Experiment X

21 | A Name

21 | A Name

.. … ..

Everything is afire. Mottled masses relics of buildings. Rusted, shiny, and cars, trucks, and even the new, sleek Hoverods alike. All up in smoke. That spews from the busted open windows, craggy, and ripped open wounds, blackened scars left by the bombing raid that only just ended. The clouding, choking smoke makes it difficult to breathe, and fly for Tallie as she drifts through it all, holding a hand against her mouth, coughing.

Her chest heaves, and rattles with the dust and debris floating in the black, thick air. The heat is sweltering, and she can feel the sweat trickling down the back of her neck, as she frantically searches for the billboard to find her partner Seke. Squinting her eyes, her breathing ragged she flits through the smog in hopes that he would be somewhere nearby.

He has to be here, the thought pulses through her pacing mind. From the east, there’s a gust of unexpected wind and lessens the thickness of the veil of dust, revealing the surroundings with more clarity than before, but it was still difficult to see much of anything wholly.

Well, there’s the billboard…but no him. Floating around, searching still her breathing begins to quicken, and an unsettling frantic begins to settle in, clenching at her stomach. Nausea bubbles inside of her, and she feel her heart pulses achingly in her head. Oh where is he? Where is he? She thinks over and over. Suddenly, she realizes what if she’s being watched? And if she calls out to him, would that only alert others too?

“Hey! Over here! Over here!” she hears a familiar voice from below, and her heart sinks into relief.

“I can barely see anything!” she calls out into the pluming smoky veil. “Where are you?”

“I’m over here,” she hears him again. “Follow my voice! And hurry…I think I’m hurt.”

Oh no, Tallie thinks. Great. She does exactly as he says, and hones herself toward his voice, as he would call out a “here” every now and then. And finally, she spots him, emerging out of the filthy gloom, lying against the slated roof of a stooping building that had somehow missed destruction of the nearby bombing. She sees he’s struggling to sit up, leaning onto a folded arm, squinting from pain or just because of the smoke and dust, Tallie doesn’t know. She smiles at him, when her feet touch the roofing, and he attempts to return it weakly.

“Hey, there you are,” she says quietly.

“Yep, here I am.” He expresses this with a motion of his arms, letting them fall again beside him.

“I don’t see any blood, that’s good.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, nodding. “I think I just sprung my ankle…I hit the roof pretty hard while teleporting here…The bombs took me by surprise; and, the blast knocked me far, and mid-fall I managed to teleport here.”

“Oh, okay,” she says, sighing, sitting by his side, her eyes trailing the snaking, spiraling streams of smoke surrounding them.

“Yeah,” he repeats. “It’s nothing that can’t heal soon; I should be fine tomorrow at least.”

“Also you don’t really have to walk,” Tallie points out for him, “considering…Lucky you.”

“This is true.”

Tallie embraces herself, pressing her lips into a line. “We should get out of here as soon as you think you can stand. I don’t have a good feeling about this place…I feel as though…I don’t know. That we’re being watched.”