Vessel, Book I: The Advent

by Tominda Adkins

Fleeting images and feelings. No order, no definitive beginning or end. Something like a meadow. Something like riding a horse, a rushing feeling. A singing falsetto. A hot, tingly, smothering feeling.

  It was the blood rushing to my face.

  My eyes opened to blindness. My windpipe met a roadblock. I was crushed under a dead weight. Thousands of tons of water? The panels of a crumpled elevator? No. Arms, legs. Warm, heavy. Ghi, Abe.

  Something buzzed. My sight returned because there was light. Ghi, flat on his back. Panting, arm stretched toward the top of the elevator, where the dead light flickered feebly at his command and became steady. He let his arm drop, rolled his legs off of us. His face was inches from mine.

  "You okay?" he asked.

  I made a noise that sounded affirmative.

  The world bobbed back and forth. I heard the water rushing, slipping by all around the elevator's exterior and down the shaft. Ghi began to roll up to his feet, but grimaced and paused. He rolled to his stomach instead and tried again, ambling up one leg at a time. Using only his left arm, he tugged Abe off of me as gently as possible. His right arm hung by his side at a strange angle. Dislocated shoulder.

  I looked down at myself carefully, noting with distant relief that all of my bones were right where they belonged―where I couldn't see or feel them. No longer crushed beneath Abe, I took a full breath. The oxygen made stars dance in front of my eyes. I began to roll forward.

  "Don't move yet," Ghi said to me, still hunched over Abe. I ignored him and stood up. I was fine. My shoulder blades felt like one gigantic bruise waiting to happen, my head weighed two hundred pounds, and my ears rang, but I was fine.

  Then my vision blacked. It returned moments later, with a blue tint. I felt very silly, then screamingly fearful, then silly again, all in less than ten seconds.

  "He's breathing. I think he's okay," someone said. It took me a moment to remember that it was only Ghi. I rubbed my eyes and ordered myself to pay attention.

  "I'm going to need your help here," he wheezed, working his good arm under one side of Abe, trying to haul him off the ground. The doctor's body was limp but whole, and he was conscious enough to groan when lifted. I nodded and staggered over, and together we managed to hoist him between us in a suitable enough position. Ghi and I, just two good arms between us. How hilarious. I giggled and it did not feel at all inappropriate.

  Ghi stared at me fearfully and pushed a button.

  Somehow, the elevator doors were still in working order. They shuddered halfway open on their own, and, with a bit of pushing from Ghi's foot, managed to open wide enough for our passage. A coursing sheet of water fell beyond them, forming a solid curtain that flooded into the base of the elevator shaft. We stared at it for a moment, assessing whether or not it held any threat, but at the moment it seemed only harmless and beautiful, like a normal waterfall. Not like the disembodied spirit of someone we knew, blind and bent on destruction.

  No time to think about it. Ghi wordlessly tugged Abe forward, and I had no choice but to follow. We squeezed through the door, passed under the pouring water―which was disturbingly warm―and took one steep step out of the disarranged elevator, soaked and shivering. First the river, and now this. I wondered if I'd ever be completely dry again.

  I blinked. The corridor was gone. Behind my starry red vision, I struggled to understand. We weren't in the corridor. And we hadn't made it to the top level. The elevator had plummeted down a level, all the way down to its bottommost stop.

  We were standing in the basement.

  I had to guess that anyway, because I could see nothing beyond the glow of the elevator lights, shining faintly through the streaming water. Its splashing echoed out far and wide, and a disorienting nausea twisted in my stomach, the opposite of claustrophobia. This place, whatever it was, was massive in terms of open space. Massive and dark.

  I turned my head to locate Ghi and almost gasped. My voice multiplied into sightless space, echoing a hundred times over.

  "Ghi, your eyes!"

  In the closer blackness, two mirrory, round planes of light stared back at me, like cat's eyes. These eyes weren't reflecting any light, however. They were making light of their own. I could just make out the planes of Ghi's face, moving when he answered me, sounding alarmed. "What?"

  "Your eyes. They're ... shining."

  "Oh." He started forward again, keeping the pace slow for me. "Neat."

  I shifted Abe's weight in my good arm, maintaining focus. "What can you see?"

  "Not much," he said. "The foundation. Open space. Machines. Big ones, bigger than the elevator. And they got down here somehow, right? So there has to be a very big exit somewhere."

