Revolution in the Underground (32 page)

“Let me replace you.  I’ll go with Sven, you go with Maggie… that way if we get caught at least then you won’t have to bear the torture for as long.”

“Ember, I don’t know what to say,” Kara murmured incredulously.

Sven’s heart jumped.  “No you can’t!  Styles said…  You have to… We are supposed to go… together…  Kara?”

“You can do anything you want Kara.  I want to do this for you!  Let me do this for you!  The thought of you being tortured is ten times worse than the worst thing they can ever do to me!  Let me go in your place!”

“Ember?!” Maggie screamed, with equal shock as before.

“Kara, I wanted to… I need to… talk to you!  We need to… go… together!” Sven said, unusually panicked.

“I… uh… I…” Kara mumbled, speaking more to herself than the others.  “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?!” Ember said seeking clarification.

“I can’t let you do that…  Sven and I will go together.”

Sven sighed a heavy sigh of relief.  “We should get going then, it’s about time.”  Sven stepped into the tunnel with his dwindling candle and motioned for Kara to follow.  She stepped in after him.

“Wait!  Kara!  Not like this.  Not like this!” Ember shouted.

“This is not your battle Ember.  Take your sister, and go back.  Wait until it’s over.  No one will fault you,” she said, gloomily looking towards the ground.

“But Kara, we can run away…
together
… you and me…”

“Ember…  No.”

“But… Kara?”

“Stay with your sister.”

“Kara?”

“Come on, we have to go,” Sven said, pulling Kara by her hand.

“We will see each other again,” Kara said.

“Kara?”

“Goodbye Maggie,” Sven said as he walked with Kara deeper into the tunnel.

***

“You look mad,” Ember noted.

“Yes Ember, I’m mad.”

“Why are you mad Maggie?”

“I don’t know Ember, why do you think?”
              “I don’t know,” he shrugged, feigning ignorance.

Maggie, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, pealed off the some of the wax on the side of the candle and fed it to the flame.  “Come on Ember, tell me.  Why am I mad?”

Ember, who was sitting next to Maggie with his back against the outer wall, kneaded a small ball of wax in his hand.  “Are you mad that I got you into all of this?  Do you wish you were back home in Erosa?  Are you mad at me for that?”

“No Ember, I came to terms with that long ago.  That part of my life is… it’s very distant.”

Ember picked at his ball of wax and looked at the stub of his remaining candle.  “You know, if these candles go out we’ll be alone in the darkness…  No Luna to guide us.”  Maggie pondered his words and then blew out her flame.  “What are you doing?!” he asked with urgency.

“No need to have both candles burn at the same time.  When yours gets low, we’ll light mine.  That way it’ll last longer.”

“Oh… good idea.”

“You know Ember, honestly, all of that stuff is okay.  Whatever, it’s over and done with.  But… this… this was supposed to be our time—our thing.  I mean, how many times have we talked since coming over here?”

“What do you mean?  We’ve talked a lot.”

“Really talked, Ember.  How many times have we really talked?  Like our discussions of old?”

“Oh… Uh… I don’t know…”

“I mean, I get it Ember.  I know that I’m not the only one in your life, but…  I mean… I’m your sister.  Doesn’t that count for something?”

“What do you mean?  Of course it counts for something.”

“I just feel like you’d rather live inside your own head… with your own fantasies and delusions.”

“What are you talking about?!  If I was bothering you so much, why didn’t you just tell me?  Why didn’t
you
come talk to me?!  It’s just as much your fault as it is mine.”

Maggie looked at her brother through the flickering light of the candle and breathed heavily.  “It’s just… you seemed so happy… with her… with your own thoughts… in your own world.”

Ember toyed with his ball of wax, breaking it into two and then kneading it back into one.  “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault…  I should’ve said something.  It’s just… you know… we could die there… in Imperium…  and I just thought that… well… you would want to talk to me before we went.  I mean, you never even told me why you believe so strongly in the cause!  I mean, we never even talked about it!  We used to talk about everything…  No secrets…  What happened Ember?  What happened to us?  We’ve changed.”

Ember broke off a piece of his wax ball and conciliatorily handed it to Maggie to play with.  “We’re not going to die Maggie.  It will be okay.”

“You know Ember, Kara was right.  This is not our fight.  It’s not too late.  We don’t have to go in.  We can wait until it’s all over.  There’s no shame in that.  She said it herself.  How much will our contribution really help Luna and Styles anyway?  Even if it does, is it really worth the magnitude of risk that it poses to us as individuals?”

“But… there are so many more of them...  It’s not just about us…  There are thousands of lives to consider.  Though the marginal benefit to society may be small, you must multiply it by the number of lives it may affect.”

“I know,” she said, looking down from the hypnotic dance of the flame.  “I know all of that.  It’s just that…  sometimes it might be best to worry about ourselves for a change.  I mean… this is it.  Life is something special…  Should we really risk it so easily.”

“We’re not going to die Maggie,” he repeated, as if saying it might make it so.

“It’s not that I don’t care, you know…  It’s just… I thought it was something worth talking about,” she said, almost apologetically.

“No… I understand.  I had the same thoughts.  I thought about running away too.”

“But with
her.
”

Ember fed a piece of wax to the flame slowly, finally understanding the source of her sadness.  “Yes, with her,” he admitted.  “I’m sorry Maggie.  I can’t help it.”

“I know Ember, I know.”

“It is best this way…  It is best, I think, to fight for everything now, don’t you think?”

“There are two considerations…  Whether or not the mission fails and whether or not we act,” Maggie said, laying out the framework more precisely.  “If we act and it fails, we die.  If we don’t act and it fails, we live, but ask ourselves ‘what if?’  If we act and it succeeds, we are heroes.  If we don’t act and it succeeds, we are still heroes.”

