“Hey, have we met somewhere before?” the boy asks. “You know, before coming to this place.”
I have no idea. All I know is the woman had taken me to a big mansion and promised to reunite me with my sister. Yet the moment I got to the mansion, I realized I had been tricked. My sister was nowhere to be found. Then the woman disappeared and left me in the company of big burly men who would surely hurt anyone they disliked.
The next thing I knew, I was put inside a dark room with very little light. I saw a huddle of small faces whose eyes looked puffy. Some of them were pale-looking and seemed very ill. They had been crying. They were also mostly my age.
“Yeah, I can’t remember you, either,” says the boy. “I always cried in that room.”
He was in the room! Of course! My mind reaches back to the child in the back of the room who couldn’t stop crying. Some of the other children tried to calm him down. I didn’t care so much about him, though. At least, not at first. I only started caring about him when the guards scolded us for letting him cry. “If he keeps it up,” said the guard. “No one will get a meal.”
“Please, be quiet,” I said to him. “Do you want us to starve to death?”
He lifted his face and his eyes quickly gazed into mine. “I can’t,” he said, still sobbing. “We’re going to die.”
“You’re just a crybaby,” said another child. “Look what you’re doing to the other children here. We’re not going to die. They’re going to send us to work, most probably.”
“They’ve been lying to us!” said the boy, raising his voice. “They are going to kill us.”
