#
Estimated oxygen time: 23:35:31
She drew the blade and took a step towards me, like a vulture inspecting wounded, helpless prey. She’d used to move like a martial artist, disciplined and careful, but now her movements flowed unconsciously, as naturally as an actual predator. “All that trouble, and you didn’t even manage to escape,” she judged, her voice a little less hoarse. “In the end.”
Behind her, a shadow moved slowly in the darkness—a hulking form, lumbering, pained. On comm, I heard Dov panting through his teeth—but not begging.
I need to face her as an equal, some calculating voice inside me said. I need to create a distinction between me and the others, if I don’t want Keren, or myself, to end like that. The thing about talking to a killer, a real killer, is that something deep and ancient inside of you advises strongly to shut up and piss your pants. “Did you do have it any better?” I said, struggling to keep my tone casual.
She eyed me. “You’ve changed. Death row was good for you. Toughened you up. You’ll need that to survive, here.”
I took the friendly tone as a good sign. “What happened here, Diocletian? Where are the lines?”
Her eyes turned dark. “The name’s Vempress now. Say it.”
“What happened here, Vempress?” I spoke slowly, as if calming a wild animal.
“War. You should know - you started it.”
Something lit the rock, and I saw Dov, staring at us from a hiding place among the rocks, collapsed on his knees and one hand. His face was tinted blue, and his bloodshot eyes were focused, determined. He was still fighting, somehow, refusing to let go. I didn’t know how much oxygen a suit could hold, but it couldn’t be much. It was the death that everyone in the old Last Day Town feared. It made having your suit opened seem like a great kindness. Shouldn’t I feel bad for this guy? It didn’t matter. All I felt was quiet and cold. “I don’t remember starting any of this,” I said.
She looked at him for a moment and turned back to me, smiling. “Once I killed the lines, I didn’t see a reason to bring them back. I didn’t need any of them: Not greedy Ctesibius, whiny Pythia, or stubborn Anaxagoras. I am enough to keep this place in order, and I don’t need to hide or lie. This is better than Last Day Town ever was.”
Behind her, Dov pulled something from within his armor - a short, straight knife. He lifted it above his head, as if preparing to strike himself, but instead flicked it forward. In the microgravity, it flew in an almost straight line, right towards Vempress. She must have seen something reflected in my visor, or my eyes, because she jumped, straight up—and the knife slit the bag around her calve.
“Fuck!” she yelled, far above, and placed a hand against the tear, rolling in space. Still rising, she pulled the duct tape from a pocket and spread it over the tear with one hand, quickly, while pinching the tear shut with the other. She was done before she even reached the apex of her jump, ten meters above me, and thrust herself back down. When she landed, still graceful, her eyes were on the violet letters at the bottom right corner of her visor, her mouth forming silent curses.
Dov looked at us, still on his knees, a smile on his blue face. Vempress turned to look at him, and I couldn’t see her face. For a moment they stood frozen, forgetting their urgent situation, then he collapsed forward.
Vempress untangled her lasso, and threw it at me. “Grab on,” she said, and I did. “Let go, and I’ll noose you by the neck,” she added, her voice steady.
Good. She hadn’t decided to kill me yet.
I wrapped the fabric around my arm twice. She hurled herself up with surprising force, pumping the jets before the line tightened and pulled me after her. We built up speed and once again I got to watch Last Day Town from above, albeit much lower and faster this time. I spotted three people, scattered, moving along the rock face, foraging like wild animals for who knows what.
“Why did you let Yahushua live?” I asked, regaining some measure of control. “What’s the purpose of leaving someone there?”
She was silent for so long that I’d have suspected she’d turned off her comm, if I hadn’t heard the sound of her breathing next to mine. “If I kill all of them, how will they remember?” she said finally, not looking back at me. “Somebody needs to remember.”
I couldn’t see the airlock anymore—and when I saw the chasm, I realized we were heading west, toward Diocletian’s old cave.
She didn’t use the thrusters to stop our descent – in fact, she used them to send us down into the mouth of the chasm, which put her below me. She turned herself feet-first and slipped into the narrow, sloping entrance of the cave. I, unable to turn around, collided with the wall with an arm and a leg. I fell down into the abyss, trying to reach for the wall, but I had already bounced too far off.
