It had only been two months since my mom died, and I could still see my brother grieving for her. They tried to move on, tried to continue without her, but it was impossible, and I saw the spark in his eyes disappear altogether. I think that was why it happened, why they didn’t see it coming. They were too caught up in their grief to notice the ground shake and quiver under their feet. My dad didn’t notice the uneven ground trying to tell him to turn around, to go back. He was too far into the tunnel and too distracted that he couldn’t see the warning signs, and I couldn’t warn them.
One second they were there, and the next…they were gone. The tunnel collapsed so quickly and with so much dust and debris, I couldn’t even find them on the screen as I watched the scene disappear before my eyes. Frantic, I checked all the cameras I could, any angle just to see one sign of them, to see if they had made it out alive, but I knew. I knew. They were gone. Just like that. Gone forever.
Shock took over before I had a chance to let it sink in. I sat there, gaping at the screen for what felt like days before a quiet knock on my door startled me awake. Woke up my senses and everything inside of me was ready to burst.
I opened the door and rushed out before the person behind it even said a word. I knew he would know about it before I even arrived. He saw everything that happened around here and I had decided that I would do anything I could to try to get them out, because he already knew anyways.
Without knocking, I burst through his office doors. My lungs burned from running so hard to get there. He wasn’t alone, but I paid no heed to anyone but him as my eyes locked on his.
“Please, let me go help them, let me find them,” I begged. He knew what I was talking about, who I was talking about.
And the time he wasted putting down his pen, smoothing his shirt down the front, and leaning back into his chair had my blood boiling, but I kept my rage inside as my energy threatened to peak.
“That is not a possibility. I’m sorry, Kenzie, but they’re gone. That is it. You will let this go.” Though his voice was calm, I could feel the warning behind his words. I straightened a bit, shocked at the coldness that came from him.
“Please,” I begged.
Again, his cold eyes revealed no emotion, no care for my family—or me, for that matter. All he said was, “You’re dismissed.” And with that, the conversation was over.
My feet wouldn’t move. Shock seemed to freeze me where I stood. He was back to business, back to whatever I had interrupted, before I even moved an inch. As if I wasn’t still standing before him on the edge of breaking down.
Finally, my feet shifted and I slowly walked towards the door. A fog consumed my thoughts and my mind as my body found the way out when I could no longer see anything around me.
Distantly, I heard footsteps behind me and as he brushed past me, hitting my side, I was nearly knocked over.
“Sorry,” Peter mumbled as his eyes quickly darted to my pocket before he kept going.
I waited until I rounded the corner to put my hand in my pocket where I felt the small piece of neatly folded paper there. I didn’t dare open it yet, with so many eyes all around, both seen and unseen. It took all my willpower not to sprint back to my room.
I turned the corner and nearly knocked over the Doctor who was leaning against my door, still waiting where I left her gaping after she had knocked only minutes ago.
“You were supposed to be at our lesson over 30 minutes ago,” she said sweetly as she brushed a piece of hair behind her ear.
I didn’t know if she could feel my panic. The urgency had me wanting to shove her out of the way and read the note burning a hole in my pocket. But I did my best to calm my features as I avoided her eyes, not in an obvious way, but in a tired one.
“I think I just need one more day to recover, if that’s ok. Yesterday was…hard. Can I take the day off?” It wasn’t a lie. We had been going through rigorous training to learn how to control my powers, to figure out how to let out just enough to cause pain or whatever I needed it to be, but not so much that I lost control, not like that night.
She looked me over and I finally met her eyes, calming my rapid heartrate and feigning an almost tired demeanor.
Whether she believed me or not I will never know, but she eventually pushed herself off the door to allow me to pass. “Tomorrow,” she said as she brushed past me and headed down the hall.
I sighed with relief as soon as I walked through the door, closing it with one hand and pulled out the note with the other. Written across it was a disjointed message only I would understand.
Code juha5423w off. Sb 9 hatch. Left quad. 60.
I raced to the tablet and entered the code. Within seconds, the cameras on the screen went blank and a text box popped up reading Restart initiated, 60 minutes to reboot.
I jumped from the chair and turned the tablet screen off, leaving the computer to do its work but avoiding anyone seeing what I had done. The tunnel cameras would be off for only 60 minutes, so I had to hurry.
I set my watch and ran down the hallway to the elevator. Once inside I pressed the button for Sub 8 level, the lowest it would go. My ears popped as I reached the bottom, and I was glad to have avoided running into anyone. I poked my head out of the elevator doors and found the space nearly abandoned. There was one guard down the hall but he hadn’t spotted me. I quietly crept down the hall and creaked open the stairwell door to head down one more level to the basement of Sub 9. This area was completely unguarded. There was no need for this space as it was only meant to be an escape room when the architects built the place a long time ago. I assume they left it here just in case of a cave in, but it hadn’t been touched in years, as was evidenced by all the dust layering the place.
