Cipher Code {complete}

Chapter Thirteen: Maddened And Insane •EDITED•

There was something about encountering a problem and not being able to solve it that really ticked off Dawn.

Sitting in a chair-as comfortable as it might be-and staring at the same stretch of information while barely moving her eyes away from it for a period of three days was starting to tear at her consciousness.

The musky stench of damp dirt and the acrid smell of rusted metal bit unremittingly at her nostrils, and the reek of the moist and musty air compelled her to hold her breath at intervals in a useless attempt to preserve her sense of smell.

Dawn didn't really want to be here, but this was her thinking place-something about being put in a distressing situation and trapped in solitude improved her inventiveness. But these seventy-two hours of stillness, hunger and self-punishment would all be in vain if she didn't get the answer to what she was looking for by today.

The room she sat in was dimly lit and small. A single, ancient light bulb swayed teasingly above her head, flickering with varied brightness as was expected in an abandoned cellar-at times it sporadically switched off only to spark back to life with a burst of current.

Thin wires snaked around the floor with faint glimmers of electricity running over their supposedly insulated surface. Seeing that, Dawn knew that she should have gotten the more expensive kind, but still the faulty cables served their purpose. The blue, red and black strips of plastic-dressed copper twisted around on the cemented floor her feet rested on, like little worms with a visible pulse wiggling around the legs of her table and ending in a tangled ball of electronic disaster by an unseen outlet somewhere in the room.

The professor shifted her body away from conducting cables and dragged her gaze back to her computer screen. At this point all the words looked like little lines of black blurs, obsidian technology that poured from her CPU and was transformed into a string of coded characters.

Dawn felt like throwing up.

The creaking steel walls around her danced and spun, nauseating movements in the faintly flashing light. The cables on the floor slithered like slippery serpents in a pond of melting concrete, bewitching to look at but terrifying to acknowledge.

She heard their soft hisses and felt the painful nudges from their fangs.

Dawn tried to remind her mind that there was a floor-and that she was hopelessly alone underground-but somehow the thought of being in the company of snakes and sinking deep into the earth seemed much better than forcing herself to calm down and continue her pointless research.

A groan slipped past her parched lips as she placed her head on the solid steel table in front of her and sucked in a deep breath while resisting the urge to throw up.

"Well braek," she cursed fiercely and bit her lip, peering at the screen in front of her and choking on the bile in her throat.

I've gotten nowhere. Dawn shook her head in displeasure and wiped the drool at the corner of her mouth with her stained sleeve-originally a vibrant sky blue but now with an additional blend of dust-colored rust water and gall.

Corey was still unconscious the last time she checked and yet-despite the amount of time she spent on finding a solution-she didn't know what was wrong. Dawn wasn't afraid that he would die, she was scared that he would never wake up again.