Talindarian year 4692, July 2, Tae
I have fifty talins who will go with me. More than half are my good friends, and the rest are slightly younger, the twenty- and thirty-year-olds. They're young enough to believe that everything will work out fine. Me, I'm fifty-seven. I know that our chances are so slim that the likelihood of us all ending up all over the floor with the radiation having messed us all up is so high we could just do that and be done with it.
But freedom is worth everything - and if we succeed, we'll leave a legacy for others to follow. If we don't... well, there won't be a second chance. For us, at least.
We spent all of yesterday writing up plans. We'll do it during the night, since there's less guards then.
I have various maps of the Bunker, drawn by talins who've lived here all their lives. They know every staircase and hallway, even the blocked-off ones where we think we dug too close to the surface.
That's what we'll be aiming for. Sure, they told us they had been filled with diamond-cement and everything, but we know the direction to dig in.
The problem isn't that, of course. It's the guards.
The guards with their gamma-guns and electrocontrells. The guards who can see everything.
There was a period when I wanted to be a guard. When I was just ten years old, I would run around the guards with the other children and shout "can we hold your gun please can we hold it?"
The adults, upon seeing this type of behavior, would always put on a mask of faint disapproval heavily tinted with "How cute they are! So cute, right?" and quickly walk by. It was only at around twenty when I realized that the guards were not fun. It was when I was twenty that my dad's body was left in the bedroom, slightly purpled skin an indication of the gamma radiation that was listed as his 'cause of death'.
"Here." Said the guard. "You can hold the gun."
He held it out.
I screamed and ran off, deep into the mines. In two years, the guard fell down one of the shafts and shattered half of his spinal bones. The mine is closed off now, his purple blood staining the stones forever now, and I remained tight-lipped about the whole event and had a strong alibi.
It's not like anyone asked about the odd remote-control stopwatch or the wires leading to the elevator-hook system. It's not like anyone heard the guard's screams. Or noticed the purple tinge on my hands and feet. His death was branded an "accident".
After I set the timer, I went to the bathroom and threw up. I hadn't thought of himself as the villain, the torturer, but I'd done it and something in my chest felt lighter. Something else, though, felt cold and wrong. I was afraid at first, but then I got used to the feeling.
I shake my head, floating to the top of the memory pool. It's okay, I tell myself. They're all long dead: my father, the guard, younger me.
It shouldn't matter, but it does.
Talindarian year 4692, July, Valtari
Valtari, 4692, July 3. Orinoco Gold Bunker, Entry 4
The other talins in our bunker want to go to the surface. They think there's no war! I'm terrified - it must be a trap. The Vyrkoll must have threatened her or something to make her say that. They're smart, the Vyrkoll. Once everyone leaves (if they can, I hope the guards stop them without hurting them!), I'll seal the escape tunnel or whatever, and hope it all blows over.
I wonder how much food is in this bunker.
Otherwise, today was fairly uneventful. Instead, everything's been very quiet. Talins are just talking in small groups unlike the shouting-across-the-dining-hall arguments that would happen, like clockwork, every tuesday, between Margeh and Hirma. They both love the same guy, and he's too smart to choose one.
Tina and Giat aren't fighting either: and they're always mad at each other! They got married many years ago and I guess they just didn't click. Two weeks ago Tina hit Giat over the head with a ceramic jug, and it broke. Now he has scratches all over his horns. They'll probably heal but it must hurt. Three weeks ago Giat tore up one of Tina's favorite skirts, and they didn't talk directly to each other for five days.
Those were the good times. Oh, I wish nothing had changed!
Valtari, 4692, July 4. Orinoco Gold Bunker, Entry 5
I think talins are avoiding me. Just because I think that there is a war and they're all making a big mistake doesn't mean they should ignore me and stop talking to me! It's lonely now that whenever I walk through the corridors I'm surrounded by a bubble of empty space and silence and intense stares.
I confronted Eimia, my best friend, who talks to me more than other talins these days. She told me, embarrassed and slightly angry, that most of the Gold Bunker talins think that if I overhear their plans, I'll tell the guards, who will then definitely stop them. She told me that to talk to me, she had to swear to secrecy. Otherwise the others would forcibly keep us apart.
"Even my parents?" I asked.
"Yeah. Even them." she answered.
I immediately told her I would tell nobody, but then she looked at me in the way she's so good at. She walked off, and I thought about it. She's completely right. I would go running to the guards and tell them - but it's for their own good! Why don't they understand? They'll all die out there if they make it!
Tomorrow I'm going to have an argument with Eimia. I'll just make her promise not to use that look.
