Episode 49: Free Falls and Failed Trust
- Crystal Crawford
- Apr 28
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 29
Our free fall was short-lived. We struck a surface a few seconds later, most of us tumbling to our knees in several inches of water as more water and sand poured in on top of us.
I gasped for breath, trying to get out of the flow.
A moment later, the opening we’d fallen through, which was now several feet out of reach above us, slammed shut.
The rush of water and sand cut off immediately and the water at our feet was rapidly receding.
I pushed to my feet, and found that we were now in some kind of underground chamber, almost like a cement tank, but square. The water was draining away into small slits at the base of the walls, though it did leave behind a thick layer of wet sand.
Thankfully, there were also what appeared to be air vents embedded at the top of the walls on all four sides. I had no idea what they connected to, but perhaps we wouldn’t suffocate.
Lockley moved close to me, looking around nervously. “Where are we?”
“Some kind of underground bunker, looks like,” Trenchcoat Man said. “See there? That’s a door.”
We all looked where he pointed and, sure enough, there was an outline cut in one of the cement walls, with a handle attached.
Trenchcoat Man clapped and reappeared a few feet away, near the door. “At least I can still travel in here,” he said. He traced the door with his hand. “I wonder where this leads.” He tried the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Locked.”
“Couldn’t you travel to the other side of it and see?” Collin asked.
“I could,” Trenchcoat Man said, “but it’s inadvisable. I make it a general rule never to travel blindly. Fire, more water, cockroaches—any number of dangers could be on the other side of that door.”
“Cockroaches?” I asked.
He shivered. “Foul things. The way they can survive radiation…” He looked at me. “Did you know the reason they can survive radiation levels that would kill a human is because their cells divide more slowly? It’s disturbing. Anyway, given these people’s ability to negate my travel magic, I’d prefer to investigate further before I travel blindly through that door and possibly get stuck on the other side.”
Aside from the weird fact-drop about cockroaches, he had a point.
He turned to Chloe. “Do you know what’s in there?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t know about any of this.”
Trenchcoat Man studied her. “Hmm.” After a moment, he looked away. “Well, then I suppose I’d better try.” He looked at the cheer hawks. “Wish me luck.”
“No, wait—” Jillian started, but he was already gone.
One tense moment later, he was back. “It’s a hallway,” he said with a look of satisfaction.
“A long one. It seems to lead back toward the shore. I’ll be back momentarily.” He flashed away again, then returned. “Yes. It leads to the shore. Dumps out under the pier.”
“You mean we could’ve gotten in here without that whirlpool?” Collin said.
“Could have, if we’d known, but isn’t that the way with so many things?” Trenchcoat Man answered. Then he looked around. “I suspected there to be more to—ah. There we go.”
He hurried over to the other side of the cement room, where there was another door outline we hadn’t yet noticed. This one had no handle. He tried pushing it, but it didn’t move. He glanced back at us. “Here goes nothing.” He clapped.
Nothing happened.
He frowned at the door. “How unsettling.”
“It’s blocking your magic?” my dad asked.
“Yes.” Trenchcoat Man turned to face us. “There’s no handle, so my guess would be that this door is meant to be an exit… or that whatever’s beyond the door isn’t supposed to be accessed from this side without special approval.”
“Maybe both,” Jillian said.
“Wait,” Chloe said softly. “I have an idea.”
We all turned to look at her.
She looked suddenly uncomfortable. “I mean, it might not work, it’s just…” She shoved her hand deep into her waterlogged pocket and pulled out a tiny metal rod, about the size of a small hex key, but flat. “My dad has handleless doors on one of the storerooms in the warehouse,” she said. “I always keep one of these in my pocket now, because I’ve accidentally locked myself out of it too many times.”
“That opens the doors?” Trenchcoat Man asked.
“Yeah,” Chloe said, holding it out to him. “You just shove it in the crack near where the lock would be if there was a handle. It’s a magnet seal or something, I don’t exactly understand how it works, but this door might be the same kind.”
Trenchcoat Man looked at the device in her hand, but didn’t reach for it. “You do it, then,” he said with a suspicious look.
Chloe’s face fell at his obvious distrust, but she nodded. “Okay.”
She walked to the door and slid the rod in about two-thirds down the right-hand side of the door outline.
There was a little click, then the door popped open a crack.
Chloe stuck her fingers in the tiny space and pulled it the rest of the way. “There,” she said, then stepped back.
Beyond the doorway was a long, dark corridor.
“What do you think is down there?” Meredith asked Trenchcoat Man.
He turned to Chloe. “Go in and see.”
She blanched. “What? Why me?”
“It’s your father, you happened to have the key that opened this door, and I don’t much fancy going in only to have you shut the door and trap us,” Trenchcoat Man said. “You go first.”
