He turned with a horrible slowness. Not an unwillingness to talk to her'he appeared quite grateful for the human contact. No, he was moving so slowly because human time was behind him. He moved at the rate of the eternity he was about to join. He looked at her and uttered something in a language she didn't know. His eyes were wild, uncontrolled, and sweat sheened his face.
'I don't understand,' Ayaan said. She tried the languages she had'Somali, Arabic, English, her smatterings of Italian and Russian. None of them got an intelligible response.
'He says he's hungry,' a woman's voice said, speaking Arabic. It came from the cage atop hers. She couldn't see who it belonged to'the woman up there was hidden by her own blanket. 'It's Turkish,' the woman said, answer Ayaan's next question. 'Turkish, we're from Turkiye. Where did they' get you?'
'Egypt,' Ayaan answered. 'He sounds like he might''
The woman clearly didn't want to hear it. 'Egypt, they drag us that far? I don't know where they'll go next with us. They take us out into the light once a day, give us a mouthful of rice to eat. I don't know who they are, though a body hears tales, of course.'
'Listen,' Ayaan said, 'this child'he's not going to make it.' His rattling had grown into a sustained droning croak. He was dying, there was no better way to say it. 'We have to let them know, they have to take him out of here.'
'They won't,' an old man coughed from somewhere near. Ayaan got a sense of the bodies around her as if they were hovering in empty space with no bars between them, bodies lined up perfectly in meter-and-a-half wide rows, stacked a meter above and below, extending into infinity. She fought the sudden vertigo.
The boy spasmed, his forearms clanging against the bars of his cage. His legs jerked and the smell of fresh excrement blossomed in the darkness.
'They have to, when he says he's hungry'that's one of the signs, maybe you've never seen it before, but''
'Everyone's seen it.' The old man again. 'We've all seen it too many times. They like it, this bunch. They like for us all to be dead, it's holy to them. They rejoice when one dies. Now you be quiet. When you talk, it makes the time drag.'
'But he's going to change! He's going to change and we'll be trapped in here with him!' Ayaan was panicking. She fought to control herself. This was not how a soldier acted. Slowly, with a real effort of will, she turned her face to the side, to look at the boy.
A ghoul stared back.
Ayaan grunted and shoved herself backward, away from him. The dead boy reached for her, his fingers jammed between the bars, his nails pale in the bruised flesh. His face swam towards her in the darkness, his teeth chewing at the metal, his eyes perfectly dead. It was the first time in years she'd actually looked into the face of a ghoul. She had forgotten how they changed, how the animation left the features. The skin went slack. Like a mask it hung on the skull'there was no mistaking an animate corpse for a living human being.
The face slammed against the bars hard enough to crack bone. Ayaan let out another grunt. The fingers kept striving, pushing through the bars. A broken hand burst through, reached for her'couldn't quite get her. She crammed herself into a corner of her cage, as tight as she could. The hand moved around inside her cage like it had no bones, like a tentacle reaching for her soft flesh.