by Lane, Styna
“So you’re the ones nobody’s been able to shut up about for the last couple days,” Mattie remarked, eyeing me over. She instantly reminded me of Lyla.
“Matilda, do not start,” Lily warned, taking on the same tone Emmy had always used with Eric and me when we were being obnoxious. I was surprised to see the girl look down at her feet and mutter a quiet apology.
“Hey,” I chirped, getting Mattie’s attention, “I like your hair.”
It was a very attractive chestnut-brown, and fell in tight ringlets down to her shoulders, and I really couldn’t have cared less about it. But I’d had enough experience with the younger girls in The Facility to know how to get along with them; flattery usually worked pretty well. I wouldn’t have typically cared about getting on a thirteen-year-old’s good side, but seeing as how her gift would be very useful on our mission, I figured it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to have her not want me dead. As she looked up at me, the little glint in her eyes suggested that I was all right in her book.
I was confused as Mattie reached out to take my hand. Perhaps I had misjudged her, and she was about to freeze me over or turn me into a frog—I had no idea what the other Elementums were capable of; it seemed totally logical. She grinned and tilted her head, motioning for me to turn around.
“No way,” Lakin said from behind me, eyes wandering wildly in every direction but my own.
“You can’t see me?” I shrieked, waving my free hand directly in front of his face. He jumped as I booped the tip of his nose with my finger.
Lakin’s eyes widened, focusing on me immediately after Mattie had let go of my hand. My heart fluttered at the sight of his crooked smile. I wondered if we would ever grow so used to each other that I wouldn’t have that reaction. I hoped not.
“Do you both understand what we’re doing?” Al asked.
The kids nodded, and suddenly seemed much older than their age. I realized why Al had told Lily they were too young. We could’ve possibly been marching the children to their deaths, and they weren’t questioning a thing.
“Mattie, you’ll be with Angie. Jason, you’re with Al,” Lily explained, still trying to mask the concern in her voice.
“What about Lakin?” I questioned, protectively weaving my arm through his. Al seemed hesitant to meet my eyes.
“He needs to stay here.”
“What?” I exclaimed, my voice harsh and angry.
“He doesn’t have enough experience using his abilities.” Al tried to be as gentle as possible, but it did little to calm the fire that was building up inside of me. ‘He’ll only put us all in more danger… including himself.’
Even though I knew Al was right, I hated the idea of leaving Lakin behind. He’d be safer in the Eden, but we had spent so much of our lives apart, I was consumed by the concern that we might never see each other again. The thought pulled at my innards like a pack of hungry honey badgers fighting over the last bit of defeated cobra.
Before I could turn to Lakin, Cora came trotting back to us, face hard as she stretched her hand out toward me. In the brief moment that her skin touched mine, my vision fogged over. I discreetly closed my eyes, ensuring nobody could see that I was looking into her past. Through Cora’s view, I saw the burning ruins of the store, and people hurriedly carrying buckets of water to the destructive flames. In the midst of all the neighborly love—townsfolk selflessly helping each other to extinguish the devastation—there was one body frozen behind the smoke. I was not in control of my movements, as Cora’s hands helped bring water to the fire, but I was able to identify the image of the man in my peripheral vision. In his pristine gray suit, he stood out amongst the ash-covered civilians. And he was staring right at me.
My vision cleared as Cora dropped a stunning necklace into my hands. Curtis had managed to craft my one stone into two tiny, intertwined loops—shackles. They looked like a miniature version of my shackles, connected to each other. He had no way of knowing what my Electro-Cuffs had looked like, and I suddenly understood what he’d meant when he said our stones would become whatever we needed them to become. My cuffs had been a part of me for so long, I felt incomplete without them. And now that I had them back, without the restrictions of those little green lights, I felt… invincible.
At first, I thought Al was only watching me gawk at my gem in awe. After feeling him inside my mind, I realized he must have been aware of my vision. He knew I saw William standing in the crowd watching Cora.
