Goa blinked. It was just a few minutes now since he’d regained consciousness. So he was awake again, tied up, alive, but barely. He watched the girl who had woken him, poked him so violently run off over the gravel. The bent bar she’s used was too far for him to reach. He continued to struggle as best he could. She’s called him food. He had no intention of ending up in some crazed southlander’s belly. There had to be some way out of this.

The girl disappeared into the group of slumping structures off to the right. He turned to look in the direction the explosion had come from. A thin column of smoke drifted up from the ruined city, kilometers away.

So one of his eggs had gone off, but given the time of day, it either blew up early, or someone or something had found it. Clearly it was too far away to do much good, and one blast wasn’t going to impress anybody except the idiot who might have set it off. Still, he was breathing, for now, and that was something, but he was tightly trussed to some sort of post and could barely feel his hands and his feet.

Good enough to catch me, but not good enough to tie me up properly.

And while he had managed to recover some consciousness, he still had much to go through to regain full consciousness, his ability to think, to reason things out came and went, and then he blacked out again.

That wasn’t the end, though. Pain eventually forced him back to consciousness; bruises, cuts, a broken bone or two, the throbbing of a headache.

He woke up confused. He wasn’t lying down when he woke up next, wasn’t curled up in protection. Then Abek remembered. He was strung up, arms held straight out bound to something solid, but in such a way he was practically standing.

Woke up like this twice. Can’t have been a dream then. Streck.

He raised his head. Thick strings of his hair hung before his eyes.

The world was still blurry. It was light, daytime, and it was also still hard for him to breath. He felt pain with every breath. Broken ribs then. Damn. It was going to be harder to get out of this with that in addition to being ties up well and tight.

Or was it so well? He could move a wrist. And the post wasn’t completely solid in the ground. He could just move it… a bit.

Goa took in a harsh breath as pain from a dozen parts of his body warned him to stop.

He heard a groan, turned his head to spot Kel next to him, breathing, alive, but similarly strung up. Not a good situation. He tested the bonds again. Yes, not so tight he couldn’t-

“Hey, buddy,” he tried, voice coming out scratchy, barely above a whisper. He coughed to clear his throat, spat out blood, tried louder. “Time to wake up. You wanna live, don’t you?”

Kel didn’t respond. Didn’t even groan again. Abek sighed. He was on his own.

Yep, escape is all up to you, as usual.

The question was: what was the weak point in how he was held? Not the bonds perhaps, they were too tight and but pulling against them hard was growing painful. He tested the pole, and the cross he was stood up on. It shifted a touch again. And the effort didn’t reward him with spikes of pain from his ribs this time. Maybe they were just bruised.

Then the blurriness before him produced movement. Damn, that little girl had been real. And her family was real as well.

They were lead by the little girl who he had tried to use earlier, finally showing their faces as his vision slowly cleared – scarred, dirty and underfed, but apparently curious. Where the others were, those who had captured him, he didn’t know. Whatever the community was down here, it didn’t likely correspond to anything he was familiar with.

There were only a couple figures tall enough to be adults. The rest, had to be children, young children.

At least he had people of some kind to talk to. And that made things better for a chance to survive this.

He looked up, and smiled.

You can find a way, Abek. Like the many times before. It’s just a matter of overlooking the situation you are in and making the best of it.

If it’s food they want, you can get it for them. Or you can convince them you can get it for them, certainly before they haul you off to a slaughterhouse to be readied for the next meal. Hell, make whatever deal you can. Get them to take you off this pole and you’ll be half way there.

The question was; how to start the convincing? And with which one?