"A what?!"
Johanna's shrill shout capped a moment of stunned silence after Firth and Sam's revelation of the island's secret. Eyes of the assembled former tributes and victors bulged with surprise and shock back on board the hovercraft. Sam wasn't even sure herself of the sight now that she'd gotten back – it all seemed so strange, so out of place. Nihlus had foretold of this – but where would the submarine lead, out here in the middle of the ocean? What did the recordings, the voices, mean – how far back in time had she looked?
"Not possible," Johanna continued on before receiving an answer. "I'm calling bullshit. We're stuck on an island; there's no magical submarine to take us away to…who knows where. That's it. End of story."
"It's still up there if you want to take a look," Firth replied.
"What choice do we have?" Persephone spoke up, her typically-high District 1 accent muted by circumstance and surroundings. "We're stuck here in a busted hovercraft. It's not like we can swim to shore or anything – there is no shore."
"Well…I could…" Firth interjected.
"Wait, wait," Haymitch interrupted everyone, holding his palms up. "Look, I've been checking out this hovercraft…it ain't gonna fly now, but that doesn't mean it still can't. Now, there's enough rations and stuff on this thing to last maybe two, three of us for a bit while we see if this can be patched up. If all of us try to stay here, Johanna, we're not going to be in a great place. If there's something up there in that hill of yours, Sam and Firth, then why don't you go check it out while we try and kick the tires?"
"Food doesn't mean anything. We're freakin' victors," Johanna complained. "This is just another arena, as far as we're concerned."
"That's fine," Sam sniffed. "We'll go investigate. You all can stay, and if we find anything…we'll come back."
Johanna looked ready to renew a round of arguing before River spoke up, her voice reduced to a nervous meekness, minus much of the stoic confidence of back in the arena: "You're going to need help. If anything dangerous is there, you could get in trouble with only two people."
"Reverse is also true," Cheyenne commented. "Too many people and you've got logistical problems. We should leave a couple up here, to scout the area, see if the hovercraft can be fixed, and hold down the fort. The rest go check it out. If it's a path out of this mess, it's best if we find it."
Ultimately, Cheyenne's verdict won the day. Out of the assembled captives, Annie, Finnick, Rory, and Haymitch would stay with the hovercraft, doing what they could to try and fix the craft. The rest – Cheyenne, Locust, Johanna, Firth, Sam, Jetty, Persephone, Lily and River – would investigate the underground facility, seeing if the submarine led to any escape route - and if so, finding the quickest way back to civilization.
That is, if the Capitol wasn't hunting them as they spoke.
The facility hadn't gone anywhere in the few hours since Sam and Firth had uncovered it. Already Sam's eyes grew tired of the stale sterility of the place; the steel and white walls that merged together like a flat plane. It was all too colorless, too dead and devoid of human touch.
"The submarine?" Locust walked out onto the underground pier after everyone had had a chance to get over initial awe of the place. "A small model. I do not know if it will hold us all."
The submersible didn't look small in Sam's eyes. The bronze-colored oblong craft was at least twenty feet in length, sporting a circular top hatch to climb in and apparently holding enough passenger space for ten people, at least. It was no hovercraft of the sea, but it would ferry them to wherever "descent" led to – two powerful, outboard propellers affixed to the rear of the cucumber-shaped vessel would see to that.
The dark, shadowy waters concerned Sam far more. Who knew what lurked in them?
"Where is this even going?" Johanna continued to belittle the plan. "What's to say this thing leaks as soon as we start diving?"
"One way to find out, huh?" Firth retorted with a cocky smile.
"Your dad would not be happy with that," Johanna pointed out before correcting herself. "What am I saying. Of course he would."
"Lighten up, Johanna," Cheyenne slapped her on the shoulder before moving towards the sub's boarding hatch. "Stick around long enough and you might break a nail, huh?"
"Really?" Johanna brushed her off. "Fine. I'm getting in the sub first. All of you get out of my way."
She made good on her oath, climbing out onto the unsteady craft and slipping into the sub's well-lit interior. Sam could just see her through the large front porthole, examining the seats of the craft as Locust made his way to follow her.
"What a piece of junk," Johanna swore from inside the sub. "I'm right again."
