Book of Glitch – Chapter 11

Part IV

The blast had managed to knock Syena to the lab floor, but she sensed no additional damage had been done. As she rolled onto her side, she blinked through the dusty haze to see faint, red light shining out from the edges of the lab’s door. She felt a gust of wind whip across her cheek and looked over to see a crater-sized hole in the wall where she had just been standing with Joshua. 

“Joshua?” she called out. “Elder Joshua, are you all right?”

But with the tower’s emergency alarms blaring in her ears, she could hardly make out the sound of her own voice. She clambered onto her knees and began to poke through the debris in the darkened room. The explosion had extinguished all of the illuminators, while floating ash muddled her vision and made it impossible to keep her eyes open as she sifted through the wreckage. Syena continued to cry out for Joshua, but the young Elder did not answer.

The smoky air had made it unbearable for her to breathe, so she began to crawl toward the cavity in the lab wall. She gulped down several breaths of fresh air and prepared to renew her search, when she noticed some sort of material had snagged onto the glass at the edge of the opening. She inched closer to the patch and shuddered as she recognized in the pale moonlight that it was of the same shade of dark-green as his robe.

Collecting her nerve, Syena neared the portal once more. This time she peeked out from the hole in hopes of finding a dangling man that she could still reach. Instead she saw another piece of Joshua’s garment frantically flailing about in the wind some three stories further down. She shouted into the darkness, but no answer came from below. Staring down at the shredded material she held, Syena traced the frayed threads with shaking fingers. She tied the ragged scrap around her wrist and clenched/balled her fists together in her lap.

Syena sprang to her feet and stomped over to the lab door and raced down the hallway. She considered hitting the call button for the lift elevator, but the power outage had disabled them. Slipping her hand through one of the lifts’ glass doors, Syena wrenched them opened and stared down into the empty shaft. She reached out for the thick cables hanging down from above the center of the shaft. She tugged forcefully at the two cables before facing away from the opening and repelling her way down the shaft.

The cables whined under her weight for six of the thirty stories she had to disembark. Without warning the wires finally snapped and Syena found herself hurtling toward the top of the stalled lift car. She braced herself as her body crashed through the plate-glass like a pebble through still water. As she burst through its floor, she reached out for anything that would delay her impact. Her hand managed to catch hold of the short ledge on the other side of the glass doors the lift car had not made it to. But the force with which she had gripped the ledge was too great and her hand sunk eight inches into the mortar.

Once she settled her hand into the groove, Syena looked down to see how far she was from the main floor. She estimated that she had fallen at least ten stories before colliding with the elevator car. Looking up she saw what she thought might be an eleven or seventeen painted onto the wall in black underneath her ensnared right hand. Not being able to discern the remaining distance to the ground level, Syena considered the gamble. If it were eleven stories left before reaching the bottom she could absorb the impact of the drop safely, but seventeen stories put her at great risk of fracturing her rock-like limbs. She stared at the crushed digit trying to decipher if it had once been a one or a seven next to the intact one on its left.

From below her another explosion sounded from outside of the tower, but it shook the glass doors above her. Syena looked up at the dark-green scrap from Joshua’s robe she had tied to her wrist, took a deep breath and kicked off from the wall she had buried her hand in. The force of her dismount pushed her toward the back wall of the shaft and in this way she managed to bound back and forth between walls long enough to make it to a safer distance before hurtling the remainder of the way down the shaft.

A crackle like cannon fire reverberated up the lift’s shaft as Syena crashed into its base. She paused for a moment to ensure she hadn’t fractured any of her limbs before climbing back up the shaft wall toward the doors and punching her arm through the glass. The shards rained down on her but she stomped through, paying no mind to the tatters they were reducing her frock to. She charged toward the main doors, which had been shaken loose from their hinges and stepped into the settling chill of the night air.

The damage from the second explosion had done the least damage to the tower’s entrance. The great stairs leading into the building had been pummeled to pebbles and the steel walls had been charred so severely that they had warped into large, brown welts which reeked of burning iron. Syena left over the concaving staircase and landed on the main street, which was all the more worse a scene. Every inch of the road seemed to have been dug up and turned over. She searched for signs of Joshua both underneath and atop the rubble, this time not paying much regard to the possibility that she might crush him under her dense weight.

She dug through the rubble for well over a half an hour, paying no attention the older Stonie male approaching her.

“Pardon me, Miss?” spoke the gruff voice. “What have you got yourself up to this evening?”

Syena did not answer/hear the male, but continued to toss every pebble and grain of rubble/concrete over her shoulder instead.

“Oi, Miss. I asked what you getting up to there?” he repeated.

Finally taking note of her addresser, she turned about to face him with an expression on her face that seemed to repel her pursuer. He withdrew for a moment only to redouble his efforts as she continued to sift through the rubble at the foot of the tower. 

“I’m speaking to you love,” he continued. “What are you looking for? Maybe I could help you if you’d be so kind as to do a little something for me.”

The male took several steps toward the girl, growing bolder as Syena’s insolence continued. She was chucking small boulders and steel plates over her shoulder in her search, not considering how close the male had drawn near. Finally, one of the slabs of concrete collided with his skull and knocked him onto his backside. He shot up from the ground with a reflection of lecherous intent smeared across his hardened face. Recovering from his blunder, the pursuing Stonie shot to his feet and stomped over to Syena with his thick hand outstretched.

“See her, you…”

“Hey there, mate,” another voice sounded. “How ‘bout you leave my gem here alone, all right?”

Syena paused her search to see who had spoken up. As she looked back she her harasser’s claw a few inches short of her shoulder and a younger Stonie male holding him by the wrist.

“Who the hell are you, boy?” the gruff Stonie barked.

The youth winked at Syena and threw the other male’s predatory arm away from him.

“Like I said, she’s my gem,” he answered. “Why don’t you ship off, all right?”

The young male approached Syena and placed his arm around her waist. She immediately brushed it off, but he continued the charade several times. Finally she shoved him away and turned to continue her hunt for the missing Elder. The older male had all the while been standing before the younger Stonie seething. He made an attempt to push the youth aside to renew his pursuit of the girl, but the younger stepped in front of him.

“Are you chipped in the head?” the older rebuked. “Get out of my-”

But the male could not finish as he had once again found himself knocked down onto his backside, this time by the Stonie youth. For a moment, the older gawked at his junior with his mouth drooping as the younger reset from the strike he had just dealt the offender. He reached for his nose and winced.

“Son of a dusty shell, you broke my nose,” he hollered.

The brutish Stonie rose up clutching his nose and stormed off, cursing both Syena and the young male Stonie throughout his retreat. The defender sneered as he watched the lumbering aggressor stumble away clinging to his now crooked nose. Syena flung a chunk of charred steel behind her, which struck the boy’s back.

“You’re welcome, dearie,” he said. As she did not cease in her digging, the male continued, “Name’s Iggy, what do you go by? No don’t tell me, I bet you I’ll guess. Rockelle, no wait, Concretia?”