Vempress sat comfortably in the cave entrance, the tether that was connected to me coiled around her fist. She watched me fall to her level and lower, but didn’t move, as if to see what I would do. When I’d fallen as low as I could, I felt the tug of band as she flung me up, with one powerful motion, just high enough for me to grab hold of the entrance and lift myself in.
She slid down into the narrow, dark tunnel. By the faint light of her visor, I could see her tending to something, a wall made of bags glued together. She opened a long zipper in the middle of it, exposing a second layer of patched bags. She looked up at me, and I saw her face lit violet behind her visor, looking impatient. She moved aside, just giving me enough room to pass, but still held the blade in her hand, ready to slice me open by the thigh. “Airlock’s not big enough for both of us, so you get in first. At this point you might come up with the idea to ruin the airlock itself in hope I choke, but I assure you I never leave this cave without enough oxygen to fix a new one if I need to, so don’t waste our time. Once you get in zip up behind you, then open up the inner door. Close the inner door, then let me know by comm, and don’t move” she said flatly. “Touch anything, and I’ll have you breathing vacuum,” she added. I recognized that threat.
I crawled down, in the even narrower space that she left with her body, as warry of the blade in her hand as I was of touching her body, in this strange, forced intimacy, and folded myself between the layers of fabric. The space between the layers was clearly tailored for dimensions smaller than mine, and when she zipped up behind me, I found myself wedged, almost unable to maneuver. I fumbled for the other zipper in the faint light of my own visor, while trying to ignore the numerals. I was careful not to tear anything; I was now messing with her home, with her oxygen. I didn’t want to breathe vacuum.
I opened the second zipper into pitch blackness, and felt a gentle push of gas against my suit as the gas from the inside rushed to fill up the empty airlock. Is that air? Does she really have that much oxygen just lying around?
I crawled through and closed the zipper carefully behind me. “I’m done,” I announced, as I floated the darkness I succumbed to the temptation to look at the timer. How did forty minutes pass so quickly?
I landed, crookedly, and by the time I had managed to stabilize myself, she had already passed the airlock, her face lit by her own visor, appearing in the darkness, looking for something, and suddenly everything was illuminated red.
I blinked at the light. There was no light bulb – the light came from a row of detached helmets, the visors all displaying oxygen timers showing zero hours and zero minutes in bright, red digits. The cave was the same large, spherical hall that I remembered, with the pile of discarded bags where Diocletian had once hidden their only rocket, where they had kept their bubble. Now it was all one big bubble. And there was more - various forms of equipment, some of which may have been as weapons or batteries, oxygen tanks, arranged in neat rows.
Someone was taking pained, shallow breaths on comm. A man, perhaps injured? But I didn’t see anyone.
“Turn around and stand in the center of the cave,” she said. “I’m going to be changing, but I’ll still have a gun on you. Turn around, even slightly, even just your head, and you’re getting impaled.” Her voice had a doubled quality to it, and I realized it was carried through air as well as radio. “And don’t even think about taking off your helmet.”
I swallowed a lump, thinking about Diocletian’s Third, and obeyed, floating slowly towards what seemed like the center of the room, stopping at a spot that was empty of any equipment, just bare rock.
I considered putting my hands above my head, but I had no weapon, nor even a place to hide one. I studied the floor beneath me, instead. It was covered with a thin layer of ice: the humidity from her breath freezing on the rock at minus fifty degrees centigrade. On comm, the panting sound stopped, as the man cursed—and I recognized the voice. It was Yahushua, bleeding slowly in his suit, back at the airlock. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the devices Ctesibius had used to eavesdrop from afar—picking up radio signals from wherever it was, transmitting them over here and broadcasting again, as if the original transmission had been sent from this room.
“What did I say about turning your head?” She said, and I immediately turned my gaze forward, like a scolded child.
“What happened to them?” I asked. What have you done to them?
