Awake

Chapter Fifty - Into The Light

The world was beautiful. It was blinding. It was radiant, open, huge, impossible, mesmerising, alive. It was drowning in adjectives. It was too bright and devastating to look at. It was everything. The world was everything, and it flooded into all the spaces, pushed at the cracks of your soul, crept in behind your eyes, drowned you and overwhelmed you and consumed you and filled you with itself.

The world was there.

Carmen felt it lift her up and overturn her and bury her. Who knew what colour was? How bright green was! Blue! Brown! Yellow! Who knew how many shades they had? And so real, so immediate, not artificial or faded, not white like almost everything underground. Colour that made your eyeballs burn.

And the smell of it! All those scents carried on the air, of plants and animals and earth and space! Carmen hadn't realised how much she had missed that, underground, where all you could smell was the sharp tang of disinfectant.

A breeze stirred her hair and raised goose-bumps on her skin and she could feel the space, the endless, impossible, dizzying space, tugging at her and dragging her. There were no walls to hem her in. There were no corridors to abide by. There was only the world, the great and glorious world, stretching away in all directions.

The sky! How devastating, how overwhelming, how heartbreakingly beautiful was the sky! Today it burned clear and blue and true but who knew what it might be tomorrow? Who knew how the clouds might cover it, in grey or yellow or white? Who knew what the sunrise would look like? Who knew when it might rain?

The glory of the world took Carmen's breath away. She couldn't control it. She couldn't guide it. In it, she was small and insignificant and vulnerable. She was as close to nothing as she could be, lost in the towering space, in the endless air, in the busyness, the sound, the wonder. She was borne on a current she couldn't change.

She laughed and the sound was swept away on the wind, disappearing, sounding into the emptiness with no walls to reverberate around, nothing to keep it in. She closed her eyes against the glare of the sun and sucked in a breath, a breath of air that tasted and filled her lungs and was good, so good, so much better than what she'd been breathing for so long now.

She was not alone. They were on their knees. They were dancing. They were surrendering. It had been worth it, it had all been worth it, it had been a gamble worth taking. Because this was paradise, heaven, the promised land. They had stepped out of the darkness and into the light.

But the miraculous moment couldn't last forever and as their eyes adjusted to the light, as their senses learned again how to shut out the barrage of information, they were forced to look around them and see where they were, understand what was going on, make plans.

They stood on the side of a hill. The open door behind them jutted out of the earth where it had been concealed for so many years. The grass was long, waving near their waists, scratching at their hands with its sharp blades in a million shades of green and yellow.

Down below, at the base of a hill, the woods started, sweeping up on the other side of the valley. The leaves waved and rustled and shifted, swaying in the breeze, a movement so natural and unconcerned by anything around it, a movement almost without purpose or function.

Beyond them, the sky in its great dome, blue and untroubled. There seemed so much between Carmen and it. She wondered how she had ever thought the world was small.

"We made it," Sandy said, hoarsely. "We actually made it. We...we did it."

"We did it!" Carmen crowed, seizing him in a spontaneous hug. "We did it! We're here! We're outside! Isn't it perfect?"