They had crept up the stairs and into her room in the middle of the night, and stolen her away.  To be honest, she’d expected them.  In the nights prior to her abduction, her dreams had become vivid and prophetic:  men in blue robes, faces hidden by their cowls, crowding around her bed as dim moonlight streamed through the window.  She must have looked tired and worn on the mornings after her dreams, because the children at her parents’ preschool had asked her what was wrong.  She just smiled at them, wearily.

She could have resisted her abductors.  Oh, sure, she couldn’t have taken them all on, but she could have given a quick psychokinetic jolt to one of them, maybe singed their robes.  It would have been enough to scare them, to make them scatter and think twice.  They were heartbreakingly ordinary people from all she could tell, not career criminals like Everdred’s men.

But she hadn’t fought them off at all.  In fact, she’d gone nearly willingly.  She had held limp as they duct-taped her mouth shut and blindfolded her, then bound her arms and legs together.  One of them slung her over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and she didn’t wriggle or struggle or anything.  She knew she must not resist, not here, and not now.  This was the way of things.  She knew, deep down, that she must be captured, and then rescued.  Only then would the boy meet her; only then could her quest begin.

They brought her through the valley that night, by cover of darkness.  The wind was cold on her face, and her abductors had the faint, lingering, nauseating smell of paint about them.  And there were sick things, wicked and wrong, stirring in the woods around them.  She could feel their presence with her mind, but always did so gingerly.  Probing them too closely could be dangerous, like petting a cactus.

Instead she had reached out to the boy—the one she knew would rescue her, the one she had known from her dreams since she was small—and prayed to contact him.  Come through the valley.  Come to rescue me.  I need you…

They had brought her into a cabin, set her in a prison cell, and removed the gag and bonds.  But once she was free she was passive, silent.  They locked her in, and she sat on the edge of the cot, and prayed, and waited.  She found herself shivering a lot, from cold, or loneliness, or sadness.  She shed a few tears, though she’d never admit it, and she scarcely slept from anxiety.  Her family missed her, she knew, and she’d thought more than once about connecting her mind with theirs, projecting outward in a dream, letting them know that she was well and safe.  But it was more important that the boy find her and come for her, and so she put forth all her psychic efforts toward contacting him.

They left her a bowl filled with a strange blueberry mush to eat.  She did not touch it for the longest time, for fear it was poisoned or drugged, but one day into her captivity, dizzy and sick with hunger, she’d tasted it—just a little—then finished off the bowl.  It was tasty, not drugged at all, with a consistency a little like oatmeal.

It didn’t take long, though, before she was sick of it.

A man, middle-aged and balding, came in to see her on the first morning of her imprisonment, with a whole bevy of blue-dressed teenage girls in tow.  They ogled at her, peered at her, whispered to each other.  He unlocked and opened her cell with a key he kept at his hip, but he did not let her out.  Nor, to be fair, did she make a run for it.  Instead he let the girls in to see her, and they set about cleaning her off, brushing and braiding her blond hair, tending to her with an enthusiasm that frightened her a little, inwardly.

“My name is Mr Carpainter,” he said, and pulled up a chair to sit in front of the opened door of her cell.  His voice was kind and low, but there was a hardness to his eyes and mouth.  The girls crooned over her quietly while he spoke.  “I am these people’s leader.  We’ve heard plenty about you, Paula.”

Paula didn’t look at him.  She angled her head down to the floor of the cabin, and she stared.  Better that than eye contact.

“We’re honored to have you here,” he continued, leaning forward slightly.  He smelled a little like aftershave, and had that chemical smell of paint on him, the same as everyone else here.  “You will make a fine priestess for us, and your beauty, wisdom, and kindness will spread the joy of the color blue far and wide…”

He trailed off, inspecting her face for any reaction or emotion.  There must have been a flicker to her lips, a quick trace of resentment or anger.  He reached out and took her chin with his hand, and angled her head up to force her to look at him.  She lifted her gaze to look into his eyes.

She reached out gently, probingly with her mind, feeling the edges of his soul.  There was a miasma there, a contamination that she could feel overpowering his spirit.  Paula could feel her chest tighten up a little with instinctive fear.  But she kept her stare steady, her face expressionless now as he considered her in return.

“Do not trifle with me, Paula Polestar,” he said to her finally.  “I have powers that even you cannot understand.”

He released her chin, stood up, and ushered the cultist girls to exit.  Before they filed out, one of them left a blue dress for her, folded up, on her cot.  He locked the cell’s door and soon she was in solitude again.  She looked the gown over—it was a flattering cut, a pretty shade of teal, with bows and ribbons.  And it was clean.  The pink dress she was in certainly wasn’t.  But she stayed in her old clothes.

Later that day the cultists began to file in, still wearing their robes and cowls, to watch her like she was a zoo exhibit.  Paula still didn’t look at them.  She sat there on her cot, hands clasped, praying silently, lips unmoving, as they commenced their chants outside her cell.  In their strange religious ecstasy her captors were suddenly gentle, even ominously calm.  Blue, blue…

On the third day, even as she tried to ignore them, there was movement from the corner of her eye.  She glanced up and there was a child, blue-robed like the rest, standing in front of the other cultists and holding a teddy bear out to her through the bars.  It was daubed with blue paint, messily, and missing one of its big button eyes.  The chant faltered at this, went quieter for a moment, before it picked up its steady thrum again.

