by Kelli Kimble
They didn’t budge at all.
I waited for the water to go down a few inches so that my body wouldn’t be so buoyant, and I could use my weight to my advantage. I pulled again, straining this time. The wires tightened over my hand, crushing it painfully. It was clear I wasn’t going to get the wires pulled free. Instead, I concentrated on forcing a thin sliver of air to slice through the wires at the mouth of the hole. The wires snapped, and I tumbled into the water, the wires snagging around me.
I tried to summon the light. This time, it came with little effort. The box was as bright as a summer day. The tattered wires swirled around in the water and tangled up with each other. I imagined them tying into a neat bow and brought it to myself. The wires weren’t humming, and when I touched them, I didn’t feel anything.
Was that how they’d been suppressing my ability? I frowned. I’d been controlled by nothing but a bunch of wires? I let the wires drop from my grasp, and they drifted towards the bottom of the box. I kicked at them as they floated by my feet. It made me angry. I’d been held here by wires and my own inability to figure it out. Why wasn’t I using my head?
I pursed my lips. I wasn’t going to let Thanos do whatever it was he wanted to do. He wasn’t going to get to decide what happened outside the city or anywhere else, and neither was Orthos.
The anger continued to build, and I let it. I was going to get out of the box, and I was going to stop Thanos, and Orthos, and whoever else stepped up to be slimy in their place. I opened my mouth and let my anger out, roaring for Thanos to come and get me.
He didn’t, but I knew he wouldn’t — and it made me angrier, which is what I wanted.
My hands were clenched, and the muscles in my neck strained with rage. I thought if I could have seen myself, my eyes would have been shooting red flames, and if I could hear myself, my voice could have shattered glass.
Even though the box was draining, I could hear water moving. Something was rumbling, something big. I could feel the vibrations in my bones, and it was uncomfortable, and the indignity of that slight discomfort put me over the edge.
Something inside of me exploded, and the box was gone.
I fell downward until I was standing in what felt like a warehouse. Bits of wet concrete surrounded me, and the water pooled and ran down a nearby drain.
I turned to look around me. There were other boxes, one on either side of me. I took a step directly away from them and was horrified to see dozens of boxes, lined up in a row.
“What is this?” I whispered. I was panting heavily, still hyped up from the adrenaline that had allowed me to free myself from the box. I heard footsteps, and I floated into the air, moved in the opposite direction, and ducked behind a box, half a dozen away from the one I’d occupied.
“Hey.” Someone broadcast their thoughts into the air. “Box Seven is a bust-out. We’ve got an escape.”
Immediately, an alarm began blaring, and flashing emergency lights swirled around, bouncing off other concrete boxes. The effect was somewhat disorienting.
I forced myself to look away and focus on what else was going on. People were running nearby. A cranking sound was coming from either end of the room. I peeked out from around the box and saw it was an overhead door, lowering to a closed position.
“Box Seven is an Alpha threat level. This is not a drill. There’s been an escape from Box Seven. Alpha threat level,” a female voice announced.
Heavy footsteps began running around the room. I thought they were looking for me, so I hid in the shadows of the rafters, but they weren’t. Everyone in the room was hastily filing out through the one door, which was open only enough for them to roll underneath it. One by one, they dropped to the ground and rolled on their sides out of the room. As soon as the last person cleared the door, the cranking sound resumed, and the door closed completely with a heavy boom. It was followed by the sound of bolts sliding home, locking me in.
I was alone. Or was I? Were there others in the other boxes?
I floated down to the closest box and imagined the lid sliding aside.
A woman floated inside, barely dressed in tattered clothing. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was slack. She appeared to be sleeping.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”
The humming stopped, but she didn’t open her eyes.
“What is this place?” I wondered aloud, turning to the next box and sliding the lid open on it.
Another woman floated there. She also appeared to be asleep, though she had no clothes to speak of. She was close enough to the edge of the box for me to touch her, and I pressed a finger into her shoulder.
“Hey,” I said again.
The wires stopped humming in her box, too, but her eyes flew open.
I wished they hadn’t. Her eyes looked like they were bathed in milk. I could barely see her irises through the haze.
She blinked.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She turned her head towards me, though she couldn’t possibly have seen me.
“What is this?” I asked. “Why are you in here?”
She blinked. The water in her tank was receding, and she had room to stand. She reached up towards me.
I tried switching to telepathic communication. “Can you understand me? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I can understand you.”
“What are you doing here? Why are you in this box?”
“I don’t know.” She tried to take several steps, but her movement was ineffectual. Instead, it sent waist-high water sloshing around the tank. It buffeted her to one side. “Help me out?”
I mentally lifted her from the tank and set her on her feet beside me, but she couldn’t stand on her own. She stumbled towards me, and I propped her against the box with my shoulder, wrapping an arm around her waist. Her skin felt slimy against my hand, and I pushed back a feeling of revulsion, reminding myself she’d probably been put in the box against her will, just as I had.
