Sold

And, with those simple words, I was sold for {if ateSelena==true}almost a million bucks{else}less than half a million bucks{endif}.

“Alex, are you okay?”

I take in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, “It’s funny, ya know… I’ve repeatedly heard people say that, ‘you can’t place a price on a human life,’ but that’s such a load of shit. I know exactly how much my life is worth, or at least how much it was worth at that time, to those people. It’s a sobering thing, realizing that everything you are, everything you’ve done, all your hopes and dreams and everything you might become, it’s all just worth a few stacks of stupid green sheets.”

“Oh, Alex, honey, I’m so sorry,” Cathy says, setting her basically empty cup down and sliding onto the bench next to me, pushing me to the back of the booth and wrapping her arms around me in a hug that feels soft and warm, but is hardly up to the task of breaking through my rumination.

After a long moment of her trying to hug me increasingly hard, which is pretty comical coming from her tiny arms, she says, “Tell you what, Alex, let’s head out of here and go somewhere else. We can do something fun and forget about what happened for a bit.”

With a small chuff of amusement at her attempt, I rebuff her, “No. Thank you, but no. Now that I’m telling the story, it’s best if I continue, at least for a bit longer.”

Anyway, I was sold to one of the bidders at the auction and I didn’t even know whom, at the time. I just stood there, sad and afraid and angry that I was so impotent to stop any of it.

Once again, a voice came over the speaker and told me to exit the stage, where I was greeted by a quartet of the ogres that had been omnipresent in the concrete halls of the auction house.

They led me back around, toward the glass-fronted holding cells, and I tried to hurry ahead to search them for Mira. Though, as I took my second step, I felt a pressure in my back. It took a moment before I recognized it as a stinging sensation. Too many seconds later, did I realize my limbs were going cold and unresponsive.

Collapsed on the floor, my last memory of the auction house was of the guards’ massive hands grasping me and lifting me whilst my vision faded to black.