WORLD 4: AWAKENING

My eyes were large and wondrous as I stared on, completely dumbfounded.

The wind had been knocked out of me almost like I’d been hit in the stomach. Finding a few ancient balls in a field was far different than finding an actual door. Baylen was just as incredulous as I was; he stepped back with one hand over his mouth, eyes wide with a mixture of fear and intrigue. Wes didn’t seem to be as startled as Baylen and I were, though — his hands were at the metal door’s handle immediately.

He jiggled it up and down but it was no use. Not only was the door made of some heavy kind of metal, it was also incredibly old and sealed shut. The handle snapped off at the third try at opening it.

Go and get the explosives, Baylen,” Wes commanded calmly. Baylen sprinted off to the transport.

“Explosives?” I cried. “Oberon would hear something like that, Wes!”

He ran his hands all over the metal door’s corroded frame. “Maybe. But there’s a lot of rock out here, so sound will bounce all over the place. If he does hear it there’s no way to tell for sure where it’s coming from.”

I crossed my arms and shifted my weight while we waited for Baylen. My eyes flew from point to point in the landscape around us, constantly on the lookout for our enemy. Finally, Baylen came running up with the explosives in hand.

“I’ve got it!” he cried in a hushed voice. His hand went to my shoulder and he looked right at me. “I covered up the transport again, don’t worry.”

“Let’s get this open, guys,” said Wes.

The explosives were made of a long, sticky rope rolled up into a coil. Baylen had brought three sets of them; he unrolled them all along the length of the door’s frame, pressing them into place.

“Alright, stand back,” he told us.

Wes and I moved away from the door down the mountain face. Quickly, Baylen pulled the small, thin string that hung from each set of the explosives’ end to trigger the countdown.

“Five seconds!” he yelled and ran over. He wrapped his arms around me and held tight as the explosion sounded. Dirt and tiny pieces of rock bounced down the mountain almost like a light snow with the vibration. We swiftly came back and waited for the dust cloud to clear. The door was still mostly intact, but just barely offset from the frame.

“Help me, guys,” Wes urged. He grabbed the handle side and dug his fingers into the newly formed crevice. I bent down and did the same at the bottom of the door while Baylen took the top. Finally, I felt something budge.

“It’s moving!” I shouted.

We pulled even harder. The door creaked and scraped almost like it was crying out in protest after being sealed shut for so long, but it was going. A huge whoosh of air rushed into the doorframe as we pulled it further. We finally stopped when the opening became big enough for one of us to get through. Baylen took out two hand lights from his vest and gave one to me. Wes had two of his own that he turned on.

“Alright, I’ll go first,” said Baylen. His shoulders hunched and tensed up as he squeezed through the door. I heard a loud gasp. “It’s a staircase! Come in, you guys!”

I was next. I squished myself through and swept my hand light around. Baylen was right; we were on the upper landing of a staircase of some kind. The walls were made of a rough, chipped stone and felt just as ancient as the door looked.

“Come on, Dad!” Baylen called out the door.

We heard leaves rustling. “Coming! Just trying to pull some greenery over this to hide it.”

I was glad Wes was planning ahead; I hadn’t even thought about hiding the door again.

Once inside with the door shut again, Wes finally began to look interested. He shined his light up into the corners of the landing, his mouth parting a bit in awe.

“I’m going,” I said bravely, pointing my light down the staircase.

“Me, too,” said Baylen. He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me and grabbed my hand.

The stairs were just as chipped and uneven as the walls. Our lights went back and forth wildly around the blackness in front of us as we descended, highlighting thousands of dust particles in their beams. I coughed as the circulating dirt choked me.

Finally, the dark mass in front of us began to grow, increasing in size until finally opening up into a large room.

“Wow,” I whispered.

The room was just faintly lit by our hand lights, but we could see well enough. Tables were placed against every wall. I slowly came over to the nearest one. Several mounds covered in a thick layer of dust sat on the tabletop. I hesitantly poised a finger over one of the tallest ones, then wiped away a line in the dust to reveal something smooth and glassy.

“I’ve got some more light, guys,” said Baylen. He took three more hand lights from the supply bag he’d brought. “There’s metal in these walls, can you see?” My eyes followed to where he was pointing and I could barely make out a small metal post, corroded and exposed from the crumbling wall.

“Is that metal important?” I asked.

“These hand lights are magnetic, watch,” he said. After pressing a tiny button on the back of the light, he stuck it right to the wall. “See!” He looked back at us proudly.

