Chapter Twenty Five
Dark green-grey lit by dull orange lights. Every corridor looked the same. They were all long, narrow and metal and all had the same heavy cabin doors with handles that jutted out into the dull empty space. We walked quickly through the corridors, opening alternate doors to cover more ground and save time.
It must have been about ten minutes since we had descended down the spiral staircase into the cavernous depths of the boats. So far we had only scoured one floor, and had found nothing. The hollow groaning of the heavy vessel, coupled with the loud hum of the engine and the rhythmic clanking of metal, made every turn of every corridor more frightening. I wanted to get off this boat as soon as I could.
I thought back to Captain Harris, his lifeless eyes staring down at the floor, the blood saturating my brother’s clothes, and I thought about his young son. Guilt swept over me like a wave; the burden of responsibility pummelling me. I knew that everyone else in our group would feel the same. It was our fault that he died. Our reckless decision cost him his life.
“I think I’ve found something!” Madzimoyo whispered. He was way out in front of me, but his voice echoed loudly down the reverberating tube. This corridor only had one large door at the very end of it, and Madz and Gamba rushed ahead to look inside. I followed, lightly jogging towards them. They held the door open so that I couldn’t see either of them, and as soon as I got to the iron-wrought slab, I dodged around it and was at the doorway. They had both gone inside the room, which glowed a vibrant red, so I flowed them inside, cautiously.
It must have been only a couple of steps along a grated platform before I bumped into one of my brothers. I wasn’t sure which one, because I was too busy staring at the mound of waste that was piled high in front of us, taking up almost three floors. The stench was hideous, so I held my nose closed as tightly as I could. Looking through the slush heap, I could see dozens of pharmaceutical boxes, hundreds of drums of waste, and piles of electrical goods all crushed beyond recognition. It was a seething, putrid mass of rubbish. And it made me feel sick.
I rushed out of the room, which was more like a hall, as quickly as possible, and my brothers soon joined me. Gamba slammed the door behind him and then pressed his body against it, stretching his arms wide.
“I guess we found the waste then. Seems like the Elementus Populas were right this time.”
“But how are we going to stop them?” I questioned.
“We need to get off the boat first,” Gamba stated seriously. And he was right.
“Okay, listen.” I had my brothers’ attention. “Let’s go back to the meeting point. Hopefully we’ll run into the rest of them there, and then we can all leave the boat together.”
They both nodded in agreement, so we set off, back towards the spiral stairwell that would take us back up to where we had come from.
We dashed as fast as we could down the similar looking corridors, until I realised that something was terribly wrong. We were completely lost.
“Which way do we go?” I asked Madzimoyo desperately.
“Just follow the breadcrumbs,” he joked, but I didn’t laugh.
“We’ll be fine,” Gamba tried to reassure me. “We’ll find our way out… It can’t be that difficult…”
“They’re here!” A voice cried out in English. The three of us spun around to see a group of guards, dressed similarly to the man who had killed Captain Harris. Because the corridor was so narrow, I couldn’t see how many people there were, but my guess was that there were quite a few.
Just when I was about to ask what to do, Madz screamed out: “RUN!”, and without thinking, we all followed his lead as he sprinted down the corridors. Our feet thundered loudly, and my chest rose up and down heavily. With every corner we turned, it seemed as if we had gone deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, and were further away from finding an escape.
“We’ve got them trapped!” Another voice called out, and almost instantly we saw another group of guards several metres away, directly in front of us. They were blocking our escape.
“What are we going to do?” Madz cried out, and then whispered, “How can we use our powers down here?”
And once again, he was right. There wasn’t much that he could really do, unless a toilet just so happened to be nearby that he could squeeze a plant through. But Gamba and myself on the other hand could use ours. I looked at him and he indicated that I take one side, while he take the other, leaving Madz to cower in the middle of us. I immediately turned to my right, to face the group of people that had been chasing us, and Gamba turned to his left, to tackle the new guards who had us trapped.
I could very quickly feel the tunnel begin to heat up, and knew that Gamba was going to turn this corridor into a sauna. I wiped the sweat from my brow as I rubbed my hands together, allowing my clammy palms to touch. I then squeezed them in and out, allowing air to go in, and was soon creating bubbles that I released into the air. Very quickly I had made about a hundred, and directed them all to become a wall that would block the guards on my side.