Chloe stared at him. “You don’t trust me at all, do you?”
“Trust is earned,” he answered, then nodded at the door.
Her hurt expression made my heart lurch, but he had a point.
Chloe legitimately looked like she might cry, but she turned back to the doorway and walked through it.
After a moment, Trenchcoat Man followed—and so did the rest of us.
Our footsteps made wet thuds on the cement floor beneath, but we couldn’t see much at all… until my dad pulled out yet another gadget.
“Oh, my eyes!” I heard Collin yelp as we were blinded by a searing light.
“Sorry,” my dad said quickly. “It’s an ultra-light. Very bright flashlight. Useful, but hard on the eyes. Let me turn it down a smidge.”
The light dimmed, and when my eyes adjusted, I could see we were in a long corridor.
Chloe was already several paces ahead, stopped, and was pointing at something. “There are cells here,” she said. “Like, prison cells or something. Come see.”
We all hurried down toward her.
By my dad’s light, we could see several empty chambers with barred doors—they did look like jail cells. The darkness a few feet beyond that was unusually thick; it swallowed even the bright light of my dad’s lamp.
“It looks like this is a dungeon or something,” my mom said.
“Yes. Probably some kind of holding facility… or a prison,” Trenchcoat Man agreed.
“For who?” Lockley asked.
“Hopefully our missing elementals,” Trenchcoat Man said. “Maybe even Emery.”
My heart soared momentarily, but I squashed it back down. I couldn’t dare to get my hopes up.
“I hear something further down,” Chloe said. “Can you bring the light?”
My dad moved toward her, and we followed him down the hallway.
The whole thing smelled damp, like wet stone and mildew.
The corridor dead-ended into a wall… I thought. Until Chloe walked left and I realized it was a corner.
We all hurried after her and found ourselves in another room… and when my dad’s light spilled over it, we gasped.
There was a giant, purple-glowing orb in the center of the room, floating a few inches above the floor. Every couple of seconds it made a whoomp sound and the purple light surged to bright violet. How we hadn’t seen the light surging from the corner, I wasn’t sure—maybe that had been an unnatural darkness in the hall.
This room also smelled damp and mildewy, like the hall, though the floor and the walls here looked dry. The room was circular, and there were six barred chambers in a semicircle. One cell was blocked from our view by the orb, but of the other five, each held a person slumped on the floor. All five of them also had purple-glowing tubes attached to their arms like IVs, running along the ground and back up to the orb. Every time the light of the orb surged, the tubes did too.
Chloe, who had been standing near me, took a step back—probably in fear, and I couldn’t blame her.
“The elementals,” Trenchcoat Man said, and ran toward the nearest one—a man that looked to be in his twenties or so, with dark hair. “He’s on our list.” He glanced toward the next one. “I’m pretty sure he is, too.” Trenchcoat Man turned back to the cell nearest him, stuck his hand through the bars with no regard to potential danger from the glowing tubes, and felt the man’s throat. “Alive,” he said with a breath of relief. “But obviously unconscious.” He turned toward the orb. “What is this thing? It looks like it’s siphoning something from them.”
“There’s another cell back here,” Collin called from the other side of the orb. “Aubrey, come—what the?” He jumped away from the cell he’d been near, then spun toward me with a look of horror. “Aubrey, get away from Chloe. She’s not—”
“Not really Chloe?” I heard Chloe say from a distance behind me, followed by a deafening clang.
I spun around.
Chloe was sneering at us through a giant metal grate that had just dropped down at the doorway. “No, I’m not.” She grinned, then her face melted—I couldn’t help but shudder—and reformed itself into an entirely different one. Her body stretched, and even her clothes changed.
She was taller, and older… and definitely not Chloe.
“What—” I stammered. “Then where is Chloe?”
“She’s back there, Aub,” Collin said, moving close. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
I gasped, then ran around the orb to the cell he’d been next to.
Sure enough, there was Chloe… unconscious on the floor of the cell, though not connected to any tubes.
Probably because she didn’t have any magic to siphon.
I spun toward the false Chloe. “How?” I spat. “We tested for illusions!”
“It wasn’t an illusion,” she said with a shrug. “My gift allows me to morph my physical cells and assume someone else’s genetic code. When I shift, I am that person, biologically at least… for a time.”
That was unsettling. I gaped at her. “Who are you really?”
“I’m the Vorcos CEO’s second-in-command, his right hand,” she said with a grin. “But how easily you fell for the poor, long-lost daughter just desperate to be accepted by her father act. Of course, the real Chloe is that.” An expression of disgust overtook her face.
“I can’t believe he ever trusted her.” She shook her head, then waved the thought away dismissively. “Oh well. Thanks to me, things are back in order.” Her grin returned. “And you’ve fallen right into our trap.”
***
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