Episode 55: Failed Attempts and Floating Whispers
- Crystal Crawford
- May 5
- 6 min read
Updated: May 6
The orb was still letting off a horrid, shrieking beep in rapidfire… but Emery had arrested our attention.
“Is she breathing?” Dad rushed up next to Mom and me. “Is she—is she alive?”
I reached for her face, but the pulsing glow of the orb zapped my fingers the moment I got close to its surface. “Ouch!” I yanked my hand back.
“Are you okay?” my dad asked.
I nodded, nursing my stung fingers.
Emery looked alive. The orb’s pulsing, purple light gave her face a strange tone, but other than that, she looked healthy and peaceful—like she could just be asleep.
“Maybe we could pry it open with something?” Collin suggested.
“But what?” Lockley said. “There’s nothing in here but those tubes and what we brought with us.”
Chloe turned to me. “Maybe we could use your dad’s briefcase?”
It was sitting on the floor, but it was way too wide to wedge into the crack.
“Maybe we could use it to hit the orb, or throw it at the orb?” Chloe suggested.
“I’m willing to try,” my dad said. He grabbed his briefcase and chucked it at the orb, just beside the crack.
As soon as it neared the orb, a bolt of electricity crackled out and the briefcase ricocheted back at him.
Dad ducked, the briefcase barely missing his head. The briefcase clattered to the floor.
Dad stood, wide-eyed. “Apparently not.”
“Let me see if I can reach her.” Trenchcoat Man hurried up beside us, took a good look at how Emery was positioned, then clapped.
He flickered out of sight for only a millisecond, then was shot backward like he’d been electrocuted. His back thunked hard against the wall, and he slid to the floor with a grunt.
“Marshall!” Jillian ran toward him, but he immediately waved away her concern.
“I’m fine,” he called in a croaky voice over the din of beeping.
My dad reached down to help him up.
“That stung,” Trenchcoat Man groaned, flexing his fingers, then he nodded at my dad.
“Thanks.” He looked at the rest of us. “Orb’s got a force field or something. I can’t get in.”
“There has to be some way to break it open,” Lockley said, her voice desperate. “We’ve got to get her out!”
I turned to my dad. “Do you have any gadgets in that briefcase that we could use?”
He cast a frustrated look at the orb. “No, nothing for this.” He turned to me and pulled me into a hug. “But don’t worry, Aubs. We’ll get her out of there. We didn’t come this far to quit now.”
“Richard—” My mom’s voice cracked. She was staring at Emery, barely holding it together.
Dad squeezed me tight—and I squeezed back—then he let go and stepped over to hug my mom. “It’s alright,” he said, hugging her tight. “We’re going to figure this out.”
I turned back to the orb, racking my brain for what else to try.
The elementals we’d found were all huddled on the far side of the room.
“Can I try?” the dark-haired guy who’d called himself Reese asked.
Trenchcoat Man nodded. “Please do. We may not have much time before this thing explodes.”
Reese’s eyes widened. He hurried to our side of the orb and shot a stream of water from his hand toward the crack.
I gasped. “You’re going to drown—”
He pulled the water back mid-air, letting it splatter to the floor. “Wait, this is who you’re trying to save?” He pointed at Emery’s face through the crack, then stared at me. “I know her.”
“You do?” I gaped at him.
“Yes. I mean—” He huffed. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know her name, but I saw her when I was unconscious, like in a dream. She was standing next to me on a beach, and I was lying down in the sand. She kept telling me I had to wake up.”
Trenchcoat Man stared at him. “She spoke to you while you were unconscious?”
The guy gave him a wide-eyed nod. “She must have. I’ve never seen her in my life, other than that, and I didn’t recognize the beach.”
The red-haired girl rushed up, then gasped. “She spoke to me, too.”
Trenchcoat Man gestured for the other elementals to come look.
They all nodded.
