"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter One-Hundred-And-Eleven: A Chance Of Escape
(E Pluribus Unum, Pt. 3)
***
Rowan didn't know how long she and the kids crawled underneath the feet of the Russians in the vents for—if she asked Erica, she'd probably know, but Rowan wasn't keen on doing that and have her mind melt with Erica's math genius. Instead, she focused on moving, on putting one hand in front of the other, of letting her powers and strength steadily recover the further away she got from that goddamned machine. She knew it probably wouldn't be at full strength—she'd used her powers already without much of a proper rest. Still, her returning strength relieved Rowan, and comforted her after the agonising feeling of the machine's electricity.
Plus, that and making sure Dustin and Erica would be safe even in the vents kept her from thinking too much about whatever the Russians were doing to her friends and Steve, of what she heard in the Upside Down. She was way too happy to go back to her tried-and-true method of pushing it all away and dealing with it later.
So when Rowan saw the chinks of light coming in through the "ceiling", relief shuddered through her.
"I think there's our way out," she whispered—she had no idea if Russians were above them.
As they crawled underneath what was indeed another hinged grate for the underground vents, Dustin made to lift it up, but Rowan clamped her hand on his wrist.
"What the fuck are you doing, Henderson?" she hissed.
"I'm lifting the grate up," Dustin explained, pulling his hand out of Rowan's grip.
"Without knowing if there's Russians above? We're the most wanted people in this entire place, remember? We can't take any chances," Rowan reminded sharply. She may be paranoid, but she was thinking of Robin and Valerie, of Steve. She couldn't let Erica and Dustin be taken, too. "I'll check, okay. You and Erica stay quiet."
"How is she gonna check?" Erica muttered to Dustin, who shushed her. Erica shushed him back and they engaged in a shushing fight until a deadly glare from Rowan silenced them.
When the children were quiet, Rowan closed her eyes and concentrated, stretching out her electric sense for the electrical impulses in people, firing along at lightning speed along the nervous system. She searched, and searched again, but found nothing. It was safe above.
"Okay, now you can lift it, Henderson," Rowan said, shuffling out of the way so Dustin could do it.
Dustin did so, lifting the grate as quietly as they could. And even though Rowan didn't feel the natural electricity humans had in their nervous systems, she peeked her head out just to check.
When she did, she suppressed a groan at seeing more of that green acid lined up in rows.
"Great. More of that acid shit," she muttered as she moved out of the way so Dustin could get out, suppressing a shiver at how that stuff was powering a machine to break open the worlds.
