by James Welsh
“Although Pilot Bliss was smarter than that,” Dart pointed out. “She was smart enough to check the solar activity before every flight. That’s why I liked flying with her so much. For them to call her careless like that is even more careless.”
Wales held the book up to his face and drank another word. “Well, hopefully with Stratos here now, we’ll finally be able to solve this mystery.”
Wales said this, not knowing just how right he was going to be.
CHAPTER 4
The miners were about to head home when hell opened its mouth and screamed.
The men were too busy doing nothing, and so they didn’t see the peak rising from the water like a volcano being born. And even as the monster shook off its cape of water, the drunken men were too busy laughing at jokes that didn’t make sense to notice. Nash only knew something was wrong when the wave of a fist splashed in his face.
Nash fell backwards, the punch planting him into the solid rock beneath his feet. The punch could have knocked him out, but it wanted him to watch the fight. The world spun dizzily around him like a carousel, and it took all Nash had to focus. Still, instead of seeing his three new friends, he saw thousands, and where there was one monster he saw hundreds. The sound of the fight was throttled as well, until Nash thought that he was fighting in a battle. Nash tried to stand up to held his fellow soldiers, but all he could do was watch as every single man fell, dropped by the monster’s left fist.
After what felt like hours – but was actually seconds – all of the men had collapsed on the battlefield, leaving behind the legion of monsters. As Nash struggled to get up, the monsters saw him and began marching towards him. In a panic, Nash scrambled backwards, his head still nauseous from the punch. As the beasts stepped forward, though, something strange happened. They began disappearing – not vanishing into thin air but melding with one another. They continued doing this until all of the monsters had shrunk into one, who was now standing over him. Nash could see clearly enough that the animal was standing on legs like pistons, that it wore a hood over its face like a monk, that it was pointing a long, curled finger at him. Until that moment, Nash had never understood what it was like to die.
Then he slipped beneath the floorboards of the world and everything was dark.
***
When Nash woke up a few minutes later, the world was on its back.
Slowly, Nash pulled himself up into a sitting position, and the world righted itself like a ship out of the storm. At first, everything was mute, but there were cracks in the dam and soon the sound came flooding through his ears. And that was when he heard it: a man shouting what could only be orders.
“Someone get help!” Coil shouted. “He’s bleeding bad!”
As Nash’s eyes focused, he could see Coil just a few feet away, crouched over the unconscious Wales. The old man’s face shined so bright with blood that Nash had to look away. Coil, meanwhile, refused to leave his old friend, keeping his palm pressed to the pulsing cut on Wales’ forehead. Coil’s hand and Wales’ blood might as well have been twins. Coil himself was hurt too but not badly – he had a black eye and a bruised arm from connecting with the ground, but he was still walking.
“Go!” Coil yelled.
This time, the words found their way through Nash’s cloudy mind. He nodded thickly and stumbled up to his feet. But, as it turned out, he didn’t even need to look for help – the help found him. The moment Nash found his feet, he lost them again, as he was hammered back into the ground. For a moment, Nash thought that the monster had come back for him. The next moment, he could hear Coil’s demanding voice, “Mayr, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Guard Mayr, one of the force’s veterans and paranoid because of it, was shackling Nash’s hands behind his back. Nash was still in a daze, and unable to focus enough to be indignant. Mayr looked Coil in the eye and snapped, “All I hear are shouts, and I get here to find everyone bloody and bruised. And I’m going to get my questions answered the only way I know how. Now, hands behind your back, Brutus!”
As Mayr yelled, a number of other guards stormed across the shore and took the camp by force. In the orderly chaos that followed, Coil had to be dragged away from his bloodied friend. And as for Wales – he was still restrained, even though he was hardly conscious. Dart was found a few moments later – he was so pale that Nash thought that he was wearing ash as war paint. With all of the miners present, the guards began marching them back to the colony.
The guards had unshackled Coil so that he could drag along Wales – the guards themselves were unwilling to do so, afraid of getting blood on their uniforms. And so Coil wheezed as he carried his old friend, Wales’ limp arm wrapped around his neck. The guards made no effort to help him along – if anything, they made matters even worse.
As Nash walked with them, he could hear a breathless Coil arguing with the one called Mayr. “If you want answers so badly, why…why aren’t you sending men after…the monster that attacked us?”
“Where would we look first? You know how large the colony is,” Mayr pointed out.
“Our attacker…he went towards the longhouse for the technological workers.”
“How could you see where he went if you were too busy laying on the ground and looking at the ceiling, like your friends here?”
“I wasn’t knocked out,” Coil said. “I’m fine.”
“Then why didn’t you chase after your attacker?”
Coil nodded to the unconscious Wales he was carrying. “I was busy looking after a friend.”
“If you didn’t hunt the man down, you’re as bad as him,” Mayr charged.
“Don’t be ridiculous – I had other things to worry about,” Coil spat. He paused, and then added, “Besides, I didn’t want to make your job too easy.”
Mayr laughed. “Yes, we wouldn’t want that.”
