Stuck below the surface of the earth with someone he just now found out was an absolute lunatic, Ethan grimly considered his options out of the haunting scenario he had put himself in.
The energy coming from the breach point was a total wildcard, incalculable until it hit them. The energy that blanketed Ascension on the night of the Surge was dispersed through Apex’s machinery. The one they were about to break into was pure, direct, meaning Ethan thought it was all or nothing.
They’d live and receive some sort of power, or die and get nothing at all. Right now, Ethan wasn’t sure which would be better.
If neither of them survived, then Rainey and her plot to kill Alex wouldn’t be a problem moving forward. Alex would undoubtedly be sad, but she’d have one less person trying to Jill her in the future, so this counted as a net win for her. However, it was a total loss for Ethan, so he’d have to avoid that option, if he could.
If they both survived, and if Rainey received powers dangerous enough to potentially take on Alex, then Ethan would be making Alex a target. He’d have gotten everything he wanted: superhuman abilities, a chance at becoming a Protector, and a life in Ascension away from the mines. However, it’d come at the potential cost of Alex’s life.
But Alex was supposed to be invincible, right? She could take whatever Rainey threw at her without so much as a scratch.
Probably. But if she couldn’t….
Ethan had already ruined his friendship with Raz, and he wasn’t willing to let this evening also put Alex’s life in jeopardy. It was time to fight or flight, and Ethan’s hand quivered when he realized he couldn’t turn back now.
With Rainey crouched on one knee in front of him, operating the drill, Ethan ran through a few scenarios of how best to knock her out the way, leaving him time to disable the drill. Awkwardly, he dipped his shoulder, reaching his hands out and pulling them back in, trying to best ascertain how to tackle Rainey out of the way in a manner that would hurt her the least.
Alex had practiced her wrestling moves on him plenty of times while they were growing up, but she never meant to hurt him, even if she often did. And, despite what all the 80s movies he and Raz watched had prepared them for, nobody in their small town ever found a reason to pick a fight with them. This lack of experience meant that Ethan was woefully unprepared to stop someone from plunging a drill into a rapidly destabilizing mine tunnel.
But he was still going to have to try.
He found himself wishing that he’d gotten into a fight in school, at least one, just so he’d know what it felt like to throw a punch, to get hit. But more than that, Ethan really wished he wasn’t going to have his first ever fight be against a girl.
On top of all that, she didn’t even know they were about to fight, but that was soon to change.
Before he could back out, Ethan threw caution to the wind and simply ran forward and slammed his shoulder into Rainey’s back, knocking her away from the drill.
“Ah!” she yelled, rolling on the dusty tunnel floor. She pushed herself back to standing, wiping off her face. She glared at Ethan.
“I’m sorry!” Ethan yelled instinctively, his squeaky wail bouncing off the tunnel walls. His heart was already pounding from stress. “I don’t know what else to do!”
Rainey growled, shoving Ethan as hard as she could. She lunged for the drill, but was beaten to the punch by Ethan, who started pulling it back, away from the breach.
“What are you doing?” she yelled, digging her fingers into his bicep, trying to get him to let go of the handle. He held on, despite the sharp pain.
“I can’t let you get powers if you’re going to kill someone!”
Especially if that someone is my sister, he wanted to scream.
“It’s too late!” Rainey yelled back, pointing at the drill. Ethan’s head snapped to the hole she had bored through the outer layer of rocks, his stomach sinking at the light blue light starting to filter through, exactly the same hue he saw earlier buried underneath Basin Lake. “We’ve already broken through, all you’re doing is making it more dangerous!”
That gave Ethan an idea, less of a lightbulb going off in his brain and more of a bomb. He couldn’t hurt Rainey anymore than he already had, not without actually doing something like throwing a punch, which he refused to do, but he could hold her off by making things too unstable for them to stay in the mines, forcing her to flee.
He shoved Rainey away from him, her nails dragging across his arm, drawing more blood. He ignored the burning pain and gripped the drill, then pointed it down, towards the stone wall’s base. He turned to Rainey, deathly serious.
“Run.”
“No!” she lunged at Ethan, but before she could grab him, he plunged the drill downward to destabilize the base of the rock wall, the bit screaming against the stone.
Rainey tried to grab him, and wrap herself around his shoulders, but three years of working in the mine had given Ethan considerable strength. Nothing like Alex, of course, but more than enough to handle a woman barely two thirds his size.
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”I’m sorry!” he yelled as he shrugged her off, sending her tumbling away. “You’ve gotta get out of here!”
Groaning with effort, he put all of his body weight onto the drill handle and forced it downward, the diamond bit biting and starting to eat away at the stone. Pebbles, like little warning signs came tumbling down the wall, signaling the incoming cave in. The rest of the wall would follow suit soon judging by the groans of the shifting stones.
Rainey, who did not have Ethan’s experience with cave ins, was unmoved despite the chaos and obvious warning signs signaling around them.
“I didn’t come all the way down here for nothing!” Rainey yelled, her desperation echoing off the tight tunnel walls. She drew her hand back and punched Ethan square in the cheek, sending him sprawling onto the floor with a thud and forcing him to lose his grip on the drill handle.
So that’s what it feels like, Ethan thought, rubbing the welt already forming just under his eye. He stood, shaking his head.