‘Say nothing,’ his voice ordered. And that was exactly what I did.
“You need to go. There may be survivors, and they will need your help,” Lily said, giving Al a final hug.
“What if—” I began.
“If… if there is no one to save, then you return,” she answered quickly, keeping her eyes on the ground.
I felt the heat start to grow inside of me again. All of those bodies—those people—and we were just supposed to leave them there to be forgotten? To decay into nothingness?
‘There were hundreds of people there, Angie. There is nothing we can do for them.’ This time, it was Lily’s voice ringing in my head.
I sighed out my exasperation and turned to Lakin, taking both his hands in mine. He seemed surprised that I was not fighting harder to take him with us. I picked up on his slight feeling of betrayal, and it filled my chest cavity with acid. I leaned my forehead against his, as I’d seen Al do earlier with Lily, and I closed my eyes. I moved my palms to his face, and forced his vision to cloud over. I replayed the moment when we’d first seen each other—really seen each other. The overwhelming feeling of oneness and infinity as the blue and orange light surrounded us. I had not expected to open my eyes to see his brimming with tears. He nodded and kissed me more passionately than he ever had before. It felt a bit awkward sharing that moment in front of other people, but I didn’t care, and nobody dared to try and stop us.
“No,” I said, just loud enough for Lakin to hear, “this feels too much like goodbye.”
“It’s not goodbye. It’ll never be goodbye.”
Chapter ten
Silent and Unseen
I couldn’t bring myself to look back at Lakin before the darkness of the stone-tunnel blocked out all light of the Eden behind us. I knew I would only find sadness in his face, and I didn’t want to remember him like that—just in case that would be the last time I’d ever set eyes on him.
The flames in Al’s palms cast shadows against the walls as we travelled down the passageway. They told the story of my first true mission as an Elementum, even though the adventure only led me back to the place I had spent my entire life trying to distance myself from. I wondered if the shadows would also tell the story of our return, or if the pages would end within the walls of The Facility.
‘Stop thinking so much. It’s distracting,’ Al’s voice bounced inside my skull.
‘You could try staying out of my mind. That might help,’ I thought, glaring at him through the dancing flames.
‘I meant that it’s distracting for you. You need to focus on what we’re doing.’
‘I need to focus on walking down a tunnel?’ I asked in an attempt to be snarky.
Just as I finished my thought, my foot caught on a stray rock and presented me with the wonderful opportunity of introducing my face to the ground. It was quickly decided that my face and the ground had far too many differences to hold any sort of stable relationship, and they would simply have to settle for being distant acquaintances.
“You okay?” Mattie asked, chuckling as she helped me up.
“Fine,” I muttered, aggressively brushing dirt from my knees. “Just a problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull.”
Al nearly choked on his own saliva as he emitted an unexpected snort of laughter. We carried on, until we eventually reached a solid stone wall. I could hear the waterfall on the other side, and was more than a little excited to be back out in the open. Not that the Eden wasn’t wonderful in nearly every way, but I had only been able to s
pend a few hours of my life without being contained in some sort of shelter. I wanted to see the sun without it being distorted through water, or projected from a computer screen. Then a terrifying thought crossed my mind.
‘What if he’s waiting on the other side?’
Al dragged his hand across the wall, leaving a mesh-like trail of light behind it. As I stared through the translucent stone in awe, I wondered if our powers would ever cease to amaze me. I didn’t need an explanation to know that we could see through the stone from our side, but others would not be able to see in. And this was one ability I wished I had known about while in The Facility—it really could have come in handy.
Al dragged his hand across the wall once more, this time creating the same white spider web of light that had allowed us into the tunnel before. Within moments, the stone was gone, and the waterfall parted over our heads as he held up his ring. The wall closed itself behind us, as we trudged through the stream to the soggy greenery on one side of the water. The sounds of squishy mud took me back to childhood, when Eddie would run the sprinkler for hours just so Eric and I could have the experience of puddle-hopping. I wished he was one of the people we were returning to save. But he wasn’t.