  Exactly where that exit was, that was the million dollar question. We dragged Abe along haltingly, staying close to the wall in hopes of discovering an exterior door. Time lapsed in confusing bursts. Deep breaths. Twinkly green spots in my eyes, coating the darkness. A thrilling ache splitting my head in two, a giddy lightness taking my limbs. Had I been talking? Had someone else? What had I even been thinking about? I was walking. I couldn't see. Why?

  "Jordan?" A voice. Concerned.

  Ghi, I reminded myself.

  "Just keep talking to me," I said.

  "About?"

  "Anything." I remembered the weight against my shoulder, and that it was a person. "Abe. These Luna Latum people. Tell me more about them."

  "Okay, but I don't really know much ...."

  "Whatever, just―just make something up. Talk to me."

  "Right, okay." Ghi cleared his throat, creating harsh echoes. "Here's something. That woman who tackled me back in New York? She's one of them. Her name is Stella. She was sent to find us and take us home."

  "Home."

  "To the Elysium. Some island paradise they built for us."

  Stella. Elysium. It was enough to keep my mind awake and chewing.

  "Do you trust them?" I asked.

  "I don't know. I might, if they ever get here."

  It was getting harder and harder to breathe in the stifling darkness. Abe seemed to grow heavier by the minute. I kept stopping without realizing it, moving again only after we'd nearly pulled him apart by the arms.

  "Ghi?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Do you really not remember?" I puffed. It was becoming difficult to talk, to push the air out. "Who you are?"

  I still have no idea why I asked him that. I guess when you sense that you're about to die anyway, you feel like you have a right to know everything. You feel like it's alright to pry into other people's deepest secrets.

  "I won't tell, I promise," I said. "Double pinky kiss-kiss."

  Ghi paused for a moment, undoubtedly perplexed by my question, much less by my proposed oath. But his answer was solid and truthful. And frankly, disappointing.

  "I really don't remember," he said.

  Another pause. I struggled to think of another question, but Ghi spoke again before I could come up with one.

  "But I really want to. Even if all I had was my real name, even that would be enough for me."

  He might've said more. I don't know. Time dimmed and brightened again. The next thing I remember was wobbling on my feet, abruptly free of my one-armed burden. Ghi was laying Abe out on the ground.

  "Here, right here." He guided me down to the frigid, dusty floor. In the sharp glow provided by his eyes, I could distinguish something directly overhead, something rectangular and metallic. A platform, maybe.

  "I'm not going far," Ghi assured me. "I just want to be sure we're going the right way, before I make you go any further, okay? You just sit here with Abe."

  I felt myself nodding.

  "Don't. Go. Anywhere," he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze with each separate word. And then he walked away, taking the only light with him.

  A few seconds or minutes were lost. When I came back to myself, I couldn't see or hear Ghi anywhere. I realized how quickly I was breathing, how dizzy it made me feel, and so that became my focus.
After a moment's blind reaching, I found Abe still sprawled out beside me, and I placed a hand on his chest. Rising and falling, steady and slow. It was all I could do to match the pace with my lungs.

  It was so cold down there, and I was still soaked to the bone. I let go of Abe and pulled Corin's coat tightly around me. Corin, who was dead, I remembered. His endless ghost flooding and rampaging down from the floor above. And Jesse. My throat and face began to ache, but I composed myself because it was already hard enough to breathe. Sobbing would not have helped matters.

  A grating, metallic creak pierced the gigantic chamber's silence. This did not startle or worry me. Every damn thing in this place creaked. I looked up, and feverish relief broke out over every inch of me. Even from a hundred yards away, I could recognize the miraculous crack of daylight for what it was, that wonderful white slit in the darkness.

  Ghi had found a door.

  We weren't trapped down here. We were going to make it out. That thought alone undoubtedly added minutes to my life. My vision started adjusting to that beautiful, faint light. I found my own hand in front of my face, the dull shapes of the distant boilers, the form of Ghi, sprinting back to us.

  And then my eyes found something else, something that made my heart come to a complete stop with a sharp pang, as if it understood that someone was listening to it. I held in the scream that built up in my chest and felt the terror turn me into an instant statue.

  Near the center of the colossal basement, unmoving against the flat darkness beyond him, stood a man. Just one man, so far away and small, so solitary, so totally still.

  The body always recognizes it first, I've learned. My heart started ramming in my chest in spite of itself, and a million names and instincts and words exploded through my veins. Scream. Flee. Hell. Dangerous. Pray. Run. God. Fear. Pain. Murder. End. Over. Death.

  Death. Death. Death. Death. Death.

  "They spoke truth," it said.