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Immortal Breath: Getting In

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The vehicle's engine is a dull roar as I strap myself in more securely. It had been just a short week, but in that time I had lost almost seven kilos from doing deliveries and odd jobs that involved me running and walking a long way. Once I actually went to the front gates and delivered a package to a man who lived in the City; he had to leave the safety of the Walls by just a few meters, but he still looked scared as hell as if some criminal would swoop down from nowhere and slit his throat, even though I kept remind him he was safe as long as I was around. Thankfully, as I was so close to the Gate I didn't see the infamous Gatekeeper, otherwise I think I might have been shaking and as nervous as the man had been.

Now we were traveling by Dune Driver (a type of vehicle that allowed miners to get out to the mines safely without being attacked by wild animals) to the facility where the Breath was supposedly produced. As Olias had informed me earlier, it wasn't part of the districts at all; it was inside the Walls. My way in would actually be a garbage shoot that I would have to crawl through to get into the actual vents. This little detail had enticed a disgusted grimace from me at the time, and Olias had just reminded me that at least I would have transport right up to the shoot itself. That had still not quelled my sense of disgust, but it made me a little less worried, and even made it seem a little easier. Then once again, Olias and his pessimism had dragged me back down as he had reminded me that if I was caught in the vents or anywhere in the site by the guards, I would be killed on sight before I would even know I was caught.

At the moment, I felt only anxious to get in and get out of there. I kept trying to calm my nerves down by doing all the generic remedies; taking deep breaths, focusing on things around me, and even thinking happy thoughts, none of which worked. Eventually I extracted my pad from within the pouch on my waist and began writing down my worries, which seemed to help a little and unravel exactly what it was about the whole thing that worried me.

"Nervous?"

I look up to Auriel who sat across from me in the cabin of the vehicle. He wore his gold electrician uniform, which made his dark gray hair and eyes look stark against the color of the fabric. He wasn't trying to smile, but his face always had that sort of foxlike grin demeanor to it that he gotten from our father.

"Not really. Just writing something down so I don't forget it for later," I lie.

He does smile then. "I know you better than anyone, little sis, and you only use that old piece of junk when you get worried."

I scoff, putting away the pad. "I get it; I'm easy to read, okay? I'm just wondering about what might happen in there."

"It'll be fine. You're going to get in there and get out without a hitch." He encourages. "Besides, Olias says there'll only be a few guards on duty today. You'll be fine."

"How does he know so much about this place?" I ask, knowing the answer already.

Auriel shrugs, saying what I anticipated. "Hell if I know."

I outwardly feel myself deflate a little bit. "I wish he was here; then I could ask him myself." Olias had told us that he had business to attend to, so he couldn't tag along, but he had left us with a friendly man who told us he was to be our driver on this "Adventure" as he put it.

"I hope this guy knows what he's doing." I add, feeling the worry and bad feelings creeping into the back of my mind again, "And where he's going."

"I'm sure he does. Why else would Olias leave us with him?"

I look up, staring straight into my older brother's eyes. "How do you know we can trust him? Olias I mean."

Auriel's eyebrows furrow. "I've known Olias for a long time; he wouldn't be sending you in there unless he thought you could do it."

"I don't know," I reply. "It seemed like he was really against me being the one to do this until you stepped in to try and convince him."

"Look," He says seriously. "Olias knows you can do it right, even if he might sound or do the opposite." Auriel smiles, "And besides, I think he likes you."

"Likes me?" I scoff. "That old man is always complaining about how I'm not fast enough and how I turn left instead of right and blah, blah, blah." I chuckle.

"It's constructive criticism. That's how he says he likes you." Auriel grins.

I roll my eyes. "Then he must like me a LOT." I laugh.

Suddenly, our bodies lurch as the vehicle comes to a stop. A door opens and the friendly man's face peeps through. "We're here. End of the line. Miss, I suggest you put on your mask and turn the scent setting off; it's really stinky out there." He says making it sound like it was all going to be fun crawling on my hands and knees through garbage.

