Mahingga

Chapter 7: Control Room

Ako exhaled and raised his eyebrows. His insides squirmed with excitement.

"Have a look around, but be quick. I want to see what you think about it, Ako," Taiyo said and set his lamp down next to one of the screens.

Kita stayed put, just staring at the room with wide eyes, but Ako stepped down and walked to the nearest panel. It had a set of controls across a board and a swiveling chair that was bolted to the floor before it. The panel looked like a sheet of smoothed glass, though it had been scratched and slightly cracked, it seemed like it might still have been intact. "The technology doesn't seem too different as far as the basic system is concerned."

"Yeah," was all Taiyo said.

Ako pushed some of the buttons and slid his finger across the panel, but nothing happened. There was no power, of course. Power...how would the power get here without Ley? He looked beneath the desk, looking for any kind of connection, but found nothing. He moved to the other desks, looking beneath and around the panels, but nothing seemed to stick out. With a sigh, Ako started coming back out from under a desk, gripping the top of the desk to pull himself out. Ako's hand slipped and his head smacked the side of the desk with a thud.

"Brother, what was that about?" Taiyo asked, rushing over. "Did you just damage something?"

Worried that he had, Ako brought the lantern closer so that he could see if there was any damage. Where his head had struck, the paneling was a little bent. "Other than my head? Yeah, I did. I'm sorry, Taiyo." As he looked closer at the damage however, something seemed to be sticking out. Squinting closer, he could barely see a tiny glimmer of what looked like a thread from a spider's web.

"Great," Taiyo said, disappointed. "What does it look like?" He crouched down beside Ako to try and get a look.

"Hold on, I think I see something," Ako said. He reached out his hand and tentatively touched the thread. It was strong, and thicker than a spider's thread. He ran his finger up the thread ever so slightly and found that it led to the underside of the desk from the base of the floor.

"Oh man," Ako said as he slumped onto his butt.

"What?"

Ako rubbed his forehead with two fingers. "It uses a micro-electric current."

"What're you talking about?"

Ako just showed him the wires. "Leypower doesn't use wires. That's only electricity. I still remember talking about it in my mechanical history class."

"Well, the damage won't go unnoticed, but at least we discovered something because of it," Taiyo said. His face was twisted, as if he couldn't decide whether to be happy or nervous. "I think this gives me some more of the evidence I need. Let me show you something else." He stood and led them to the back of the room. Though she wasn't saying anything, Kita followed.

Taiyo led them to a recessed door that had a couple steps leading down to it. He opened it up and they entered a small, cramped walkway that led beneath the floor of the control room. The walls and ceiling were striped with pipes and cords, and the floor at their feet was made of metal grating.

"Even this looks like it could be electrical," Ako noted. "Has anybody else said anything?"

"No," Taiyo said. "Some of these are used for transporting air and water, actually, but some of them do seem electrical. Maybe the other researchers didn't pay attention to the blip of information we learned in a first-year class at twelve years old, but." He stopped at the end of the cramped hallway and held out his lamp. The wall looked like it was tiered with flat rectangular pieces of dark green plastic that had been inserted from top to bottom.