X-Marks: Hiding Shadows

Gates

It had been a week since we lost Ocean. There had been no words between in the last home. Only our burdened thoughts spoke to us. Where was she now? Was she happy? Was she mad at us?

After another week of walking to the last stop, we stood in a break of the trees where the forest was gated as far as we could see.

"This is a joke, right?" Mat shouted, kicking the dirt beneath his feet and rattling the metal pillars.

I wished it all were. Even in the heat of my anger, it would have been a relief to know everything could go back to as it was.

We stood below the steel pillars where the etched letters of the gate were too far above for my eyes and the sun too bright for me to read. We had been walking along its perimeter for hours, with no break in its chain and no reason to turn back. We had made it this far. Lost so much. This couldn't be real. This had to be a joke or worse a trap.

"Did you just think they'd let us walk right in?" Nate said from a tree stump he shared with Evee.

Mat's face twisted as insult sunk in.

"Of course not!" Mat snapped and continued pacing, "I just thought you know -"

"That you'd just walk right in -" Nate interrupted with an inappropriate smirk growing under his shaggy hair.

Evee moaned beside Nate, her hands were tucked deep within her sleeves, and her stare looked deep into the gates. She could speak now that the antibiotics had help cleared the wound on her head.

"Don't act so smart," Mat scoffed to Nate, "You saw the damn thing too. It has to be here."

We had all witnessed what he was speaking about. We had no way of knowing exactly what it was. Only that it was what was promised.

The night before, as we reached the top of a particularly steep hill, we saw the grassy valley below lit with jewels. Not from the stars above but below and beyond the gate. It's dotted lights sparkled within towering buildings and bundled in clusters at the center. The lights fanned far beyond what we could see, even from the top of the valley.

It was as promised. A lamp in the sky. It made me question the gate that stood between us. If the people who had made these lights were making themselves so visible, why would they hide behind a gate?

It seemed they had nothing or no-one to fear at all. We were even smart enough to snuff out fires at night, so to not attract Allies. It seemed the least they could do was the same.

They hid from no one.

A swell of hope rose within me, as I examined the gates and their textured steel closer. I had no way to read it's script so far above my head. I could only see the flat bottom of the sharp letters.

"Hey-" Nate said with his arms held out and fingers as if he was feeling the air around him.

His blond hair whipped across his forehead and up. I looked above, ready to see a shiny steel claw or the reflective stare of another metal beasts, but instead saw three trucks and it's whirling fans hovering above over our heads.

I covered my head, expecting the vehicles to fall on top of me at any moment. I had never seen anything so compact fly before.

I hit the soft earth beneath me as the bodies of black-uniformed stranger descended on ropes from the hovering vehicles above.

A painful sting hit my eyes like I had cut an onion and a sharp pain shot through my chest. I coughed as my vision blurred anything in the distance, soon I could no longer see my own fingers, mere inches from my face.

I felt no fear as I closed my pained eyes. I knew I would never need to hide again.