"Sol, you got it?"
"Yeah."
I bite the inside of my mouth, but I don't taste any blood. I do it just for something to feel. The air in here is stagnant, not moving at all, and the musty smell makes its home inside my nose. I've been asked before by other (other here meaning human) kids if I even have a nose at all, if I can smell or taste. I know they can't see it, I know they've been told that by adults who only see my people under the hilts of their weapons, but it always hurts a little. Like they're trying to strip me of everything that makes me like them.
It's almost impossible to see. The others are getting restless - scraping around in the dark, feeling the roughness of the stone under their fingers, making the soft sounds of skin on rock. I do it too, reach out. It feels cool, but not icy. The wind can't get us in here, but it howls over our heads somewhere, blowing across the entrance to the cave like when I used to exhale over the tops of empty bottles.
Reina's somewhere beside me. I can feel the heat coming off her. Her silhouette lifts an arm to wipe her brow. She isn't looking at me, and I almost trip over a ledge trying to see where she's looking at. I want to know, in a sense, where we're going.
"Got your camera?" she whispers, and I jump.
"In my bag. I think. If it hasn't been smashed up by now."
A puff of air dashes out of her mouth. A laugh, even though I can't see the form of her face. "Yeah, right. Like we've done anything worthy of smashing up our crap." I look down at my hands, which have taken on a steady glow. I'm willing to bet it's more than just proper moisturization, as fond as my mother was of hand lotion in such a labour-heavy place. If I hold them up to the back of Reina's head, I see the strands of her hair blocking the light, frizzy in the odd air pressure.
"Cut it out, weirdo."
Sol still leads the pack. His bravado is brighter than his skin. He's wearing a shirt that's just slightly different from the one he was wearing in class. He must have dozens, I think, trying to think about anything other than what lies ahead. Kids are swarming around him, talking to him in hushed, excited voices, trying to get into his circle. Even without seeing him I can tell his head is held high, his chin at a cocky angle, daring the darkness to fight.
Then. "Oh, sh - " I hear his nervy voice suddenly shocked by something, tapering off at the end, repeating expletives.
Kids gasp. One boy sounds like he's going to cry, calling out for his leader, his leader who's the same age as him. "Sol? Sol! Where are you?"
"Are you okay?" I call, joining in. Something seizes up in my stomach. We have worse to face than high winds down here, and now it's sinking in. Sol was kind of brash, but he stood up for me, and if he's dead -
If he's dead, then I -
"I'm fine!" he calls from somewhere far away, and is instantly bombarded with screams and "Where are you?"s.
"Down here!" he shouts. I can tell his voice is a little higher than it used to be. My senses have started to adjust better to the darkness, apparently better than anyone else. I push past the throng of fumbling teenagers to find my way at the front, almost falling into a vast hole. Reina follows me cautiously, not joking, just pressing her lips together.
"He's there," I tell everyone.
"Captain Kaius Obvious. Hey, your hands - "
"Hush." I bite my tongue, giving up in a split second on trying to hide my hands. "Anyone have any rope or anything?" I try to project my voice, but it just makes my heart pound harder. It's like shouting into a void. I can just see the outlines of them, and of Sol below.
"Sol carried everything," groans a girl with muscles almost as big as his. I'm about to sigh and rethink it when she suddenly grins, a flash in the blackness. I wonder all of a sudden how I look down here. A pair of glowing, floating hands. Maybe that's why they trust me, and why I managed to speak up. Nobody can see my face. She's grinning, anyway, and slinging her own pack off her broad shoulder. "Everything except the climbing gear."
A few kids cheer. Reina claps once, before cringing and putting her hands away, looking around to see if anyone noticed. "Yeah, not that far," she mumbles under her breath.
I wave her over. "Come help, Rei."
"Rei?" With the help of a couple others, and by the light of my glowing fingers, they untangle the knotted ropes and start feeling around for a place to hook them up. She doesn't look up, just focuses her eyes on the rope. "No one calls me Rei."
"It's short." When the rope's tied to a stalagmite of ridiculous size, I give it a test tug, bracing my feet against the ground. "And easy to use. In a cave like this." I call her name again, echoing it against the claustrophobic walls. "Rei."
"You're the weirdest friend I've ever had," she says, and the pressure of the rock under my feet mixes with the joy of hearing that word. Friend. I try my best to concentrate on it, to hold it like I'm holding the rope (with both hands), but there's a memory surfacing and she can't understand it.