“But by acting we may help in the success of the mission.  The clauses aren’t exactly independent.”

“I know, but still…  You once accused me of going about my life without thinking… without considering.  I just want to make sure that whatever it is we decide to do, we do it for the right reasons—not because we feel like we have to.”

“I hear you.  I understand the options and their payoffs.  But…  I still feel that this is the right thing to do.  Like Sven said, it gives life meaning.”

“He loves her too you know.”

“Huh?!  What?  Sven?!  Really?!”
              “Yep.  Definitely.”

Ember watched the flame flicker.  “But you agree with me…  It’s best to act.”

“Come on Ember, when was I ever the type of person to run away from challenges,” she said with a smile.

Ember smiled back.  “I know things have been kind of crazy lately.  Everything is different here in the Underground.  I feel different.  Time seemed to go so fast.  Sometimes I swear that time goes at different rates.”

“Agreed.”

“No matter…  In a day or two we will be back home in Erosa.  Everything will seem better.  It will be fun to show Kara… and Sven and Luna… to Erosa, don’t you think?  I wonder what she’ll think of the Falls.  I bet she’ll love it.”

“What about Rouge?”

A look of confusion and then understanding swept across his face.  “Oh ya, I completely forgot about her.  Something tells me that she already has another boyfriend,” he said with a laugh.

“Oh, I see… so you were a couple!”

“Haha, it wasn’t like we were trying to hide anything.  I think she’ll just be happy to see me again.  I think everyone will… They’ll be excited for the both of us.  It will be a heroes welcome—we are rising from the grave after all.  Onyx, Jade, Rouge, Violet, Ivory, Jet… All of them will be there.”

“It’s been so long.  It’s funny how it seems so far away and yet so close.”

Ember cupped his hand around the flame for warmth.  A smile came to his lips, foreshadowing to his sister a clever remark.  “It’s funny how we idiomatically describe temporal concepts with spatial diction.”

Maggie began her laugh during his mid-sentence and so as to not feel like the energy was wasted, she terminated it with a guffaw.  The whole effort, however, came across as disingenuous.  “I wonder how the Underground population will interact with Erosa.”

“I think it would probably be best if we kept the populations separate for a bit.”

“If that’s possible!” Maggie expressed doubtfully.

“Erosa couldn’t possibly support even the smallest fraction of this place.  They’ll have to venture into the rest of the forest.  It should be interesting.”

“Ya… If all of this was under our feet the whole time, who knows what lies within the rest of the forest… or even beyond the forest!  Let’s promise that if we get out of here, we’ll go explore the rest of the forest.”

“You mean
when
we get out of here,” he clarified.  “And yes, I promise… but first we need to relax for a little bit,” he said with a laugh.

“You know… it’s funny… or sad, rather… but I think that part of me is dead,” Maggie explained acceptingly. “I don’t think I can go back to the ways of the old.  I have heard and seen too much.  I can no longer accept blissful ignorance.”

“I can’t tell whether I did you a favor or not,” he said, trying to be cheerful.

“Well… I’m not exactly thanking you now am I?”

“No, but you’re not exactly yelling at me either,” he said with a laugh.

“No, I suppose I’m not…”

“I just want some explanations… and I suspect that grandfather Azure, and the rest of his council, have a lot to give.”

“See Ember, this is all I wanted…  Everything seems to make so much more sense when I talk to you.  Somehow everything seems better now.”

“Good, I’m glad,” he said, leaning in to hug his sister but tipping the candle instead.  As the candle fell horizontal on the ground, the melted wax along the apex surrounded and, rather dramatically, extinguished the flame.

“Ember?!”

“You have to be kidding me.”

“Ember?!  Matches?”

“Nope.”

She scooted up next to him.  “And that’s why we should have kept both candles lit,” Maggie admitted.

“Yep.”

Ember and Maggie tried to continue their conversation but they found the blackness too oppressive.  It was as if each word was a spark, and each sentence a shower of light, immediately and completely at ends with the intolerable darkness of their surroundings.  Though Maggie tried to keep calm, she quickly became obsessed with the idea that someone from the Abyss was going to sneak up and stab her.

“We’re completely helpless here you know,” she explained.

“It’ll be okay Maggie, let’s just try to stay calm,” Ember said, feeling a bit anxious himself.  “It’s probably only been an hour and a half…  Imperium will be no better.”

“At least there will be lights in Imperium.”

“That’s true,” he admitted.

“We’re stuck now, you realize that don’t you?  We can’t go back now, even if we wanted to.  If we try to go back, we’ll get lost… and die of starvation… or worse.”

“It’s alright, we were already committed,” Ember exp
lained.

“I know, but still…  It would’ve been nice having that option all the way up to the very end.  Hey, do you remember the way Milo left…  It was very strange…  He seemed very disturbed…  And remember, that he has my knife?!  What if he is here… right now… waiting…”

“Helllllloooooo!” Ember bellowed, trying to make an echo.  “See, no one.”  All of the sudden the sound of muffled footsteps came from the distance.

“Did you hear that?!” Maggie said, instantly rising to her feet.

“Yes!” he admitted with alarm, as he rose up beside her. 

“Go away!  Whoever you are, go away!” Maggie screamed.  There was no response.

“What do you want?!” Ember cried out, but still, no response.

Maggie and Ember stood silently for a few minutes, their ears desperately trying to scan the landscape for the smallest of sounds.  The fear and anticipation proved unbearable, leading Maggie to quickly suggest going down the tunnel.

“I know it’s a little early, but…”

“Okay,” Ember said, feeling around for the entrance to the central tunnel.

“Come on,” Maggie said, pulling her brother in the correct direction.