As they walked, the Sanctions – the colonial department of justice – loomed larger and larger. Any other day, the building itself would have been beautiful – it was a tower made almost entirely of windows, and every inch of glass shined. The image of a mirror floated through Nash’s mind, and he wondered what the colonists saw when they looked at themselves through that mirror. Any other day, the Sanctions would have been beautiful, but today it was as ugly as a gallows.
When they reached the Sanctions, the guards pushed the miners through one of the sliding glass doors. The lobby itself was too simple: it was little more than a short hallway leading towards an elevator. The guards crowded the miners into the elevator and Mayr pressed the down button. As the elevator dove into the basement, Coil asked, “Are you going to get someone to look after Wales?”
“We’ll get someone – just shut up about it,” Mayr snapped.
The elevator perched in the basement and the doors glided open. While the floor above was bright and shining, the basement was dim and eerie. As they walked quietly down the hallway, Nash saw that there were a series of doors to the right: the doors were thick and sturdy, so they had to have been the cells.
Mayr stopped the group in front of one of the cells and opened up the door with the chip buried in his finger. As the cell door creaked open, Mayr said to the miners, “Get in.”
“What about…” Coil began.
“We’ll put Wales in the sick bay and call the doctor,” Mayr said.
Coil looked at Mayr suspiciously, but he realized he had no other choice. He handed over his only true friend and watched as the guards dragged Wales down the hallway as if he was a heavy box. Meanwhile, the miners were shepherded into the cell and Mayr closed the door behind them. The second Mayr did so, it was as if the entire universe had collapsed down to the room. The room was so soundproof, the miners couldn’t even hear Mayr and the other guards just inches away, laughing and joking about the men they had just locked away.
The cell itself had nothing more than a few mats and a hole in the center of the floor – Nash had an idea what the hole was used for. Overhead, a soft light was
cloaking the room in sky blue.
As Coil and Dart sat down, Nash asked nervously, “So what’s going on?”
Coil sighed. “We have the joy of being attacked the night Mayr is in charge of the guards, apparently. He’s so paranoid, if you tell him that he committed a crime, he’d believe it. I’ve been arrested by him before for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“So what happens now?”
“Well, they’re going to interrogate us, one by one. And then hopefully that would be it. Really, anything can happen in the next hour. They could let us go, or they could take us around back and shoot us.”
“They’d do that?”
Coil nodded. “They have before. There’s this guy named Arturo Solis…”
“Was a guy named Arturo Solis,” Dart corrected.
Coil continued, “Anyway, they executed him for missing too many days of work. They reasoned that since he wasn’t working for the charter, then he must have been working against them. I’m only surprised they didn’t kill him sooner. To be honest, I never even knew what it was he did around here.”
Dart murmured something – Nash couldn’t hear it, but Coil apparently did because he laughed sourly. “Yeah, he was definitely that – no wonder the whole colony turned out to see him get killed. Although sometimes I wonder: what if they did that to warm us up to the idea that we can be executed for anything?”
“You’ve been listening to Wales for too long,” Dart said, nervous that he was listening to blasphemy against the charter. “He’s making you think too much.”
“I hope so – that means it’s contagious,” Coil said solemnly.
Nash had a sudden thought. “Say, you don’t think we’ll get in trouble for the whiskey, do you?”
Dart looked alarmed at this – he hadn’t considered that. But Coil shook his head and said, “No, the guards haven’t wised up to the books – not yet anyway. They’ll probably think that we were just reading.”
“Should we even be talking like this?” Dart asked. “What if the room’s bugged?”
“It’s not,” Coil assured him. “Like I said, this isn’t the first time I’ve been arrested.”
They were in the cell for another thirty minutes. By that time, the whiskey had almost run through Nash’s body and he was feeling the urge to relieve himself. He had enough trouble going to the bathroom alone, let alone in a cramped room with two other men sitting inches away.
But before he could face that dilemma, he heard a lock click and the cell door swing open. All three men turned and saw a woman standing in the doorway. Nash was caught off-guard by her overwhelming she was: she had long hair that shined like the afternoon, eyes as polished and hard as aquamarine, and a mouth that looked as if it was about to break apart into angry words. Nash didn’t know at that moment, but this was none other than Diamond Latch, chief of the colonial guards. Later, he would be told that Latch was normally more easy-going and friendly, but he would have a hard time believing that.
“You’re all free to go,” Latch said curtly. The men just sat and looked at her, silent with surprise. And so Latch repeated herself. “You can go – now!”
The men jumped a little bit at this, and they quickly stood up. As they left the cell, one of the guards from earlier was waiting for them. There were no shackles this time – instead, the guard gestured towards the waiting elevator, and the men walked, already feeling freed. Coil said softly to the guard, “Blanco, is Wales okay?”
Guard Blanco nodded. “Yes. They’re keeping him at the clinic overnight for observation, but he’ll be okay.”
As they were about to step into the elevator, Nash stole a quick glance back. He saw Latch still standing at the end of the hallway, talking now to Guard Mayr. He couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but it was clear that Latch was upset by the news. Before the elevator door closed, though, Latch raised her voice just loud enough for Nash to hear. They were words that didn’t make sense yet to Nash, and he was unsure how to process what he heard.
