Alex
“Well, shit,” Mark, the engineering department head grumbles, crouching to get a better view. He braces his hands on his hips while huddled around the same screen I’m sharing with Toby. He’s been knocking his head on the ceiling of this tunnel all evening, but that has more to do with his height and less to do with the already overly cramped quarters we’re sharing. He’s from the Deadlands and built like it. Burly and broad, he stands several inches taller than me, and I’m taller than most men on campus, but he has at least sixty pounds or more on me, and it shows. They breed them big in the Deadlands, supposedly. Toby’s words; not mine.
“Shit,” Toby parrots, shaking his head as the drill several hundred feet below us whirls and kicks up liquid sediment.
“I wasn’t expecting a water pocket.” I curse under my breath, rolling my neck to try to alleviate some of the tension. We’ve been at it all day long. Drilling, drilling, and drilling some more–trying to secure a perimeter around the fossil we found weeks ago and finally got the extra funding we needed in order to explore it. I was correct, as was Abby, who’s currently up in the lab watching the footage on a similar screen and feeding us the data we need to determine just how far we’ve gone and need to go. But now?
I look up at the sensors on the walls. Only a few are blinking green while the rest remain totally dormant, which shouldn’t be the case.
Toby just works his jaw, grimacing. “Did you feel that?”
“Feel what?” I motion for Mark to adjust the drill arm slightly to the left before turning it off. The drill will spin for several more minutes before winding to a stop, but this is as far as we’re getting today.
“My ears popped.”
I look up at the sensors again. Still green. I don’t think I trust them. What I do trust is the data pouring in from up in the lab, and Toby’s unfortunately right. “We’re done here for now. The pressure is dipping to unsustainable levels–” An earsplitting crack rips over our heads.
Mark goes very still and then looks up, flakes of ice falling onto his lashes. I take a breath, trying to calm myself, and tip my head up.
It's a hairline, but it’s there–a crack that splits the low ceiling of the ice tunnel in half directly above our heads. Spiderweb-like fractures spread around its main channel, but then it stops, and a low rumbling vibration echoes toward us in every direction.
“We gotta get out of here,” Mark says, rising as much as he can, a wall of bright yellow nylon. “I don’t think that’s because of the drill, though. That was an earthquake.”
“He’s right,” Toby confirms, motioning to Abby’s continuous data. “We–”
Another ear-splitting roar shatters Toby’s voice. The tunnel shakes violently, rolling like a wave. The walls of the tunnels splinter and crack off in small chunks. Mark grabs Toby by the hood of his parka and throws him toward the dark entrance of the tunnel, and I’m right behind them, snatching what insanely expensive equipment I can reach off the floor.
Other researchers sprint into focus, moving like quick shadows out of the other narrow tunnels leading to the main channels, which are wider and more secure with their metal bearings and archways. I’m jostled from every direction while I count heads and shout orders to evacuate, silently cursing the sensors and the fact that I had a conversation about this very thing happening only days ago with the university president.
I’m standing in place when the last of the researchers and lab assistants who signed in to use the tunnels tonight make it into the main channel and run toward the lab entrance, which is just ahead, maybe a hundred yards or so away and around a sharp turn. The channel empties, but then, I turn back into the splintering blue-hued darkness.
Red eyes light from within the shadows, the outline of a sharp, pale jaw on full display.
I blink, and the eyes are gone–a trick of the mind… I think. My senses aren’t nearly as sharp as they could be because I’ve been pretending to be something I’m not for so long. Still, I hesitate. My instincts to preserve the lives of everyone in my lab feud with the possibility of Kai being here, in the lab, moving like the snake he is through the crumbling tunnels–helpless. If he’s here and he dies under the ice… problem solved.
But that goes against the person I’ve been for the last decade. What if my mind is playing tricks on me, and there’s a lab assistant somewhere in the darkness, frightened and lost? No–no, that’s impossible. I’ve trained everyone who’s ever stepped foot in the lab to evacuate the moment something goes awry.
The sudden screech of the emergency siren jolts me to awareness, but my instincts still prickle, begging me to at least do a round to make sure.
“ALEX!” Toby shouts, skidding to a stop around the corner. “What the fuck are you doing? You need to get out of here!”
“There’s someone else down here,” I shout back, my heart racing. Based on how I feel at this moment, I doubt I’m wrong. Someone else is down here. I can feel their presence all around me, watching, lying in wait. For help? Maybe.
“Don’t! ALEX!” The ceiling above us cracks violently as the ice rumbles again. Shards of glass-like ice tumble behind me. Below me, in the web of tunnels, they spread for at least a mile in every direction, I hear the telltale popping sounds of collapse. The ice beneath my feet is growing thinner by the second.
“Alex! For fuck’s sake!” Toby bellows.
I’m wrong. There’s no one else here. Just me being a fucking dumbass. Skye would never forgive me if I died here.
I turn toward Toby’s voice. “I’m coming. Make sure everyone is getting out of the lab. I want groups of six in the elevators–”
The ice floor beneath my feet caves in. I can’t even save myself.
The last thing I hear over the shattering ice is a thick laugh somewhere in the darkness, and I swear on whatever gods still listen, that I see… red.
* * *
Skye
My powers surge but feel sloppy and uneven. I hit the ground on my knees, my condo in The Pillars coming into focus before my powers reel back into my body. The room spins. The voices of the stars scream through my ears in their unintelligible songs, but then it’s quiet, but not… totally.
