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Have you ever tried to knee slide before? Evan had never but this seemed the perfect time to try one. He dropped to his knees just as the blast flew over his head, letting his momentum drive him forward. The hole approached and he quickly dove for it.
The drop was quick and so was the explosion above him. The ground rushed to meet him. The darkness roared and the rocks rained like hail. He rolled to the side and crawled under a crevice and folded into the fetal position, throw-up fighting up his throat.
A few seconds passed, then a minute, then two. But it was several minutes later before Evan decided it was safe to come out, after his throw-up stayed down and felt like he seriously needed to pee.
He rolled out and climbed slowly to his feet though a multitude of ants was crawling under his skin for staying in that crumpled position for so long.
He could see nothing, the darkness pressed at his eyes. He lifted his arms and walked carefully forward. His fingers met rock obviously. So he felt around, looking for an opening. Five minutes went by, nothing. Ten minutes, still nothing. Fifteen? Nope. Twenty? Yeah! Just kidding, still no.
This went on for about an hour. Him frantically crawling around in the dark, bumming his head on the same rock about ten times and crashing out each time.
Fear didn’t begin to delineate what he was feeling at that moment. The darkness was suffocating, his breath excruciating. The four walls were closing in on him, their unyielding solidity sending him fits of maniacal laughter.
This..this, he did NOT like.
Political enslavement, sure. Routinal mental torture, no problem. Trapped underground with no possible way out, now that was going too far. He could handle everything the Dominion threw at him because he could weasel his way out for a puff of fresh air. Freedom was always at his fingertips. It was what kept him sane all these years.
…Now he’s here. Stuck. Trapped. Imprisoned.
He screamed. He ran towards the wall of darkness…and fell through.
When Evan opened his eyes, he was not expecting a grimy face smiling back at him.
“Mmm…you make the cutest little thud when you land.”
“AHH” he punched the face and it yelped. Evan jumped to his feet, his fists at the ready.
“Ow, that hurt,” said the darkness, sounding slightly annoyed.
“What are you?” he squinted as the dark mass in front of him.
“What am I? Don’t you know English? Clearly, I’m a who..o-or is it whom?”
“Show yourself.” he demanded, forcing confidence in his voice where there was none.
A pause. “Ok.”
Evan hissed as bright light flashed. He forced his eyes open and in the red glow of a light stick was the grimy, grinning face.
A boy his age, in the same bio armour as him, stood with his left hand covering a bruising eye where a polarizer pistol hung by the lever hole on his pinky.
His glossy black heavy-lidded eyes gleaming warmly at him, “Hey. I’m Cinder. You got a good left.”
Cinder Kamura was…odd. And not the I’m-secretly-a-pervert odd, no. He was more of the real-life cliche of an extrovert “adopting” an introvert. You know, talking…a lot. Evan was more of an inner monologue kind of guy, any conversation, whether imagined or not, happened mainly in his mind and a very select few came out of his mouth.
For Cinder…well, it seemed the exact opposite. Anything that came into his mind came out of his mouth in steady stream meticulous nonsense. And there was no end to it.
“Crazy those Metrobots, huh?...I’ve heard about you from a friend of mine. Is it true you’re been to Low Landing before?...My favourite colour is red so that's why I'm not so upset about being dumped on Mars…My mother was killed when I was born, do you have a mom? Can we share?...I once farted and burped at the same time when I was five, calling it a bart…I actually have a sixth toe on my left foot. Ha! Just kidding, that would be cool though!”
The chattering chipmunk went on for half an hour as they walked deeper into the caves to Cinder’s campsite. All the while, Evan was slowly considering gagging the boy if he didn’t shut his trap in the next five seconds.
The red glow of the boy’s light stick was poor, unfortunately. It was flickering constantly, making it difficult to make out more than a few metres in front of them. The ground was mostly even, a few scatterings of rocks here and there which made the going much more slow than he’d like.
At one point, the ceiling was too low for them to walk standing upright so they had to crawl. Cinder was in front for obvious reasons and in that position Evan got an uncomfortable close look to a part of the boy he wasn’t sure he should be familiar with so early in their relationship.
Though Cinder did make sure to comment on that somewhere in his oration…
“Sorry about the view. We’re getting close real quick, aren't we?”