After attaching a few more, the room became bright enough to where we could make out details more easily. Along with the tables lining the room’s edges, there were two long ones down the middle. Half of them around the room had crumbled to the ground with age, and the ones still standing looked to be incredibly fragile.

I set down my hand light on the table and gingerly grabbed the top of the tall, glass mound I’d touched. My fingers cut through the dust and felt a ball-shaped handle. I pulled upward and the entire mound rose off the table — it was a cover of some kind. The glass dome was cracked in several places but had still shielded the object underneath it from the worst of the dirt. Setting it carefully aside, I picked up the strange object and turned it over in my hands. It was fairly flat, rectangular and hand-sized, with a glassy surface that had been shattered into a thousand pieces.

I remembered the supplies I’d brought and rummaged into my bag to retrieve a few bandages. My hands moved slowly as I attempted to wipe the object clean. There wasn’t much else I could see besides the metal bottom and shattered top. I tried to look more closely to make out what was underneath the glass, but years’ worth of dust had invaded it.

“Come here, Mayla,” Baylen said in a slow, eerie voice from the next table. He’d found something.

I set down the flat box I held and ran to him, excited to see what it was. “What is it?”

He was dusting off a sculpture. It was a face — a woman’s face, carved into a bust out of stone.

I sucked in a huge breath of air. “Bay…it looks like us.”

The woman’s face was probably smooth and shiny at one point, but now sat rough and worn with age. Even though details weren’t sharp, it was still unbelievable to look at. Her features were like that of any beautiful woman on Colony Four. It was almost like gazing at a statue straight from our long-dead world.

Baylen’s fingers brushed along the edges and curves of the bust. He shook his head in amazement. We’d found out something more incredible than any Science Officer had hoped for: evidence that there were not only beings that once lived on the planet, but that they were very similar to us.

“I’ve got something!” Wes announced from two tables down. His usually serious face was lit up eagerly.

“What is it?” Baylen asked as we hurried over.

“A sheet of some kind,” he said. His fingernails sliced into the dust to lift up the edges of something flat. As I came closer I could see a pattern underneath the trails in the dust his fingers had made. He carefully pulled up one corner, then the other side. A clean rectangle showed through in the thick layer where the sheet had sat undisturbed for so long. It was fairly large; Wes had to widen his arms out a little to be able to hold it out flat. At one point it may have been clear or shiny, but had turned clouded and cracked over the years. Baylen and I used bandages to wipe away as much of the dust that we could.

It was a map.

We moved closer to the wall for more light. Something was written at the bottom of the map in symbols:

EARTH

WORLD MAP

“What do you think that says?” I asked quietly.

Wes shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. But I’m positive it’s a map of this planet. It looks almost exactly like what we saw from the windows in Colony Four.”

“This is what the planet looks like?” I whispered. I’d seen it out the windows as well, but there were clouds, and we’d been at a different angle…

“There’s slightly more land on this than what we saw from above, but yes,” Wes nodded, “this is it.”

“Wow,” Baylen said quietly.

While Wes stayed with the map, Baylen and I moved on. The next table I came to had various objects I couldn’t really make out for the most part. Some I didn’t understand at all, and some had just been too disintegrated and ruined with time to make any sense of. A very small bump almost went unnoticed until my hand brushed over it. Wiping away the grime, my heart jumped — it was a ring. The metal of the ring was incredibly worn and thin but the jewel on top was a gorgeous, clear square.

I couldn’t let that one go; I stuffed it into my vest pocket with plans to keep it for myself. As I was about to move on, my eye caught another pattern in the dust, colors peeking out from the lines my fingers had left when I’d grabbed the ring. I wiped away some more to reveal another sheet like the map we’d found. Lifting it up, I brushed it off with a bandage and held it out. It was much smaller than the map but a thousand times more fascinating.

A man smiled at me through the sheet.

It was a very faded picture of some kind. The hard, clouded corners of it were cracked and splintering, but I could still make out some detail. The man had very dark, short hair, and skin not quite as dark as Sirone and Gabring. He sat in a regal-looking chair with a proud look on his face and heavy blue curtains behind him.

Something that stood out to me were his clothes: a black coat that split open in the front with a folded collar, and a white shirt with a stiff collar visible underneath. A strange piece of red fabric was tied around his neck that hung down his front. It may have been a sign of military rank or social status, but there was no way to know for sure.

