All at once, a booming voice came to her ears.
"Can't wait to see which one of us bites it first. Probably Miss Fancy Pants Rapunzel up there with her anger issues!" she heard from the platinum-blond a few seats over. Rahel glanced over. The girl was all but busting out of her tight clothes and overly made-up with black eyeliner and red lipstick. A regular superslut.
So it had been going since they boarded. Rahel was only slightly irritated by it and shut her eyes, drawing a deep breath.
She wasn't here ... yeah, that's it ... she was somewhere else entirely. This was all just a hellish nightmare that she'd wake from at some point.
"Nah, no one wants her, Tati. She's too ugly. And totally sick in the head. Look how high she is—just loco, staring into space and, like, totally flipping out in her chair. Fucking junky," railed her brown-haired gangmate, Jazzy-Assy, as Rahel called her. The two of them laughed too shrilly and one of the she-guards came languidly from the fore-cabin and cracked a staff against the cages that surrounded the passenger area in the specially equipped plane.
"Quiet! You have twenty minutes!" she said coarsely to all of them in general and then went the round of the cages with a strict look, her cudgel clicking along the bars.
Man, how exhausting the whole god-awful thing was. Rahel was also still slightly numb from the sedative.
When she'd awakened earlier, she'd implored this bitch for a drink of something – just a rotten little glass of water! But the slag had only looked at her as though she were speaking in tongues and then disappeared back into the staging area.
Of course, Rahel didn't get a thing from her. What for, anyway?! She was as good as dead already. Bitterly, Rahel closed her eyes again, licked her lips, which were flaking and dry as dust, and saw in her mind's eye the faces of her family, whom she hoped soon to join in the afterlife: Karsten, Bastian, and Florian, the crazy little triplets; Mama and Papa; and of course Grandma Ema. If she focussed hard enough, they all came back to her on the strength of her wish alone. They'd lean or sit against the cage, the triplets bored and grouchy and her parents concerned. Oma Ema somber as ever, shaking her head with pursed lips.
"What have you gotten yourself mixed up in, child? Was this all really necessary?"
Rahel took a deep, hard-fought breath. "I don't know anymore, myself, Oma. I've totally lost the thread," she whispered softly, yearningly, and all of them—the triplets, her parents, and Oma Emma—vanished into thin air. All that remained was the iron bars, the hum and thrum of the turbines, and the lightly swaying rhythm of flight. Shit!
The gang-hussies renewed their yapping about someone or other, probably one of the Asian girls, all of whom had just sat motionless, sighing mightily, in their cell since the beginning. The alpha girls made bets how long they'd each survive on the Dragon Islands and who might be left over at the end.
Blondie and Jazzy-Assy naturally felt far superior to all the others. No surprise there. But now even the Asian and the American girls started calling out and jeering at them, swearing at high decibels—until the Latinas woke up and starting clamoring, too, squealing until they were drowning out all the others.
Yeah no. Not where she ever thought she'd wind up.
Apparently, she was the only one on this airplane who hadn't been born asocial, deviant, or even sociopathic. The four German gang hos had at least all been sentenced at once, for a group murder, and had had the choice to go to the island together or get the lethal injection. They'd all seen it for themselves on the TV in the airport.
Her heart beat staccato with terrible, blunt fear and anguish at what she'd have yet to endure before she could finally go home. Home, meaning heaven. Home to her family.
She knew they were already waiting for her there and would surely come and carry her away, when everything was over. When this frantic heart finally stopped.
A cold shiver ran up and down her limbs, but she suppressed it. The last thing she wanted to let show here was weakness or cowardice.
Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes again and looked to the other cages at the front of the plane. There, to the left in front and beside her, sat four black-haired girls and then another two with very dark skin who spoke no German. They were talking together in English and Spanish (or maybe Portuguese?). From their tone, it sounded likewise like they were hating on someone, maybe a bit hysterically. Across from them, directly in front of her, sat a pair of Chinese girls, picked up for prostitution, from their looks. Over-the-top makeup and clothes that left very little to the imagination. Of course, that seemed to be the case for most girls here, excluding herself. She didn't want to look like them, anyway; so ... cheap.
She swallowed dryly and wondered in all earnestness if the other girls felt as shit-scared as she did, or the junky in the cage behind her, whose teeth she heard chattering, as she doubtless held herself rigid in her seat, wheezing and trembling audibly for over an hour.
Cold turkey. Man, how hard had she come down? She must need a fix every couple of hours, or why else was she whimpering like that? Right before they'd all checked in, they'd both been given a little glass with a pharmaceutical pill—something like heroin to get them off into the stratosphere.
According to her files, she'd done a lot worse in the last few years, although she really had no idea what all was written there. And then they'd just gone and got her loaded with such a high dose?! She'd actually wondered if it was enough for a pill virgin like her to get fucked up on forever.
She'd seen her mother before her mind's eye again, standing there with an admonishing look on her face, her eyebrows raised halfway to her hairline. "Drugs, Rahel? You know what I think of that, right?" she'd spoken vehemently. And, yeah ... that had once actually happened at her house, ages ago and far away, in a cozy kitchen, as Rahel had been telling her mother about a girl at school high on weed who'd offered her a hit. She'd turned it down. What else was she supposed to do? Her parents would have stuck her in rehab or just locked her in her room and thrown away the key if she'd so much as shown interest.
She'd almost broken down in tears at the thought of her mother, as she'd just regarded the innocuous-looking tablet in the glass. Then she'd decided to give it to the real junky right before they took off; she'd squirreled it away in her jacket pocket.
She really didn't need it. She was no druggy, as any test would have immediately shown, but no one did that anymore, so close to handing over a tribute load. They preferred any other form of test: gynecological examinations, smears, ultrasounds to see if they were fertile enough; crazy powerful immunizations that caused awful rashes; and then they up and decided to let an innocent girl walk right into the trap.
There were clear conditions for a tribute, as dictated by the dragons:
A tribute must always be a healthy, young woman between 18 and 21 who was at least passably attractive. Fat or thin wasn't so important, ostensibly, for there were always three or four Latinas and American girls who were pretty round—Rahel herself obviously never went hungry. Itmade no difference to the dragons if they were addicts or non-heterosexual; they took everything that was young and didn't look like hell.