Sam followed Locust and Firth into the vessel, stepping down from the access ladder into an unexpectedly warm interior. Yellow running lights bathed the passenger compartment in a soft sunshine hue, wrapping about bronze instrument fittings and brown leather seats – twelve in total. Six small portholes arranged around the port and starboard sides offered personal views out, while the forward porthole gave a wide look at what was ahead of the sub.
The control panel seemed odd, however – there was only one control. A simple lever stood up alongside a label – "surface." Below it, another – "bottom."
One way and only one way…
"Lovely in here," Jetty murmured sarcastically as she and Persephone climbed in. "Any idea where this goes?"
"'Bottom,'" Sam read. "Whichever bottom that is."
"Well, don't keep us waiting, brainless," Johanna said.
Cheyenne closed the hatch as she entered, the last of the nine-man group to board. Sam took a deep breath, grabbed hold of the dive lever, and pulled it down.
"Here goes nothing."
The sub rocked as the ancient rotors churned to life. A thrumming beat pulsed through the bronze, with foaming water splashing about the portholes. Sam felt nerves rising in her gut in anxiety of where this road would lead – but another feeling crept up. Unless Nihlus was watching her somehow right now – admittedly possible, although she doubted it – finally, finally, she had a measure of control. Finally she wasn't bound by the rules and whims of some society wielding its fist over her: Perhaps the sub would lead her straight into hell, but it was her choice to go there.
Fwoosh! Water flowed up and over the front porthole, bathing the submersible as it began to descend. Sam took a seat next to River, holding her friend's hand as she closed her eyes tight. What a horrible fate for someone from District 4, Sam thought. Made to fear what you were born beside…
She wondered if River would ever be able to return to District 4 again. A community bred by the sea was no place for a girl who had had the love of the ocean ripped from her heart.
"You okay?" Firth nudged Sam as he looked out the opposite porthole just beside Persephone's blonde-haired head. "Not exactly something normal we're doing."
"I don't think I've done normal for a while," Sam murmured.
"Ah, well…two's company as far as abnormal goes, huh?"
Or nine, perhaps, Sam thought. Depending on where "bottom" led to, sticking together in a group could be the best thing the band of victors could do.
5 METERS. 10 METERS. A depth gauge attached on the front console slowly ticked up as the sub nosed forward into the dark blue water. The crystal-clear sea of the island was gone, replaced with murky depths concealing everything before it.
"Looks inviting," Johanna muttered as the sub passed twenty meters in depth. "What exactly are we supposed to be finding?"
"That is the goal," Locust harrumphed beside her. From what Sam had seen of District 7's other prominent victor, he wasn't the friendliest of men. Considering that the only other male in the descending group was Firth, she figured she'd need to figure him out in a hurry.
25 METERS. 30 METERS. Running lights on the sub activated, lighting up the brackish blue water with several dots of yellow and white. A school of red-and-white fish hightailed away from the sub with the light, escaping for parts unseen.
Lily jumped in her seat as a built-in speaker began to play, startling everyone inside the vessel. A warm, almost serpentine male voice snaked over the intercom, each word spilling out with jewel-encrusted haze.
"War is all we have known," the slippery words announced. "After all, humanity has fought war for as long as we have lived. Ever since man first killed man, our species has fought for every ideal we can conceive. We fought for family. We fought for God; we fought for nation. Finally, we fought simply for the sake of fighting – and our relentless march of killing could take not another step."
"What is this, a Capitol amusement park?" Johanna scoffed as the voice paused for effect. "Lecture us as we tour the ocean?"
"This war that has stricken our world for two decades began as all wars do – with a difference of opinion over ideals and power," the voice ignored Johanna's remark, picking up enthusiasm and conviction as it went on. "Inevitably, our lust for conquest drove our species to catastrophe. We warred and killed over the sprites of human ignorance, pushing aside logic and reason, killing merely to continue a global battle of wills. We thought the development of new technologies, designed for killing and killing only, would turn back time to a more peaceful era – but in forgetting the blood-spattered lessons of the past, we only accelerated the death toll."
"It's a record; a history," River looked up, finally drawing up the strength to speak and perceiving what nobody had yet seen. "This isn't Capitol. It's from before – a long time ago."
"On the brink of extinction, our best and brightest formed a last-ditch plan to save humanity," the words continued with renewed vigor. "No longer could we continue to plow ahead blindly into the path of self-interest and combat – no! We had to embrace reason to save mankind – and so we few savants in the face of a bloody world devised our final, bitter measure."
