Blinded By Sight (Gray Series Book 3) Page 9

  As he traveled farther, the white iridescence began to sparkle and dance above those passing. He saw more colors than he had before, dancing lights from far above the lobby floor. He followed the sparkling colors upward where the ceiling was all glass. He could see through the machine, pushing past the fallen clouds, breaking the gray ceiling he’d known his entire life. The glass was a magnificent window, peeking into the rich blue that had stayed hidden from him equally as long. His knees went weak when he saw the cusp of the sun’s edge winking back at him, as if to say “you missed me this time, but come back tomorrow.” Just a sliver was all that he saw, peeking in from the shoals of the lobby’s edge, but it was sunlight, and it was beautiful.

  The sky remained blue when the sun passed out of sight, leaving behind what he thought might be the twinkle of an early star. When he came to understand that the sun was going to pass above the lobby every day at precisely the same time, he nodded an absent thank-you to Ms. Gilly, remembering their class about calendars being born from the stars. Until this moment, what he’d learned had just been ghosts trapped in a history lesson.

  “You were right, Ms. Gilly.”

  What Declan saw next turned the heat from the sun into something cold. Across the lobby, not thirty hands from him, stood his sister, Hadley. Her face was expressionless and pale, with stony smudges cradling her eyes; the luster in her beautiful brown hair was gone, replaced by graying; her skin had turned to the same shade as the fallen clouds. Hadley was a ghost, a mere shadow that walked with an absent stare.

  When he called out, she turned without seeing him, and continued forward. He immediately chased after her, knowing that if he didn’t reach her, then he’d lose her to one of the surrounding corridors. He pushed past the bodies around him, shoving one man nearly to the ground. His heart was racing, thumping hard. Bodies were suddenly in front of him, pawing at his arms and holding him. He didn’t let himself believe it was intentional at first, thinking instead that what was happening was just a coincidence. But when someone’s fingers wrapped around his arm, and then another set of hands clamped onto his shoulders, he realized that he was in fact being held.

  Declan struggled against the grip of many, and tried to keep in sight of his sister, knowing he might never see her again. He screamed for her, his voice hoarse, breaking against the strain in his throat. Sweat rose on his neck, and he found himself cursing the hands that held him, but he finally managed to slip free of their grasp. The flashes of lights from the nearest wall told him all that he needed to know: he was being held so that Hadley could get away.

  Before the mass of hands and bodies could regain its hold on him, he bulled through the crowd—his knees high, his steps quick, bodies being pushed around him—and ran to Hadley. Declan felt the crush of fingers under his feet as he stepped on the hands of those who had fallen yet still flailed to grab hold of him. The crunch of someone’s bones sickened him, but he didn’t stop—he just cursed the lights, blaming them for everything that was happening.

  He was closer to Hadley now. She was continuing toward one of the corridors, but had been slowed by approaching bodies. All of them had the same ashen skin, and their hair was colorless and faded. How had he missed that until now?

  Hadley joined one of the lines waiting to enter a corridor, which allowed Declan the chance to catch up. As he came up behind her, he reached out, placed his hand on her shoulder, and turned her.

  The woman who turned back to face him wasn’t Hadley; it was his mother. At once, his heart halted, his breathing stopped. His mother’s beautiful skin had become as pale as his sister’s. Creases stretched around her eyes, etching grooves in her leathery skin. She looked at him then, and for a moment, he thought she was going to say something. But she didn’t see him. She didn’t seem to see anything, but just stared ahead absently, without expression. He reached up to touch her hair, feeling for the soft comfort he’d known when he was growing up. But all he found was a brittle coarseness—an offense to life—dying.

  “What happened to you?” The question was not just for his mother, but for the other corpses that trudged by.

  Surprisingly, his mother spoke. “I’m ready now,” she said as she touched his face. Declan reached up to grab hold of her hand, to pull her into his arms and take her from this place—but he was too slow, he’d waited too long. A sudden rush of arms came at him like a raging current, drowning the unsuspecting. Hands came down on him, smothering him; their sheer weight ripped him away from his mother. Disbelief flooded his mind.