“I didn’t tell you this,” she sounded distant, and not just because it was air carrying her voice instead of radio, “When I found Ctesibius, he was by the airlock. Screaming at it. He was blind—some idiot had just tried crawling back into the airlock, and Ctesibius looked directly at the blast. He knew I was coming, and still he tried sending a message instead of saving himself. Can you guess what he was screaming?”
I could. Of course I could.
“Yossi Ben Ze’ev!” she yelled, her impersonation of Ctesibius’s Second so accurate that I could imagine the thin man kneeling by the airlock, exacting the only revenge he could. “Yossi Ben Ze’ev was here! Please, somebody! Shadow Man!” She mimicked his voice breaking, the sound of a man drowning in fury and desperation. Then, just as suddenly, she laughed with her own voice. “I hit him like a fucking rocket. Slash!” I fought the urge to turn and look at her, to see what movement she had performed to accompany that sound, as if it could give me anything information that I didn’t already have. “But I was a couple of seconds late, and here you are,” she said with what sounded like a shrug. “And here I am.”
Here we are. “What about Anaxagoras?”
“They blew their cave up. There were only two of them, so we easily pushed them back into their tunnel. Diocletian, the other one, was inside when they activated their safeguards. I always thought they were bluffing about the explosives,” she said, a note of bitter appreciation in her voice. “Good for them. I caught the third one later, mourning by the entrance the cave. He didn’t even put up a fight.”
He was late. He took the rocket, went as fast as he could, but he was still late.
“And Pythia?”
She sounded amused. “That stubborn bitch. She put on quite a show, didn’t she? But she was no help. I didn’t find the other one, but I guess he managed to get word out, considering how someone’s always talking about the culture that once was and the battle that ended it. But that’s for the best, honestly. It adds spice to my character, that I not only rule here, but crushed the former order to do so.”
I stared at the walls of the cave and listened to her laughter echoing through the air that I wasn’t allowed to breathe. A heat rose in me, like a fever, but it was faint. Distant.
“Don’t you like it better as it is now?” she said. “The old Last Day Town was so… confining. So strict. Here, everyone is free, without label.”
“Nina seemed pretty confined.”
“Freedom has a price,” she said with a tone that, to my surprise, was free of irony. As if it was a matter of necessity, nothing more. “And somebody has to pay it.”
She wasn’t trying to get me mentally off balance, not like last time. Ironically, she was better at it now. “Why am I here, Vempress?”
“Why do you think, hmm?” Somehow her voice told me that her hands were busy. If there was a time to try something, it was now.
I stayed still. “I think you’re sadistic, and you enjoy holding people by threads, and cutting those threads,” I said, my voice still firm.
“That again? You still think I’m evil?”
“You can’t deny what you’ve done here.”
She sighed, disappointed. “You can’t kill someone who’s already dead. Do you still not understand that? Nothing we do here matters. If killing a baby is the worst kind of murder because you take years away from their life, killing a resident is no crime at all.”
“And yet, every hour you spend here is an hour you took from someone. All of the oxygen in this room could have been spent keeping people alive.” I waved a hand at the abundance we were submerged in.
“You know what? Why don’t you take off your helmet for a moment? A show of trust, me sharing some of my oxygen with you.”
I wasn’t familiar with the helmet on the bag, and the latches took a bit of negotiation before the little computers were convinced it was safe for me to expose my head. I wished numbly that those computers would take some more subtle factors into account, aside from air pressure, like the chance of getting my head split open by a blade. As I took off my helmet, it felt as if I put my head in freezing water. I sucked in a painfully cold breath and immediately felt refreshed. Not just because of the temperature - this air had to have a very high oxygen ratio. It would have been very hard for someone to fall asleep here.
Latches clicked shut behind me, and when she spoke, I heard it more through radio than through air. “Now turn around.”
She was back in her suit, helmet screwed on, standing by the airlock, the inner layer open. She had one hand on the zipper to the outer layer, and the other resting on the handle of her blade. One quick motion and I’d be standing in hard vacuum.
My helmet was in my hands, which now seemed very far away. Even if I put it on as fast as I could, she would be faster. If I were lucky, the pressure would only burst my eardrums.
Her eyes were on me, glazed over; her expression blank, like she was looking at the timer at the corner of her visor, not a person.
