Chapter 4
I wasn’t unaccustomed to waking up in a man’s arms, but I never thought that man would be my annoying captain. I wouldn’t have known who held me if not for my cracked visor blinking that illuminated Roys’ pallid face. That face contorted in pain when I moved.
Roys opened his eyes and heaved a great breath. “Are you alright? Injuries?”
“I’m fine.”
He gave me a narrowed look, right eye twitching. “Lucky is an entirely unfitting nickname for you.”
There were more moments in my life that agreed with him than not. However, I pushed off Roys to discover we fell next to a stalagmite that could have impaled us. Also, the water canister fell in with us. He saw that, too.
I grinned. “The name is entirely fitting.”
I tinkered with the broken commlink on my wrist. The jagged screen didn’t cause the kind of interference that would block SOS signals. Somehow, we were cut off from the world above.
Above. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. We were buried. Just like they were.
“My calls won’t go through. What about yours?” I removed my visor while making my way toward the water pack. The bag was intact, albeit scuffed.
“My comm isn’t working either.” Roys struggled to sit upright. He used the flashlight on his visor to illuminate the cavern. To our horror, we were nestled under the heart-like structure that caused the fiasco. My hand fell on the flamethrower that, also to my horror, was missing.
Right. I lost it up there.
“We move, and we move slowly,” Roys said.
Attempting to stand resulted in him falling to a knee.
Sweat dripped from his temple, and his knuckles quivered in the dirt.
He was injured. He would drag me down, but I didn’t know how to get out…
and if I needed to outrun something later, he’d make for good bait.
“I expect not to be lectured for at least a week after this.” Turning on my flashlight, I knelt by him where I got a decent look at his injury.
Whatever that liquid was tore through his exoskin and our secondary layer of clothes beneath to leave a wicked burn.
Blisters formed across his back, some busted and oozing.
His shirt was torn apart, hanging on by a half-ripped collar and a few string strands on his right sleeve.
The exoskin flickered along the torn edges, broken pieces falling away.
The exoskins were meant for light travel and equally light attacks.
A hit from those vines would have stunned us but not left much of a mark.
The acid, however, proved far too much to shield against.
“You deserve to be lectured for at least a week, considering what happened.” Roys didn’t mention how I abandoned him up there. He just hissed when I locked an arm around his waist.
We marched backward. His attention never strayed from the flora.
Mine shifted between our front and back.
The root system dug an enormous cavern. There were multiple tunnels branching off of this one.
I tried not to think of the dark, of dead end after dead end, of our bodies broken and defeated, left alone to rot.
The flora wiggled, and I took the closest tunnel exit.
“How did that not get us down here? We’ve been out for,” I checked my comm that still showed the time, “An hour.”
Roys didn’t answer. He spent his energy on moving, fixating on the path ahead. Over our shoulder, the flora slept. Perhaps the damned devil spent its energy and required rest. I didn’t want to stick around and find out.
The tunnel led further in. My head brushed the ceiling.
Roys was fine, being about two inches shorter.
The root system twisted through the path, traveling above and below.
However, those roots thinned, yet the tunnel remained, and that raised the question; was it the flora that dug the tunnel or something else?
With the vines dissipating, a pattern emerged — ridges on the soil.
Roys grunted when I stopped to investigate.
He settled against my side, panting, eyes half-mast. My fingers danced over the soil, feeling the ridges, perfectly apart.
Something dug the tunnel, and it wasn’t the flora.
As frightening as it was to think of a creature alive down there, that also led to the conclusion that there should be a way out. An exit out of the deep dark.
“I need a break.” Roys’ legs gave out.
I wasn’t expecting it, and he fell to his knees. He tugged off his visor and set it in his lap. I wanted to get further, but Roys required medical attention, and nothing had proved a danger thus far. He needed the cradle, but the best we had was med spray.
“I need what remains of your shirt.” I tapped on his exoskin.
He was too out of it to care, letting me tug the upper half off.
His veins were dark on his arms, nearing black.
Many had the same marks at the Colony. I delivered a lot of the shit they took to get those scars.
Moira, no doubt, a type of synthetic that brought on practically maddening euphoria, and incredibly addictive.
I never thought Roys would be a user. He was too much of a stick in the mud.
I ripped the ends of the shirt off. “I suggest you bite down on this and lie on your stomach.”
Roys’ eyes fluttered open, his breathing less labored. “You are enjoying this.”
“Immensely, though I admit I would enjoy it even better if there were less clothes, blood, and pus involved.”
Roys shoved the ruined shirt in his mouth and laid on his stomach. His back was awful. I used my canteen to wash the debris off. He groaned, and muscles flexed. Though the tunnel was cooler than the jungle, he continued to sweat, more from pain than heat.
“Here comes the spray.”
Pointing the spray at his back, I moved slowly from side to side. The shirt did nothing to cover his pained noises. The spray fell over him in a thin film, a liquid that clung to his injuries like living organisms.