As the corridor grew hotter and hotter, condensation running down the metal walls and almost turning the floor into a small stream, I knew that Gamba must be pretty close to hurling his steam at the enemy. I awaited their anguished cries, as I locked my orbs in place and held them there. No one could get through: it would be like smashing through a wall of cemented tennis balls.
“Hoods up!” One soldier cried out. I waited a beat, and realised that nothing seemed to be happening. No one was screaming. Suddenly, it was Gamba who roared in anger.
“It didn’t work!”
“What do you mean?”
As Madzimoyo blubbered uncontrollably between us, I saw swarms of guards burst through my wall of suds, which was impossible. It was now my turn to scream, which I did.
“How is this happening?” I shouted, my voice echoing throughout the enclosed space.
“It’s the suits!” Gamba realised, “The suits! They’re like the ones that Niyol told us about!”
And then it hit me. He was right. The suits that Valeska had been creating so that she could take on the Ventus. She must have been doing the same thing when she lived with us.
But then a huge sense of dread dropped onto my lungs, and for a few seconds I stopped breathing. This boat we were on… Why was it full of Inimicus? But I didn’t even need to ask myself that question, because I already knew the answer.
It was a trap.
We had been led here. It was no accident. The best place for attacking me and my siblings would be a steel corridor, where water wasn’t readily available. Add to that the fact that they were wearing costumes that made our powers redundant; we were like fish in a barrel. But if they thought that we were minnow, we would prove them wrong. We were more ferocious than that, as they would soon find out.
I clenched my fists and raised my arms defensively, as I took a fighting stance. We weren’t going down without a fight.
The first person who tried to grab a hold of me received a strong punch in the throat. The second I kicked in the stomach. The third I grabbed by the chest and threw against the wall of the ship. But even though I was succeeding at knocking down the ones nearest to me, there were still many more to replace them, and pretty soon I was being held by several different sets of hands, and I could no longer fight. I struggled as hard as I could, but one person had my arms locked against the cold metal wall while another pinned my legs, and another my waist. I began to scream, not out of fear but out of anger, and continued to thrash my head around, until it too was slammed against the strong steel. The only thing I could see of our attackers were their eyes, staring evilly out from their black hooded costumes. They watched all three of us, and glared at me as I was unable to move. This time, I screamed in terror.
I looked to my left and saw that Madzimoyo hadn’t put up much of a fight, and held his arms up in surrender. Gamba on the other hand was continuing to punch and kick his way throu
gh guards, but he too was beginning to lose. Pretty quickly, Gamba was also slammed against the rigid wall, pinned by numerous men and women who tried their hardest to keep him in place.
“Stop fighting them! We can’t win!” Madzimoyo was trying to calm us down, and stop us from retaliating against our attackers, but we weren’t listening to him. I continued to do everything in my power, but my muscles ached and my joints screamed in pain. My heart beat rapidly, and I knew that I was growing weary, and within minutes wouldn’t be able to fight back even if I wanted to.
“Please stop! Stop!”
For some reason, I decided to listen to my brother, and so did Gamba. We both stopped fighting against the guards, giving us time to catch our breath and allowing our bodies to get some much needed respite.
“We’re outnumbered!” Madz continued, “There are at least a dozen people here!” He looked at me meaningfully, and his eyes moved from his left to his right. “And there’s nothing we can do as long as they have these suits on!”
And with that, Madzimoyo, my brother who vowed never to fight against another human being, leapt on to the back of one of the guards and ripped his hood off, to reveal his confused face.
The other guards were too stunned to do anything, so when Madzimoyo jumped onto the back of another sentry and ripped his hood off, they failed to notice the ball of steam that Gamba had created and thrust into their faces. They clutched at their cheeks and screamed in pain, at the same time that Madz was attacking the people pinning me to the wall. After he ripped the hood off the woman who was pinning my right arm, the man pinning my left arm turned and punched Madz in the face, breaking his nose and making blood burst out of it. He doubled up in pain and then dropped to the floor, and just before the man and woman began to kick him, I ripped off two of the other guards’ hoods and then rubbed my hands together as quickly as possible. The bubbles that I expelled into the air met their marks, and as they smashed into the faces of our attackers, they caused mini explosions which threw their bodies backwards, against the other guards. The man who was about to kick my brother screamed as I tore his hood off and Gamba’s prepared steam burnt his flesh. I then pushed the injured man into the soldiers on my right and dashed across to the ones holding Gamba, blindly grabbing at their heads and hoping I would pull off their hoods too. Very quickly I realised that Madz was up and doing the same thing, and while we tore their suits off, Gamba would scold them. Within seconds the sentries, who saw what was happening, realised that they were in trouble, and so turned and began to run down the corridors in opposite ways.