I made myself take in a lungful of cold air, unsure whether I was smelling the stench of human waste or just imagining it, and stared back at that icy ferociousness of her eyes. She hadn’t stabbed me from behind– she’d gone to the effort of putting on a spectacle. I found myself gripping at that shred of hope.
“Why am I here, Vempress, you ask me.” Her voice was strained, tight. She shook her head, and the blade tied at her side swung. “You are here… To tell me if the appeal went through.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
How could I forget about that? How had that not been the first thing I’d said to her? I spoke very slowly. “I passed on the message, using the only channel available to me.”
“That…” She drew the words on, painfully. “Sounds like a no.” The hand holding the zipper trembled. She seemed so small, suddenly. So fragile.
I swallowed. I was certain that I wouldn’t live to see the minute turn if I showed any weakness. If I stuttered, or made excuses, or begged, she would kill me out of spite. “I was arrested at the airlock,” I enunciated. “The first lawyer I met was at my trial. I told the judge and my defense attorney everything you told me to. But,” I forced myself to stop talking and inhale, “I don’t think they’ll follow through on the procedure. Legally speaking – ”
Her hand rose from the blade handle, one finger pointing upwards, silencing. Her face was an expressionless mask, and her body was folded slightly forward, rigid, as if she was choking down something bitter. “Unfortunate,” she said after a long moment, “that you could not bring me more reassuring news. But I might still have a use for you.”
I wondered if she was only waiting for me to start speaking to open the hatch mid-sentence. I was useless to her now, aside from whatever pleasure she might gain from seeing me bleeding from my lungs. I remembered Anaxagoras asking her second to tear her suit open. I’d be lucky to go so quickly. “What use?” I asked.
“I suspect these living conditions could start impacting my mental state. Having some small talk might be beneficial.” She seemed serious. “For my health.”
“Do you have time to worry about that stuff?” Some instinct guided me to disagree. “I thought you only cared about survival.”
“This is survival. Unfortunately, my needs go beyond breathing, drinking, and eating. I haven’t talked to anyone in a week, and I feel fine, but even I couldn’t keep this up forever.”
“Last Day Town is full of people, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but they’re too busy being deathly afraid of me to have any kind of conversation. And here you are, accusing me of being evil!” She chuckled. “You don’t give a shit anymore, do you?”
It was my turn to laugh. “So, what, you want me to stay here with you? Like a caged bird to entertain you in exchange for oxygen?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, princess. The need for company comes after the need for oxygen. Speaking of which, put your helmet back on.”
I raised it slowly and closed the latches around my neck. “You’re still sharing your oxygen just by not killing me.” I pushed further. “All of the oxygen in Last Day Town is yours, if I heard correctly.”
She smiled as she closed the inner layer of the airlock and screwed her helmet off again. I saw her hair for the first time. Black and shine-less, aside for the strands of silver that I wasn’t sure had been while she was Diocletian. It probably would have reached her shoulders in a standard gee, but here static fought the gravity and gave it volume, floating around her head like another helmet. She passed a gloved hand through it. “Of course. As much as you were given is as much I will spare for you.” Had she bounced back from the bad news I had given her, or just regained her composure? From one of the suit pockets she brought something that looked like beef jerky and brought it to her mouth. She chewed slowly.
Where had she gotten food from - oh. Oh. I kept the horror from my face, from my voice, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from her mouth. “Then, one day?”
She swallowed. “You still have more than twenty-three hours in there, don’t you?” She rubbed her brow with the back of the hand that was holding the meat, and I realized that I’d missed my chance to scratch my nose. That I’d probably never get such a chance again; never again breathe without seeing the humidity condense right in front of my face. The itch returned in full force.
Twenty-three hours and twenty-two minutes, the clock at the corner of my visor glared. “Yeah.”
“Then there’s plenty of time. I’ll keep you here as a guest, and who knows: if you’re good, I might grow soft enough to share some of my wealth.”
“And if I’m bad?” I said, trying to force a hint of humor into my voice.
She pointed the spear gun at my visor, her hand as steady as hyper-cooled steel. “Bang!” she barked, and tore at another piece of meat with her teeth.
