Those new faces and new employees? You can probably guess how they came about by now. If not, you should be able to to figure it out by the end of this passage.

Word Count: 13,410

I thought back to before Derek had gone missing, and how I’d noticed a breeze flowing through a crack in the slate. How the tunnels were turning to dust in the living areas. Officers were switching positions, like Maiya. And now, the purification plant was being shut down. What was going on?

I could see Maiya’s look – for the first time, she showed expression, and she didn’t look happy with this man. I saw her clawing for the Mu Gun in her pocket, fiddling with it. She looked at me. I looked at the man. And I spoke, “Well, I’m still sorry about your father. About this relocation business, I don’t know anything about it. But I think—”

Before I could say anything else, Maiya had slipped. The Mu Gun was out and she’d fired it at the man, encapsulating him in a blue shield. He banged on the walls of light, but it was too strong for him to escape. She looked back at me, but didn’t say anything as the man continued to pound. His fists, with all their rage, made no sounds as they hit the sides of the encapsulation. Nothing got in. Nothing got out.

With nothing but her thoughts, Maiya raised his capsule in the air and began to walk down the hallway and out of the chamber. I, passive as ever, followed her.

Through his ellipsoid capsule, the man looked at me with sad eyes. I looked away. It was just like Derek. Now we were taking this man away, too. But I had a feeling that, wherever we took him, I would find Derek there as well. I’d had this feeling that The Embassy would have a very special way of showing me just where Derek was taken to at the start of this little mission. One way or another, I’d find Derek and anybody else like him who was taken by The Embassy and his men, and release them to freedom.

That was my ambitious, and foolish, goal. Was it impossible? I couldn’t have told anyone at the time. I couldn’t have even told myself. But in those moments, dragging this innocent man out of his stronghold, I felt a compression in my gut. I was afraid.

Yet, I was hopeful.

Together, Maiya and I made our way to the front entrance and unlocked the door. Outside, the atrium was just as empty as it had been before we entered. I could feel a breeze rushing through the caverns, but I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. Ten steps away from the purification plant, we all found out. The man was right; the atrium was collapsing – but not in a month, or even a week. As we made our way across the unstable ground, our thoughts told us that the atrium wouldn’t exist anymore by nightfall – whenever that came. Even the encapsulated man looked at the fissures that my footsteps created in the metal, and sighed a silent sigh, a requiem for the lost plant. I liked to think that there was some sadness in there for his father, too. Just a drop.

Luckily the ground became more stable as we moved into the living area; nobody mined above or below the living areas, but if the ground was sufficiently weak it still wasn’t wise to be staying there. If the atrium was going to collapse in less than a day, the relocation would start soon. I thought of packing up my things – what few things I had – in preparation to leave the shithole enclave I’d lived in for eight years.

“Where are you taking me?” the man lipped through his capsule, looking at me. I turned away from him. I didn’t want to speak with him. Soon, he wouldn’t want to speak with me.

We reached the living area where the hidden office of The Embassy rested below the sand. It was bright now, and that brightness was only amplified by the light from the Mu Gun’s capsule. We brought him down the stairs and into the polished Slate rooms, where The Embassy awaited his arrival. The door to his office opened and, thankfully, his lights were already on. He greeted us cheerfully and with open arms. I shook his hand while looking down at his shoes.

Maiya set down the capsule and retracted it into the Mu Gun. She handed it to the man. “This is yours. I think you might want it back.”
But the man didn’t take it. Instead, he was frozen solid; The Embassy looked at him, square in the eyes. He was sizing him up, like a prime cut of meat. Was this man going to qualify for whatever The Embassy’s duties required? Before I knew what was going on, I was sizing up the man as well, looking for a clue as to what made him so special. The Embassy reached into the air and pulled down a small virtual object, about the size of a button. He took it and approached the man, getting close enough to be able to touch his face.

The little button went directly on his forehead, and the man fell asleep. Knocked out cold.

“Maiya, Vincent, thank you for this. You can leave now.”

“Wait,” I said. “You promised you’d tell me about where Derek was taken to. I expect answers this time.”

“Ah, do you? Well, I suppose I could spare you some information this time. Though, if you’ve met this man, you’ve probably heard that there’s going to be a relocation soon! Why don’t we meet up after we’ve been relocated? I’ll have plenty to say to you then in my new office.” The way he said “new office” – like he was getting a promotion of some sort – made me feel sick.

Maiya and I parted ways after that, and I didn’t see her again until after the relocation began. As we’d expected, the atrium floor collapsed overnight, taking the entire purification plant with it. I suppose the man and his father would have died anyway if they hadn’t been both rescued and killed by me and Maiya. I heard the horrible collapse in my sleep. It woke up everybody – and everybody but myself was shocked. There were staff members at the scene in moments to barricade off the gaping hole left by the remnants of the atrium.

Its collapse caused a domino effect – it broke the floor below it, killing several miners, as well as the floor below that. Floors broke in succession of one another, all the way to Cydia’s core. The pit looked endlessly deep. I couldn’t even make out the purification plant from this distance; the hole degraded into darkness after a few kilometers.

But we all accepted this. It was just another part of living in a battlefield. Now we would move on; the relocation was announced later that day, and everyone was given five hours to gather their belongings for the move. We would be moving underneath district 137, a rowdy district on the surface whose local government had recently been overthrown in a coup d’etat. Apparently, that sort of thing was common around district 137. Luckily for us, we were all below the surface. One of the perks of living underground is that your government is a minimum of five kilometers away at all times; none of us ever feel the urge to overthrow one another. We simply live together as one unit, as one squadron of soldiers, as one army.

I never did keep much; I was packed within an hour. My sheets, my toiletries, my precious belongings. I’d abandoned most of it eight years before, when I came down below the surface. It seemed as though my fresh start had never lost its freshness.

Four hours later, we were all moving on foot. I saw more guards and personnel that I had never seen before, and I was sure this time that nobody new was moving in. So what was going on? At this point, I didn’t recognize half of the people relocating. With a twenty-hour trek ahead of us, through multiple districts and mining areas, it was important to me to know who I was traveling with. That my community – my squadron – had not abandoned me. The sheer number of new faces I saw as the relocation began was enough to convince me that I might have been insane; what was happening was the impossible. Nobody new could have possibly come down into the mines.