  This can’t be happening, he thought, and he considered how docile the others had been until now. Above him, the ceiling spewed reflections of the lights, lively and unforgiving, throwing a storm of flashing colors around him. The machine wanted his mother and sister, and it somehow knew that he was going to try to stop them. He screamed at the hands holding him down, while his mother turned away from him.

  This is just a dream, he told himself. A nightmare. But he knew it wasn’t. Hadley was next to him then, meeting his eyes, but seeing past him as he struggled to stand. And then she was gone, following their mother. He kept his eyes on their path, watching them move deeper into the corridor, but more bodies filled the growing space between them, obscuring his view. All wore the same deathly look.

  Declan pushed against the grip of fingers, struggling, yelling. The nightmare of restraint held firm, until his only recourse was to begin swinging. He threw his arms in a wide arc, air casting over his skin as he tried to connect with anything near him. A jolt of pain bolted up his arm when a mouthful of teeth cut into his knuckles, suspending his fingers in numbness. His fist had hit the mouth of an older woman, and immediately her grip on him vanished as she lost her balance and pinwheeled backward. He watched as she stumbled and then rolled, crashing to the floor; he heard the thump of her head as it bounced on the hard ground. Even as he watched her, his other hand connected with a man’s ear, splitting the long lobe of dangling skin and leaving a trail of blood to spill onto his white coveralls. And like the woman, the man let go of Declan, falling to his knees. When Declan’s fist landed twice more, he’d freed himself of enough restraints to stand. By then, his mother and sister were far ahead of him.

  He thought to call to them; whirled around to see if there was anything he could stand on. He moved his eyes in full swings, dizzying himself in the process. And then his eyes landed on Sammi. She was walking along the other side of the great lobby, toward another corridor. Instinctively, his hands were up in the air, waving as if they were back in their Commune’s courtyard and he was trying to catch her attention as they readied for their morning walk to class.

  Sammi did turn to him, smiled briefly, and even attempted to wave with a subtle raise of her hand, before the lights nearest to her caught her eyes and turned her back around. But in the brief moment that she’d faced him, Declan had seen that something was wrong. Sammi was sick, although not in the same way as his mother and sister. Her face was pale, but not ashen; and thankfully, her hair had stayed the same bouncy red. But still, her eyes were darker, tired.

  Declan stepped forward, moving past a few bodies, trying to get closer to Sammi so that he could call out again. He glanced back over his shoulder at the corridor that his mother and sister had taken. Declan didn’t know which way to go. Another body thumped into his shoulder, causing him to reel back and fall to his knees. Thinking that the lights were instructing the bodies to hold him down again, he quickly jumped up, preparing to fend off the onslaught. But nothing came at him.

  Another morse line, he thought, and stepped to get out of the path of moving bodies.

  When he turned back, Sammi was already gone. Disappointed, Declan spat at the floor and wondered if the lights were smiling, satisfied with his loss. He cursed the flickering colors and spun around to follow his mother and sister.

  The corridor passed under his feet with fleeting steps. Running felt awkward to him—cumbersome and strange—after all, how often in his life had he eve
r been able to run? His heart beat hard and his knees and feet were punished by the unfamiliar gait. He was pushing past the graying bodies lining up to enter another room, when suddenly the floor jerked beneath him, causing him to stumble and fall. From his vantage point, he could see that nobody was moving; they’d all stopped. But the floor itself moved them along: a conveyor, passing them from the lobby to the next room. Declan jumped back up, trying to see over the line of bodies ahead of him, then sprinted to the end of the corridor. He continued to push bodies aside, gaining speed, until he was in the other room. Before he knew what was happening, the floor was gone from beneath his feet, and he was falling.