"Rei," I say numbly. The rope goes slack in my hands, which start to shake. Everybody's going to see. They're going to see that I'm shaking. I hide my hands under my scarf, but it doesn't help the twisting in my stomach, the uncomfortable feeling of images poking at the edges of my brain. I can't keep them away. The rope, still clutched in my hands, is scratchy against the bottom of my chin. It feels like a noose. I press my hands deeper into the ground, getting ready to climb down for Sol, and -
Run. Go. Hands twisting around each other. Go, run, in a language I barely understand, and I shout something that goes unheard, and I turn around and push my feet into the ground, solid ground with void below, the only land I've ever known, I run and find hell where I run so I run faster, see body parts, see tinted violet smears on the ground, throw up something purple too, wipe my mouth, no time, my family, where is my family? People dying. Enderpeople dying. I do not yet know the word for war. Someone is grabbing my shoulders roughly and angling me back into hell telling me go run go run there are protectors there but I see no protection I see violet I see blood and I see the destruction of my home, End stone and ends of limbs, ends of lives, ends of me maybe, and I, and I -
Reina slaps me. Smack. It's a clean sound in the cave, like the snapping of fingers, like the breaking of a bone in a quiet room. "Dude." The word's casual, but her tone isn't. She sounds nervous, and I can feel her shaking too, standing a foot away from me. The other kids are huddled away from us, seemingly waiting. "Snap out of it."
"They." My tongue won't form the words I need, and I, and I, and I -
"They can't hear you." She flexes the muscles in her forearms, holding me still. My hands still shake, falling out from under my scarf. My face boils with shame that no one can see. Traitors to my body. I wish they were gone. Solas shouts something indignant from below us, kicking at the dirt with his boots, but Reina doesn't even turn.
"Listen," she says, glancing at my long fingers as they twist around one another. Her voice lowers to a whisper, urgent-sounding. "You would probably get this if you weren't always staring down, but I am not a people person." She bites her lip in an uncomfortable silence. I find myself longing for home, for my bed, for the human normalcy of my mother. "Let me continue. I had to learn how to not freak out when I'm around a ton of you, okay?"
"A ton?" I'm trying to figure out how to speak without wanting to throw up or tell her everything or both at once. Regurgitation, that's what they both are. "A ton of Ender - "
"A ton of people. Beings," she says firmly, her eyes boring into me through the darkness, her grip tight on my hands. "So I made this up."
"Made what up?" I start to say, but she shushes me. "You're too loud." She breathes in, the whooshing sound of the air slowing my heart, holds the air in her puffed-out chest for a second, then breathes out. I get a puff of carbon dioxide to the face. Her breath smells a little like pumpkin pie and a little like something I can't pin down. A scent that reminds me of my mother, a human scent. That word comes back. Friend.
"Four-seven-eight. Breathe in for four, hold it for seven, let it out for eight."
"Eight sounds hard," I say, regaining my balance and adjusting my pack on my shoulders. The bones there ache where they jut out into the straps. My camera's a reassuring weight, though, and it helps ground me without reminding me of much. I remember this much - when I ran from home, I ran with nothing but the skin on my hands and heavy, raw fear. I start to climb down, my hands still trembling a bit, Reina's words echoing in my head.
"Hey, Kaius is going down," shouts a gruff boy from above me. I hear Sol shifting impatiently below. I wonder if he ever feels afraid. The photography patch is still on my jacket. The landscape of the cave is rough under my feet, and I have to be careful, but my extra-long legs let me navigate it in the dark. "Where is he?" I realize I can see the bumps in the wall, as I make my way down, but he can't. None of them can. Purple light reflects on the deep gray stone I'm facing, the only light to be seen.
Then the slamming starts. The wall shakes at its core, rumbling like there's a beast inside. Hey, I want to shout, there's enough beasts in here already! I glance down and Sol's bag is open. He braces a pickaxe against his shoulder before swinging it down into the ground. There's string laced around his knuckles, probably more as a place to hang the string than any kind of protection for Sol. Little pieces, clouded by dust, start to fall off the wall before I'm even close to the bottom. I don't protest, just breathe as slowly as I can, counting in my head as I manoeuvre down to the ground. "It's safe," I call weakly. The breathing doesn't keep the rapid heartbeat at bay, but it loosens the knot in my belly, and helps me open up my eyes.
