The cell block was dark, though that didn’t appear intentional. ‘Dark’ was not a part of Dragaunus’ usual ostentatious aesthetic. He liked the bright, the garish, in tones of blood red and royal purple.

The ceiling above the central control console revealed that the room had suffered heavily in the crash, or perhaps the explosion that proceeded it. There was a gash where whole panels of steel had been shredded and sheared away, exposing wires, cables, tubes, and machinery that sagged over the opening.

There appeared to be a single, flickering, yellowed light at the center of the semi-circular space. It was inadequate, and losing the battle with shadow. An unfortunate and crass metaphor, Wildwing thought.

They had stripped him of his armor and anything else they thought useful. He did not know what they intended to do with it, but he would never see any of it again.

The cell itself was, for Saurian standards, simple. Nothing fancy or high tech about it, a box with bars—actual physical bars—covering the opening. They seemed to slot in place from above, smoothly and without seam.

At first, he had been sure that someone would reappear and collect him again, quickly. That was the old pattern: someone would gather him up and parade him around, explaining the nuance of his demise and the ultimate Saurian victory.

This did not happen, and he found himself unbearably impatient as the moments ticked by into hours. Surely they had a plan. But it appeared no one felt like telling him about it.

He sat in the dark cell, propping a shoulder against one of the bars, watching the doorway.

They would come, eventually. They needed him for something, or he would not be alive.

They had forgotten to take his combat boots. Steel-toed, sure, but the far more relevant part was they were designed to convert to ice skates. Pointless in the middle of California, but a strong, sharp weapon for the circumstance. It was a long shot, and it was stupid, but he was confident he had gotten himself out of worse problems with worse ideas. Fighting with your boot was better than sitting and waiting to die, in any case.

Time wore on, the adrenaline and anger wore off, and no one came, Saurian or teammate. It was just him, and the dark, and the strangely warm air that drifted in from the gash in the ceiling. He might have slept, or he might have not. He didn’t know. Constant unanswered vigilance is, paradoxically, exhausting. If he had slept, it had been dreamless, and when he was alert again, he could not tell if anything in his limited field of view had changed.

The cell was regretfully in tact, but filthy. He had no idea what could have been in it before, but one wall was covered in a black, odorless substance that resembled a large splatter of tar. He resolved to avoid it.

There was no guard, not even one of the hunter drones. Maybe they simply did not find him a big enough threat, maybe they forgot, or maybe they had lost too many drones in the crash and the ability to manufacture more. Maybe it was just to screw with him.

Surely, he wasn’t really unsupervised. They weren't that confident, were they? There was a video feed, or maybe just an audio link—there had to be. He could imagine it clearly enough, with Dragaunus happily checking in every hour on the hour, just for some satisfied sighs and gloating to no one and everyone. The lizard wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.

Wildwing’s spiraling thoughts were interrupted by a scraping noise behind his head, through the wall. He didn’t move for a long moment, straining to hear. Silence.

Maybe it was the air, or maybe he caught the slightest hint of shallow breathing.

“Hello?”

Silence. He was not sure how long he had been there—almost certainly not as long as it felt. It had not been long enough to start hearing things. He hoped as much, at least.

“Sorry,” came a very soft, delayed whisper. Not a voice he recognized, but feminine, perhaps young. “I didn’t-” she began, but did not finish her thought. “Sorry.”

There was a dueling elation and horror of another person being stuck in here with him. He would never be able to see her, their cells shared a wall and sat side by side. But that was a superficial desire, after sitting in this unchanging place for hours.

Another voice could easily have been one of a million things. A real person, a generated sound, the Chameleon, anything. Putting a face to the sound meant little and would not tell him intent.

Wildwing wished, not for the first time today, that he still had The Mask. “How long have you been here?”

For a long moment there was nothing, and he felt the slightest hint of creeping dread that he had imagined her after all. He strained to hear anything, and there was nothing but the strange creaking of a ship in disrepair.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, at last. “It-a few days?”

