SERA
Well, I thought I had managed to spite them. Turns out, all I did was pass out.
As I felt the sensation of my limbs waking up, I groaned internally. Was I happy to be alive, seeing as I was likely still in The Below? I suppose only time would tell.
My hearing returned before I opened my eyes, and I figured I’d try to keep up the charade of being passed out while I tried to collect information. There were vital questions that I needed answers to. Where the fuck was I? Who or what was with me? Why wasn’t my chest burning from breathing in the toxic air anymore?
Feminine voices carried in the light wind that was dusting across my face, and I strained to listen to their faint whispers.
“I swear to you, Madison. They were not physical beings. They looked like shadows.”
A soft gasp came from the girl who I assumed was Madison. “Then how were we transported here if they can’t physically touch us? None of this makes sense.”
A tense silence ensued before the first voice spoke again. “I don’t know, but we really need her to wake up. It’s only the three of us left, and if we’re going to have a fighting chance, we need to band together.”
Well, shit. It sounded like two of the girls who came with us had died already, but the positive side of this conversation was that the two remaining didn’t seem to be freaking out and were thinking logically. I could work with that.
Deducing that I wasn’t in any immediate danger, I opened my eyes and announced, “I’m awake. Let’s come up with a plan.”
The way their voices bounced around the room we were in, like an echo, had given me the briefest of hints that we were somewhere new, in an area that was somewhat enclosed. So when I saw the dark crevices of a rocky formation above me and a solid wall behind them, I wasn’t completely surprised to find we were in a cave.
What was surprising was the small glimmering pieces of the rock, like a sparkling mineral of sorts that gave off quite a bit of soft light.
Their sharp intakes of breath showed that my sudden addition to their conversation had scared them. I heard a shifting against the hard dirt floor we were on as I sat up, and when I turned to where their voices had come from, they were both facing me with wide, determined eyes.
The first voice I had heard belonged to the pretty brunette girl who asked me, “What’s your name?” Gesturing to herself and the raven-haired, petite girl, she introduced herself. “I’m Mishka, and that’s Madison.”
So, Hope and Olivia hadn’t made it, if my memory served correctly of the names involved. The image of my name and the others on my TV screen was practically seared into my mind.
Brushing my hands off onto my pants, I offered, “I’m Serafina, but you can call me Sera.”
Looking down, I gave myself a once-over and did a mental check to see if anything was injured, but I felt fit as a fiddle. Even my previously burning chest and lungs felt back to normal. Glancing around at the cave we were in, I saw no passageways behind us, so I turned my attention to the cave’s opening. That was where the danger lay—outside.
“Mishka was the only one of us who was awake as she was transported here,” Madison informed me. “You and I were already here when she was deposited into the cave. She was just telling me everything she remembers about the creatures.”
I gave a nod of my head as I took in the ashy landscape that was void of any natural growth. “If you wouldn’t mind filling me in on those details too, we can hopefully piece together a plan on how to move forward.”
My vision definitely wasn’t the best, and I was struggling to make out any landmarks to get some type of lay of the land. Was it night time here? I really needed more light to try to give us a leg up.
Giving up on trying to discern anything of use outside, I turned my attention back to the two girls as Mishka began from the beginning. “After you left the shuttle, a group of…” she trailed off, her brow furrowing, “I don’t know how to describe it other than incorporeal shadow forms, appeared.”
This part I had heard, so clearly I had woken up right on time and hadn’t missed anything.
“They came in quickly, hovering over the other two girls who had dropped to the ground first,” she recounted and shook her head. “But they quickly moved onto Madison and me, as if dismissing the other two.”
“Hope and Olivia,” I said softly, feeling it was important to give them the respect of using their names.
Mishka continued on as if she hadn’t heard me, or maybe she just didn’t care. “Madison passed out just a few seconds before they came, and as they approached us, it seemed like a small stone or something attached to the shadows began to glow.”
A tracker?
A beacon?
My mind whirled with the possibilities of what that could mean.
“I suppose they picked us up, but really it felt like I was being suffocated by shadows and suspended in the air as we traveled,” she explained.
“They had no solid body parts at all?” I asked, miffed at how these monsters could have ever physically fought us in a war if that was the case. It just didn’t add up.