  He crashed onto a grated floor, and pain thundered in his legs, vaulting him forward. Declan caught himself against a narrow rail, his middle having hit the metal tubing hard enough to push the air from his lungs. Pin-lights darted across his eyes, and he reeled back, planting his feet firmly until he was still. He thought a bone was broken in his foot; he could feel the ache increasing, his big toe growing deaf to his commands.

  He rested then, waited until his breath came to him, before looking up to see where he was. Gasping, he choked on the air; it was filled with salt and a putrid decay that tasted acidic in his mouth. He spat once, trying to clear his mouth, but the powerful acrid taste stayed deep within his throat.

  A quick look around told him that he was standing at the railing of a thousand-hand drop. He’d fallen from the moving conveyor, dropping him on the other side of the corridor. Had he missed the small metal landing, he’d surely be dead; it was all that prevented him from tumbling to the bottom of a deep cavern. His hands rested on the metal railing, absorbing the cold touch as a necessary safety against falling.

  Looking over the edge, his heart went into his throat, lifting his stomach until he felt sick. He turned away. His knees knocked together until he dropped. He was terrified.

  In his lifetime, he’d never experienced height like this. Before now, the executive floor—where he’d walked with his mother once, on her first day of work—was the highest that he’d ever been. He remembered that his mother had pulled him back from the ledge as he had looked down at their courtyard. She’d embarrassed him, calling out that it was too dangerous to be so close. But this was ten times that height. Above him, he could see that the cavern was dome-shaped, and as tall as the lobby he’d just left. Gripping the cold metal, he forced himself to lean over and look below.

  “That’s where the heart is,” he mumbled. “It’s deep inside the earth.”

  Declan pushed to stand, a distant heartbeat throbbing in his foot. He ignored the pain, and began his search for his mother and sister. The moving floor he’d fallen from was above him, turning inward toward the black walls that made up the sides of the cavern. With his eyes he followed its path, winding downward into a long, drawn-out spiral that stretched away from him and to the other side. The distance was great, and if not for the line of white coveralls standing against the dark walls, he thought he would have lost sight of it.

  Across the vast cavern, he saw other landings like the one he was standing on: jutting square pockets of metal affixed to the cavern wall. He could see that for each of the moving conveyers entering the cavern, there was a metal landing beneath.

  Maybe these are for maintenance, he thought. But none of them were connected. The only way on or off of the landing was to use the moving platforms above each of them. Or maybe they were used for building the cavern and then forgotten?

  Turning around, he pressed his hand against the rocky wall, which was wet, moist with a salty smell that reminded him of the ocean. But that wasn’t the source of the foulness, the putrid smell aching in the back of his mouth. That decay came from somewhere else. He leaned forward against the rail, looking down into what he couldn’t see.

  “They are mining something,” his voice echoed, recalling a conversation between his mother and father. The VAC Machines had drilled deep into the earth, mining for compounds to use with the ocean’s water. What kind of machine could drill a hole so big?

  Below him, more conveyors moved across the open expanse, crisscrossing back and forth like the streams of white iridescent coveralls from the lobby. But some of the lines of bodies were naked, free of coveralls, standing one behind the other, following in what looked like a motionless march down into the cavern.

  He spotted his mother and sister in one of these lines. Bodies naked, they moved obediently forward and stared ahead without expression. He screamed their names, but they were already too far from him to notice. He considered, then, that maybe they could hear him, but were just ignoring him. But, if that were so, he knew it was not because they had chosen to.

  At the end of their moving conveyor, there stood a robotic machine: a type of android, but bigger than Andie from their classroom. Its articulating arm swung in wide arcs, bringing a mechanical hand with rubber-tipped fingers to rest on the face of each person. He could hear the faint whirring sound of the arm as it swung around from one conveyor belt to another, alternating back and forth.