“It’s too late,” Ethan he called out to Rainey, pointing to the rock wall. The base was shifting in front of them, rocks the size of Ethan’s chest cracking under the weight. Perhaps even more dangerous, more and more light was beginning to pour through the cracks and out of the breach. “The tunnel is coming down now, we’ve gotta get out of here before the whole thing collapses!”
Rainey’s eyes narrowed in determination. She folded her arms, planting her boots in the ground. To prove her resolve, she waited a moment for the rocks to stop shifting before speaking.
“I’m getting powers, or I’m not leaving here at all.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Ethan protested, carefully reaching a hand out to Rainey. “I know you feel responsible for hurting your sister, but you’re not. You never could’ve predicted that, and you won’t hurt Apex by hurting yourself. All we can do is try to move on and be better, for them.”
Which is what I’ll do if I make it out of here, Raz, I promise.
“It’s too late for that!” Rainey slammed her fist beside the crumbling rocks, sending another one crashing to the ground loudly in front of them, making Ethan’s heart skip a beat. “The only way I can make Apex feel the hurt I do is by getting powers, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
“You can’t do anything if you’re dead,” Ethan countered.
“Well then,” Rainey spat. She grabbed the drill, the energy from the breach bathing her face in a dark, swirling glow, “I better make sure I get powers before that happens.”
Rainey shoved the drill into the center into the rock. wave, crumbling it entirely. The wall came crashing down as a wave of blue light rushed through the newly created pathway, Surge energy pouring through the breach.
Ethan hadn’t given much thought as to what it would feel like to be hit by the Surge. After all, he knew the chances were slim he’d ever find one, and he was mostly concerned about what came after. Nobody wanted to get eye beams, but in his darkest moments even Ethan would take them if it meant getting out of the mine. But in the few moments he had considered what it’d feel like to have a portion of your DNA rewritten, he imagined it much like someone slapping your sunburn, or something close to taking a shot of cheap whiskey: a flash burn that subsided just as fast as it came.
In actuality, the pain was indescribably worse than he ever could’ve imagined.
Ethan wasn’t sure if there had even been a noise. He and Rainey were met with a wall of overwhelming force that shot them back and sent their nerves into overdrive, every inch of them feeling like it had just caught fire and been struck by lightning simultaneously. For all Ethan knew, maybe he had; his eyes were shut tight, every thought he had dedicated to wishing the pain would stop.
After he hit the ground, he realized he could barely hear himself screaming, drowned out by the rocks raining down on them from the top of the tunnel. One planted itself into the ground next to him, barely missing his head, and Ethan popped an eye open slightly, giving him just enough of a view to realize he had precious few moments before they all came crashing down on him from the top of the tunnel. For just a brief moment, with jagged rocks racing towards his head, he saw clear through to the night sky, and he could’ve sworn he could still see the lights from Ascension dancing above him.
Ethan knew it was futile, but he found himself wishing that he was up there to feel the mountain breeze he suddenly found himself missing flowing by his face, cooling the burning sensation enveloping him. More importantly, he wished that he could get a chance to apologize to Raz for shoving him to the ground earlier, to try and repair the friendship he threw away. He probably owed Alex a few apologies, too, but Raz came first, especially since Ethan hadn’t ever bothered to learn how to use the dishwasher in their apartment.
With the rocks crashing all around him, everything in Ethan wished he was up, towards the lights, away from the chaos of the collapsing tunnel, away from the death raining from above. Suddenly, his vision was overtaken by a flash of purple light, then Ethan felt something slam into his entire body, cold and solid, knocking the breath out of him, forcing him to open his eyes wide. Confused, Ethan thought he must’ve been hallucinating: he could’ve sworn he was staring at trees.
The sudden chill of the cold air snapped him out of his daze, and he realized he was, in fact, out of the tunnel, somehow, safe, lying in a field of grass, barely illuminated by the moon. He scrambled to the edge of the hole that they had ripped in the earth, noticing a glowing, purple portal in the bottom of the tunnel below.
I must’ve come through that, somehow, Ethan thought, his mind racing. But Rainey isn’t here with me. She’s still down there, but there might be time for her to escape, too!
He wiped the dust from his eyes, barely able to notice that the portal’s light was starting to fade.
“Rainey!” he yelled down. “Jump through!”
“No!” she yelled up, her voice faint but even angrier than before. “It’s not fair! Not until I get mine!”
“You’ve got to go, now!” He yelled down. “You won’t get another chance!”
“I don’t care!” Rainey screamed. “It’s now or-“
The earth finally gave way, the rocks holding up the tunnel walls collapsing in on themselves, unleashing a horrible screech as the earth reoriented itself.
The noise was so loud, so intense, that it forced Ethan’s eyes shut, and he felt himself slipping into unconsciousness. Just as his body shut down from the pain and exhaustion, he heard a voice ring out softly and sadly over his broken body, sounding equal parts disappointed and concerned. He recognized it instantly.
“Oh Ethan,” Alex said, reaching her hands under Ethan’s back and pulling his limp body into the air. She surveyed the scene in front of her: a massive, flaming hole where the mine used to be, rocks tumbling into the sinkhole forming right before her eyes.
“What have you done?”