The words had so engrossed Sam that she'd failed to keep watching outside the sub. The depth gauge had sunk deeply – now recording a level of over one hundred meters below the surface. Indigo waters stared back from outside the porthole, gaping in with looming darkness that weaved its way through the very bottom depths of coral reefs and forests of kelp. Sam noticed something else, however – something out of place. A small gleam of white light shone off in the distance, not any of the sunlight filtered mostly out from above or from the sub's running lights. What would shine like that down here?
The sheer array of wonder outside fascinated Sam. Despite the relative darkness, she could still pick out a myriad diversity of creatures swarming about in a cacophony of life. Even this deep, more than three hundred feet below the surface with only touches of sunlight still shining down, nature found a way to bring spirit to this new and frightening land. To a girl far too used to the dusty fields of District 10, this place tantalized with the allure of a new world.
"Our measure would not simply save mankind from the bombs, the diseases, the radiation," the voice within the sub inched higher, gaining momentum as it plowed towards a climax. "No, our measure would save mankind…from itself. The species will be reborn here, under the waves in an oceanic womb where the world first gave birth to life."
"My name…is Prometheus. I invite you to cast off the notions of our flawed society of greed, burning in the embers of nuclear fire. I invite you to throw aside the ideals of a corrupted human spirit, and to embrace the tenants of reason that mankind has long since abandoned. I invite you to a world reborn, where we will reignite the fires of progress and community to better the very nature of humanity I invite you…to Lazarus."
The sub pushed through the edge of a kelp forest it had navigated, clearing into open water and revealing an astonishing sight.
A colossal silver dome stood up from the sturdy sea bed, suspended on a wide base like a mushroom. White and aqua lights dotted its massive exterior, twinkling like stars here and there into the dark blue ocean. Bright spotlights lit up the sea, bathing the titanic complex in a dark rainbow of midnight hues. Dozens – perhaps hundreds – of other structures surrounded the main dome, ranging in size from small abodes to one well-lit geometrical structure nearly a third the size of the main complex.
"This…" Sam stuttered. "This…has been here this whole time? This…"
"Relic," Locust finished her sentence slowly. "From time forgotten."
SEE WHAT I SEE. Nihlus's intentions hit Sam with renewed force. Her adversary had not just learned his philosophy and trade from the Capitol, from the likes of men such as Octavian and Salvador. Nihlus had experienced something far different – so radically beyond the notions of Panem and the trivial details of the Hunger Games that he had turned into the monster Sam knew today.
But Nihlus hates humanity…what did he FIND down here?
"This is incredible," Persephone had her face pressed up against a porthole, gazing out into the kelp-strewn reefs riding up against the complex's structures. "I've gotta be dreaming."
"Don't count your chickens before they hatch," Cheyenne grunted. She, Locust, and Johanna hadn't expressed the enthusiasm of their younger colleagues – even River had seemed genuinely surprised and amazed by the appearance of the massive sprawl. The older victors harbored something beneath their skin – a healthy dose of skepticism bred by years of watching helpless deaths.
"I don't think there's gonna be a lot of chickens here," Sam looked back.
Between Nihlus's words, looming all the more dangerous now in context, and the doubt resonating between the three middle-aged victors of the group, Sam began to hesitate. Had Nihlus intended for them to walk straight into a trap? Was a watery death right around the corner?
She'd beaten death before – but never a hundred meters below the very air she breathed to survive.
"Looks like we're coming in," Johanna pointed out as the sub dipped and headed towards an outlying building – a stark white spheroid sitting in a bed of silt. Sam could pick out transparent tunnels heading away from the dock, firing out towards every nearby building and spreading like a giant, interconnected spider web.
"Better be ready for anything," Cheyenne gritted her teeth as the sub came in.
Two large, spindly docking clamps reached out to snag the sub, sending a halting shudder through the craft as they latched on. The automated clamps pulled the vessel into a brightly-lit circular hole in the superstructure, slowly dragging the craft into the entrance to the sprawling facility. With a final tug, the sub lurched through the hole and forward, up out of the water. Salty sea rained down from around the craft as bright, sterile lights shined into the craft from all directions, bouncing off hot white walls curving off each intersection like a giant bubble.
