Nadia

I could already feel the headache before I was even all the way awake. “Ugh. Damn it!” The cold hard ground I woke up on left my body hurting in too many spots to count. “Now what’s going on?!”

I had just processed that I was in some kind of weird glowing crystal prison when I noticed the creepiest guy staring right at me from behind some iridescent cell bars. “Bruh! What the hell?” He seemed about my height with your typical white guy features complete with shoulder-length brown hair slicked back. Everything else about him was less than normal. He had on some kind of circlet and was giving off heavy royalty vibes from the detail on his green robe, black boots, and silver gloves.

Using the back wall of the cell to stabilize myself, I stood up but nearly fell back down at how shaky my legs were. “Oh, shit. Hold on. Gimme a minute. I ain’t all the way right yet.”

After a few minutes of me taking deep breaths to fight back some nausea and dizziness, my vision finally cleared. The creepy dude still hadn’t moved. Like at all. He was just scowling at me. “Seriously. It ain’t bad enough you stuck me in this ‘Dark Crystal’ looking prison? You gotta keep on with the staring?”

I waited for a response but received nothing. If he hadn’t been blinking, I would’ve thought he was a statue. My limit had been reached. “Whatever, dude.” I summoned fire in my palm and moved my hand around while looking at the guy expectantly. Not a single response. “Fine,” I said before rolling my eyes and shooting the fire at him.

The flames were halfway to him when the crystal cell bars absorbed them. It didn’t even surprise me. “Crap,” I breathed out. Whatever they had knocked me out with was somehow keeping me slightly mellow and made it hard to focus. But I was a New Orleans gal and, damn it, I was not about to be outdone by some fairy dust, or whatever they had hit me with.

My head cocked to the side as something about his face suddenly felt familiar. “Hold up!” I said putting a finger up to him, even though he had yet to say a single thing, let alone make a sound. “Wait a minute. You the bastard with those coma seeds, ain’t you?”

His face stayed the same, but he pulled back from the crystal bars. Finally, I got some kind of response. “Uh-huh,” I said with a smirk. “That’s right. I know who you is and you should’ve killed me because when I get out of this cell, I’m gonna beat yo’ ass.”

His scowl changed a little till it he looked almost disgusted before slowly walking away. I quickly hobbled over and grabbed onto the cell bars. “Hey! Where are you going? Bastard! I ain’t done yet. Get back here and catch these hands!”

He just kept walking until he was out of sight. I finally felt like my normal pissed-off self again, but I had no one to take it out on. That changed when I noticed someone sitting in the cell directly opposite mine. “Hey! Yo! Pssst.” The person had their back to me but started to turn around. “Oh, my god!”

Once completely facing me, I recognized my sister, Noelle. The only thing was, she looked much, much older than she had a week ago. Stunned was putting my current state mildly. “Girl, what happened to you?”

Noelle’s mouth started to move, but no words came out. She let out a visceral scream and just started crying. My whole body was shaking from disbelief. I didn’t know how to process what I was seeing.

I could feel my throat tighten as tears started to run down my own face. In my entire life, I had never seen Noelle look so broken or so sad. I may have been bad in my own right, but Noelle was the toughest broad that ever lived. The Noelle in front of me now was a shadow of my sister. “What did they do to you?” It came out as a whisper due to my trying to swallow down my own sobs.

I was still staring at Noelle when the soft voice of a woman came out of nowhere. “You must be Nadia.”

It took me a second to snap out of the pain I was feeling from looking at my sister. “Wha--what?” I said looking around. “Who said that?”

Her voice was faint, but I could tell it was coming from the cell next to mine. “Sorry. It’s been so long since I’ve had anyone to talk to other than Noelle. She talks about her sister Nadia all the time. Well, she used to. The last few years, she hasn’t said much of anything, apart from crying.”

I shook my head as my eyes bugged out at the words she said. “Years? What are you talking about? She’s only been missing for an hour or two at best.” I ran my hands through my hair because I felt like I was going insane.

“I guess it’s true then. I’m Serena by the way.”

I took a deep breath to keep from losing it. “What’s true?”

She waited for what felt like forever before responding. “The guy who was watching you earlier mentioned something to me years ago. I was talking to myself, asking myself if anyone was looking for me. He was standing by the bars watching me. He does that a lot. Just stares for hours and hours. Day after day. He never says much. Sometimes it’ll be so quiet, that all I can hear is his heavy breathing. Just in and out. In and out. I wake up and fall asleep to it.”

I was rubbing my temples because I really did not want to yell at this crazy chick, but she was working my nerves. “What was it that he mentioned?”

“He said no one even knew I was missing. That on Earth, it had only been about thirty minutes, but that I had been in my cell for five years. By the time anyone would even realize I was missing, I would already be dead. That was ten years ago.”

I could feel the blood drain from my face. It was like being stuck in a nightmare. The entire glowing crystal prison felt like it was sucking the hope out of the air. “How long ago was Noelle brought here?”

As Serena paused, every passing second felt like an eternity. “Noelle was already here when I arrived.”

I stared at my sister sobbing into her hands and my heart broke before a sinking feeling set into my stomach. “She’s been trapped here for almost two decades.” I couldn’t keep it together anymore. Tears came out of me in torrents as I fell to my knees. One drop after another hit the crystal floor before I threw my head back and shouted as loud as I could. “Aidan!”