Evan scowled, “All the more reason to hurry along.”
“That’s fair.” Cinder went silent for a moment (Good gravy, he can do that?!)
“How did you find me?” Evan thought he was at liberty to ask since he did let him take the brunt of the conversation longer enough to be a wet wire.
“I didn’t. You sorta just fell out of the sky. You must be crazy strong to break through all that rock.”
Fear and adrenaline are great coaches.
“How did you get here? Like underground.”
A pause, “They dropped me right in the middle of the Metrobots’ nest. I’m glad I’m a light sleeper because If I hadn’t woken up any time soon, my head would be as flat as a pancake. Dodged them a bit, ran away, fell down a hole and now I’m here. I think I’ve been here a day or so before I found you. Good thing too, I was running out of water.”
He paused as the tunnel widened to a cavern and they could finally stand up. On the other side of the cavern was an opening. Cinder pointed to it with his light stick.
“Another fifteen minutes through there and we should reach my campsite.”
Evan nodded and looked around. The cavern was not as large as he thought, barely four metres both width and length. It wasn’t ideal but he had ignored it long enough.
“Dude, I need to piss.”
Cinder glanced at him in the red gloom, that grin threatening his lips, “Oh?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged, “You do you.”
Evan turned to the side, trying but failing to keep his goods out of the boy’s line of sight. It wasn’t working.
“Do me a favour and turn around, man.”
Now Cinder’s grin was out in full force, “What, you shy? Don’t worry, I don't judge by size.”
Heat crept up his neck. Okay, maybe he is a perv.
“Just turn around, Cinder.”
He raised his hands in surrender and turned round, chuckling. When he was done, the sound of his stream annoyingly echoing which made Cinder laugh even louder, they continued on, reaching a more vast cavern, the shadows too dark to see its depths.
The campsite looked little like what he imagined. He thought, and surely you did too, the boy had a tent with a sleeping bag, maybe some flat rocks to sit on or something.
It was better than that: it was a hut. Underground it looked out of place. It was built as the wall of the cavern, the rocks piled in such a way that no visible cracks could be seen. A stout slab of rock acted as the door. Cinder pushed it aside and crawled inside, gesturing to him to follow.
Again, it was too dark to see its content even with the light. Cinder pulled the slab back to close it and stood with a satisfied look.
He gestured around them proudly, “Welcome. Home sweet home…for now at least.”
“How did you build this so fast?” He did say he’d only been here a day, right?
“It's quite simple actually. You know, find rock, pick up rock, drop rock. So on and so forth.”
He gave him a droll stare, “You know what I meant.”
Cinder just smiled and then…took off his helmet. Evan only had time to gasp before the boy started cackling.
“You should see your face! HA! You thought that I was going to melt, didn’t you?”
“Something like that.” Evan looked at him carefully. There was no struggle for breath. No strain of any kind. He looked fine.
“How are you doing that?” Instead of saying anything, he lifted his hand and made a long sweeping gesture. Evan’s helmet flew off and landed in his hand.
He nodded calmly, breathing in crisp air for the first time, “Telekinesis.”
“Yep,” he confirmed and handed him back his helmet. With another gesture, the place lit up. All around was more of the light sticks wedged into the ground, revealing a sleeping bag and airtight bag against the fourth wall.
“Still don’t understand how you’re controlling the air though.”
“Neither do I,” he confessed as he went to lay down on his sleeping bag, removing his polarizer pistol into his airtight bag, “Kinda did in the heat of a moment, you wandering around in the dark and all. There is a lot of iron oxide down here so I just imagined splitting the oxygen from the particles and boom! Clean air. Though the light sticks are a bit more complicated.”
“But that’s impossible, telekinesis only works on masses at least a third of your weight. Moving things on a microscopic level is unfounded,” Evan said, thinking back to his many lessons of the inner workings of the five pillars of the mind. An average kinetarch would die from the mental strain of even attempting it.
Cinder shrugged though he was looking at him more intensely, his ebony gaze flaring with blots of fury red, the easy going vibe he showed earlier forgotten, a familiar hardness spread on his features, “Probably why they chose me for the Trials. Had to pick the best of the best. Question is, what are you in for?”
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and then Add to home screen.