"Thanks." I reply, doing what I'm asked and switching off the scent filters on my mask and set it on my face as it self-adjusts and "straps" to my face. I unbuckle the safety belts that kept me in the seat and I stand to find Auriel waiting. We lock eyes and give each other a hug.

"'Bye, Ramona," He says, his chin resting on my head. "Come back safe for Mom and Dad."

"See you in a while, Auri." I reply into his shoulder.

Minutes later I jump off the ramp of the Dune Driver as it drops down onto the sandy ground. I had been advised to wear a special suit over my uniform for this; some of the garbage that left the shoot was highly toxic if touched by bare skin, so I had to be covered head to toe for protection from the possibly toxic nuclear poison. At once, I was glad that I had turned off the smell setting on my mask as I saw what lay before me. Everywhere were remains of food, metal scraps, and things that looked alien to me as I stepped closer to the field of debris. Squinting, I could see a small hole in the Wall that must have been the shoot. It didn't look much bigger than about the size of my fist at this distance, but from what I could speculate, now that I had become smaller I could fit easily into the entrance.

The problem would be getting to it.

Carefully I step around piles of trash, some towering unstably above my head as if threatening to fall and bury me in hulking metal and foul garbage.  My boots crunch on bones from creatures that had wandered into the toxic waste and had perished from the virulent toxins leaking from some of the canisters that were lying around, many with the nuclear or the radioactive symbols on them.  I shiver involuntarily, realizing I had stopped to look at one of them that seemed to be visibly leaking black slime. I pick up my pace towards the garbage shoot, hoping that it wouldn't be covered in the stuff.

Thankfully, it wasn't. It looked wet though; as if it had been recently cleaned. I sigh in content, knowing I wouldn't really be crawling through gunk. I take a quick glance around encase someone might be out here (obviously there was none) and crawled inside the entrance after lifting the hatch.

Almost instantly I wasn't sure which way was forward. As soon as the hatch closed, I was trapped in utter darkness. Not sure what else to do, I reach into my adjusting pouch on my belt and grab out the pen that I always used that also had a built in flashlight. Clicking the button, the light immediately solved the problem, showing me as I craned my neck up the narrow shoot it was a fast incline up. I put the penlight in my mouth so I could have more stability as I began to crawl on all fours up the shaft.

Finally after what felt like an hour but was only a couple of minutes at least, I see the exit; a heavy looking grate. I put my hands on it and push, but it doesn't budge even as I add the force of my legs pushing on it. It must have been automated, I deduced, as I stick my fist back into my pouch and withdraw with an electric screw driver that my father had given me.  I feel around with my gloved hands with the pen still in my mouth for a seam or a bolt. After only a few seconds, I'm done with all of the seals and I'm pushing on the grate, careful to not make it go crashing down onto the floor below as I ease out of the garbage shaft and take the pen out of my mouth and putting it away.

The room I had emerged into was boxed off, but I knew somehow it was part of a much larger room. I quickly strip out of my toxic suit, making sure to turn it all inside out and folding it up small and hiding it under a nearby row of boxes so I didn't have to worry about being encumbered and being noisier than I would be in just my clothes I wore underneath of it. When the time came, it wouldn't take much time to put it all back on and slip back out the way I came, only keeping the protective black gloves on just in case. More boxes lay about, probably filled with noxious materials that they would throw out eventually. I check a few for good measure, just in case something in them was salvageable. I found several boxes that were empty, but eventually I decided it was more of a waste of time than a help to go through the other ones.

Crouching, I scramble to the door that I assumed led out to the rest of the facility and cracked it open slowly. Though it I could just a sliver of what looked like meters of tubing on the ceiling and walls, many of which had entrances and exits in the opposite side of the wall in the form of wheel-like hatch. In the middle of the floor were a great number of lab tables that had tubes, clear beakers and metal containers that were steaming and producing strange colored liquids out of the tops. However, contrary to the massive amount of lab equipment, there were only two scientists I could see. The appeared to be debating on something, but I couldn't pay attention to what it was. My eyes were locked on their appearances.