“You’re saying that Khunrath’s responsible?”
***
Although he had enough adventure for one night, Nash still found himself leaving his room at the longhouse once more. He had tried going to sleep, but his mind was still running laps, as he tried to make sense of the day. He went from being enemies to friends with the miners, he was attacked by a mysterious man, arrested because of it, and now finding out that Khunrath may have been the culprit. Khunrath: the man whose wife died on the operating table, the man who no one had seen in years and was presumed dead. The image of the hooded monster that had risen out of the lake still haunted Nash, enough to make him believe in ghosts.
And so Nash kicked off the bed sheets and left the longhouse. It wasn’t until Nash stepped outside that he realized he had no idea where he was going. He froze with indecision, but only for a moment. Then, he found his feet taking him in the direction of the clinic. It wouldn’t hurt to see if the sick miner Tumbler was awake – he probably needed as much company as Nash did anyway.
The walk to the clinic was a short one – in just a few minutes, he found himself walking down the same hallway that he walked down earlier in the day. Or was it yesterday when he was in the clinic last? Nash was still adjusting to the time that the colony lived by. Back on Earth, the days were measured by the drops of sunlight. In the darkness of the underground colony, though, there was no day, at least not in the traditional sense. He had no idea how the colonists kept the time – the secret was that they didn’t keep the time very well at all, that they had just as much trouble as he did.
As Nash walked down the dark hallway, he saw up ahead that the door to Tumbler’s room was ajar and a blade of light was cutting through the crack. Nash was pleased, taking this to mean that Tumbler was still awake at this hour. But as Nash opened up the door and entered the room, he saw that Tumbler was in bed and very much asleep. What Nash saw next startled him – in bed next to Tumbler was a hooded figure. At first, Nash thought only of the hooded attacker by the lake, and he thought that Death had come back to claim a victim.
But whoever it was saw Nash staring at them, and they sat up in the bed. The stranger pulled back their hood – far from death, the stranger was a lady. She was not intimidating like Latch but inspiring instead, with earthy eyes that the poets used to write about and a smile like an injection of sunshine. She had her brown hair loosely pulled back in a bun, and a few strands tumbled across her forehead as she took off her hood. She wasn’t Death – she was Life. Nash had only known her for a few seconds, and already he knew that she was nothing like anything he had learned before. He struggled to find his words – after a few stutters he finally managed the word, “Who?”
Immediately, Nash felt like an idiot, the blood rushing to his face and warming his cheeks. But the lady didn’t respond the way he thought she would: she didn’t laugh at him, nor did she look at him with uncomfortable eyes. Instead, she smiled sweetly as she said, “I’m Ava Chaser, and you must be David Nash.”
Chaser’s answer only fueled more questions for Nash. “How?”
“Come in,” Chaser said, beckoning him closer. “Close the door.”
Nash closed the door behind him and took a few unsteady steps towards the bed, as if he was learning how to walk again. By the time he got to the bed, Chaser was already seated at the foot of the mattress, her arms wrapped around her legs, perched like songbirds in the branches. She patted the soft mattress next to her. “Go ahead, sit down – the water’s fine.”
Nash did as he was asked and sat down. He glanced at Chaser, unsure of where to go from there, and so Chaser took the lead. “Craig here was telling me earlier how he made a new friend today. He said that the man’s name was David Nash, that he was one of the miners who had just arrived here. He said that even though David had just got here, he didn’t act like a stranger would. He said it felt like David had been with us before, and that, if anything, he was just coming back home after a long tr
ip. The moment I saw you, I knew that had to be you.”
“Oh,” Nash breathed. He then asked, “So, are you two, like, you know…?”
“Hmm? Oh no, it’s nothing like that,” Chaser said with a smile, realizing that seeing her curled up with Tumbler must have given the wrong impression. “I’m the nightingale for the colony.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You mean you’ve never heard the term before?” Chaser asked, with a vague note of what Nash could only imagine to be surprise. “A nightingale helps people with getting the sleep they deserve. They’re quite popular back on Earth, as you can imagine.”
“It sounds like it was one of the many luxuries I couldn’t afford,” Nash said.
“That’s such a shame. I take it then that you’re having trouble falling asleep?” Chaser wondered.
“I am,” Nash admitted.
Chaser thought out loud, “Well, I am booked for the rest of the night. But, if you have a few minutes free, I can too.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to be a bother…”
Chaser shook her head. “Don’t think you’re not worth my time. You’re worth every second. Here, let’s find an empty room, and I’ll see what I can do to help you.”
With that said, Chaser took Nash by the hand and led him out of the room, turning off the lights to the room as she did so. As they walked down the hall together, Nash asked, “So whatever it is you’re going to do to help me sleep, it already sounds too good to be true.”
Chaser did laugh at this, which made Nash desperately want to try and make her laugh again. She said, “Trust me when I say that’s not the first time I’ve heard that. But enough about me – let’s talk about you.”