I saw the hatch in the floor. It was nearly rusted shut but with my stronger, rebuilt arm, I was able to open it. As I looked down inside I knew exactly where I was—the underground tunnels. I was about the jump down when I realized I had no idea where I was going.
Then I remembered the last clue. I went to the left quadrant of the room and began pulling out drawers, looking for anything that may be the clue Peter had meant for me to find. I was near ready to give up, having only found dusty logbooks, broken tablets, and many scattered papers that meant nothing to me, when I spotted it. In the back of one of the drawers, rolled up neatly and tucked safely behind a few empty logbooks, was fresh paper and what looked to be a map. I unrolled it and found the entire underground grid sprawled before me. My heart sank. It might as well have been a maze for all the good it did me. I rolled it back up, stuck it in the inside pocket of my jacket, and dropped down into the tunnel. There was only one way to go from here, so I set off.
I passed a main station before I ran into trouble. There were four tunnels before me and none of them gave a clear view of what was to come. I opened the map, which still didn’t help much. I had no idea where my brother and father had been in relation to Sub 9, so each turn was nothing more than a guess at this point. Each tunnel could take me further from or closer to them, but there was no way to know for sure.
My watch beeped its 10-minute warning, and with a frustrated sigh, I turned and ran back to the hatch, closing it up just as my watch told me time was up. I slumped my way back to my room as I realized time was running out, and I might not reach them in time. But I had to try. There had to be a way.
For the next two weeks I studied that map. I looked at every camera angle I could find on that tablet, and I worked out exactly where I needed to go. It was a lot of trial and error, every day I would reboot the cameras and head back down to Sub level 9, into the underground rail system where I searched and searched for them.
Finally, on the 15th day, I found them. There had been multiple cave-ins throughout the tunnel system and I had wasted more than one trip digging out the wrong tunnel, but this time I knew it was theirs. I pushed away the rocks, and dug as fast as I could with the little time I had left. My chest tightened. I knew it was them.
It to
ok me three more trips to get them out. Once I did, when they were there beside me and I saw with my own eyes they were, in fact, gone…I broke down. I wept for them over and over again as I cursed myself for not being faster, for not being able to find them and save them somehow. Deep down I knew there was no way I could have saved them, but something had broken inside of me and I was now searching for a way to repair it.
My watch beeped its warning as I placed the last rock over my brother’s lifeless body. And with one last final vow to get vengeance for their death. I closed my eyes and those amber-brown eyes stared back at me, as if to say, together, we will avenge them together.
When I returned that night, a cold calm had settled over me. I knew I was a pawn in this game, that I wasn’t meant to be anything but some soldier, obeying every last word he said. I would play that game. I would be that soldier, but I was no pawn. I would be nobody’s pawn.
Chapter Six
I didn’t return to those tunnels in the six years that passed. Even when I was sent out on missions, even when I brought back humans to be transformed, to be used. I didn’t let myself think about them for too long. I had to keep my eyes firmly focused on the mission. I had become that obedient solider, but never the pawn. I honed my powers, perfected them with flawlessness, so much so that even as it flowed through me it never consumed me. I vowed to make good on that promise, one way or another.
I knew that if I thought too long about it I would crack, and the powers deep inside of me would break down this entire building just to have vengeance. But I had to be smart, I had to be patient. And so I was. I waited, but I never forgot them, and I kept them tucked deep inside me.
She visited me nightly, the girl with the amber-brown eyes. I named her Shadow, as she was the darkness to my lightning. She was the backdrop to the painting I created in my dreams across the night sky, lighting up the world like a million stars filling the universe. She never allowed it to consume me, never let the power get out of control, as if she herself were controlling it, too. We were a part of each other, one and the same as we painted the sky with darkness and light.
And as I sat there in front of the glass window overlooking Cytos, as I so often did, I pulled out that star shaped pendant from my pocket, the one that reminded me of her in the daytime. The peaceful calm from my sanctuary high above was a stark contrast to the reality I knew filled the streets below and it sickened me to think of it.
It was the only peace I got in those days, the only time when I knew my thoughts were my own. As I looked down at that pendant, I thought of the day when I was given it, ten years ago—before this war had even begun.
“Why are you crying, dear?” she had asked me. Her hair looked so smooth and dark, practically black as it sparkled in the artificial lights of the room.
“I am alone,” I remember saying. She seemed to know the meaning of what I said, not that I was physically alone, though I was, but that I was alone in spirit. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the little star-shaped keychain and put it into my hand.
“You are never alone. The millions of stars in the sky will always be here for you. Even when you can’t see them, they are there.” She’d smiled, and I had longed to feel her embrace me, like my mother would. She gently patted the top of my head and whispered, “The stars are the key. They will keep you safe.” Then she was gone.
I squeezed that pendant as the door behind me softly clicked open.
“It’s time,” he said, and it was then that I knew I must now become someone else. The only one that mattered in the world I lived in now. That little boy died the day he arrived here, and the man I had become would be my destiny.