They didn't at all look like the people of the districts, only just the opposite. Outside of the Walls, people's color as soon as they're exposed to the Remnants is bleached; The less color they have in their hair, eyes and skin, the more you can assume they spend a lot of time outside. But these two scientists who stood just a couple meters from me and the door I was hiding behind had no signs of color deficiency at all. It made me surprised to see people with so much color. One (the one facing the door) was a woman, her hair was a golden blond, and her eyes were a dark, rich green and her skin was like sand, not porcelain like mine. The other was a man from the shortness of his hair and the way he held himself; his hair was as black as the mountains past the outer reaches of the desert in the distance of the districts. Both wore all white which was tinted to a pale blue from the light coming out of the tubes on the walls and ceiling.

Suddenly my ears are able to pick up their conversation. The woman was speaking. Quickly, I grab out a small recording device that Olias had given me before we had departed. I turn it on with the signal of a red light and begin to listen.

"We shouldn't be reducing the about of The Chemical in each batch of the gas!" She was saying, sounding distressed. I immediately assumed they were talking about the Breath. I took in steady slow breaths as I cracked open the door just a little bit more.

"It's not our decision; the higher-ups want the Outside batches to be deluded until—"

"Until what? All those innocent people die?"

The man crosses his arms, his voice turning more firm. "These are criminals; murderers, thieves, lawbreakers."

The woman looked as cross as the man sounded. "They're still people!"

That seemed to shut the other up for a minute. But only a minute before he speaks again, whispering so quietly that I had to strain and open the door just a little more to hear over the thrumming of the machinery in the glowing tubes.  "We can't do anything about it. Soon they'll be dead from the poison anyway. All we can do is give them more time."

The woman dropped her voice as well. "We're just prolonging their suffering, aren't we?" The sound of sobbing rings quietly through the room as she drops her head onto the man's chest as he comforts her.

My heart aches for her a little, but seeing that this would be the best time to act, I turn off the listening device and stick it carefully and quickly back into my pocket as I quietly push the door as much as I would need to squeeze through, using the sound of the mechanisms and the woman's sobbing as cover. But the door did not make a sound as I slipped past and behind some of the father desks from the couple and shuffle as far as I could down the row with great ease. I swiftly find the far end of the room, hiding behind a pillar of metal and tubes to catch my breath and quell my hammering heart.

I look up and notice a card fixed to one of the exits for a tube. Glancing around, I quickly shuffle towards it and study it. The words were written in perfect handwriting and read in big red letters, "Substance unstable and highly noxious if exposed to skin. Please wear protective gloves when handling," With the word WARNING in bold across the top. I backed up, deciding that it was best not to try and tamper with it when I didn't know exactly what it was yet.

I fallow the hallways, no longer crouching down towards the ground, but still on high alert for a while, checking for any signs of guards. Strangely enough, I heard none, but kept my alertness up as I remembered what Olias said about them. Of course I wouldn't have heard anything, I thought, as long as these tubes were making noise. That made me nervous until I realized, then again, neither would they.

I walk almost silently down what felt like hundreds and hundreds of hallways and passages, all of them curving into another hall. While I was in these passage ways, there was no way to tell how long I had really been in there; it felt like hours, but my viciously beating heart wanted to tell me it had been days. I felt tired, running on adrenaline all the while. If I had been anywhere else, I would have stopped to eat, or let my eyes close for a minute or so; my eyes however felt cemented open, and my Breath supply was being used up more than it usually was as my lungs begged for more of the gas from my mask. I stopped several times just to occupy my mind with how much of my canister I had. It was the last day of the month according to the amount I had left; later today when I got back I'd have to buy another canister before I accidentally ran out of this one or risked being stranded somewhere.  I had a mere two to three hours left; I needed to calm down.

Taking some steady, slow breaths, I rested just around a corner that when I peeked around it, ended in a steel door with a heavy brass hatch knob. Crouching towards it, I try to turn it with all my might, and just as I feel as though my strength would fail me, the knob turned and the door opened. Next time, I told myself, if I have to do this again, I'm going to work on weights instead of speed and fitness. I stride inside quietly, my eyes taking a minute to adjust to the room's darkness.