My breath had been taken from me. It was almost haunting, in a way, just like the statue Baylen had found. It was as if I was staring at a ghost. Any astonishment I’d shown at the stone bust couldn’t even compare to the picture in my hands. It was absolutely unbelievable; I was actually looking at one of the people that used to call that planet home. They’d been there, they’d lived there, and for some reason they were either gone or just hiding somewhere that we hadn’t figured out yet.

The picture was small enough to be able to take with me and there was no way I could leave it behind. It was just barely able to fit in my vest pocket; I stuffed it inside very carefully and fastened the pocket shut. I practically had a heart attack when I heard Baylen scream.

“Baylen!” I shouted and ran to him at the back corner of the room. Wes arrived at the same moment as I did. Baylen shined his light on the floor and I couldn’t hold in a shriek of my own.

Four sets of skeletal remains lay intertwined on the ground.

I gasped and took a few moments to be able to comprehend what I was seeing. There was some terror to my voice. “Those bones look just like ours,” I whispered. I turned to Wes for answers. “What is this place?”

“Some kind of a tomb?” guessed Baylen.

“More like a relic,” said Wes. “These people put different kinds of their items in here for some reason. Maybe for us…I’m not sure.”

I stared at the bones. “What do you think happened to them?”

The men shrugged and seemed as confused as I was. I crouched low to examine the remains. Baylen came down with me and shined one of his hand lights directly onto them. The skeletons had some kind of clothing mixed in with them, filthy brown and in ragged pieces from years of decay.

“I don’t see any obvious signs of death from the bones, but I don’t know for sure,” I said as I concentrated on them. Taking the remains back to Science or Medical might have given us more answers, but I wasn’t experienced enough to be able to tell myself.

“It seems like they died here together, maybe they were sick?” asked Baylen.

“Or maybe they were hiding, just like we are,” I said and turned my face to him. We exchanged a worried look.

Wes exhaled heavily. “If only those Science Officers were here, we’d probably have more answers.”

A gasp of realization escaped me and I startled, toppling sideways. “I forgot! I have something that can help!” Baylen helped pull me up to my knees. I reached into my vest for the device that Soren had given me back near the stream. “Soren had me hold onto this for him, it can tell us how old these bones are.”

“Whoa,” said Baylen. He shined the light closer for me.

I paused over the skeletons and slid out my dagger. With a grimace, I carefully pulled one of the arm bones away and began scraping tiny pieces off into the box.

“I just scrape off some bone,” I said, then slid the box shut, “and then wait for the information to come in.” I pressed the top corner to activate the device.

Soon, it lit up with different numbers.

“What does it say?” Wes asked loudly. He joined Baylen and me on the ground, just as astonished as we were.

As I took in the information I felt like I could barely speak. “Seven thousand years,” I whispered.

Baylen was almost as quiet as I was. His hand moved to my shoulder. “Those bones are seven thousand years old?”

“Do you think these were the last of them?” I asked Wes.

He shook his head and touched one of the bones. “I don’t know, possibly. But it’s also very possible that they weren’t…I just don’t know.”

I stared into the face of one of the skulls. Just like the picture I’d found, it was extremely haunting, almost like it was staring right back at me.

“Look!” cried Baylen. He was standing again, pointing at something on the back wall. There was a carving in the stone face, fading and aged, but still clearly visible. He positioned his light upward to illuminate it further:

NORTH AMERICAN WORLD TIME CAPSULE

Baylen groaned. “I wish I knew what it said.”

I reached up and slowly ran my fingers in and out of the crevices. “Me, too. Maybe it’s the name of this planet.”

“Or maybe it’s a warning,” he said back in a low voice. “Who knows.”

“We should get to bed, you two,” said Wes. “We need to focus ourselves if we’re going to be able to get back to the Colony tomorrow.”

He was right. Even though the relic room was unbelievable and more than I ever imagined we would possibly find, it wasn’t our most important issue. Oberon was, and the fact that he wanted us dead. Taking one last look at the bones, I grabbed Baylen’s arm and led him along with me, following Wes to the front of the room.

We picked a spot near the staircase to sleep. Baylen had brought in a stiff, foldable sheet of some kind from Science Lev’s storage crate in the transport. He spread it out on the ground, not giving us a comfortable bed, but at least a cleaner one.

Wes announced that he would take the first watch at the door, listening for any unusual sounds or voices, assigning me to do the second. As he quietly walked up the stairs to take his place, I threw Baylen’s coat and warming shirt to him where he sat on our make-shift bed.

“Put these on, it’s really cold down here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a grin. He put the shirt on and then immediately got back to work trying to fix our map screen.