Now that the guards holding Gamba had been defeated, I grabbed Madz’s arm and pulled him along, knowing that he was suffering from serious injuries. But as we ran as fast as we could down the corridor, I noticed that he was scraping his hand against the wall of the ship, collecting water in his hand and then throwing it at his face. After a few seconds his nose looked fine, and the bleeding seemed to have stopped.
Realising that I was probably going delusional from the heat, I was very relieved when we finally found the spiral staircase leading up to the main level of the ship. Gamba took the steps two at a time, so I followed his example, but I was soon worn out and had to slow down. Madzimoyo seemed to be full of energy, probably because he hadn’t done much fighting, and so encouraged me to keep going, even when it felt as if my legs would drop off.
Minutes later, we were on the floor that we wanted to be on, and dashed out of the metal portal into the moonlit night. The cold crisp air felt good against my skin, and as I inhaled, trying desperately to get my breath back, I was thankful that we had escaped our ordeal. I looked towards the bright city lights that began to twinkle in the distance merrily, and considered running to the edge of the ship and diving into the sea. I wanted to leave this wretched boat, and never come back. We had found what we had been ordered to discover, and it had already cost one person their life.
But then I shook my head, remembering that this was in fact a set up. Someone had lured us onto this boat to kill us. It clearly wasn’t Captain Harris and, as I still doubted that the Ventus were our enemies, it only left four obvious suspects: Babajide, Sigwald, Malik and of course, Diane, who wasn’t actually the ‘real’ Diane at all. But judging by the way Captain Harris had been dealt with; I doubted that she was still alive, so that left us with three possible traitors. Unless it was in fact none of them, and someone else entirely. Or it was actually one of the Ventus, and I had been wrong to go with my gut instinct.
Finally, my breath was restored to my throbbing lungs, and I began to breathe normally again. I immediately turned to my brothers.
“Are you alright?”
Gamba nodded, still out of breath, his mouth hanging open and tongue waggling out. He must be dehydrated: I knew that using his powers caused him to deplete the water stored in his body. I looked around, hoping that there was a water fountain nearby, but then I realised that there almost certainly wouldn’t be.
I turned to Madzimoyo, and rushed over to him, grabbing his cheeks with my hands and inspected his nose. Apart from the dried blood that had spattered across his face, he looked fine. His nose wasn’t broken at all.
“Does it hurt?” I asked him.
He pushed my arms away and shook his head.
“It’s okay. It’s fine.” My brother was a lot sturdier than I gave him credit for.
“We need to get back to the meeting place,” I began, walking down the ship, towards our destination, “We need to…”
My instructions were cut short by a bloodcurdling scream. I looked up and saw a guard, dressed in the same special suit but without a hood, fall from above and drop head first into the water. There was a loud splash, followed by footsteps rushing across the deck overhead.
Without hesitating, I ran back to the doorway that led to the stairwell, and hurried up them as fast as I could. On the next floor up, I was almost instantly greeted by Sefarina, who smiled at me warmly.
“They have suits on that stop our powers from working,” she told me assuredly, as if nothing bad was going on around us.
“I know,” I informed her, bracing my body against an attacker as I saw a shadow moving behind my ally. Just as I was about to kick the person in the face, I realised that it was in fact Niyol. He saw my pouncing body language and threw his hands up cautiously.
“It’s just me.”
“You’re lucky: I almost kicked you in the face.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
Normally, I would have laughed, but I couldn’t. The events of today were weighing down upon me heavily. I just wanted to get off of this boat and swim away.
“We found it,” I told them, as Madz and Gamba stopped behind me in the stairwell.
“The toxic waste?” Niyol confirmed.
I nodded. “It’s about three floors deep, and spans the entire length of this boat.”
“That’s disgusting!” Sefarina cried out.
“You didn’t have to smell it,” I added sharply.
“Where’s Shasa and Aura?” Gamba’s head hovered over my left shoulder. He directed his question at both of them, so they simultaneously shrugged and answered that they didn’t know.
“We need to find them,” I said, “so that we can get out of here.”