Eye of the Raptor [DISCONTINUED]

Chapter Eight

A/N: 14-year-old me didn't know how to end this chapter, so...that's why it ends weirdly. x3 Please vote and comment!
Also, the Birdy song would probably fit better later on in the story, but meh.

The trashbox smelled faintly of rotting food and other trashy smells. That was normal. But what wasn't quite as normal was that the inside of the trashbox wasn't the inside of a trashbox. Several threads of sunlight that streamed in through cracks in the spacious box revealed that it was some sort of cramped, smelly foyer with a door cut into the ground.

Raige curled her nose. "What...the hell?"

Tygron tugged on a ring on the door, which opened up to expose a steep staircase. "Watch your step," he said, and he began to climb down.

Willow, Cyrus, and the tall man followed. Raige had no choice but to hurry after Cenerien.

She descended the precipitous steps in darkness. Cenerien kept jerking her rope. She lost her balance and nearly fell and hissed at the boy more than a dozen times. The air grew stuffier the deeper they descended. The ancient scent of dust and decay flooded Raige's senses. Were they descending into the belly of the planet? That sure could explain the heat. But what explanation could there be for someone building a set of stairs leading down into no man's land?

After a long time, a hazy light appeared below. Raige saw the dust-rimmed silhouettes of her captors walk into the luminescent splotch and disappear. She sighed in relief as she finally stepped off the cracked concrete stairs.

The light came from a dingy, empty room with a dozen hallways branching out from it. The source of the blurry yellowish light was an old-fashioned lightorb, which was far larger and uglier than the ones that illuminated the halls of the Sky Palace. A shaft cut into the farthest wall puffed out warm air. Overall, the place was ancient. Stuffy. Whatever this underground hellhole was, Raige hated it. If she couldn't see the sky, she would never like it.

"Come on," Tygron said. He led them down one of the halls, which was narrow and twisted, with walls bleak and unwelcoming.

Suddenly, the man in sunglasses tripped over a rather large chunk of the wall that lay on the floor. He cursed, grabbed at the air to catch himself, landed-hard.

"That has to be the fiftieth time I've tripped on that-that thing!" he said. "I thought I asked Metrich to get rid of it."

Raige lifted an eyebrow. "How could you not have seen that? It was right in front of you. It's, like, the size of your head."

The man turned his head to look at her. She gasped.

He wasn't, in fact, wearing sunglasses. The glasses he wore were clear, translucent, not dark at all. It appeared that the lenses became dark in the sunlight, and now that they had cleared, Raige could see his eyes. His milky, inert, colorless eyes.

"You're blind," she said.

The man gave a harsh bark of laughter. "Unfortunately."

Willow snorted. "You'd think that after twelve years in darkness, Kendill would learn to get around." She grabbed the tall man's elbow and heaved him to his feet.

Kendill wobbled around for another two seconds before he appeared to remember how to walk. "I never was completely blind," he said to the blonde girl. "I remember a time when I could see colors-not just colors, but things. Like my first mini-motoron." He sighed wistfully. "It was blue."

"Stop your yammering," Cenerien said. "What's in the past stays in the past. You became blind. Great. Now deal." He yanked on Raige's rope to urge her along.