“We don’t have much time,” Helena interrupts. “They will eventually find a way to us. They won’t stop until they do, no matter how long it takes. We have to get out.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?” Brogan asks skeptically.
She doesn’t answer, instead tilting her head down at the dark chasm beneath us.
“Do you have rope?”
We move carefully toward the walls of the large cavern, which slope down gradually until they edge off at a steep, seemingly endless drop into nothing. There, Kat uses a device from her pack to embed metal anchors into the rock.
“It goes down a couple hundred feet and then slopes into a large tunnel that rises and falls until it reaches the sea,” Helena instructs.
“Why have you never used it to escape?” a soldier asks, the one Brogan had interrogated whose name I now can see reads Dalton on his uniform.
“I was never able to make it there. The dark one who imprisoned me, Samael, was able to numb me so that I couldn’t get past him, though I tried many times.”
“Then how do you know where the pit leads?”
“There are things to see with other than your eyes,” she answers cryptically, then smirking at me.
I’m starting to sense what she perhaps means. I still don’t understand where she got her gifts from, but I am beginning to understand what it feels like to sense things beyond myself. Even now, I can sense the creatures above us and the progress they are making in clearing the debris away. I feel their bloodlust, their anger. It weighs me down, causing me to worry about what the mysterious being, Samael, meant when he said I was to be his replacement. I wish there were an escape from whatever is happening to me, but I feel the inevitable wrapping around me like the Necromancer’s cold fingers. I have walked too far down the path he made.
Despite that, I feel a subtle peace, even in the darkness that hovers around me, as I glance at Helena. Not in myself, but in her. She looks back warmly, though I can feel her studying me, perhaps starting to grasp what I already know. Yet, she smiles anyway. She must still feel hope somehow.
“I’ll trail behind,” Kat says, looking at Dalton.
He eyes her suspiciously as she hands him the rope.
“My team will set up explosives in case they br
eak through,” she continues.
“Very well,” Brogan says, taking the rope from Dalton and latching it to his belt. “My men will take the lead. Yours will follow.”
Dalton nods, and Brogan begins repelling into the dark below. The rest of his men follow quickly after him. Astor, Helena, and I then go next, trailed closely by Dalton and the several others who are with him.
My visor turns back on when we get low enough, the light above a distant spec. I was just getting used it, a welcome change in this otherwise shadowy subterranean maze. Still, it’s nice to be able to see despite the dark, though the images on the visor remain somewhat distorted, making it hard to move unhindered in the uneven terrain as we start walking.
“Light up a flare,” Brogan orders.
One of his soldiers pulls something out of his bag and ignites it. I immediately recognize the pinkish-red flame it produces, the same kind that Yori and Wade used when they trapped the draeg in that marshland oasis. I am entranced by its glow, my mind wandering back to the world I came from and my heart sick at the thought of what is happening to the few people there I truly care about.
It is strange how memory and emotion are able to manipulate each other, as despite all of the doubt and distrust I feel concerning Wade, I genuinely miss him. Then there’s Yori and Julianne, for whom I greatly worry. I even worry what is happening with my sister Mariam, regardless of the horrible acts I know she has taken part in.
I feel like there is so much I could do to help them, things that I must to find a way to do. But I am helpless to act as I drift
further from them among these distant stars. I wish against the despair I feel that I’ll be able to return and save them before time runs out. That I will be able to overcome whatever it is within me that is tearing my old self apart.
“We’ll need more rope here,” a soldier calls out as he lifts his flair to reveal a large wall of rock blocking the way.
The ceiling of the cavern is high above it, and I can see the faint outline of a plateau above maybe a hundred feet up.
“This is all we have,” Brogan says to Dalton, handing it to him. “Can your men handle this?”
Dalton nods, and he tosses the rope to one of his soldiers, a woman, who drapes it over her shoulder and immediately starts climbing without any support. I watch nervously as she scales upward. She slips a couple times, drawing gasps from Helena and myself, but after a short time, she is at the top, tying the rope to something and dropping it down to us.
Helena goes first, Brogan climbing up right behind her to help support her as she goes. Dalton follows, then Astor, myself, and finally the rest of the soldiers. When I have nearly reached the top, an explosion echoes from the way we came, and my heart sinks. The creatures have broken through.
I push myself to climb faster and then turn around once I’m at the top, my eyes trained on the darkness from which Kat will hopefully emerge in only moments. Astor comes over by me and squeezes my arm encouragingly, but I’m too anxious to feel any relief right now. The sick feeling I had earlier is returning, and worse than ever, even as Helena walks over to stand with us.