“I saw her, too,” one of them, a dark-skinned teen said. “She kept saying I had to get up, had to run, but it was like I couldn’t move. I kept telling her I didn’t know how. My body felt like lead.”
Trenchcoat Man looked puzzled. “That may have been whatever they’d drugged you with when they connected you to the orb. But none of you are dreamwalkers, are you?”
They all shook their heads.
The beeping of the orb intensified again.
“Visions and dreamcasting,” Trenchcoat Man said, thinking out loud. “But dreamcasting usually requires a dream gift to receive it.” He stared at Emery’s face. “She must have grown extraordinarily powerful, if—”
“Please,” Reese interrupted. “Let me see if I can get her out.”
He tried again, but the water just ricocheted back off, splattering him in the face.
He sputtered. “Guess not.” He looked at us with genuine disappointment. “I’m sorry.”
The fire girl rushed up and tried a stream of fire—but it was diverted before it even touched the orb, too.
I groaned in frustration. “Nothing works!”
The other water elemental—a short, middle-aged man with ash-brown hair—tried a variation of what the first guy had done, and the wind elemental tried the same with a gust of air. All diverted.
“Let me try,” a voice called out.
We turned to find that the last supernatural—the dark-skinned teen who by elimination had to be the earth elemental—was holding a metal pole.
I was about to ask where he got it, until I noticed the broken bar on the cell behind him.
He caught my gaze and shrugged. “Couldn’t break out before, but now I can use my magic again.” He gestured at the rest of us. “Stand back.”
We all hurried back, and the guy adjusted his stance to get leverage, then spun—and swung the metal bar hard at the orb’s side.
He was smart enough to let go at the last second, fortunately, because the metal rod flung back off the orb before it ever made contact and clattered to the ground, still sizzling red-hot from its contact with the orb’s electric field.
We all stared at the orb in a moment of silent frustration.
I looked at the five elementals. “Thank you for trying,” I told them all, meaning it. They didn’t even know us, but they could see Emery was important to us, and they’d all tried to help.
“I can open the bars on the door there,” the earth elemental said, nodding toward the gate fake-Chloe had used to block us all in. “We could go and get help.”
What kind of help was he planning to get?
“Do it,” Trenchcoat Man said, not bothering to ask for details. “I plan to get us all far away from here as soon as possible, but you five should leave.”
Reese gave us all a long look, then nodded and turned to the others. “Come on. Maybe we can get up top and figure out how to stop this thing from there.”
“Worth a try. Let’s go,” the red-haired girl said.
The dark-skinned guy raised his fists and yanked the air, and two bars flew off the gate. “We’ll try to find help,” he yelled back as they lined up to squeeze through the opening.
“Just get to safety. Let us worry about this,” Trenchcoat Man called after them. “Follow the corridor—there’s one door that leads to the shore!”
They slipped out and ran.
The orb continued pulsing and beeping, so fast now it was almost one continuous beep.
I stepped toward the orb. “Come on, come on…” There had to be some way to get past the force field. I reached out, inching my hand closer to it. There had to be some way to—
I gasped, suddenly sucked into a vision.
“Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?”
Emery was chanting, standing on the shore in a long skirt and a sweater, barefoot as the waves lapped against her toes.
“Please!” she cried out, face toward the sky. “I’m lost!” Her words cut off with a sob that stabbed my heart.
She was facing away from me, toward the water, as a breeze toyed with the edges of her skirt and her hair.
I stepped toward her—
“O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?”
She turned and looked right at me, eyes wide and full of tears. She whispered, and despite the crash of surf and the rush of breeze, I heard it like she was right next to me:
“Break the gossamer web.”
I heaved a breath like I’d just surfaced from deep water, as the room and the orb and its frantic beeping crashed back in around me.
“Aubrey!” Mom yelled, rushing toward me. “What happened? Did the orb shock you again?”
Had that only been a moment? My hand was still outstretched, like I’d just reached for the orb.
I stared at her. “Emery talked to me.”
***
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