Other kids start to follow us. Reina hops down beside me, jamming her hands into her hips the moment her feet hit the ground. I can see the anxiety in her if I look hard enough now, look beyond the particles drifting languidly off my fingertips. I'm really starting to feel like we could be friends, even though the feeling isn't familiar.
After a few minutes, the others start to get impatient. "Sol," suggests the lackey of his who'd screamed his name when he fell, "are you hurt?"
Sol shakes his head mutely before breaking off an even larger chunk of stone from the wall. His arms move brutally when he does it, like the wall's a living thing he wants to kill. There's no glimmer in his eyes, no reflection of my own.
The boy persists. I start to get fidgety myself, running my fingers along a sharp piece of rock that had fallen off. "Are you gonna be long? We want to - "
"Then go on without me," snaps Sol, before breathing in quickly and lowering the pick, giving the boy an apologetic look through the fog. "I didn't mean it like that. But I'll be a while."
"What are you looking for?" suggests Rei, coming up from behind me, her hair full of dust.
"Iron. Good iron." He spits somewhere in the void, and Rei wrinkles her nose so intensely that it almost makes a little sound.
An idea comes to my head, maybe born from all the slow breathing I'd been doing. Or maybe it's a side effect of the dusty air. I can't tell. My hands reach out to the wall, skimming its surface. My eyes open as wide as they can, casting a soft glow down. They search for even the tiniest shine.
"Bioluminescence."
"What?" I glance over my shoulder, breaking my stride for just a little. If Sol can't find it, maybe I can. Then again, I've never seen iron ore before, not in person. In Deep Earth class maybe. Bioluminescence is definitely a Naturals thing, though. Glow-in-the-dark properties found in nature. The one who said the word turns out to be the boy, the lackey of Sol, tapping his feet against the rock-scattered floor among the others. Their restlessness makes me want to move faster, make everyone happy, but he makes me stop.
He opens his mouth again. "Bioluminescence. That's how your eyes and your hands glow, right?"
My heart leaps, but settles as I realize he's no threat. He's lanky, with bony wrists and shoulders like mine, and he looks bookish. I turn back and keep searching, but my hearing picks up his words no problem. My anxiety's fading. Reina's breathing actually works. I look over my shoulder to thank her, but she's lost in the throng of impatient kids.
"Yeah." I keep my eyes forward, focusing on that. I feel a different way than I've felt for years, but I can't put my finger on the word. I can't describe the feeling, really. I'm not so good with things like that. I can take an okay picture, though.
Now there's a way for me to help everybody move forward. That way I can move back into the tail of the crew, letting Sol move on and trying my best to figure out how I feel in words I can say out loud. I can't call it pride. The feeling is too modest.
Reaching backwards, I unzip my pack and pull out the instant camera, angling it without most of my usual care, just looking for an image. The flash goes off and a tiny slip of paper falls out. I wave it in the musty air for a second to let it develop, then hold it close to my eyes. There, in the top left corner of the photo, sparkles a tiny piece of iron ore, sticking out of the wall. I'd never have spotted it without the camera. I reach up and touch the wall where it is, and call Sol over so he can dig it out. Maybe my vision's unreliable because of the darkness, but I could have sworn he flashed me one of his famous smiles before hacking it out of the wall. Several kids exhale behind us as my heart warms. I don't even need the hat and scarf, but I keep them on for safekeeping. We don't have to be trapped anymore, though. Maybe we'll slog on through the cave, grab some supplies, forge history. I'll be the first Enderman in the Nether, in the places beyond even there. But nobody's going to point it out. I'll be just like one of the others, here in the dark. It'll be just my voice, not my face, not the violet that gives us light here.
Sol brings the pick, hefted high above his proud head, down on the chunk of iron. The wall gives a little, but nothing falls. I'm listening for it even as the sound of the impact crashes into me. Sol does it again, grunting as the weight of it presses down on the muscles the whole town admires. I admire him, even through my fear, but I wonder again if he's afraid.
I don't get time to ruminate. On the second impact, the wall gives way, and a light so blinding it overwhelms my dark-adjusted eyes pours through the cracks and bathes us all in stark illumination. Stark contrast.
The image of everything we'd run away from. I drop the photo of the wall in my shock, even though nobody's screaming. Everybody cranes their neck and squints their eyes. The photo drifts on the thin air, falling down and down and down, and slips through the hole Sol made. It falls to the ground, sinks into something undulating and bright. Burns up.
Turns into smoke, the useful-for-a-second single glimmer, incinerated.