Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

The Deep End

"So this is supposed to be hell, or what?" she said, as she leaned closer and scrutinized her own face in the broken fragments of the shattered bathroom mirror.

She doubted that she was really dead, but she certainly looked the part. There were dark shadows under her bloodshot eyes, barely any grey was visible around her widened pupils. Her cheeks were hollow, her skin was pallid and her lips cracked. But there was something else that irked her about the sight. She squinted her eyes at the image in the mirror.

Somehow, her face didn't really seem like hers. Something was missing.

"Call it what you will," her mirror image answered her question and shrugged. "Point is, there's no way out."

"Shut up. What do you know," she snarled at it.

"I know enough," it answered, "I've been here for a very long time."

She rolled her eyes and turned her back at the young girl in the mirror. Leaning back against the bathroom counter, she sighed heavily and pondered her situation. All the doors were locked, and the windows were made of reinforced glass. Calliope refused to be of any help, and had stopped talking to her entirely after a while, as if she was pouting over her continuous attempts to break out of this place. The girl in the mirror was her only company now, and she was seriously grating on her nerves.

"There really is no use. You should just give up already," Evelyn in the mirror behind her said. "Accept the fact that you're dead."

"I've been dead before," she said, rolling her shoulders back. "It never lasted very long."

"You're being naïve. There's an end to everything," Evelyn called after her, as she left the bathroom.

Back in the living room, she began to sift through the debris again. She had done this countless of times by now, but she continued to look for something, anything, without really knowing what or why.

The worst part of it all was this feeling that the longer she spent in this place, the more her memory seemed to fail her. She knew that she must have been here a long time already, but whenever she passed by the chaos and destruction in the living room, it seemed to her like it was the first time she saw it. Everything she did in this place gave her a feeling of déjà-vu, and she kept circling around and around in the house like an animal in a cage, trying to find something that might help her understand just what the hell was going on.

She picked up books, flicking through their pages, but they were all empty. She tried every single piece of technology that she could find, but everything was broken beyond repair. She turned on the taps in the bathroom and in the kitchen, but no water came out.

The whole place was broken, lifeless, dead.

"Something's missing," she mumbled.

"You lost a lot of yourself," Evelyn chimed in.

She had appeared next to her, and she paused in her search to cast her a brief glance. She was as pale as the white dress she was wearing, and her legs and feet were covered in cuts, just like her own. She had the same eyes, the same black hair. The only real difference between them was their size. The girl before her was no older than fourteen, perhaps fifteen.

"That's not what I meant," she grumbled, and returned her attention to the books for the umpteenth time.

"Maybe this is just all that's left," the girl suggested.

"Shut up."

"Make me."

"Perhaps I will."

"I'd like to see you try."