It was a fairly large space, and looked a lot like the halls with its tubed ceiling and walls. However, the tubes were open, blue colored steam coming out of each one of the open hatches and rising slowly to the ceiling. A shiver went up my spine; a horrified one, not a cold shiver. Something about this steam, this blue gas, wasn't right. I gave the steam jets wide berths as I skirt down the room's length, noticing that these hatches also had cards attracted by a metal chain to them. Some of them only had one, but others had several as I checked each one, careful not to let any of my skin touch the gas, whatever it was.

The third one down from the entrance of the room had seven note cards neatly written on the silver chain. I read through them, one in the middle catching my eye: "Carbon dioxide, nitrogen, etc. Partially successful," it read. Suddenly it dawns on me what this stuff, the gas in the tubes, was.

It was the predecessors of the Immortal Breath.

I searched every card now. Hastily, I flip through each of them and then go on to the next. Nothing, Trash, unimportant!  Each one had symptoms this one caused, or side-effects that this one caused. But none ever had the line "Successful" or something of the like. They were always partially successful or failed experiments.

My fingers fly, searching all of the ones closest to the door again in case I missed something. Nothing, again, was in those. I stop, gazing at each, trying to get a feel from my instincts to which it might be; the pure stuff. I didn't want to go any deeper into the room, but something egged me to go on and go in further. I squint towards the end of the room, only catching the glance of something else further in through the smoke and steam. Slowly, I advance down the corridor, again making sure not to come into contact with the other tubes of steam and giving the ones with nastier symptoms the widest berth as I could manage in the narrow corridor. As I continued further, the steam and the tubes began to lose the glow of blue, instead turning into shades of darker colors. I did not stop at these; I already knew they were failures and potentially dangerous by a second shiver that crept up my spine like something cold and evil.

Suddenly, my legs freeze to the floor in shock as my eyes lay themselves upon it. There, at the very end of the room in the center was a great black, cylinder like vault with the words "Immortal Breath" written in a peeling white paint across the face of the hatch.

This containment unit was not open; the door of the vault, which was transparent, was locked shut by a pair of heavy looking pressurized seals. The glow from the clear front made my pale skin look like ice, and as I tentatively reached out, my fingers drew back just as suddenly as they had touched it. The gas swirled lazily in the clear panel door, and I realized it didn't continue down the walls like the rest. It was isolated.

I glanced back the way I had come, suddenly realizing that the noise had stopped. All was quiet, and as I shuffled my feet on the metal floor to turn around again, it sounded out through the entire room like a round of thunder. I cringe silently. How was I supposed to get out of here now that my only cover had been shut off?

I gaze back at the Immortal Breath. Seeing it also had cards, I snatch them up and find irritation as my mind synthesizes the syllables at a head-aching speed, testing.

Suddenly my thoughts are interrupted as the door creaks open at the far end of the room. Ripping the piece of paper off the silver chain, I duck behind a large canister beside the Immortal Breath, thankful suddenly for the available cover.

Footsteps click on the floor; hesitant, careful, slow. They grow louder as the owner of the shoes comes ever closer to my hiding spot as I adjust so that I'm out of sight, my lungs exploding as I stagger my breathing into whispers. Tucking the ripped paper into my pocket, I peak around the corner as much as I could, my heart pounding in my chest.

It was the woman from before. Her shoulders were hiked in agitation as she checked over them to be sure she wasn't being watched, thankfully her eyes passing right over me as I duck again just enough to hide myself as she looks back to what she was doing. In her hand she had a pad that shot light from one end to to the other, and somehow she touched the light and the images on the screen suddenly moved as she studied it frantically. She cast another glance around in anxiety, and then her hand shot out and began fiddling with the pressurized locks.

She was going to open it.

It takes her several tries to pop the thing open, and a couple times, she loses her cool and slams on the glass with a fist. After three more tries on the number pad though, the hatch suddenly bursts open.

And the woman brings her hands to her throat, and then to her chest as she chokes and vanishes in an instantaneous cloud of sand without so much as a scream.

I hear a strange sound emit from my own lips behind my mask. Then suddenly all the hair on my neck stands up on end as my skin begins to suddenly prickle. The feeling at first is uncomfortable, but quickly begins to burn like fire across my body. The sound in my throat instantly turns to an ear shattering scream as my body erupts into the feeling of being engulfed by a vicious inferno.

