Mortals

03: MERC

The dark is all-encompassing here. It presses close and firm, weighs down all my limbs, fills my lungs, my throat, my eyes. I am drifting in the space between worlds. I am lost in a timeless void. Up and down, left and right, past and future fail to have any meaning. There is only the darkness, and the hum in the walls, and the slow, measured steps of guards as they pass by in the hall outside. Meals come three times a day. Nights stretch endlessly on. The air never stirs. All of it combined is enough to drive a person crazy.

Except I'm not crazy. I know this. In the darkness, I waste time by remembering. I remember myself: Mercury Renmore, son of Jef and Alice Renmore, brother to Valence Renmore, the doe-eyed younger sister I haven't seen in years. I remember the simplicity of my early childhood in Quadrant 3: the rich home-grown cherry cakes my mother made each Sunday; the sun warming the back of my neck as I played football with local kids in the street; the refreshing chill of Lake Oberson after school.

I remember the ugliness of it, too: the year-round heat drying the lake a little more each year; the time Valence got heatstroke and nearly died; the long, stifling nights spent without AC, when the electrical grid overloaded and the quadrant's power went out, and even then, when we were most in need of a cooling breeze, how we bolted shut the windows to protect against the thieves who'd take advantage of the heat.

This was all before the USO Evaluators came through in third grade, talent-scouting. Before the day my teacher pulled me aside in class and said, very solemnly, "Gather your things, Mercury, you've been Selected." Before the day I was removed from my family, my parents sad but proud, my sister crying on the front porch, and relocated to the USO compound in Quadrant 2.

In Quadrant 2, I experienced winter for the first time. I was thrown in amongst a bundle of other wide-eyed kids – the Selected – all of them smart enough to know why they were there, but young enough to cry about it every night before they slept. We attended classes taught by renowned scientists in the mornings, and in the afternoons we were put through our paces by USO officers, running obstacle courses, learning to fight. They taught us well and made us tough, and after the first year, no one cried anymore, but the pain was always there.

I remember meeting Cal for the first time, the child-genius whose parents were professors at Q2 University. He was luckier than most – his parents got to visit him when they came to USO for work – and I despised him for two years out of jealousy. Only in our third year at USO, when the Selected were thinning out and company our own age was growing sparse, did we form a tenuous friendship.

I remember the day Lilith arrived, a military transfer from Quadrant 4 with a steely, unblinking gaze. I remember watching Atara, the one kid in the compound kept separate. We didn't see her often, and when we did, it was only in passing. She was a curiosity at first – born and raised at USO, she seemed to operate on a level above us. But at some point she stopped being a curiosity for me, and became something more.

More than anything, however, I remember my time spent in Aion Universe, the strange world parallel to our own. Sometimes after waking, in the moment before memory surges up, I catch myself thinking I'm still there: barren ground, dust in the air, the world so dark you can't see your own hands. Stumbling towards a sound in the distance and finding Atara, her voice soft and familiar.

"Over here," she'd say.

"Where?"

"Here." Lurching forward, feet kicking up rocks, following the sound of her voice. "This way."

My hand makes contact with her arm. "Atara," I sigh, relieved.

"I'm not Atara," she says, and suddenly her voice is hard as stone, empty as the void. Something's changed. The air grows cold. Below my touch, she starts to dissolve. "Atara's dead."

I jerk awake, heart pounding. There's a moment of disorientation before I realise I must have fallen asleep. In here, there's no clear distinction between waking and sleeping. I dream of darkness, and I wake to it, and half the time, I can't tell which darkness is which. If I'm being honest, it scares me.

But doing something helps. I crawl away from the edge of the cell and press my palms to the smooth, cold, real concrete, stretching my legs out below. "One," I whisper, and do a push-up. "Two." I take a breath in and release it through my mouth. "Three."

At a hundred, I stop and roll over onto my back, my pulse a living thing in my body, grounding me in reality.

I remember the first thing Atara ever said to me. We were thirteen, and I'd just gotten in trouble with Major Sanders for giving him lip. He sent me up to see Colonel Eckhart, to get me straightened out, and I was waiting in the hall outside his office, slowly tearing up all the plastic cups for the water dispenser beside me.

The door opened and Atara emerged from the colonel's office. She took one look at me and the graveyard of torn plastic cups at my feet and said, "What's worse, the death of a thousand strangers or the death of someone you love?"

I was caught off-guard – by her, and by the question. "Someone I love?" I replied.

"Hmm," she said, and left.

In the colonel's office, I was made to stick all the cups back together in silence, a painstaking lesson in both keeping my mouth shut and not damaging what wasn't mine. But the whole time, all I could think about was that question: The death of a thousand strangers or the death of someone you love?

Getting to an answer wasn't what concerned me; what concerned me was that the question had been asked in the first place. Even years later, Atara carried a certain mystery about her. It seemed, even in her moments of deepest honesty, that every word which left her mouth was a riddle. You couldn't walk away from the conversation without feeling like she'd handed you pieces of a puzzle, one you now had to go and solve.

There's a double knock on my cell door. "Renmore, dinner."

The flap by the base of the door lifts, letting in a sliver of light, along with a plastic tray. I don't have to look at it to know what's on the menu. It's NutritionMeal, a tasteless slime that contains all the nutrients necessary to remain alive and healthy.

I grab the plastic spoon, devour the slime, and then start picking my plastic tray apart piece by painstaking piece.

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Hi guys! Chapter 4 of Mortals is now up on Inkitt. You can read it now by clicking this link: https://inkitt.app.link/RA_shayebay (link in the in-line comment).

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Love you long time,

Shaye <3