Crumbling Earth

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

A shiver overtook him as Grey reached for his glass of water. Pale hands passed it to him and curved his fingers around it. The pair of them - him and Trecia - sat at the breakfast table, air seeping into every orifice. Liquid slipped down his throat like sunrise over dreary fields. On one hand, he could've stayed that way until the sun set but the silence between them wasn't so easy to digest.

"Where's Naid?" he inquired, and placed the glass back on the table to the time of a clink. Trecia paused mid-chew, glanced up at him then swallowed.

"Still in bed. After everything, I thought he deserved some rest so I left him to it." She paused with her lip worried between her teeth. "I don't suppose you know where Kailen is, do you?"

"About as well as I know why the sky is blue. She's avoiding me." At that, he cast his gaze down to his hands. Trecia's fingers slotted into the gaps his own sprawled digits left and created a two-tone mesh of skin. It even reminded him of the pictures teachers would jam into their presentations when they were trying to show a hall full of small children what sharing and caring was.

Her thumb reached to brush across his forefinger. Featherlight and brief though it was, he had even less time to take notice of it. "You know, you shouldn't get yourself down about it. She's blanking us all. I'm not saying you don't have a right to feel like you do, I'm just telling you not to let it control you - that'll only give her what she wants if she's doing this to get a reaction."

Grey let out a half-humorous chuckle. "You sound like all the adults I've ever known - well, the ones that weren't drunk or otherwise..." As if trying to wash the words from his mouth, he chose that moment to take another swig of water.

"Not the best of childhoods, hmm? Mine wasn't either. For different reasons, of course." That made Grey stop. The older of the two was playing with his hands, after a fashion, and slim fingers danced across his knuckles. This time, it was her that wasn't making eye contact with her companion. Which, considering their proximity, wasn't as easy as it sounded.

At the end of the table, they didn't sit opposite each other. Instead, she sat with her chair facing the longer side of the table and angled a little in his direction. While his chair was positioned at the much smaller side, turned so that his legs weren't stuffed into the cage that was the end of the table.

"Want to talk about it?" The fifteen-year-old shifted closer to the edge of his chair.

And there she was, biting her lip again. "It all started out pretty normal. And, no matter what I say, understand this: I don't blame any one person for what went wrong." When she looked back up at him, her eyes were focused. 

After a moment, he nodded.

"We're a mirror universe, but you knew that. Every fifty years, we had a storm and people could cross from your universe to ours - not vice versa. Perfectly natural, perfectly fine." Her words were stern and slow, like she wanted to make sure that someone got it this time.

Grey frowned, leaning closer on auto-pilot. Even though there was no one to hear. No one to tell the school bully. "Then what went wrong?"

"We don't know. There was a disease, some kind of problem, that started to spread and they called it the merge. Everyone and everything that ran into it would give way for your existence. All we knew was that it needed a string of objects to keep going and these objects had to be within a certain height distance of each other.

"It was annihilating the planet, so we set off some depth charges and blew a continuous pit in the edges of the city. Like a really deep moat. Then, Kailen's mum came along. She used a forced storm to get in and, without knowing it, she turned that pit into an ocean of souls..." For a moment, she closed her eyes. It was as if there was something printed on the lids that she needed to see. It was a while before she spoke again. A while before her lips could form words with out shaking.