Her head throbbed in her dark world, and her throat burned. It was as if rats were clawing all over her skin. She opened her eyes when a coughing fit jerked her up to sit.
There were people all around her, staring at her. Studying her body, her clothing, taking her in.
People with neon yellow eyes. People just like her own. Although these people, their skin was yellow-crusted and breaking, their yellow eyes hinted with red bloody lines.
“Where are you from?” one demanded.
Whatever Airya was sitting on began to shift and move. In a panic, she went to jump off it, but couldn’t find her footing in time because the black table broke apart while keeping her afloat and then rotated to help her stand. There was heat at her back. She jerked around to see that the table had red lights that fell over her in little beams. Wherever it touched, the yellow dust on her turned to a mellow kind of ash that brushed away with the slightest flinch as the table came together to set itself flat to where it looked like a table again.
“Where are you from? You’re obviously NOT one of us.”
Airya turned around. The one that was asking was a man with grey curly hair who looked worse off than the rest with tempered yellow eyes and a scowl.
Airya didn’t know what to say, “My… my parents. They had come from here.”
“From here, to where?” An older girl with her brown hair pulled back asked. Airya could swear that she had freckles, but couldn’t tell through the bloody lines that trailed her cheeks. “Obviously, somewhere healthier. Look at her! She doesn’t even look sick!”
Sick?
“I’m from… I’m from another world. It was after the Repression in the Eysology camps,” Airya tried to explain.
Someone else scoffed. “After the Repression? Don’t you see we’re still in the Repression?”
Airya was shocked that who had said that had bright green eyes,
“I— I meant,” she tried to get her words together to explain. “My parents were in the Eysology building that blew up.”
She got a few widened eyes.
“The ones that disappeared? They were right? Your kind was magick?” someone whispered.
“No. No. We’re not magick,” she hated that lie. The lie that she could tell was implanted to turn people against her own kind. “My parents, my people, do not have magick.”
And even if they did? What was wrong with that?
“Then how did you get here?”
“Through a portal. My people may not have magick. But… but I fell into some.”
A gasp from somewhere, “What other magick do you have and can do?”
Then she heard someone else, “Can you get us out? Can you help us escape?”
The older man with the grey hair put up his arm hushing all those behind him with his sharp movement, “Even if she could. We could not go.” He looked dead set into her eyes, “Are your people still alive? More Yellow Eyes?”
She gulped and nodded.
He nodded too, relief relaxing his face, but his eyes were still sad. “We cannot go with you. Not with the Yellow Crust infecting us all. We don’t know if it’s contagious and we all may die soon.”
Die? Gone forever? Airya still could not wrap her head around it. But no one died where she was from, they could live. “No one dies where I live.”
He looked at her like she was insane, then shook his head, “I still would rather not go. I do not want to run. We stand our ground. This is our home.”
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Their home? But their home was infected with something and they looked like they were not well off. They looked nothing like her people besides the yellow of their eyes. They were broken, ruined. They truly wanted to stay here to hurt, suffer, and become nothing?
She looked around. Even in this room, she could still see yellow dust in corners, and on tables, as if it was something that they could not escape. “What happened?” she whispered.
The old man sighed again and turned to shoo the others out of the room, then he took her hand. It felt rough, like the bark of a tree.
He led her outside the room with him. It seemed like they were in a smaller building with the same glistening grey rock as before, but yellow dust was everywhere. He must have noticed that she was staring at it and that she was trying to figure it out.
“We can’t get rid of it all. No matter how hard we try,” he said. “It’s too powdery and light to be sucked up well and when we suck it up, what are we supposed to do with it? By the time we figured out how to turn it into heavy ash, it had already gotten into our lungs. And where does the heavy ash go? Still in the air. It’s all over our food, all over our systems. Our technomachinary from before the bad times can’t fight it away. It’s in those systems too.”
The building may have been short, but it seemed long because he had pulled her with him through several halls. There were about twenty doors in each hall. She wondered if all the people slept here.
She finally saw where he was guiding her after he dropped her hand and turned a corner. She followed, but then stopped. There was a giant room enclosed in the same type of wall she had seen all over.
She put her hand up against the wall that looked like it should be invisible, but was not, “What is this?”
“Glass.”
He didn’t even question how she had not known. Instead, he stared into the room with his hands across his chest and his shoulders fallen in defeat. She looked too.
In it were piles and piles of food that should be growing on trees, but instead, beams of red light shun creating them from thin air. Airya followed the device and saw that it was hooked up to some kind of liquid that was almost out. There was something else too like a small lake held in another thing of glass, big enough for Airya to swim in. There were lines of yellow liquid that shifted midway turning the yellow liquid to clean water before expelling it into the thing of glass.
The man opened a part of the wall and a glossy red ball fell out. He held it out to her and told her to take a bite. She did, trusting him fully as her teeth crunched into the ball. Juice spilled out along her mouth, so she pulled her face down to keep it from dripping onto her chest and then chewed the bite she had.
Within two chews she wanted to spit the bite out. It tasted like mud mixed with something rancid and wrong. But she kept chewing not wanting to offend the man.
He almost laughed, “You can spit it out.”
She did immediately, shocked that the white glob on the ground held such a sour flavor that stuck to her mouth.
“Plants won’t grow anymore outside, so we made this. At first it worked perfectly until the dust started clogging our systems and there is no way to clean it all out. Everything tastes rotten, but it keeps us alive. But in order to make the food, we used the inner liquids of the foods from the outside duplicated before they went to waste. Our water is from our own urine since the water is contaminated too.”
“But… how did it get this bad?” Airya asked handing him the red ball she took a bite of when he held out his hand for it. He opened another part of the wall and threw it in.
“The yellow dust was always settled in the ground, but over time, it grew worse as more people walked over it. The deeper we went into the ground, the more there was. We tried machines to slow the progression, but the energy waves only stirred it up even more. It became even worse when the energy waves were being used to turn the yellow eyes to green. Everything we did, even in the ways we tried to get rid of the dead, only made it worse.”
Something he had said made her remember the Green Eye she saw in the room, “Why are there Green Eyes over here?”
He sighed deeply, but then smiled, “They didn’t think about the fact that when Yellow Eyes were converted to Green that yellow-eyed babies and green-eyed would still be born. That was when the division really happened. That is what really sparked the war.”
“I’m… I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged, “It is what it is, but I need you to go. Go before you are infected like we all are.”
“But I can take-”
“No. You need to leave now before someone begs you to take them with you. It’s enough for me and should be enough for some of us to know that our kind continues to live. That they got away and are still prospering.”
She could only stare at him. A part of her didn’t want to go. Not when there was a whole other world with more of her people hurting and in pain.
“Go!”
She jumped back, scared at the anger she saw flaring in his temperamental eyes, and opened a portal immediately. Never looking away from his face, she backed into it knowing that she would never be back.
Grass tickled her feet as the portal closed in front of her. She looked down and saw the yellow dust coating the grass. Without thinking, she sat on the side of the river and let herself fall straight into it. She rubbed her hands along her body to get rid of all the dust on her skin and clothes before she started shaking her hands through her hair. She knew she needed to get rid of every little dust or speck. She could not risk hurting her own people here. When she arose, she splashed the water over the grass trying to get rid of those yellow stains knowing that she could never tell her parents what she knew or saw, especially her dad. It would break him.