“You’re shivering,” I said. “We need to find you some clothes.” I glanced around, but all that seemed to be in the warehouse were the cement boxes. I mentally slicked the water from her skin, and that helped some. I imagined a cushion of warmth around us.
“You just have to be difficult, don’t you?” a familiar voice asked from somewhere beyond the box.
Thanos.
He emerged from between the boxes, several boxes away. “I don’t get it. You had it so good inside the box. Nobody bothered you. Nobody was hurting you or anyone you loved. Now, we’re going to have to get nasty about it.”
“What are these things?” I asked him. “Are there people in all these boxes?”
“They’re not people. Not anymore. They’ve got a higher purpose now.” He leaned against a box and trailed a finger over the rough cement exterior. “You could’ve been the best of all of them, but now I’ve got to punish you.”
The woman shrank from his voice and whimpered.
“This one.” He pushed away from the wall and pointed at her as he walked towards us. “She was pretty good. She provided enough power for nearly a square mile. Decent. Exactly what we’re looking for, but if we could’ve gotten you up and running? Man.” He was right in front of us, and he tapped a pointer finger on my collarbone. “You could’ve powered the whole city. All by yourself.”
I scowled and pushed his hand away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He tipped his head towards the box we were leaning against. “Alternate fuel. I have it figured out. Turns out, telepathic energy is four or five times more powerful than the energy we can produce at the plant.”
My knees felt weak. Things were starting to click into place, and I didn’t like it. “The mayor—” I started to say.
He interrupted. “The mayor didn’t like our plan. You see why I had to take over, right? It was just common sense. She wanted to keep throwing people at mining and returning with fuel. I’d rather use the resources that a
re already here and sucking the city dry anyway. It’s a win-win.”
My scowl deepened. “Then, why the weather change? People outside the city aren’t of any use to you.”
“They’re only useful to me if they come here. I went around visiting all the known settlements within a thousand miles of here. If I can get them to come to the city, then I can train them. They’ll power the city, and decent people won’t have to lift a finger.”
“Decent?”
He shrugged. “The slums will only provide for so long, and anyway, most of those people are too broken to survive the training. They wouldn’t last.”
Beside me, the woman stirred. “People won’t stand for that kind of treatment,” she said.
“People will do whatever I want. You know what the well-off people want now? They want to have their chips removed, and they want to be trained. They understand that’s the next step in our evolution. They understand it will be a turning point for humanity. All your filthy kind can see is how hard it is to achieve.” His upper lip curled, baring his teeth. “You’re all just lazy. You could have what I have, if you’d stop wallowing in the gutters.”
She staggered away from me, swinging her arms wildly at him.
He laughed and stepped to the side. She tumbled to the floor. The impact made a gruesome, splattering sound. I moved to help her up, but he stepped between us. He poked a finger at me. “You understand the hard work, and you’ve achieved more than any of your kind, but I still don’t like you.” He punctuated his last words with increasingly hard pokes to my breastbone.
“You can’t just stick people in these boxes and use them like this,” I argued. “She’s right. People won’t stand for it.” I gasped as he flicked his hand to my throat, closing his fingers around it. He squeezed hard enough to cause discomfort but not hard enough to cut off my air.
“You’re going to get back in the box,” he said, “and you’re going to do what scum like you were meant to do. You’re going to serve the privileged. Got it?”
I wrenched away from his hold, rubbing at my throat. “You’ll never get me back in one of those boxes, and I won’t let you put other people in them, either.”
A burst of air pushed against me, flattening me against the side of the box next to us. I grunted as I lost my breath, but I couldn’t let him get the upper hand. I imagined the lid of the box sliding free and tumbling onto him. It didn’t fall; it hovered above him, and then disintegrated into dust. The dust whirled into a tiny funnel cloud, and he whipped it toward me. I deflected it and returned with a razor-sharp blade of air that he easily pushed aside. I floated off the floor and dropped high-pressured blows on him. I tore chunks from the ceiling; girders, cement, and duct work fell and picked up speed as I pushed them down. Thanos didn’t even have to take a step out of the way. He turned his head to the side, and the debris tumbled away like autumn leaves, falling from a tree and collecting in a windblown corner. The hole in the ceiling revealed another floor. I darted up through the opening and looked down.
I needed to gain an advantage over Thanos, but there was only one thing I knew he wanted.
Me.
If I he thought I were dead, would that leave him vulnerable?
I kept watch on him while I mentally scanned the room for something that I could use, but it was just another room with tables and chairs scattered around. There wasn’t much to work with. It seemed like it would be a good idea to keep up the barrage against him, so I began throwing the furniture down through the hole.
Behind me, I heard the door open. I glanced over my shoulder.
