Persephone Incarnate [Wattpad Prize 2014] | ✔️

{19} Anna

“Is it alright just to leave him like that?” she looked over worriedly at Ava, rubbing her fingers along the cornucopia resting at her neck. It had quickly become her comfort object as soon as they began the whole Save Sophie operation – the number of nerve-wracking events that had happened in a few short hours had made that certain.

Ava remained expressionless. It chilled her, to see the girl so…cold, so distant. Ava had always been quiet and sort of passive in certain situations, but never had she exuded so much hostility before. “He’ll be fine. He can’t expect to save Sophie if he can’t do this.” She bit her lips as she stared at the monitors splayed in front of them, dying their faces white and blue in the dark room, but the emotion quickly faded.

Ramsey tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned around. “Okay, Anna, Ava, come over here. You need to see this.” He led them over to a laptop, positioned at a small desk away from the row of monitors. Too excited to sit on the attached seat, he leaned over the desk, typed a few words and clicked a few buttons while muttering, “Hang on, just hang on, okay?”

A few minutes later, he tapped at a graph, full of blue and orange and green lines, shooting up and down in little colorful mountains.

“You’re measuring brain activity? Whose? Why?” Ava immediately moved over, blocking Anna’s view. She shifted to the other side of Ramsey to get a better look.

“It’s Alexander’s.” he laughed, but stopped when he saw the expressions around him. “Okay, so basically, these green lines – those are the active – um, okay, how to explain this, those are the active waves. You know, the detectable kind.”

“Not…really,” Ava said slowly.

Anna studied the graph, looking at the key, then back to the darting lines, which were still constantly moving. The orange and blue would move rapidly, while the green would stop, go in a bumpy horizontal line, then shoot up again. He’s measuring both the physical and the mental activity, she couldn’t help but marvel.

“So, this green line – that’s how he’s moving. He’s stopping – see those little bumps? And where those little bumps are, this blue line shoots way up – that’s him listening. When he’s more attentive, he emits more of these waves, so that’s how…this…thing-a…this thing picks up on it! And then here, this orange line – I don’t know what that is, but it been pretty steady. It doesn’t decrease a lot.”

“How do you even know all of this?” Ava raised her eyebrows.

“No idea,” the boy stared at both of them with wide eyes, and they stared back. Suddenly, all three of them were laughing.

“No, but really, Ramsey, how did you figure all this out?” Anna gestured toward the screen.

“Well, see, okay, all you have to do is just look, see him walking? Yea, just compare that the graph.”

“Okay, basic observation,” Ava muttered. “What’s it all for, though?”

“I don’t know. It’s here for a reason, obviously. I don’t know why.”

The three of them stared at the screen, puzzled. They were in a closed off section of the Underworld, outside the gates, in a room dug into the side of a rock hill. They had no Internet, no signal of any kind from any satellite. No one even knew where they were, other than the twelve others who were involved in this operation. They hadn’t even left the room since they’d arrived three hours ago. So, where did the chart come from?

“Okay, let’s just worry about that later then,”

“No,” Anna spoke sharply. “We need to get to the bottom of this. It’s dangerous to just leave it like that. How did these charts get here?”