The Black Box

34

The edges of the glass that touches the walls, floor, and ceiling have ice crystals on them. The entire glass wall is beginning to fog up and I have an idea. I stand up and start writing, How long is this gonna take?, backwards so Isaiah can read it.

"As long as it takes," he replies speaking into a microphone.

After what felt like hours, I try to open my eyes. I thought that since I breathed underwater, why not just sleep until it's all over? For some reason I can't move at all. I give in all of my strength to open my eyes. I just see ice.

I'm frozen alive, I thought to myself.

I try to move my muscles but I can't. I look around but the ice made everything blurry. I can't even tell if I'm breathing or not. Breathing. I breath in and breath out letting out the air against the ice. Slowly but surely, the ice is melting and I can move my nose and my lips. I let the moisture go down my face and go into the cracks in the ice. I can feel my neck.

I have no idea how I could defrost myself. Just then, I feel a warm sensation in the small of my back. It grows until my whole body is warm and melts from the ice. I stand up and melt myself a "staircase" to the surface of the ice. The ceiling is higher than I thought it would be and I can stand up on the ice, my head a few inches from the ceiling. I look over the glass wall and see Isaiah standing there, clapping.
"Nice job."

"Uh. Thanks? How do I get down?"

He types something into the keypad and the ice disintegrates beneath my feet. I fall ten feet and hit the ground rolling. I get to my feet faster than I would've thought.

He presses a button and the wall vanishes.

"Are you cold Peter?" asks Isaiah with a smirk.

"Um. Not really I guess. It felt like I was standing outside in September." I rub my arms to try and get warm.

"So you could feel your body the whole time?"

"Yeah."

He walks out of the room and checks the main training room, looking both ways. He walks out and I hear him talking to someone. I catch bits and pieces of the conversation as I walk toward the doorway.

"...withstood the coldest one possible..." It sounds like Isaiah.

"Is he ready?" It's Feye's voice.

"I don't know."

I walk away from the doorway when I hear footsteps.
"Hey Peter!" Jax runs towards me and gives me a hug.

"Hi," I reply. "You're shirtless too?"

"Yeah." He looks down at his chest, "Man, you feel like you've been incased in ice. You're freezing."

"That's actually what happened."

"What?!" He backs up. "They seriously did that to you?"

"Yeah. What'd they do to you?"

"They, well Navi, walked me and Kevin to this white room with a tube in the middle of the far wall."

"We went to one of those rooms too."

"What? Really?"

"Yeah. I bet there's at least three or four here."

"Anyway, he made me go first out of me and Kevin. I went into The Tube and I started to feel numb and I started to see black flames licking my arms and shoulders eventually going down to my fingertips."

"That's almost what happened to me."

"Really?"

"Yeah. We are so dumbstruck."