Sail
Chapter Twenty-Two

There have been many times when I awoke as a child to strange surroundings and had no idea how I got there. Hospitals, closets, under the bed. I should’ve been used to it by now. But waking up this time filled me with terror because of the sounds I heard before my eyes fluttered open: hard, human voices, squeaky wheels underneath me, and the faint wail of Saelis. Those three sounds together were eerie and not right at all.

Something rough jostled my arm, and a voice that reminded me of sandpaper said, “Almost awake. Take this one to the farm.”

No, I’m not I wanted to answer because I must be dreaming. Somehow, I was still alive, though that could change in an instant. Why hadn’t the Saelis killed me? What did these people want? Probably nothing good. I didn’t even know where I was.

The gurney underneath me lifted, and I peered through the fringes of my eyelashes at my surroundings. A faint orange glow somewhere nearby darkened the profiles of the men who carried me. Something that sounded like gravel crunched underneath, and then it hollowed out, like we were entering a cavern. The ground sloped downward at such an angle I could hear the men’s shoes slide against the dirt. Orange lights dotted the curved ceiling at regular intervals.

“Woo-hoo-hoo, look at this one,” a voice hollered close by in a thick accent I couldn’t place. “Such a sweet-looking young boy.”

I jerked and then immediately tensed for fear someone had seen I was awake.

“Can I keep this one?” Just the suggestive way the man said it bristled thorns over my skin. I had to get out of here. Wherever these men wheeled me couldn’t be any better than this guy’s revolting need to own me.

Someone pulled me roughly to my feet just to push me back down again somewhere else. Only this time, I landed on a padded seat. I opened my eyes since I couldn’t fool anyone about being asleep anymore and found myself inside a type of car.

Compact and doorless, this wasn’t any car I’d ever read about, but a steady hum vibrated my feet from the chug of the engine. I’d never been inside a car before, and if I thought I’d ever see Pop again, I would memorize every detail just so I could tell him about it. My chest tightened at the rush of emotions welling up inside me until I feared I might scream, but who would hear me anyway? Not Pop. Not anyone who could help.

The man with the weird accent hopped behind the wheel with an air of ease around him like he did this every day. Two other men shoved in on either side of me, and one sat in the front seat. They all wore woolen black smocks and matching pants. We rolled off, slowly at first and then gaining speed.

Large tunnels branched off from this main one to the right and left at irregular intervals. The orange lights above our heads stretched down all of them in twisting curves. The dark walls mirrored the light back in silver rainbows.

The tunnel we traveled looped down and around seemingly in circles. Tire tracks marked the dusty ground, so the man who drove us must have it all mapped out in his head.

Which was exactly what I did. I marked the entrance as iron, safety if, when, I found my way out again, and branched up from there. It was tricky, though, because no two tunnels were across from each other, and I ran out of elements on the periodic table more than once. So I started over again until I had a map sewn inside my eyelids.

If I did make it back to iron, where would I go? I was obviously on some kind of planet somewhere inhabited by Saelis and humans, as far as I could tell. But I couldn’t just stick around here and wait for whatever they planned to do with me either.

I didn’t need a place to escape to though. I just needed to escape and worry about the where later.

My ice pick weighed heavy against my left thigh. My left, not my right where I usually kept it. Had someone frisked me and then put it back? I didn’t know, but thanks to Captain Glenn, I knew Saelis bled just like the rest of us. Were he and Mase here somewhere too?

From the corner of my eye, I snuck a glance at the men on either side of me. They stared straight ahead while the car jostled them up and down.

I could stab one through the throat but then what? The other could make a grab for me before I could leap out of the car. Unless I twisted myself over the stabbed one and out a moving car. That seemed dangerous under the best of times, but I had to do something.

The bumps of the dirt path were good cover for inching my hand closer to my pocket, but at that rate, I might be dead before my fingers reached it.

I jerked my hand to my pocket just as the car lurched to a stop and everyone jumped out. It all happened so fast, it might’ve looked like I just jumped in surprise. But the tip of the ice pick was between my fingers, and nothing sat between me and a tunnel on the opposite wall.