Al’s hand shot into the air, signaling for us to stop. Cracking twigs suggested we were not alone in the woods, and ‘not alone’ was a very bad thing to be. Al and I took hold of Jason and Mattie’s hands, just in time for a couple of teenagers to hike into view. They walked right past us, fishing rods in tow, without so much as a glance in our direction. Releasing the breath I realized I had been holding in, I eyed Al with worry.
‘We are silent and unseen from here on out.’ The newly-added echo of Al’s voice gave me the odd feeling that I was not the only one he was talking to.
We all nodded and continued our path through the woods, avoiding twigs and noisy things as much as possible. It was difficult to see the sky through the dense foliage, and everything seemed to be tinted a mystical shade of green. My nostrils tingled with the strong scent of pine, which I hadn’t noticed on our trip to the Eden. It probably had something to do with the whole ‘broken nose’ thing.
The forest was abruptly severed by a paved road, which didn’t take much caution to cross. It seemed as though heavy traffic wouldn’t be a concern in the small town of Freedom. As we carried on, the uncanny, bitter smell of burnt stuff permeated the air, and a dwindling smoke clouded the sky.
The sight of the torched store had an unexpected effect on me; my heart raced and my feet felt weighted as I imagined the same amount of destruction within the walls of The Facility. I pictured my tiny apartment in ruins, a new alarm clock torn to pieces by something other than myself for once. The vase full of blue flowers strewn across the floor, wilted and crispy. Emmy’s trash can toppled over in her kitchen, Eddie’s damp shoes spilling out of it.
The fire had mostly been extinguished, but a few straggling townsfolk prodded around the site with shovels and sticks, looking for who-knows-what. I caught sight of a familiar face, very animatedly talking to a police officer. The face belonged to Lakin’s adoptive father, and he looked mostly angry, with just a hint of despair.
‘They thought Lakin was in the store…’ Al explained after reading the hefty man’s mind.
I was surprised that it mattered at all to him. He had all but kicked Lakin out, and had never shown any amount of care for him. By the look on the police officer’s face, I was not the only person who knew of the man’s neglect.
‘How do we get in?’ Mattie’s voice streamed through our little network of soundless communication, reminding me that I was not alone inside my head.
Al focused on the officer for a moment, before giving us his response. ‘We won’t have a problem.’
Though the flames had diminished, heat radiated against us from the remaining embers as we stumbled across ash and scorched cans of sodium-ridden stuff that was considered to be food. We made sure not to cross paths with those who poked around the disturbing sight, and found ourselves at what obviously used to be the men’s restroom, a single blackened urinal still protruding from the ground. Al did his best to shuffle the debris as discreetly as possible, until we could see the thinnest outline of a door in the floor. He ordered that we all keep a close eye on those around us as he lifted the door just enough for each of us to shimmy through, but the order quickly became unnecessary.
“All right, folks,” the officer spoke up from the edge of the ruin, “I’m going to need you all to clear the scene.”
As the stragglers turned their backs to us, I thought I saw the officer’s gaze linger in our direction. But I knew it couldn’t be so.
Chapter Eleven
Break
Darkness. Complete and total darkness. That was all that seemed to exist on the other side of the door. Mattie dropped my hand as Al held his lighter to each of our palms, eerily illuminating our surroundings. I recognized the room we wandered into by the human-shaped scorch-marks littering the floor. I shuddered at the thought that Al had created those morbid marks, and that he had created them because of me. I didn’t know if those guards had died, but the bits of flesh still stuck to the floor suggested that they had certainly been left with some nasty scars—and at least one missing ear.
In the stairwell, fluorescent lights dangled dangerously from the walls, threatening to give us just the slightest startle from an unexpected crash. Other than a thin coating of dust, The Facility seemed fairly untouched by the explosion above. Al and I took the free hands of our humany-invisibility-cloaks, fearing that we had perhaps strolled into the den of a less-than-sleeping—and very hungry—monster.