He nodded stupidly to himself in the dark, as if she could see it. “Do you know what they want?”

“I was hoping you did,” she answered.

“Strangely, no. Usually, they tell me by now.”

“Us-usually?” The voice spluttered, forgetting to whisper. “Does this happen to you a lot?”

“It’s-look, it’s my job.”

“Your job,” she repeated, though he could hear the incredulity in her voice. “What does it pay?”

“More than you’d think, actually.”

She had no response, and he thought the better of offering up information unbidden. The yellow light flickered, and the dry air whispered through the gash in the ceiling, carrying with it the smell of past fire and melted plastic.

“What’s your name?” She asked.

Silence was the safer option. She could have been any number of things, planted there to draw out information, or to torment him later. But, the waiting was so mucheasier with someone else.

There was also the real possibility that, if she were a real person, he was going to need to befriend her.

If she were a real person, he was going to have to get her out, too.

“Wildwing.”

“Ariana,” she responded, as if they could shake hands. “I’m-my mother would be so mad, I don’t have a flimsy on me.” She laughed, the sound hollow and strange, and she cut it short.

Wildwing sat for a long moment, turning the sentence over in his head. It was just a slight bit of slang, and he could not gauge well how authentic it felt to him.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“No where, I guess,” she answered. “Keel’s a bunch of rubble. So’s everywhere else. You?”

Wildwing searched his memory, and tried to frame what he needed to say next very carefully, while sounding conversational. He needed to get it right, and say it easily. Friendly. “That’s the Hailsmiths, isn’t it?”

“Hailsmiths? I-”and then he heard a scrabbling sound through the wall, like perhaps she had shifted position suddenly. “Hailsmiths is Deshin University, Keel’s the Stormsurge. You went to Keel?”

“I think my father did,” he said, staring at the far wall of his cell, bewildered.

The Saurians should not have known the details of tiny college league team names, and would not have bothered with such bland trivia. In that million possibilities Wildwing had considered, it had not occurred to him that he would be speaking to someone from Puckworld, rather than a human.

He could not allow himself to be excited by it, either.

Ariana was a duck. That did not make her an ally. He had learned that the hard way, from Lucretia DeCoy. Action made the person, not outward appearance.

Wildwing tried his best to remember anything else about Keel, that he could use as conversation in place of outright interrogation, and was met mostly with the mental equivalent of static. He knew he had been there once, years ago, to humor his father in the search for a school. He remembered having to stand in the sun on a summer day, bored and half-listening to someone talk about the campus. It was too hot for his tastes, but normal for the region. He remembered a squat building with a wooden sculpture out front, incomprehensible, resembling nothing that he could name. It had made periodic thumping sound that his mother had speculated at the artistic meaning of to pass the time. Eventually, a small flighted bird’s head appeared, peering down at them with accusing black, beady eyes, from a nesting hole she was tapping into the wood.

He could remember literally nothing else.

He felt some guilt for not having preserved the trip better in his memory.

All he got for the effort of searching for anything useful in the static was the reminder of his parents.

The parents he hadn’t seen since before the nightmare started. He had not seen anyone he had recognized before Canard-

“Where are we?” Ariana asked, pulling him back to the dark, empty cell.

“A long way from Keel.”

It was not a good answer.

She seemed to think about this, and said, quietly, “I never wanted to be in a place like this again.”

“I had hoped something very similar,” he agreed.

“You know it, though? Where we are? Is it bad?”

“How is Puckworld doing?” Wildwing clumsily deflected her question. He should have known better than to ask. Anything she said was suspect, but he asked just the same. Even if she only crafted an answer that he wanted to hear, he could not stop himself.

“It got worse, and then a little better, and then worse again,” she said.

He wanted so badly to ask why. He should have. It could have been important. Or it could have been a Saurian lie. He would have no way to tell the difference.

“Do you think we’re going to die in here?” She asked.

“We’re going to try not to,” he answered, and would only realize much later that he was supposed to sound more reassuring.