Awake

Chapter Twenty-Eight - The Corridor to Nowhere

They had agreed not to tell anybody else about the Nevera papers or their clumsy heist for everyone's safety but Carmen found it difficult to keep her mouth shut. She wasn't used to keeping secrets and part of her was itching to ask Alexei his opinion, for she could guarantee he would have one. He had an opinion on everything.

  She kept her silence impatiently, brooding on the topic in private, waiting for Jonathan to come back to them with some new information. They were relying on themselves to find out where the route above ground could be, and how to get the things they'd need to reduce their chance of dying horribly. This did not sit well with Carmen.

  It wasn't that she thought Jonathan incapable as a leader. In fact, she thought him perfectly adept so long as somebody stopped him getting too wrapped up in himself. But for all their re-emerging memories, they had little concrete knowledge of this place to build on and the only true native they had trusted with their plans was, not to put too fine a point on it, somewhat handicapped.

   Carmen was used to delegating tasks. She had lived on a boat, after all, where there is no such thing as privacy. She was the captain of a democracy. She was used to shared opinions, long discussions and evenly divided spoils. Everybody helped and everybody had the right to know what was going on. That was the point of piracy, really: there was no underdog.

  But the others didn't seem to think that way. Ebb, she could see, couldn't care less. Sandy was distracted and unmotivated, far too relaxed into himself, for Carmen to think he would hold any opinion at all. Miriam seemed unconcerned, maybe because the only person she would have thought to tell already knew. Nigs seemed more withdrawn these past few days, retreating into himself and scowling, all his friendly chatter drying up.

  That only left Jonathan, oh fearless leader, who, Carmen could already see, believed in working alone and off your own power. He lacked the ability to delegate. She had a horrible feeling there was going to be something of a row when – if ever – it came to going above ground. He would want to go with them and Carmen was damned if she was going to let him.

  Suicide missions belonged to the suicidal: to drugged-up teenagers with nothing better to do and pirate captains yearning for the sky again. There was no place there for Jonathan, who Carmen already felt sure was needed alive. If he died, Natalia would be in charge and this whole endeavour, whatever it was, would be at an end. She was certain of that.

 Days swam by, whole weeks, and all the time Subterra became more and more familiar, more like home. But, in some kind of strange inverse proportion, the more Subterra felt like where Carmen belonged, the more she missed the tropical seas she had sailed, the islands where she had made port, the constellations she knew and recognised. The more she missed Missie Cream and the pirate round.

  Carmen didn't feel any more like Carissa, though she felt less and less like Cream. She wanted to go home in some deep, aching way. The sea was part of her. Her bones were made of shells, her blood salt water, her heart beating the same rhythm as the tides. The less that felt like reality, the more she despaired of what was in front of her: underground, solid earth, walls.

   She didn't want to be a soldier. Soldiers were the enemy, they always had been. It went against every principle she held dear.