I didn’t even think. I saw my chance and went. My feet hit the soft dirt and pounded a path across it. Iron was to my right, not down this new tunnel, but I needed to lose them first. I only hoped more tunnels forked from it to help hide me until I could find my way back.

But no one was chasing me. I risked a glance over my shoulder to make sure, but no footfalls except my own pursued me. I only heard laughter, deep and cold, spiked with screams that seemingly materialized from the air around the car. Female screams.

Worry fell like a stone in my gut. What was happening? Where were the screams coming from? This place did strange things to sound, like a swab of cotton had been wrapped around each noise and then deposited somewhere else.

I followed the first curve at top speed, anxious to hide my back from them with as many dirt walls as I could. Yet I would need to double back sometime or I’d lose track of which element I sprinted past.

“You want a game of cat and mouse, do ya’?” the driver shouted. I recognized his accent bounding down the tunnel toward me. “Well the cats hunt better in the dark. Bye, bye, mousy.”

And all at once, the orange lights above my head winked out. A panic so extreme, so deathly cold with its vise-like grip, yanked me to a stop. Quick gasps tried to fill my lungs, but they were too shallow. My head spun, and I felt my eyes widen in their involuntary search for more light. Though maybe it was best not to see what my end might look like.

I swayed and crashed against the wall, which knocked my lungs loose enough to pull in a breath. Feozva, help me keep it together. If I lost it now, I’d never get out of this place. Except it would be much harder to get out of here with the cats out to play with the mouse who feared the dark.

Faced with the choice of going deeper into the tunnels or finding my way out from where I stood, I picked the latter. I felt my way along the wall toward the car, the men, and the screams, the things that would hopefully kill me quicker than the dark unknown.

A musty, metallic scent filled my nose. Powdered dust sifted between my fingers as I raked my hands over the rocky walls. What were these tunnels for anyway? The wall began to curve under my hands, and I knew I was almost to the tunnel with the car. As long as no one and nothing heard me, I could slip…

A deep growl sounded from right behind me, or at least what I thought was right behind me. The back of my neck prickled. I turned, not because I expected to see anything, but because I hoped I’d imagined the noise and facing it could somehow prove I hadn’t. And just as I felt a shift in the air in front of me as delicate as a flap of wings, there was a sigh of footsteps behind me. A light flicked on, bright and yellow, and shone on the massive creature towering over me. Saelis.

Shiny, dark scales sprinkled with white hair covered it head to talon. Drool leaked from between rows of pointed teeth protruding from an elongated muzzle. Rings of luminous green circled black pupils that aimed an unsated hunger right through my skull. Five fingers on each of its four hands were tipped with sharpened claws, and they were steadily reaching for me.

I ducked. One of its claws snagged at my shirt, ripping it without barely touching it.

Whatever held that light charged forward with a war cry. Steel sang against air as something shiny captured the light and threw it in the Saelis’s face.

The Saelis’s hand flopped to the ground. Blood spurted down my front from where its hand used to be. The Saelis threw back its head in a wail as I lurched away from it and the sick smell that covered me. Then it charged forward.

I ran toward the car, toward iron, the sound of labored breathing hot against my neck as someone chased me. The bright light bounced through the tunnel behind me, dizzying me with thousands of shiny reflections on the walls and floor. Who was behind me?

The car sat fifty feet ahead, but that was it. No people. No Saelis. Maybe the engine was still running. Oh, Feozva, put me behind that wheel.

Something snatched at my leg, and I went tumbling. A powerful grip dragged me toward another darkened tunnel at warp speed. I clawed at the dirt to try to scramble away but the powdery earth did nothing but make mounds under my palms. The light, at one time in hot pursuit, faded far behind to a pinpoint in the dark, a lone star like a beacon of hope crowded out by darkness. It vanished when we rounded a corner.

Zirconium. Had to be. I twisted to my side long enough to get my hand to my pocket, my ankle screaming in protest in the vise grip that held it. One end of the ice pick skipped over the ground, and our speed almost wrenched it from my hand. I held to it with everything I had, and with one more rock of my body, I curled toward whatever dragged me. My fingers grazed over scales, and that was where I stabbed.

