The Gemini Age: Book One

[13-1] To Blindly Leap - Part One

    A whirring sound began to bleed through the walls, and Skye watched the lights outside the prison cell flicker. The facility's ventilation shunted into life around the hour mark to keep the air breathable, yet the need to keep the building's electricity flowing under the city's radar meant diverting power from the lighting system. The blackout was arriving a few minutes earlier than usual, but few would notice the anomaly, let alone raise suspicions. Skye rose to her feet and dusted herself off. Thanks to Nora, the place would be pitch-black for long enough to put the plan into action.

    Skye peered through the slats in the cell door, noting that the dying lights and persistent noise had no perceptible effect on Wilfred. He was still sat cross-legged in the middle of his cell, still a sturdy stone jutting from a foaming current, still on the verge of drifting away from the ground and disappearing into thin air. "What are you doing all the time?" Skye asked as she tapped on the door.

    The counsellor remained silent. Even in the growing dark, his face was grey with grief, devoid of both emotion and conscious thoughts.

    "I know you heard me, old man! Answer me!"

    No response came, and Skye pressed her fingers against the slats to check there were really gaps to speak through between them. The brush of the warm air through the door did little to steady her heart. Without the counsellor's rambling chatter filling the air, Skye could not unhear the barrenness of the facility holding them both in its jaws.

    As the buzzing of the lights grew louder, Skye counted the minutes before the black-out arrived. The artificial night could not come soon enough. Despite their predictability, the facility's population complained that the regular bouts of darkness made their jobs all but impossible to complete. She smiled. In a few minutes, she would hope their complaints were legitimate.

    "It's a centring meditation." Wilfred's steady voice alerted Skye to how far she had wandered from the cell in her thoughts. By the time she arrived back at the cell door, Wilfred had risen to his feet. "I practice it in times of stress to cultivate calm. By appreciating the moment and placing myself within the wider context of things, I put my problems into perspective."

    "You should try something else. It seems to me that, even after all your meditation, you're still stuck inside this cell."

    "And you're still stood outside it."

    Skye pressed up against the door with a grunt, kicking its broadside with her boot. "Not for long! This isn't what my father planned for me!"

    "Yet here you are regardless." Bundled around his frame as he stood in the centre of his cell, Wilfred's suit revealed a patchwork of crumbling mud stains and frayed stitching around its edges. He was unbound, yet he remained in place as if bolted to the floor. "Sometimes, we focus so much on what we believe we see that we end up overlooking what's really there."

    The lights rang out before they shut off and gave way to the darkness. "Save your lectures for another day, old man," Skye smirked, lighting up her fingertips and letting their slight glow brush her cheek. "You can get back to your meditation. I'm breaking out of here."

    Wilfred's silence swirled through the air of his cell.

    Snuffing out her flames and keeping her breathing slow, steady, and quiet, Skye felt her way along the corridor walls. She slithered along the side of the walkway to keep her bootsteps muffled by the whirring of the ventilation system, the fans growing louder the closer she travelled to the centre of the sublevel. In her head, she had executed the plan confidently and calmly every time, yet now she winced at the thickness of her heartbeat as it strained through her fatigues. Every drop of saliva landed like lead on her tongue between breaths.