  Declan watched as a woman reached the swinging arm. As the arm swung around to touch her, he brought his hand to his cheek, remembering how his mother had touched him there. The mechanical arm stretched a rubber finger, pressing it against her skin. The graying of the woman’s skin began to quicken, starting at her temple and spiraling downward, like the moving conveyors around the cavern. When the woman’s skin had lost all color, Declan watched her body collapse in a jumble of legs and arms. Declan jumped when the floor beneath her suddenly opened and she disappeared into the cavern’s black depths.

  Declan forgot all about his fear of the cavern’s height as he counted the number of people between the machine and his mother and sister. Twenty, maybe a few more, giving him only minutes to pull them to safety. He ran from one side of the metal landing to the other, looking for anything that he could use to reach them. He found nothing. He looked back to the machine: eighteen people. Urgency spread over him like sweat as he desperately sought a way off the platform. He swung a leg over the front railing, hoisting himself up, only to drop back down undecided. The whirring sound of the machine and the collapsing of bodies thrummed in his ears. And with each swing and deathly touch, he kept a count, visualizing his family in the line. Declan realized how fast the conveyors were moving. He was losing time. Sixteen people.

  Climb the wall, he thought. It’s the only way down.

  Holding his breath, he climbed atop the railing, perching himself above the cavern’s depths. He rested all his weight on his good foot, leaving the other to help him balance on the railing. Fourteen people. He reached and grabbed for the wall, his hand slipping almost immediately. The walls were slick with moisture, and he struggled to hold himself. Thirteen people. He tried digging his fingertips into a fissure, attempted to grip its stony edge and shift his weight to his arms.

  Declan found a small lip in the rock face and took hold, shuffling a few hands away from the platform; he was climbing, attached to the cavern wall like the metal landings. Eleven people. The rocky wall gave little for him to hold on to. He found another fissure below his knee, and shoved his broken foot into the space. Sweat pestered his eyes, and he fought the urge to wipe them. The threat of falling brought on an overwhelming nausea that wetted his mouth and closed his throat. A jagged shard stabbed into the tops of his fingers, splitting one of them open and prying up a fingernail until it broke away. Nine people.

  He’d rested too much of his weight on his fingers, and his hold on the wall broke. Declan sucked in a breath, and lost most of his grip. All of his weight fell to his injured foot, with only three fingers clutching the rocky lip. His body swung outward, opening up to face the depths below. Shutting his eyes to squeeze the sweat from them, Declan pushed his broken foot around, resting his heel in the opening. When the fissure held, he shifted more of his weight to his heel.

  Looking to the conveyer closest to him, he judged the distance and wondered if he co
uld jump. Seven people. His arms and legs were shaking, violently trembling beneath his coveralls. He wasn’t going to make it. He tried to ignore his quivering muscles as he looked again at the closest conveyer. If he jumped, he’d fall off, he was sure of it. He might land on the conveyor, but he’d tumble over into the chasm below. Six people.

  I can make it, he thought desperately, and then looked over to the metal landing, apprehension eroding his hopes.

  Declan made his way back, dropping down onto the landing. The crisp sound of ringing metal echoed off the cavern’s far wall. He searched past the floor’s metal grating, through the mesh of raised steel triangles. Choking on his breath, and knowing that he couldn’t save them, he counted anyway. Four people. Surrendering, he felt insignificant, lacking and small, like a salt-gnat in the massive cavern. Three people. Declan collapsed onto his belly, pressing his face into the metal as he poked his fingers through the grated holes. Tears came to his eyes, giving in to gravity, just as he had given in moments before. Two people remained in front of his mother and sister. He held onto the grate, calling out their names, telling them that he loved them, apologizing in sorrowful heaves for having abandoned his attempts to save them. One person.

  Declan’s mother and sister stood quietly, never looking up to see who had been calling out to them. Instead, they calmly followed the last remaining person in front of them.

  Declan was winded from his attempts to get off the platform, and his breathing remained heavy, leaving warm drops on the metal floor, like the moisture that blanketed the walls. The cavern is breathing, too, he thought wildly. He wanted to turn away, to hide his eyes, but he didn’t.