A strange humming sound erupts through my ears. It grows louder with each rapid beat of my thundering heart. It’s an alarm. In fact, my living room is pulsating with red light. I try to stand, but my body refuses to listen, my limbs like Jell-O. I pushed myself too far this time, I fear. I curl my nearly frozen fingers into fists and give myself approximately three seconds to regain my composure before pushing upright. I sway, stumbling into the kitchen, and catch myself on the wall near my door. My coat is still hanging on the hook. I pull it on, trying to calm the voices screeching in warning, realizing too late that years spent ignoring my powers and focusing too heavily on the hows and whats of who I am and why the stars play such a huge role in our magic made my senses weak and my powers overwhelming to the point that my training feels obsolete. I’ve been stupid. Pretending for so long I’m something I’m not. I chased a future meant for a person with divine gifts, and now I’m paying the price… because something is terribly wrong, I could have–should have–been able to sense it long before it happened.
I’m barely down the hallway in The Pillars when I reach a crowd of faculty and professors standing outside one of the exits to the greater campus. Everyone is dressed for bed and ruffled–some donning bathrobes and slippers. It is well into the middle of the night here, which makes sense. I always forget about the time difference.
I scrub my hand over my tingling face while trying to side-step through the crowd, but I’m stopped by a hand on my wrist.
Dr. Gerralde stands beside his mate, a tiny woman in her early sixties or so in a bonnet and rollers, blinking blearily up at me. I’ve met Agatha a few times, but I don’t know her as well as I know Dr. Gerralde.
“I didn’t realize you were back,” he says, tugging me closer while the crowd swells.
“I got back a few hours ago,” I lie, rising on my toes to look out over the heads swarming the exit, which is closed despite several attempts to open it using badges. “What’s going on?”
“I have no idea,” he answers honestly, his voice heavy with exhaustion, like the alarm pulled him from a deep sleep. “We’re supposed to evacuate to the commons if this alarm goes off, but we’re locked in, apparently.”
“Do you feel that?” I ask, motioning to the floor and walls, which feel like they’re vibrating slightly.
Dr. Gerralde shakes his head, but then the doors open wide, and the crowd moves with a quickness only possible when self-preservation is in play, and he lets me go to help his wife move through the exit without getting trampled.
I’m jostled but stand in place, closing my eyes to try to separate the movement of the crowd and the vibration of the skybridge.
It’s… not the crowd causing the shaking. A jolt spreads across the skybridge in a wave. I open my eyes and watch the floor-to-ceiling windows. They flex slightly and bounce each time the wave expands and returns.
“Oh, my Goddess,” I whisper and zip my jacket to my chin, rational thought leaving my mind entirely.
Somehow, I end up in the commons–the wide, open section of campus several stories above the ice that connects to places like the library, cafeteria, and commissary, among other student-leaning spaces.
Everyone is talking over each other while waiting for the president to make her grand appearance. I track familiar faces but can’t find Toby or Abby, and I definitely left my purse on the floor where I landed only twenty minutes ago, so I don’t have my phone.
“The dorms are being evacuated, too,” someone to my right says over the constant murmurs.
“Why?” another voice asks, nervous.
“You didn’t hear? That lab–the one under the ice–there was a collapse.”
My heart leaps into my throat.
“Are you serious? Oh, my Goddess! Is the entire campus about to fall under the ice? What do we do?”
“Apparently, the engineering team said it’s stable enough, but the lab is gone.”
Gone. The word ricochets through my head like a death knell. I crouch, hugging my knees, trying and failing to catch my breath while reaching for what little powers I have at the moment. I have to find them. Alex is always in his lab. Toby is usually right there with him. And Abby?
I squeeze my eyes shut for several seconds in thought. My powers are dim. Any stretch to try to scry for their locations would send me into an immediate power depletion, and I’ll be more useless than I am now in that situation.
When a thundering of new footsteps signifies the arrival of every single student who lives in the dorms under the ice, I make my move, rising and walking through the increasingly frantic crowd until I’m able to slip into one of the elevators just vacated by the horde.
The alarms sound, but I bypass the security in the elevator with my badge, thanking the stars it worked, and then I’m dropping down into the ice.
I try to steady myself, pull myself back together. I don the same mask I’ve been wearing for years. When the elevator doors open, I step out into a chaotic mess of maintenance workers and what looks like the entire engineering department and their devices. They’re running around like mice, yelling at each other.
“Dr. Abbot! You cannot be down here!” One of them shouts at me from down the hallway. “We’ve had a collapse. This entire section of campus has been evacuated until we confirm stability–”
“It’s stable, for Goddess’ sake,” I shout over my shoulder, moving briskly down the hallway against the constant wave of red light pouring from the alarms.
“We don’t know that yet–”
“I’m a physicist!” I pause and turn toward the trio of alarmed men rushing in my direction to stop me. My hand braces on the wide double doors leading to the biology department’s lower offices, classrooms, and labs that aren’t housed in their dedicated tower above us. “I know what I’m doing.” I push through the door, not knowing what I’m doing, but thankful to have a working knowledge of mass to understand that the likelihood of the entire campus collapsing is so slim it’s almost laughable.
Still, the air changes the second I breach the biology department's underground territory. Sniffles and muted sobs reach me over the hum of the alarm, and when I turn a corner, there they are.
A sea of neon yellow.
But someone is missing.
I think I already knew that, though.