She hesitated too, then reached out to take the bear with both hands.  “Thanks,” she said.  There was a smile under the cowl’s shadow, placid and pleased.  Paula tried a smile back, faintly, and hugged the toy’s plush body.  She did it a little gingerly at first, then harder, even a little fiercely.

“Do you want some gum?” the child said.  It was a little girl, Paula thought, but she couldn’t be sure under all that blue fabric.

“Sure…”  Hugging the teddy bear with one arm, she held out her hand.  The child pressed a stick of gum, wrapped in peeling metal foil, into Paula’s hand.  It was warm from being held.  Paula unwrapped the gum; it was faint blue, and she caught a whiff of paint and artificial blueberries that made her stomach churn.  “Thanks,” she repeated, and wrapped up the gum again, a little quickly.

“You look sad.  How can you be sad when—“

“When everything’s blue, right.”  She looked up from the piece of gum, the cultists’ chant still droning around them.  “Hey, I have a question.”

“Yeah?”  The child tipped her head to the side.

She leaned in a little, face softening, like she was back at home with the children at her parents’ preschool.  “What sorts of things can Mr Carpainter do, anyway?”

Paula could hear the sudden brightness in the girl’s voice as she smiled.   “Mr Carpainter’s amazing…he got the revelation about the color blue, you know?”

“Yeah.”  Paula nodded.  “I figured.”

“He’s bringing peace and joy, and happiness, with the color blue!”

“Yeah…”

“He isn’t afraid to smite people who wanna hurt us, either!  He’s a real hero…”

“Smite?”  Paula pressed her forehead against the bars of her cell, curiously.  “Like how?”

“Last week some policemen came from Twoson to see what was up here, I guess they’d heard some bad things?  And they were gonna head back to Twoson and tell lies about us.  But Mr Carpainter, he lured them into the sanctuary, and we all surrounded them so they couldn’t get away…”  Paula could see a grin under the cowl, and the girl hit her palm with her fist.  “Bam!  He hit ‘em with lightning.  It was even inside, too!  Lightning, inside!  It was incredible.  Nobody’s quite like him…”

“That’s wonderful.  You’ve really opened my eyes…”  With the teddy bear in her arm, she reached out for the child’s hand, and squeezed it for a moment through her cell’s bars.  “He’s a wonderful man.  Thank you.”

At night the last of the cultists left, and she was alone again.  There were noises outside, and the occasional strangled cry of a crow, but there were no guards inside to keep watch over her.  Maybe her passiveness had lured them into complacency.  She had tossed the unchewed gum through the bars, hours ago, and was stroking the edge of the foil idly as her prayers slowed due to sleepiness.  The metal was beginning to separate from the paper where she was fiddling with it.

Paula paused, biting at her lips with thought.  She held the foil between her fore and middle fingers, and began to pat over her person, for something, anything…

She glanced around and finally to the paint-daubed teddy bear and its one sad eye, and she quirked a grin.  Paula edged closer to the teddy bear, grabbed its head to brace it, and tugged at the button eye.  With a little work it began to loosen.  She leaned over and bit at the thread, carefully with her front teeth, and the button popped off.  Terrific.  One button, and an eyeless teddy bear.

She set the button down on the floor of her cell and slowly, carefully, peeled off the biggest piece of metal foil that she could from the gum wrapper.  She smoothed the foil over the plastic button, rubbed it in place, and it stuck.  Paula smiled.

Carefully so as to not wreck the foil, she held the button between her two hands, trapped it between her palms, and she started to pray over it.  This was a different prayer, an unfamiliar one for her, a careful weaving of love and protection around the little button.

When the sun rose the next morning, she could taste a difference in the air, fear and hate and worry.  No one came to stare at her today, or to sing and pray in front of her cell.  Alone, Paula’s mind turned to cold loneliness again.  She sat on her cot, the button on the floor underneath, and hidden like so much trash.  She hugged the teddy bear, and rocked back and forth and prayed.  Please come.  Please.

It was that day, when she was left alone, that she began to doubt herself.  She had to admit to herself, reluctantly, that the cultists did seem happy here.  They were a little naïve, maybe, a little controlled, but when they were praying around her cell and chanting—blue, blue, such that she could even hear it in her dreams—they seemed happier, somehow.  They didn’t fight with each other.  If the world turned blue, maybe there wouldn’t be anyone to fight with.  And if she had a change of heart, she would be Mr Carpainter’s priestess.  Maybe she could pacify them.  Maybe she could bring peace.

There was a solid thwack, followed by the sad caw of a crow.  Something had hit the side of the cabin, hard, from the outside.  It sounded solid, like a ball or a rock.  She startled out of her thoughts and dropped the teddy bear; it slid down onto the floor between her feet.

She stood up from the cot, slowly, a little shakily, and moved forward to peer out slowly from between the bars.  There was a silhouette of a person outside, obscuring some of the sun that filtered in through the cabin’s high windows.

She ducked down a little reflexively as the door opened.

There was a boy there, her age.  He was lean and wiry with a mess of dark hair, under a red baseball cap turned sideways.  He was wearing a striped shirt and jean shorts, with a yellow backpack.  He was tapping a baseball bat against his calf as he glanced the room over slowly.

His eyes widened when he saw Paula pushed up against the bars of her cell.  “Oh, man…”  He shook his head and jogged to the cell’s door, trying it, shaking it.  It didn’t open.

Paula cracked a smile, hints of a pink blush starting to touch her ears.  “Ness, you have no idea how glad I am to see you…”