"Alright," Cheyenne took command with ease, barely even pausing to take in the view as the others examined the scenery. "Listen! We'll be safer if we're out of this rusty bucket – we could get trapped in here if anything tries to come for us. Let's get out, stick together, scope out the nearby area. We can figure out if there's supplies we can drag back to the surface that will keep us going if the hovercraft can be fixed, or if there's anything else – parts, weapons, heck even another hovercraft – that can get us out of here. I'm not interested in sticking around forever, no matter how much you all are slack-jawed and staring at this thing."
Sam was impressed. She'd always known Cheyenne as a nonchalant person simply moving through life without much of a plan. Even as her fellow mentor during Clara's games, Cheyenne hadn't shown any great predisposition to serious strategy apart from a few good ideas. Now, however, she'd immediately gotten down to the basics of what they could glean out of this: Get what they could to make escape from the island crash site easier, and get out as soon as that was finished.
Sam followed Johanna out of the open sub hatch, taking a long sniff of the air as she stuck her head out. The atmosphere felt stuffy – over-pressurized, maybe, with the smell of saline sea water mixing with chemical sterility. The dock itself was much smaller than she'd imagined: The white walls were just big enough to hold the sub, as if the unit had been specially designed to capture it. The clamps coming out of the ceiling felt too big for the white-walled area. Hints of more teased Sam from beyond clear glass doors, where she could see white hallways leading deeper into the facility.
She wouldn't have long to wait to find out what they hid.
As soon as Lily, the last tribute out of the sub, climbed out onto the dock's surrounding platform, the docking clamps abruptly jumped. Sam snapped her head around as the sub was lifted from its watery perch, pulled up all the way to the high ceiling and away from its exit point. Below, two half-moon doors slid out from the dock's undercarriage, coming together to cut off the exit point from which they'd arrived.
They were trapped!
"This dock is now on an exit lockdown," a pleasant female voice came over an unseen intercom, reporting the news as if pointing out the weather. "Submersible traffic is suspended into administration confirms the surface can be repopulated. Please, enjoy your stay in Lazarus – guides will direct you to reception. Remember – a logical man is a Lazarus man."
Sam didn't have time to digest the announcement. Another voice interrupted the intercom almost immediately – a voice all-too-familiar in these alien conditions.
"A logical man indeed," the new voice interjected. The scratchy growl was not some byproduct of this sprawling complex – but instead reflected the menacing words of Nihlus. "It always plays the same in every dock. Meaningful ideals of reason and purpose…ha! Meaning, purpose! The jokes are pathetic, and I find them crude."
"It's…hmm, right now you're probably crying over the death of Ms. Bowie, aren't you Miss Parker?" Nihlus continued. Sam recoiled in horror – even down here, he'd managed to target her. So much for control. "Right after the 99th Hunger Games, and I have nothing better to do with my time but re-visit this place's sickening stench. It smells like a cancer…a viroid vector of vexations, all of them disgustingly human. Blech. I find myself needing to vomit."
Nihlus's disjointed rant had stunned Sam's colleagues into silence. She felt their stares, one-by-one, coming to settle on her as her adversary continued: "But I have plans for you, Ms. Parker…for you, when you come to this place that forged me. You see, I'll make sure you land in the 100th Hunger Games, the 4th Quarter Quell…the joyous celebration of Capitol power that I have all-too-easily laid my fingerprints on. I'll make sure you win it, too, land right in my lap just as I kick-start these pathetic Vox I control into a firestorm of anarchic revolution.
"A perfect fit for you…and for me. And while the 'surface' tears itself apart in war yet again, defiling every 'purpose' these arrogant scum down here once tried to profess, I will bring you to where it all began. You see, Ms. Parker, I think you and I are simply attached like this…I find you just so much fun to wind around my finger, testing the limits of someone so unequivocally human. So…representative of everything that everyone in this dead city hated. Think of Lazarus as your 101st Hunger Games. I look forward to seeing whether or not you survive...oh, and lest I forget, my the odds be ever in your favor."
A/N: I understand the logic behind keeping Rory and Finnick on the surface and sending Lily and River down is…wonky strategizing at best, but hey. They've all proven themselves in the Games, even if my crew is admittedly lacking in guys (and I figured I'd be boring people if I did yet another re-iteration of Annie+Finnick...) And yeah, I realize the concept here is kinda…unscientific. I needed to mix things up, introduce new topics for the second half of the series, and begin to explain my version of Panem's and Nihlus's backstories – all done easier in a closed environment. Things will explain themselves over time, don't fear.