Undefined - The Zephyr Book 1 ? (completed)(#Wattys2016)

Chapter 22 - Syianne

22 - Syianne

The office elevator brings me downstairs to "take the tour". I stare at the cavernous hall, the "Portal". After scanning the line of silver-clad Jewels in front of the glass elevator, I search for something that tells me where I need to go. The place reminds me of a train terminal. Across the far side there are three huge flat-screens with rows of numbers, names and times, like a train schedule with a platform number and a final destination. The third screen is different from the others: It looks like something taken out of an action film, a round dark green radar screen with colorful dots drifting over its surface like leaves on a pond. The dots flicker, blinking in and out of sight in a steady tattoo, like beating hearts.

Tiger's story of the Zephyr taking people and not returning them comes to mind as I notice how the dots are drifting about in twos. It is strangely disturbing to think of one of those dots wandering over the dark face of the radar for days until it finally flickers out forever.

I look away from the screen with a shudder, my gaze coming to rest on the only sign in the hall; it says "Central Control Room". There isn't really anywhere else I can go, my only other option are the toilets. I cross the hall and peek into the open double doors of the Control Room.

It looks like the command deck of the spaceship in a science fiction television show. Dozens of large screens, each showing something else which I can't decipher, mainly jumbles of numbers and colours, line one wall. There are perhaps a hundred Jewels, all Undefined, sitting in three half-circle rows, drumming furiously on the touch screens in front of them. The central and largest screen shows the radar again.

"UE in P16," announces an Undefined man with thick horn-rimmed spectacles standing with a worried expression, as he supervises. It looks like he's trying to see everything at once. "Evacuate 454B, 667R to a 15 meter radius."

"On it, Lev," pipes in the small voice of a tiny, brunette Undefined woman sitting in the front row before the screens. She's so small that the chair she's sitting in looks huge. She adjusts her white headpiece, her fingers rapping over her screen. "454B, 667R, UE in P16. Evacuate, I repeat, evacuate to 15 meter radius."

"Milon, pull up the EL Fade chart," Lev commands, as he scrutinises the screens. The main screen changes from the radar to a very complicated colourful graph showing hundreds of different colourful columns and zigzagging lines with equations along the edges. It looks like a drawing of a furious four year old who found crayons in every imaginable colour. Lev points to an area in the graph. "There, what's going on there?"

"It looks like an erratic field," suggests an Undefined man with a large round face.

"Or an under-sustained area," intones a rather bony Undefined woman with a pointed nose.

Lev rubs his chin and strides up to a touch screen that sits before an empty seat. He taps it a few times. "Looks like it's in UD12 — send Team G to investigate, please."

"Exciting, isn't it?" says a voice behind me. I start and turn around. An Undefined girl around my height smiles at me, one of those adorable faces that are like a human manifestation of a porcelain doll and I can only envy the way her blond hair falls to her shoulders in perfect shining bouncy locks.

"I'm Kaitha Luegreem, you're Syianne, right? We're waiting for you to start the tour." She waves her arm toward two people waiting on a nearby bench. I recognise Fellin Quaine, who is grinning broadly at me, and the other is a sandy-haired, bespectacled boy who looks like he's not yet twelve years old. He wears an evil glare as he looks at me, as if he already hates me. I guess it's because I'm staring at him, I can't help it — his Jewel is black.

The thirteenth Black.

"Is Cello joining us?" Kaitha asks.

I shake my head, "No, he left through a hole in the wall." Fellin's eyebrows shoot up at my comment.