Talindarian year 4692, July 2, Tae
I'm going to kill the guards. It sounds easy when I say it, but getting that guard down the shaft wasn't that easy. It was only that he trusted me a bit that he stepped right into the trap. Plus, he wasn't scared of a tiny twenty-two-year-old boy. By fifty-seven I've grown to be a menacing figure, around the size of my father who was pretty gigantic. My mother also wasn't the smallest of talins, and an accident three years ago left my right horn scratched up and bent.
The guards, upon seeing me, instinctively move their hands to their guns.
Well, all of them except one. Dant. He doesn't react at all, and while it's a bit of a relief, there's a deep current of hate stopping us from being anything friendly.
Once upon a time, when we were fifteen, I used to blush when I walked by. When we were fifteen, he would smile at me. We were young, he wasn't a guard, I wasn't a lone wolf.
When we were seventeen, he held my hand. It was in secret - but only because they didn't want to be teased by their friends.
When we were twenty, I cried into his shoulder as he rocked me like a child.
When we were twenty-two, his father fell down the shaft.
I told him everything.
He gripped my hand, his amethyst eyes searching mine. He found it all - the truth, the secret, the pain.
The pain that now echoed in him. The pain that, as I already knew, would never leave. It would forever tear him open when the memories flooded back, as sudden as a body falling down a mineshaft.
Dant hit me. I saw the flood of feeling before it came out. He shouted like it could help. His claws tore into my chest like my blood would bring his father back. His teeth found their way into my neck like my pain would ease his.
I placed an open palm on his chest, watching my claws dig five purple points into his chest. He stopped, allowing the new pain to flood through.
What I know is that this pain never replaces the other one. No matter how much your skin hurts, your heart will hurt more. The skin will heal, the heart will only patch itself up shoddily. A word said at the wrong time can tear the cover up.
Back then, I hadn't realized that some hearts "heal" differently.
Dant's heart froze, inside and out. It stopped beating the minute the funeral ended.
I find myself at the barrier. It's made of dark strips of ratfur tied around metal poles. It's mourning and sad and after all those years, tears begin to bubble up to my eyes. I can't hold my breath and sob loudly, allowing them to slide down my cheeks. I lean heavily against a pole, choking and trying to breathe through the literal and emotional waterfall.
Slowly, the pain fades again. I swallow, wiping my tears, flicking them down into the shaft.
Cold footsteps echo through the cavern behind me. I don't need to turn around to know who it is.
His voice, which I haven't heard in years, is more familiar than expected. "Gloating over what you've done?" It's calm, a bit frosted, and so heartwrenchingly sad.
I remember all the years he didn't say a word. I remember the last time I heard him say anything: 'Please never look me in the eyes again.'
I've never heard him say a word because he was hiding what it'd become. That was the price he'd paid for a heart of ice.
I whirled around, not angry but impatient, desperate. I wanted him to see my face, covered in tears and scarred with hurt.
He took one look. I saw something painfully sharpen in his previously still face expression. He lowered his head and walked back out.
I stepped away from the shaft, melting into the shadows.
Minutes later, Dant appeared back in the cavern. His guard boots clicked across the pavement and I found myself thinking that at least I'd know when a guard was coming. Not that I'd hear it in a battle.
Dant looked down the shaft, and then I saw something that made me shut my eyes tight and turn around. He had allowed his facade to shatter, and the expression I had seen for just half a second stabbed deep into my mental heart.
"I want you to come back!" I heard him shout. "I miss you too much! I miss everything! I want it to go back!"
The echo softly repeated his words, reducing the volume but not the raw emotion.
Dant fell to the ground. He was just so tired of holding himself up all the time. His muscles screamed at him, but he forced them to keep that cool expression on his face all the time. His fingers itched to sink into the murder's body, his arms wanted to wrap around him and hold himself up. He was always so close to the edge but he held himself together, relying on friction and inertia.
Then he saw Tae's crumpled face. And it was the last gust of wind that pushed him over that edge.
Dant found himself rocking madly, a kilometre above the long-turned-dust body of his father.
Thoughts to end himself in the same way visited his mind, but he fought them away. Then he stood up as his mind floated into the pit of darkness. Maybe, just maybe, there would be light at the bottom.
He felt light as a piece of paper floating down through howling winds that made up the edges of the pit.
"Evan," Dant said. "Can you take over my shift today? I'm feeling unwell."
Evan shrugged. "Sure."
Dant lay down on his pallet and closed his eyes. His mind sunk through the pit into the land of sleep.
When he opened his eyes, he was dreaming.
All he saw was light. The light of the place he hadn't allowed himself to fall into for so long.
Sometimes giving in was so refreshing. He was so free.
When he opened his eyes and said "good morning" to the ceiling, he didn't hear the mourning wrapped around his words anymore.
He placed a hand on his chest, and he felt his heart beating once more. The frost was melting away.