Chapter 6 - Part II
Tunnels
With the closing of Chapter 6 Part 2, I will be closing the first season of Volcano. I have several more chapters written, but there is more polishing and work to be done before releasing. I plan to continue releasing chapters in the spring, and complete entirely my first draft of the first book by the summer.
Enjoy :)
“Have some of this.” Shai handed me a potato shaped fruit that melted slowly in my hand like an ice cream cone. We were in another pocket somewhere in the middle of the tunnel. “Eat it.” she said.
The surface of the fruit gave into the pressure of my forefingers as the mud oozed down my hand. I sniffed it to check if maybe the sight of it was misleading. It wasn’t. It smelled like really old piss, brewed over some cheap spice you find in a run down store in the Mid Street halfway between my house and the Zero line. Actually it was worse than that.
“Eat before it melts!” Shai barked.
I reached out with my teeth, curling my lips back, and took a bite. Electricity jolted into my throat and through every vein in my body, only to collect itself from all the edges where veins travel and come back to my mouth as bile. I took another bite. The strength felt too good to stop eating but my mouth burned like the core of an engine. “This thing is no fruit, it’s a little mouth grenade.” I said, taking another bite.
“Be careful with it, just a few more bites.” Shai scrutinized me with her wide eyes and held my arm tightly. There was safety in her dominance, and I felt confident under her control. “It feels good for a few seconds…” she said, “And then-“ But her voice trailed off into the infinite emptiness of the tiny compartment.
True enough, she was always on the mark. The electricity had converged into a tight center at the side of my ribcage and quickly intensified before it spread outwards like a fire. My head spun with a darkness more intense than the mud pocket emanated, a darkness multiple dimensions deeper than I ever experienced before, and there are multiple dimensions to it, many more than I had thought. In the first dimension of darkness, you become aware that you can rely on other senses besides your sight in order to see, though some objects may still be seen, such as the silhouettes of items and persons, and their benign shadows that distinguish them, though barely, from other items. This darkness, while challenging, can still be overcome.
The next dimension of darkness transcends you beyond yourself. It sweeps through the previous darkness and renders it a past comfort gone. In this darkness there are no shadows, there are no silhouettes, one cannot distinguish between anything, and all images disappear from reality. This is the darkness of the blind, or rather, the darkness experienced when first becoming blind. It raises the terrible awareness of the loss of dear sight and sends a shockwave inherent in the new dimension that renders absolutely nothing, as the mind desperately scrapes its archives for something to replace all the sights it lost. In this darkness and those beyond, your vision is gone, and if it’s quite, like it was in that pocket where I devoured the mud fruit, then you hear nothing as well as see nothing. And after a few minutes of that you smell nothing and feel nothing and have no proof at all to your existence.
I ate one last bite…
“Stop!” Shai took the fruit from my hand and threw it like a poisonous snake. It hit the wall - PLOP. God knows where it landed in the darkness.
“What for?” I asked, irritated, exhausted, delirious, drained. “What the hell for?” I looked up, up as if I could see beyond the near, stalactite filled, mud dripping ceiling. I wasn’t asking Shai anymore. I pined for the hole in the sky and the endlessness of space beyond the volcano.
“It isn’t the fruit that’s making you hurt.” Shai said, “The acid in the lake numbs you to the pain. The fruit brings you back. But you don’t want to take it too far, every bite has impact.”
“Every bite has impact” I mocked her. “What difference does it make? Which feelings are real and which aren’t? This place is a nightmare, and you are the devil orchestrating my nightmare, my devil and my god down in this claustrophobic hell hole. This is a nightmare, isn’t it?”
“No.” She uttered gravely, “It isn’t. Straighten out.” She stood up and looked at me. In her eyes I saw the same starkness as on the day we met when she pointed a gun at me. “Or would you rather wander around high as a kite through these tunnels? Your feeble heart won’t take it. They close off you know? Constantly, the structure of the tunnels changes, you need to know how to read them, and you don’t. I do so you have no choice but to stick around with me. You won’t survive here without me. I’ve been up and down this tunnel more times than you can count.”
“But I don’t get it,” I said, “You’re a noble. High Grounders only come down here for kicks and laughs, and they come through the Main Chute. Why would you even know about these tunnels?”
“Listen to me,” she grabbed my shoulders, “Do you want to get caught and go to jail? Do you want to get away from your pathetic little life? I saw how you live. What hope do you have, even if you don’t get caught, even if you hadn’t murdered a guard? Will you ever leave the Middle? You know you won’t. Look at your father, he’s a hard worker isn’t he? A good worker. Has a good job too, and what is he doing? Still stuck in the crevice, the same old fucking musty crevice. And your mother…”
“What about my mother?” I lashed and just barely restrained myself from strangling her little neck and bashing her head into the wall.