The Saelis cried out and immediately let me go. The sudden stop flung me into a tunnel wall head first, but I didn’t have time to process the shock to my skull.

I jumped up, the ice pick in front of me, and listened for the slightest sound of movement. But with the soft ground and the strange things these tunnels did to noise, everything was muted. Yet, I could feel I wasn’t alone.

Somewhere, an engine roared.

A drop of something wet plopped onto my forehead just as lights, two of them, swept over the wall behind me. I looked up into the open jaws of the Saelis just inches above my head. Razor teeth gleamed white in the approaching brightness. Their points skimmed across the bridge of my nose. A long red tongue squirmed in the black hole at the back of its throat.

I thrust upward as hard as I could and buried the point of the ice pick into its upper palate. It screamed and fell to the ground with blood spewing from its mouth.

The two lights ended their advance in a skid of tires and a storm of flying dirt.

“Get away,” someone shouted, footsteps pounding toward me. A man’s voice. The same or a different one who’d lopped off the Saelis’s hand? I couldn’t tell. I might have just traded one horror for another if this one had come to take me back to wherever I’d been going.

I backed into the tunnel wall, away from the man and the Saelis, whose limbs jerked spastically. The man had his back turned to face the puddle of blood gathering around the Saelis so I didn’t waste any time. I sprinted toward the car and threw myself behind the wheel.

Now what? I had no idea how many elements the Saelis had dragged me past and I had no idea how to drive. I started punching at buttons and dials and pulling random levers until the car rolled forward slowly. In front of me, the man raised a sword and swung it down at the Saelis’s head.

“No!” It burst from my mouth before I could stop it. The man whirled around and shielded his face to ward off the lights on the front of the car. But the damage had already been done. The sword had been buried in the Saelis’s neck. If it became a ghost, I’d still be here because this car wouldn’t go any faster than a crawl. Then I’d have to cross the Saelis through me, and I didn’t have time for that. Plus, I didn’t have any iron I could hurry it through with anyway.

The man came at me, shouting something, but I couldn’t hear what inside the confines of a thing that refused to go any faster than frozen honey. I pounded and kicked, desperate to make it move, because already the Saelis’s spasms were lessening.

My foot must’ve hit something because the car shot forward. The man leaped out of the way at the last second. I kicked again, at a pedal on the floor, and the tires gained speed. I twisted the wheel to go back in the direction I’d come but the tunnel wall stood in the way of a clear turn. The front of the car smashed into it and stopped.

Behind me, the man approached the rear with cautious steps, and over his shoulder, the Saelis crawled to its feet, its scales tinged with red from the lights from the back of the car and the blood oozing from the sword in its neck.

I shoved open the door to run even though I knew I’d never make it. But the man yanked it out of my grip and pushed me back inside.

“Don’t touch me,” I shouted and clambered to the passenger door. Strong hands sank into my shoulders, pulled me back, and spun me about. I reared back with a fist, but my breath hitched at the words coming from a man I’d never seen before.

“Absidy Jones?”

Movement from the corner of my eye forced all my non-answers I was about to give him into one word: “Drive.”

He didn’t ask any more questions, just threw the car into reverse, and spun out of there without looking back.

Through the glass, the Saelis bent its head back in a scream. Vindictive, ruthless, and way pissed. The sound raked claws up my back.

“Faster, faster,” I begged even as the man ripped around corners and down tunnels. I sat clutching the back of my seat to look out the back but I couldn’t see anything in the darkness.

“Absidy Jones, right?” the man said, glancing at me.

I snapped my gaze to him. Longish curly dark hair bounced around his face with every bump in the tunnel. Strands of multi-colored beads and charms dangled behind his ears and fell to his shoulders. He sported a short, scruffy beard, and above the sleeves of his black smock, he wore dozens of thin, black bands on his wrists.

“Who are you? What do you want?” I demanded.

“I recognized you the second they landed the ship. You look just like your sister.”

“My…?” I blinked. “How do you know my sister?”

“Relax, Absidy Jones,” the man said. The glare off the headlights caught on something shiny in his mouth. A piece of iron. “She’ll be glad to see you.”

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