Great. Orthos.
I jumped to the opposite side of the room, putting the hole between us.
He slithered into the room, but he wasn’t alone.
Chapter 16
Orthos pushed my mother into the hole. Instinctively, I stepped forward and mentally grabbed her, holding her in midair. My father grabbed Orthos’ arm, and they began grappling with each other. “Don’t worry about me,” my father said between grunts. “Take care of your mother.”
“Are you all right?” I asked her. “Did he hurt you?”
“No, I’m fine,” she said out loud, but then she continued in my head, “We’ve got to stop them, Nim. They’re planning to use people like batteries to power the city against their will.”
“I know,” I answered, “but I’m not powerful enough to stop Thanos. I threw this entire floor at him, and he batted it aside, like a cat playing with its food.” I gestured towards the hole.
She smiled and put a hand on my cheek. “I know you can do it. You’re smarter than him, and you’ve got something he’ll never have — love in your heart.” Her eyes welled with tears, and she hugged me to her. “I’m sorry we pushed you into partnering with him. We thought it was the right thing to do.”
“It’s okay, Mom. Everybody believed their lies. You couldn’t have known.”
“Red’s here,” she said. “He arrived about a week ago. I got to spend some time with him. He seems like a nice boy.”
“Red?”
“Yes. He and a few others from your settlement; they came to help. Your dad and I thought it best for them to hide. Orthos doesn’t know they’re here.”
There was a crash as my dad and Orthos fell against the wall, still fighting. My dad pummeled Orthos in the stomach. Orthos countered by headbutting my dad in the groin.
Mom released me and jerked a head towards the two men. “I’ve got to go help your father. You get down there and put a stop to this.”
“I don’t want to kill him, Mom.”
She shook her head. “I know, and you shouldn’t — unless you have to. You’ll know it — in your gut, in your heart — if you have to.” She kissed me on the forehead. “I love you. Now, go. Get me over there and go.” She pointed towards the two men, still fighting with each other. I propelled her over to them, and just before I went back through the hole in the floor, I saw her deliver a right hook to Orthos’ jaw that sent blood spraying from his face.
Thanos was pacing back and forth. When he saw me drop to the floor, he stopped, and his face darkened. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?” I asked.
“You got out of the box. You shouldn’t have been able to get out of the box.”
“I don’t even know how the box works, Thanos.”
“The box is designed to absorb the energy from your ability. That’s why it feels like you can’t use it in the box. It’s not that you aren’t using it; it shunts the manifestation of what you’re doing away when the energy is absorbed.” He punctuated his last words by chopping the air with one hand, then pounding the side of his fist into his open palm.
I shrugged. “I don’t know how I got out.”
“I couldn’t get out. It’s how my abilities got so strong. I spent a year struggling against one of these.” He kicked at the corner of the nearest box. “I was never able to escape.”
“You wanted to escape? I thought you volunteered for their torture.”
“They still had the same objective,” he said. He turned at me as he said it. His face was contorted with what I took to be rage at first, but it dissolved into something more like embarrassment. “I was supposed to escape from the box, but I couldn’t.”
At the far end of the room, I heard one of the doors roll up, and then back down. Eneece appeared around the last box. She approached us slowly with her hands out, like she was trying to retrieve the last loaf of bread in the house from a dog who’d stolen it. “Why is she out of the box?” Eneece asked. She cast an accusatory glare at Thanos.
“She escaped,” Thanos said.
Eneece looked as if I’d slapped her. “She did?” she said out loud.
“I did,” I said.
She looked at me. “Nobody’s ever escaped before,” she said. Her eyes swept up and down my body. An expression bordering on respect briefly crossed her features.
“I don’t know how she did it,” Thanos said, “but she’s g
oing to tell us. Isn’t she?” He pushed me backwards with his mind, shoving me against the nearest box. He approached me, and with each step, I felt a zing of pain run up my spine. He ran a finger down my cheek. “I hear your parents made it here,” he said.
“They aren’t part of this.”
“But they are. Why do you think Orthos trained them? All those people he ‘saved’ from death in the city?” He made a tsk sound with his tongue. “They thought they were escaping certain death, and they did. We couldn’t believe our luck when they begged him to teach them what you’d learned. Now, they’ll be the first group to provide enough power for the whole city.”
“What’s wrong with you? They’re human beings.”
He slapped me across the cheek with his open palm. “You think you are — you would believe that — but you’re not. You, and your family, and all the people who can’t figure out how to make their own damn way — you’re just something I’d scrape off my boot.”
My cheek stung, and tears popped into my eyes. I blinked them back, but one escaped.
“Oh, Nimisila,” he said. He used his thumb to wipe the tear away. Someone watching might have thought it was a tender gesture, but I knew it was supposed to make me feel small.
I batted his hand away. “You’re not going to get away with this,” I said.