She took a step back defiantly. “What if I can help your mother?”
I had to rack up all the nerves in my body to keep my head on my shoulders and my gaze fixated on her. I had enough of her head-fuckery.
“My mother?” I caughed. “My sick beautiful mother, who I left to rot up there, without so much as a goodbye, without so much as a note! Does she even know I’ve run away? Or how long it has been?”
“I know you’ve been afraid to see your mother.” Shai said, almost robotically.
“I…” I stuttered. I was afraid. Mother was as good as gone. “I don’t want to see her. I don’t need to see her. I have a good memory, anything else will ruin that, she wouldn’t want that. She wants to be remembered in good health, I know it, she told me. “
“But what if you could help her?”
“I can’t… we need… I need to get her to better care, there is a clinic up the volcano…”
“You know there is no way in hell you can get her up to Marlin’s, besides, you’re a fugitive. Face it, even if you don’t like me, you have to trust me. You mother will die long before you finish schooling, or get her into better care. Even if you did get her to better care at Marlin’s, it’s a small chance she will survive. I’m telling you, there is a way you could help her, you need to trust me. We need to keep going, please, let’s keep going.”
We started down the next segment of the tunnel. “There is something else I should explain to you , it’s just been such madness, we haven’t gotten to talk since the silver letter. The guard, when you chopped off his head… He sent out a signal.”
“What? Are you fucking with me again?”
“I wish I was. Guards continue to speak after their heads are severed, you did not notice it because you just stopped looking. They transmit signals out. That is how they know you killed him, or at least, they have a fair guess.”
I had a hard time concentrating on what she was saying, the pain started to get at me. After we started walking the extreme influence the fruit had on my body slowly stopped, and it was then that the pain grew stronger, and that was my body’s natural state, pain. The injury in my ribcage was real.
“Don’t ask me why it’s like that,” Shai continued, “You need to drown those fuckers. That’s what I planned to do. But you chopped his fucking head off entirely, I mean, it’s alright, how could you have known? Don’t think for a second that I blame you, but if you had kept the outer window closed he would have just drowned out there in the waves, they would have done him in. I would have gone my way, and you yours. I am glad I got to know you though, you’re alright, really, I admire your strength, I’ve seen people fare much worse in these tunnels, and your hospitality was warm, I loved your crevice, I loved your room, you treated me kindly, and we are of similar kin, but we could have just been friends without all this running away business, wouldn’t that have been nice? We could have spent time at the lake, studying the terraces, and … remind me, what were you hoping to study? Ah, it doesn’t matter, soon enough I would have disappeared back down here. I have business here, you’ll see. Anyways, what’s done is done, you may be an upper lake princess who’s never been in a mud tunnel, but hey, this is kind of fun, isn’t it? It might not seem like it but what you’re going through is making you stronger.”
“Please shut up.” My head was throbbing. The more she spoke the more acute the pain had become. It transcended my ribcage and pulsed through every nerve in my body. It took all my energy to just keep walking, much less converse with Shai. I preferred the hallucinations.
But I did have some questions for her like how did she know he had to drown? And why was she even out there? And why was he looking for her? But all I could manage was a spittle composed of mud and blood that oozed from the tip of my tongue. I was too tired, too out of breath. My vision tunneled into darkness and I lapsed for a moment.
“The severed head law was one of the first laws to affect the security staff.” Shai continued,“It was suggested by the radicals-“.
Somehow that triggered me, “Oh the radicals- please don’t talk about them, you’re giving me a headache. I was fine not knowing about them before you came along, I don’t need to know about them. Can we just walk in silence? I’m succumbing to you, just please leave me in peace. And you know what? I had every fucking right to kill that guard! And you had nothing to do with it, he would have fucking killed you! I saw everything!”
“Leh, you’re delirious, maybe you’re right, you could be, but you’re right, let’s stop talking, I’ll stop talking, we’re close enough. It will be over soon.” She said it, I know she said it loud and clear but all I heard was a faint whisper. The darkness of the tunnel finally absorbed me and there was nothing I could do to fight it. I felt like I was dying, I saw the lake, I saw my father in his study polishing another glistening moon rock. I saw Mother sitting out on the balcony, staring at South Lake at dawn. She was content. Always content. I envied her.
I moved my fingers slowly above my ribcage, where the pain screamed its way through my body… I raised my hand and saw what I expected and terribly feared yet denied at the same time - blood. I spread out my fingers in front of my face so that one drop of fell atop the other. Behind them, Shai’s looked at me, she was calm, too calm, she tried to look worried, but I knew, she wasn’t worried for me but about me. Then I noticed another figure behind her, a large one, hulking forward from the shadows. I could not see his eyes, but I felt their penetrating fixation through my sensations. I was finally attuned to the darkness.
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