Two days later, I was yet to see or speak to a single person. I'd had another message thanking me for my cooperation, along with a really nice piece of steak, but I still had no clue whatsoever why I was here, or what my captors hoped to gain. I was being fed three meals a day, and they even seemed to trust me with cutlery now, which was nice and all, but why? For what reason were they were going through this trouble?

The whole setup seemed far too extensive for kidnapping random kids from the street. This was the sort of thing I'd expect for the children of millionaires, and I couldn't think of any reason why I would have been specifically targeted. Maybe I wasn't the intended target and was just collateral damage from one of the other girls? As far as I knew, neither family were rich, but maybe they were hiding it to try to avoid exactly this situation? But even if so, that didn't explain the effort put into keeping me.

The normal way to dispose of kidnap victims who couldn't otherwise be monetised would be to sell them on, and while I couldn't say I was familiar with the whole people trafficking and slavery markets, I couldn't see myself as being anything special. I wasn't a particularly good looker, or even a virgin, and while I was pretty intelligent, with my grades being at the upper end of our school, I was no genius, nor had I any special training that would be valuable. I'd expected to be sold off as a domestic servant to a corrupt, rich individual with more money than morals, somewhere far enough away for no-one to know my face. As far as I'd heard from the news, such victims didn't sell for very much, which meant they should have wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible, to try to keep things cost effective.

Knowing I wasn't going to come up with answers on my own, and that my captors certainly weren't going to share, I decided to take a shower. I'd been avoiding it so far, suspecting that people were watching, but ever since yesterday my back had been really itchy. The mattress looked clean enough, but who knew how many previous victims had been using it before me, and what skin conditions they may have had.

The shower had its good points, being very high pressure, with an easily configurable temperature and with jets pointing out of the walls in many directions. On the downside, in the spirit of not providing movable items, it didn't have a detachable head, nor did I have flannels or anything to properly wash myself with. Despite that, I enjoyed the experience of letting it blast me for a bit, before standing in front of the full-body drier.

Alas, it didn't seem to do anything to help the itch. There were no mirrors around for me to try to get a look at what was going on, but as far as I could tell by twisting my arm around and prodding at it, everything seemed fine. If anything, my skin felt softer than normal.

"If anyone's listening, there's something weird going on with my back, and it won't stop itching," I said out loud, just in case. If they were feeding me this well, presumably they'd want to keep me healthy too. Message sent, albeit maybe not delivered, I sat back on the bed to continue reading, doing my best to ignore the strange itch.