“Done.” I tucked the near-empty canister in my pack.
Roys should have one, too, so we weren’t out yet. The spray slipped beneath the wounds to stop the bleeding. The blisters oozed, shrinking until they were little more than dead skin hanging off his back. The cradle could piece him back together in a minute. This would last him for hours.
“Something down here is blocking our comms,” Roys said while tinkering with his commlink.
The holo screen flashed from his failed attempts to call out.
The med spray did wonders, seeing as he was already back in commander mode.
“They worked fine above ground. I can check my downloads, but that's it. Yours?”
“Same.”
“Check your supplies.”
We didn’t have much, seeing as his pack was burnt off from that flora and I was assigned the water canister, so I wasn’t carrying another pack.
Weapon-wise, we had two blasters, a flamethrower, three blades, two flash grenades and two regular grenades.
In terms of supplies, we had one full med spray, our water canister, a lamplight, and three ration packs.
“We could last a few days down here,” said Roys.
“I’d prefer it if we didn’t.”
“We wouldn’t have to worry at all if you followed orders.”
“That took longer than expected.” I stood with the water canister on my back, the lamplight attached to my belt, and marched.
Roys put his supplies on his waist, including his visor. He left the top half of the exoskin dangling, too broken to protect him and far more irritating for his injuries. The lamplight and my visor illuminated the path ahead.
“And here you are making the same mistake.” He caught up to block me. “We need to scan these tunnels as we go, otherwise we may end up moving in circles.”
“Then start scanning.”
“I am in no mood for your attitude, Ethin.”
“Lucky.”
Roys got in my face, eyes blazing. “You realize you would have gotten your friend killed had I not intervened?”
I waited to see if he’d add that last bit — how he came in to protect me but I didn’t return the favor. He didn’t, and I shoved past him. He bit back a pained noise.
“That thing would have killed us all if we had stood around. I wasn’t about to die doing nothing,” I said.
“We did not know what the flora was or what it could do, and you made us learn it the hard way. You shouldn’t have shot, as I ordered, but you panicked.”
“I didn’t panic. I made the best choice that I thought would get me the fuck out of there.”
“Just you?” he challenged.
“Just me.” I took a random turn while Roys had his commlink up, scanning. “Now cut the fucking lecture. We’re alive. That’s what matters.”
“You best hope the team is alive. We won’t know until we’re out of here, if we get out of here,” he said, and my blood ran cold.
I wouldn’t die down there. I wouldn’t be left in the dark.
Roys stepped in front of me. “You’re impatient, stubborn, and you always do whatever you want regardless of the consequences, especially if those consequences don’t really harm you.
Maybe you are lucky, lucky that it’s you down here and not any of them.
” He turned away. “I’ll scan. Stay behind me, if you can do that much. ”
Every muscle in my body screamed to walk in the other direction. I would show Roys what it meant to do whatever I wanted. I’d leave the bastard to defend himself, to rot away after that med spray wore off.
Pivoting, I had every intention of doing exactly that.
Except the tunnel was long and dark, growing smaller, constricting…
and I heard the rustling of the mine, the constant creaks and cracks.
The message. A single fucking message on our broken holo screen with our parent’s pictures.
I wouldn’t even get that much. I didn’t have anyone to send that message to anyway.
I gave away all I ever knew, everyone I loved, for a glimpse of freedom.
Most wouldn’t see this life as free, but compared to the Colony, tolerating Roys was the better option.
I marched after Roys, keeping my blade out, considering what had happened with the blaster. He had a flamethrower in one hand and the scanner pointed ahead in the other.
“I can’t see the team’s vitals on my commlink,” he said, bottom lip caught between his teeth.
“They’re likely searching the perimeter for us or waiting for backup.”
We trekked for about three hours away from base prior to the attack. Since we were out for an hour, that could be enough time for another group to have caught up, or were close to it.
“Except they listen to my orders, and my orders state no one can stay out after dark. They have at least a three-hour walk back, so they have little time to search for us,” he replied.
“Good thing nights last barely over five hours because, if they haven’t taken notes from me, we’re going to be alone out here.”
“We aren’t alone,” he mocked.
“I would rather be alone.” And I was once again tempted to make that happen, considering beating the bastard over the head with the water canister. But his corpse could attract scavengers, and he was more pleasant to look at than the uneven walls of a cave.
“How touching.” Roys reached into the small pack on his waist. He retrieved a candy to pop into his mouth. “I don’t think we should move on after nightfall, either.”
“It doesn’t exactly matter here.”
“Caves are well-known dwellings for nocturnal creatures. We aren’t too certain if there are any, but I don’t believe we’re equipped enough to risk finding out.”
He had a point there. My silence made him smirk. Death by water canister was growing awfully tempting, but instead, we walked in silence.