Coleman
A Watcher Series Mini Novella
Chapter One
I never knew what an awakening moment felt like until it happened. It’s a moment that occurs at a specific time in one’s life and triggers something deep within you like a lightbulb being turned on. And just like that, something inside of me awoke. Like a virus, it began to spread and fill up my entire body. It’d take years until it reached my heart and filled up my soul, but in that moment I knew I’d never be the same.
What should have been the most amazing day of my life transformed me into the monster I would one day become. It happened only four hours after experiencing what should have been a joyful time, a time to celebrate. I had never dreamed it would shape my journey the way it would. When my wife told me six months ago that she was with child, I didn’t know what to think. Was I ready to be a father? Could I really do this—bring a child into a world that was about as stable as a toddler?
With my wife at my side, I knew I could. I could do anything with her. She was my strength, my hope—my everything.
I had planned it all out meticulously, just as I plan one of my projects at work. I found the best MediBots, one of my creations, to oversee it all. I hired the best human assistants and reserved the best room in the best hospital, the one with my name on the front door. We made every appointment and every checkup, and we took every precaution necessary to ensure my wife received the best care and that my unborn child came into this broken world strong and unbreakable.
But not everything goes as according to plan, no matter how hard one tries.
My wife went into labor two months early. We were out for dinner one night, enjoying freshly made pasta and creamy tomato sauce, when my wife felt a pain. Something was wrong; I could see it in her eyes even though she tried to be brave.
To think, that was less than two days ago. I hadn’t realized that was one of those moments.
She was rushed to the hospital, and after thirty-six painful hours of labor, my beautiful baby girl was born. When they placed her in my arms, I thought there was no way I could ever feel more love than when I did right there. To hold a life in my arms was a concept I had yet to fully understand; that this little thing was part of me was both amazing and confusing all at the same time.
The baby cried in my arms, her tiny limbs flailing, as she reached out for something or someone, until I laid her across my wife’s chest, and she went quiet and became content immediately.
My wife and I were both tired and drained, but neither of us took our eyes off this amazing miracle before our eyes. I sat in the chair beside my wife’s bed, holding her hand while she sang our baby to sleep.
My eyes were drifting closed when it happened.
The baby began to cry, and it took me a few confused seconds to realize what was going on. The room was silent, save for the screams of my baby girl, and it was then I noticed my wife’s voice had gone mute. When I looked to her face, her eyes were still open, staring at the hospital room’s ceiling. Her mouth was still parted with the words of a song on the tip of her tongue.
I didn’t realize what had happened, but it was almost as though the baby had felt my wife’s heart stop beating and her chest stop rising and falling with each breath.
My mind seemed foggy in these moments, moving slowly as I tried to comprehend what was going on. The attendants ran in, scooping up the baby, and took her somewhere else. The MediBot strolled in, standing over my wife to scan for vitals. The bot placed a hand over her chest, and a long needle protruded from its palm and stabbed deep into my wife’s chest. I flinched at the sound of the needle piercing through skin and bone.
It took the bot only a minute to determine she was gone.
“What do you mean dead?” I said, finally finding words.
“There is no life left in this subject. She is dead.” The MediBot gave me the news like it was reading ingredients on a cereal box. No care or concern that he had informed me that my wife had died.
“No.” I stumbled to my feet, gripping the bed for support as I looked down on my wife’s lifeless body. “Fix her. Bring her back. I order you!”
The MediBot stood there, staring. “The subject cannot be fixed. She is dead.”
“Fix her!” I screamed again. “There has to be something you can do?”
&n
bsp; “Please sign here.” The bot ignored my request as it handed me a tablet.
“What is this?” I looked down to the tablet, the words across it were a blur as my eyes rimmed with tears.
“Permission to harvest the subject’s organs for transplant to another subject.” The bot’s monotone voice scraped in my skull. My mind tried to understand how it could be asking permission to cut her up and give her organs to someone more worthy. As if it was the decider of who was to live and who wasn’t.
I shook violently and tossed the tablet back at the Carbon where it bounced off its chest and onto the ground. “No.”
The bot gathered the tablet off the floor before it turned and left the room.
“Sir.” The young human attendant touched my arm, startling me. “I am so sorry. There is nothing we can do.”
I shook my head, unable to process what they were saying, “How? How did this happen? You were supposed to be the best. She was just here. She was just fine.” But she was no longer fine. And just like that, my life was over.
The attendant placed a sheet over my wife’s body as the other steered me out into the hallway. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t breathe. Words seemed lost as I stood in that empty hallway, alone, while I watched them roll my wife’s bed out of view.
I couldn’t tell you how long I stood there. It could’ve been days, it could’ve been minutes; it all seemed the same and time was going too fast and too slow.
I heard a voice speaking beside me, but it wasn’t until a cold hand touched my arm that I blinked out of my stare. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“Would you like me to take you to your daughter?” the young attendant whispered at my side. Her name tag read Sarah, and her dark brown eyes glimmered with sympathy. Her dark skin was such a contrast to the sharp white uniform she wore.
Untold: The Complete Watcher Series Mini Novellas (Watcher #4) Page 4