We made our way down to the floor where I’d been released from my shackles. Cubicles were covered in messes of papers, and the floor was sprinkled with the tiniest bits of ceiling. A light was on above a single desk, exactly as it had been on the night of my escape. A lump developed in my throat and seemed to hold itself in place with barbed wire as I walked toward the light.
‘Angie, don’t,’ Al pleaded.
I ignored him and continued to the cubicle, using all my strength to force one step after another. A long exhale whispered through my lips at the sight of the empty chair, but the dark puddle of blood beneath the desk was less than reassuring.
“Aww, her grandpa?” The sound of Mattie’s voice alarmed me. After realizing she had spoken aloud, she clasped her hands to her mouth and stared at me with wide, regretful eyes. My scowl at Al received nothing more than a shrug, before he turned back toward the stairwell.
William’s office looked like something out of an odd and violent video game. The glass labyrinth Al had created out of sand still stood, but large sections of it were busted. Bullet casings mingled with the shattered glass across the once-pristine floor, and patches of dried blood smeared the table. Some of it was surely mine, some of it Al’s, but there was much more than either of our wounds had produced. My stomach felt as though it were attempting to turn itself inside-out and free itself from the gelatinous confines of my body.
We continued downward until we finally landed on the tenth floor. Five of the six apartments were just as barren as they had been when I lived there, but mine was still occupied by the phantoms of recent memories. The window at the far end of the living room was stuck on a loop of the half-deer I had seen on the night of my escape. It would spend the rest of its life—or the rest of however long the generators lasted—trying to walk into the woods and off-screen, only to reappear a moment later in the same place it had been before; one more prisoner, held captive by The Facility.
My apartment was in relatively the same state it had been in before I left, with the exception of its obvious ransacking. The few cupboards and drawers were left open, their contents scattered across the floor. They had twenty-four-hour video footage of most of my life; had there been anything interesting in those drawers, they would have known about it without needing to toss my underwear all over the place. I made an effort to look away from t
he crumple of black cloth on the floor next to my bed—the dress I had worn to Eddie’s funeral—as I tugged at the edge of a piece of paper from inside my pillowcase. I kept my face cold and hard as I folded up Jenny’s drawing and tucked it into my shirt.
I didn’t glance back at my apartment when we left. I didn’t want to—I didn’t need to. The only thing it contained of any importance to me was sitting next to my heart, where it belonged. That place was no longer my home.
We all reacted in our own ways to the sight on the eleventh floor. Mattie gasped, Jason’s face went pale and sweaty, Al sighed with regret, and I relentlessly dragged Mattie along behind me as I rushed toward Paula’s apartment. I emotionlessly stepped over the unmoving bodies that lined the hallway, obvious bullet-holes in their heads. Al stopped at each one, checking to ensure that life had indeed left them. Perhaps I was being selfish in focusing on the people I loved before tending to the others, but as I pushed wide the open door of Apartment Sixteen, I didn’t care.
Paula’s body was nearly unrecognizable. William’s men had certainly spent more time on her than they had the others littering the hall. She sat, hunched over in a chair in the middle of the kitchen, blood still dripping into a puddle from her tied hands. They hadn’t just killed her; they’d tortured her, mutilated her, destroyed her—and it was my fault. I’d been so close with her, maybe they thought she’d had some sort of information that could help them find us. Maybe they knew we would come back, and they just wanted to break me. If that was their goal, they had succeeded. Although I kept my cold, hard expression, broken was the only thing I felt. Broken, and guilty.
Al placed his hand on my shoulder, pulling back enough to let me know that we needed to carry on. I wanted to do something for Paula, but I knew there was little that could be done. Mattie made sure to hold tightly onto one of my hands, as my other untied Paula’s body and pulled her to the living room floor. I wiped as much of the blood from her face as I could, pushed her matted hair behind her ears, and covered her in a white sheet from the couch. It was the closest thing to a proper burial I could offer.