The Immortal Breath.

I scramble in earnest in what I think was the direction of the hatch, reaching to close it as tears of pain cloud my vision and collect in the seals of my mask.

The gas was trying to find its way in; I could feel it as it burned at my skin, trying to find, or make, an opening as if it was alive. The pressure of it felt horrible as I groped the space in front of me desperately.

Everyone could have heard my screaming; no one could have not heard it. I scrambled even more frantically as that flashes across my mind, almost instantly replaced again with the knowledge of the pain.

Finally I find the door and put my body to force it closed. It slams shut, and my body comes crashing down to the floor, gasping, and my face landing in the pile of ashes that was all that was left of the woman scientist.

I couldn't feel my face. I couldn't feel my body for that matter as I lay there in the dust on the metal floor, my breath shallow as I'm unable to breathe. I move my hand as best as I could and fumble with the time meter on the current canister of Breath on my mask. Seconds ticked; only seconds.

I had a minute.

As quickly as I could with my numb limbs I scramble to my knees and hands, half way between a crouch and standing as I stumble and shamble towards the door; it felt so far away.

My vision fades in and out as one second I find myself shuffling/running past the open door and the next down around a hall that I desperately hoped with all of my being was the way I had come; The way out. I could hear faint yelling in my ringing ears, and instincts in my faint mind kick in and take over as my numb limbs finally kick into an occasionally stumbling sprint. They were chasing me; men in white with black masks, I saw over my shoulder as I took a rapid glance back as I passed down another corner. Men with strange contraptions that made my blood run colder. My legs move faster; my heart skipping beats as my breath caught in my lungs in raspy inhales.

And suddenly, I leapt into a hole.

I seemed to fly for what felt like hours, but it was only milliseconds as I hit something smooth hard and my body kept going, rocketing down a shoot. And just as suddenly I am blinded by a burst of light and ejected and hit solid surface; hard.

That's when everything went black.

ӁӁӁ

I awoke to the sound of distant yelling.

My eyes were crusted shut for some reason, and my body was splayed out at an odd angle as if I had fallen. Pain arose to the forefront of my mind as I became more aware, and also remembering how I had gotten here.

Wherever "here" was.

What little of my skin that was bare was cold against a stone floor that matched my paleness. I slowly lifted my head from the rock, finding that moving the rest of me was impossible for now as another pang of discomfort rang through my nerves. My mind finally came to full realization as I noticed the inside of my mask was fogged.

I wasn't dead yet. Something had kept me alive. I check the cylinder on my mask that held my Breath. It didn't even have zeros on it.

The atmosphere was breathable.

Slowly, painfully, I reach my bruised hands to my mask and press the buttons for release. It falls to the ground next to me and I gasp in a clean breath as my eyes set on what was before me.

The stone beneath me was artificially paved. The same white rock made up towering, faceless buildings that hovered over me and seemed to touch a white sky. Shrubbery bushes lined the street in neat rows, showing off their yellow or red flowers.

I was inside the Walls.
Chapter 2: Getting In

"After the Wars, there was peace. Finally.
And then they made the Breath; a chemical, or a virus, or something, I don't know. The only thing I know is that there are rumors that it once had the power to give people back everything they ever lost and make them live forever; make them immortal. One day eighty years ago, before I was even born, they released it into the world as we knew it on the wind.
But it killed it. Everything that breathed it died with in minutes, all due to a minor miscalculation. They never expected it to bond with the chemicals left over from the Wars. They never expected it to become so deadly.
This was dubbed the Remnants; and it killed millions beyond counting.
That's when they built the Walls. A fortress to keep their toxins out and away from the last of us in the Great City. Where the breath had been introduced into a stable environment. This was also when they exiled us; the criminals, the mentally unstable, the threats to their now "Utopian" society. But they never thought we'd survive with the little bit of breath they gave us. We thrived where they could not; like weeds.
And so, the time of the districts began.
I am Ramona, sixth generation of the Asher name.
I am the first to discover the truth."
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