I exhaled. She was back at her game. Whatever it was underneath, whatever I saw at that moment was hidden again, and that was good enough for me. “So you’re not afraid that I’ll try anything?”
“I’ve been doing this for a while now, and it turns out I have quite an eye for who’s into fights and who’s into compromises. I think we both know which one you are. Listen,” she said, still chewing, “You don’t get it. I’ll do anything to stay alive. Do you think I’m just chatting with you? You realize this time could have been used for hunting, cleaning my guns, doing some maintenance. The thing you don’t get is, this is maintenance.” She swallowed with a gulp.
“So, what happens after my day ends? What will you do next week?” I was genuinely curious.
She turned away, as if to check on her stock of helmets. “I’ll figure something out. I always have.”
Oh Pythia, if you could see me now. “I refuse.”
Vempress looked at me with surprise, then at her gun, as if to make sure that it was still there, then back at me. “Are you under the impression I’m giving you a choice?”
“You could keep me here if you wanted—but I have a better offer for you,” I said, still not sure what it was.
“Yeah?” The indignation in her eyes was tinged with curiosity, but more importantly, amusement. This is exactly why I let him live, she might as well have said aloud.
“Let me back into Last Day Town.”
“What for, exactly?”
“To rebuild the Line Pythia.”
The silence hung for a long moment, by Last Day Town’s standards. Then, as if speaking of her childhood, she said, “I never visited Pythia. I’m not one for confessions. I don’t waste time on guilt.” She hadn’t said no, I noted.
“The line never provided absolution,” I explained. “Just the simple comfort of a listening ear. You’d be the line’s patron. You could come every day, speak to someone who won’t be afraid of you, because you’ll have made an agreement.”
“Why should I believe you? I have no reason to trust you won’t just waste oxygen bashing skulls with the others, or looking for someone to put you out of your misery.”
I shrugged. “Like you said, I’m more about compromises than fights, and if I wanted to die I would try to mess with your stuff. What I want is to make things different around here. More like the old Town.”
“And talking to people about their memories is what will change it back?”
“Maybe not, but it will be better for some, and you could still take oxygen from everyone else.” I hated myself for condoning this, but I had to start somewhere.
“I don’t need you. If I wanted to, I could have rebuilt the lines myself,” she spat. A blob of water left her mouth, flew in a straight line and froze the instant it touched the rock. “Remember?”
“I remember you promised me you would, a week ago. Tell me, Vempress, did you break your promise or…” I mirrored her trademark smile. “Did you fail?”
Her smile was pained, though still somehow absent. She nodded encouragingly and took a big bite of the jerky. No, not jerky, I forced myself to acknowledge. I wondered what was the name of the piece of meat she was eating had been. How they’d died; what they’d been thrown out for. She swallowed and cleared her throat. “You’ll see for yourself. One person can’t build a line. People become a part of something only after they see someone else making the sacrifice they’re expected to make. Otherwise… they feel cheated. Used. They don’t think it’s worth their time. And as soon as they understand that I have no intention of dying, at the end of the day, they snap.”
“So the only other option was… that?”
“You’d be surprised, but I actually formed a type of culture that was stable. You should have seen how beautiful The Tournament was. No matter how many people have come and how many have gone, every time I got there, they all got on their toes, weapons on the floor and hands over their heads, looking up at me with a perfect obedience that didn’t change, no matter how many generations passed.” Never, in my short acquaintance with that woman, had I seen such delight.
“It kept going? This tournament?”
“As long as I kept providing the winners oxygen. It would have kept going forever.”
She didn’t have to explain any further. I didn’t need to know the details to imagine what it would have been like for those poor souls, fighting over oxygen. “Why did it end?”
“I got tired of it,” she said and paused. “I fell asleep!” She laughed, a sound hollow and loud.
This is what insanity looks like, I reminded myself. When we say that anyone would go insane in a place like this, barely sleeping for more than seven days, killing to survive, we speak in abstracts. But there it is, in the flesh.
“By the time I woke up, they’d all killed each other. Not for anything specific, mind you; there was nothing to gain. They just wanted to, I guess. Maybe that’s just how people are.” She shrugged.