I set down my coat and turned away from him, then lifted up my vest and light blue shirt. The series of nasty scrapes all over my front were stinging terribly again. I pulled out the tube of numbing cream from my vest pocket.

“Need help?” Baylen asked from behind. I startled and the tube dropped to the floor.

“Nope, I’m good,” I said and swiped it up quickly.

He sighed and put down the map screen, then stood up and dusted his hands off on his pants. “Like I said earlier, you’re a stubborn one. Let me see.”

I pulled my shirt back down and faced away again. “I really am capable of doing it myself, Baylen.”

“Seriously, May.” He grabbed my shoulder and turned me around, then stole the cream out of my hand. “You can’t see everything from that angle. I’ll be able to get every scratch better than you can.”

I hesitantly took off my vest. My eyes moved to the upper corner of the room and I clenched my teeth together. I couldn’t admit that I was embarrassed. I pulled up my shirt halfway. “Fine.”

He whistled as he took in the sight. “Ouch, I forgot how many of these you got everywhere.”

I stayed quiet. Baylen spread out some numbing cream onto the last bandage we had left, then began rubbing it all over my abdomen. I jerked as the first bit came into contact; it burned like fire. Only seconds later, I arched my head back with a huge, calming sigh.

“Whoever invented numbing cream should win an award of some kind,” I said and shut my eyes in relief.

Baylen grinned. “Maybe we can start that kind of thing back up.”

“What thing?”

“You know, normal things,” he said, applying cream to the last of my wounds. “Awards and ceremonies and everyday kind of stuff.” He helped me carefully pull my shirt back over my belly.

“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea. If we actually survive all of this, I’ll start the every-day thing of having dessert regularly.”

He hadn’t let go of the bottom of my shirt. He shook his head and looked right at me. “You and desserts. The most romantic love story on Colony Four.”

I chuckled softly. He moved his hand from my shirt to my waist.

“Bay!” Wes shouted in a very hushed voice.

Baylen and I both cringed at the noise; Wes was supposed to be as quiet as possible up there, not shouting down the staircase. We both stepped quickly to the stairs. Baylen cupped his hands over his mouth and whispered loudly, “What is it?”

“Just checking on the map.”

Baylen glanced at me. “I’m working on it! I’ll come up and let you know.”

We waited for him to respond. There was nothing. I gave Baylen an amused look and shrugged — for Wes, sometimes silence counted as a response.

While Baylen got back to work on the map screen, I put the supplies away and grabbed my warming shirt and coat. My body seemed to release about ten years’ worth of stress as I put them on and felt warmth begin to slowly envelop me. Securing the coat together all the way up to my neck, I sat down near Baylen on the sheet and leaned against the cold wall.

He was enjoying his trade, despite the precarious situation. He squinted as he tinkered with the map, using different tools to piece things together and re-route the power. I loved watching all the tiny changes in his expressions as thoughts raced through him. His cheeks twitching, eyebrows moving, even his mouth curling up into different shapes all made serious emotions rise up inside of me. I felt safe with him. We had a blood-thirsty hit man hunting us and still, I felt safe knowing Baylen was there with me.

Suddenly, his face lit up. “I got it!” he exclaimed. He turned the map screen to me, finally up and working.

“Thank you, Baylen,” I said and touched his knee. “You have no idea how much you may have just saved us.”

“No,” he chuckled. “I’ve just got a freaky obsession with fixing things.”

I watched him intensely again as he packed up his tools and hurried up the stairs to tell Wes the news. The second he was back and had fastened his coat, I pulled him down to me on the ground. He laid on his back and I scooted close to his body with one arm wrapped over him and my cheek against his chest. I purposely kept my gaze away from his face; there was no way I could look right at him. There were too many feelings coursing through me.

“Nite, Mayla,” he said.

I reached out and grabbed his hand. “Goodnight,” I said against his chest. I could hear his heart beating rapidly with my touch, but mine was going even faster.

A lot was on my mind, which was understandable, given the current situation. But there was more than that. It seemed like every night was bringing me something new to stress about. At that moment, Oberon was the new worry. I should have been terrified of him. He was a murderer of murderers. And supposedly his brother could be going after Colony Four. The problem wasn’t going to be an easy one to solve. But at that moment on the floor with Baylen, Oberon wasn’t the biggest thing on my mind.

Baylen gave me peace. He made me feel safe even when the odds were so terrible I had every reason to turn into an insane nutcase. The reason that my heart was racing and that I couldn’t look him in the eye just yet was because I’d made an important realization. I finally understood what Jinna had been talking about.

Baylen was my home.