“How long did it hold?”
“Oh, a couple of days, at least. I didn’t even have to be there for the newcomers – The Tournament did that for me.”
“So, you still managed to build a line, in your own way. But that line wasn’t free, so it couldn’t have been a friend to you. There was no one to hold your hand.” I thought about Anaxagoras’s First again.
Her lips tightened into a fine line. “Survival doesn’t require anyone hold my hand. Certainly not you.”
“No,” I agreed, “It doesn’t.” But it was too late. I’d already crossed the line.
“Fuck it. I’ll keep you in a cage. You think I give a shit about what you want?” She spat again, swinging the spear gun. “I can bring anyone here and cut them out of their suit. I gave you a chance.”
I didn’t move as she stepped towards me, and touched the speargun to my chest, right under the hard control panel. Up close, her eyes were two pools of icy anger, confused, power hungry, but most of all, exhausted.
“Do it,” I said, not knowing myself if it was a bluff. “You’re right. You were right all along. The only thing that matters is survival, and I’ve already lost that, so why not spare me the bullshit and end it now?”
The anger washed off her face, as suddenly as it appeared. “You’re starting to get it.” She still held the gun to my chest as she tapped my visor with the knuckles of her other hand.
“But I’d like to propose a wager.”
She raised an amused eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Let me try. See if I can rebuild the first line. If Line Pythia becomes stable, sustained even without me, let it live.”
“And if you can’t?”
“Kill me, torture me—do whatever you want.” I realized that I really didn’t care that much.
“So, nothing that I couldn’t do anyway.”
“Like you said, everything here is yours. If you let me do this, it’s for your own amusement and gain.”
“Right again. I can bleed you, vacuum you, starve you even, if I don’t get bored. But none of those would be as sweet as actually watching you waste your last breathing hours on a wager, and fail. A real game.” This was her true smile shining on her face now, not the facade Diocletian had worn, and so much more terrifying for it .
“But it only counts as real if it’s fair. If you keep killing people while I try to build the first line, I could say that you interrupted the process, and—”
“Ha! That’s precious. I’ll think about it. Also,” she added, “Diocletian were the first line, not Pythia.”
“I can’t hold up my end of this wager if I don’t have a guarantee you’ll cooperate.”
“Tough luck. You won’t survive out here if you think like you would on the inside. I won’t make you any promises, because you know what? I just don’t have to keep them.” She turned and pumped the jets away to bring herself to the corner of the room, to another pile of equipment I’d had no time to inspect. “But I accept the wager, and not only that: I’ll give you the protection you need.”
“You will?” A note of hope escaped my mouth before I managed to repress it. If I left something for Keren, that would be one thing I managed to do right.
“Yeah, they’d eat you alive without it,” she said, no hint of irony in her voice, as she picked up a blade that had rested against the rock wall and tossed it towards me, much too quickly for comfort. I moved my body out of its way and caught it very carefully. My fingers tightened around the straps of bag wrapped around the metal – the grip was far less comfortable than I’d imagined it would be.
She coughed formally, and recited:
This blade that you are given,
Has struck down many times
It drew the air of villains,
As it will yours and mine.
Strike first, if you have to strike,
But never strike too hard,
Because the blade you sink in bone,
You may as well discard.
She finished with an exhalation, then chuckled, as if fondly reminiscing.
I didn’t intend to use the blade, but I did my best to memorize the poem. Like any other poem that originated here, it was, in a way, sacred. How many times has it been passed on? How many different mouths and ears has it been through, and how has it evolved, over the days? It was lunacy to pay such attention to such things, when much larger ones were coming to an end. Perhaps I too had gone a little insane.
She threw an oxygen tank and I caught it with both hands, feeling the weight of the heavy, precious liquid sloshing inside. Welded to the pipe that was supposed to connect to the suit, was a complex nozzle with a small valve.
“I built it in case my jets ever break down.” My jets. The bulk of the contraption was an oxygen balloon, the standard kind each newcomer came with. She had killed someone for it. Just in case. “You’re going to have to move around a lot,” she said, perhaps reading my expression. “Let’s go to the surface, I’ll teach you how to use it.”
I went through the soft airlock, exceedingly careful not to let the blade clasped at my hip touch the bags, and climbed out of the tunnel. I crouched at the edge of the entrance and jumped out of the fault. With no assisting device, I floated above the endless chasm, trusting that I had launched myself correctly, which I luckily did – I hit the top of the wall with my chest, and pulled myself up to flat, safe grounds. Vempress was there only an instant later, her accurate jet-bursts landing her softly.
She stood at the edge of the fissure. “Come, there’s something I want you to see.”
I followed, stopping on the edge. “This is the canister. You use it by pointing it to the side you don’t to be in and turning the valve. Use the strap to secure it, in case you lose grip.” No poem was recited, because no one ever expected to teach this to anyone else. Last Day Town could never have supported such a blatant misuse of oxygen. "If it does after you’ve gained speed, smile.”
“Why smile?”
“Because crying is for losers.” She smiled humorlessly, and let the canister drop into the cavern.
“Why would you do that?”
“Don’t worry, you can still get it back,” she gestured with her chin toward the pit.
Cautious not to tilt forward I looked after the canister. It fell, beyond my reach. Who was I supposed t- Then she kicked my ass. A nudge, just hard enough for me to lose balance, and I fell forward.
“Why? Why are you doing this?” There was no calmness in my voice now, nor in my head. The abyss was in front of me, slowly swallowing me whole, the canister falling out of my reach. “Vempress?”
“Punishment.”
I tried turning myself around, to look at her. “For what? What am I being punished for?”
“Refusal.”
“It was a mistake. I apologize. I’m sorry, I truly am. Please, Vempress, there’s no need for this.” Falling all the way down is obviously going to hurt, but more than that, it will cost me time. A lot of time.
“Evidently, there is. You can make it out in an hour, if you’re lucky. I will not be as lenient next time.”
“Please, I’m begging you.”
Finally I managed to twist myself around. There wasn’t repulsion in her eyes, nor contempt. I could have endured those, but as she looked at me, all I saw was embarrassment. “Never beg,” she said.
I started crying, instead.
#
Estimated oxygen time: 22:42:57
All throughout the fall, I tried keeping my eyes on the canister. If I could push myself towards it, if I remembered where it was when I landed, I might not have to spend as much as time down there. And still, I would lose a lot of my remaining time in this pit, and I hated her for it, perhaps more than I hated her for killing the lines and the people they were made of.
The narrow band of stars above me grew narrower until it was nothing but a single hairline-fracture of light in a world made of absence. You never quite remember how terrifying real darkness is, especially when falling. Despite myself, a terrified “Vempress! Please!” escaped my lips. Never beg, I reminded myself, and crashed into the bottom like a load of bird shit, sprawling on to my side. It hurt, but nothing was broken, and no leaks were heard.
“Ok, you idiot. Stop whining, and think.” I would have slapped myself across the face, if I could, but instead I compromised on clapping my hands together hard enough for it to hurt. “How do we get out of here? We get the canister. How do you we get the canister? We scan over the bodies.” I stood up, trying to keep myself away from the bodies. “But we have to be methodical.” I panted. “If you miss it, we’ll never know whether or not to turn back.”
I stumbled to one wall, and put a stiff, naked body leaning against it, looking away, but unable to ignore the cold taking hold of my fingers. Then, orienting myself with the line of light above, I started towards the other wall. I crawled over the bodies, putting my visor close to them as it was the only source of illumination. The faces were the worst, solidified in pain, but the hands were also bad, fingers clenched or contorting in that final pain; layers upon layers of them, the true bottom couldn’t be seen beyond them, nor the ends of the pile . I knew that many people had reached Last Day Town only to be thrown down here by Diocletian, but knowing wasn’t the same as seeing them. I found myself apologizing to them, especially after touching a shriveled eye or genital. “Come on you baby, don’t lose your mind yet. Keren is counting on you. You got this.”
I made it to the other wall, and brought another body to a stand. That way I could know how far I was advancing, and whether or not I was biased to one side. Now all that I had to do was keep going.
“Come on buddy, walk it off. Keep moving, and we’ll be back in the light in no time.”