Chapter Text
The first thing she sees is a stranger’s face.
She bolts like a scared animal, scrambling away until her back hits stone. The stranger raises his hands in surrender and doesn’t approach. He says something, and so does another voice, but the pounding in her head drowns them both out.
“Who are you?” she hears herself say before the thought has formed. “Where am I?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I woke up here, too.”
‘Here’ is a concrete room with no doors, windows, or appliances. She flicks her gaze around, and she catches two flashes of metal — a small drain in the middle of the floor and a vent near the ceiling. The other voice came from an unconscious, muttering second stranger across the room. The first stranger, she realizes, seems to be a teenager. He must be around sixteen.
That age doesn’t strike her as ‘older’ or ‘younger,’ so she figures she must be around that age, too.
Them being the same age doesn’t comfort her. He’s standing, and she’s on the floor, but she can tell at a glance that he’s taller than her. His shoulders are broad, and his stance is solid. He’s leaving her alone for now, but if he changes his mind–
Slowly, she stands. He drops his hands to his sides.
Then the other stranger wakes up.
He’s on his feet fast, fists raised, but his legs are shaking. She guesses he’s around sixteen, too — or maybe a bit younger. “Who are you people? Where am I?”
“Those are the top two questions,” the first stranger says, “but no one’s come up with an answer yet.”
The second stranger — redheaded and less built than the first — doesn’t relax.
“Put the fists down, man. We’re all in the same boat.”
Boat. A boat would be better, she thinks. She’d rather be in a boat than… here.
“This definitely isn’t a boat,” the redhead says, but he lowers his hands. He looks past the dark-haired one at her. “I wouldn’t trust him.”
“It’s an expression,” she says, “and why should I trust what you say, either?” She shakes her head. It hurts less now than it did earlier, but she still feels unsteady. “I don’t know either of you, but it doesn’t matter — we just need to figure out where we are and why.”
“That might be difficult,” the first stranger says, “considering I can’t remember anything before waking up here. Can you?”
She tries. She can’t.
“What the hell’s going on?” she chokes out, voice tight with panic.
The redhead gasps. “May-maybe we– we’re–”
“Dead?” the other one says.
The redhead squeaks. “I was gonna say ‘kidnapping victims,’ but thanks for the existential crisis, dude!”
“Sorry,” he says, wincing. “I don’t– know where that came from.”
She shakes her head. “We’re not dead,” she says. “That– this can’t be the afterlife. Right?” The panic comes back. “Are we dead?”
The first stranger springs away from her. She’d grabbed his arm in her panic, startling him — and he cleared the room in one jump.
The redhead gapes. “I don’t think dead people can do that.”
The first stranger shakes his head, glancing at his own legs in bewilderment. “We’re not dead, but this…” he sweeps an arm out, gesturing to everything around them. “This is not normal.”
She nods. “We should probably–”
“Um,” the redhead says, pointing at the other guy’s arm. “Tall guy? You’ve got something on your wrist.”
He looks down at his wrist and freezes. “It’s a name,” he says. “Adam.” He looks up at them. “My name?”
How can he not know his own name? It’s his name — his identity. That should be intrinsic, unerasable. It should–
Her breath catches in her throat.
What’s my name?
“I have one too,” the redhead says. “Uh– ‘Kay?’ No, I think it’s pronounced ‘Ky.’ My name is Kai.”
She hesitates. They’re both looking at her. She raises her right wrist, and she finds bold letters stamped across it. MIRA.
“Mira,” she says. “My name is– is Mira.”
For a few seconds, they just stand there.
“I’m gonna say it,” the– Kai says. “It’s really freaky that we have our names tattooed on our wrists.”
Mira swallows the lump in her throat, breathes past the panic, and focuses on what she can think about without having a nervous breakdown. “Adam,” she says, and she ignores the feeling in her chest when he snaps to attention. “You can jump far — can you jump high?”
He follows her gaze to the vent with a smile. “Let’s see.”
—
Adam can, in fact, jump high.
It’s a surreal sight, especially since it doesn’t look like he’s exerting abnormal force with his legs. He just pushes up on his toes once, twice, and then springs straight up.
Kai glances at Mira for her reaction, but she seems more contemplative than disturbed. At least, that’s his guess; it’s not like he knows her.
“It’s bolted in,” Adam says, clinging to the grate with his feet braced against the wall like a Spider-Man without faux tarsal claws.
Kai spares a moment to wonder why he knows who Spider-Man is and what tarsal claws are when he only knows his own name from the tattoo on his wrist. Then he says, “Maybe we have something I can rig into a screwdriver or something,” and he checks his pants for pockets.
That’s the first time he registers what they’re all wearing. It was background noise before, like the clothes were part of their bodies, but once he notices them, he can’t un-notice them.
For one thing, they don’t have shoes. For another, they’re wearing jumpsuits. The material is stiff and coarse, but they’re clearly well-worn. Kai’s is a dark red, like dried blood, and Mira’s is a dull, greenish blue. Adam’s jumpsuit is completely black, and unlike theirs, it’s short-sleeved.
As it turns out, their jumpsuits do not have pockets. There’s a tear in the side of Kai’s waistband, though, and some odd impulse guides him to check that. He finds a small, twisted piece of scrap metal hidden in the fabric. It could work.
“Okay, if you can get me up there, I can–”
“I think this’ll be faster,” Adam says, and the grate comes out with a screech and a crunch. The force of it sends Adam flying across the room. Somehow, he flips around midair, pushes off the opposite wall with one foot, and lands in the middle of the room still holding the grate.
“That works too,” Kai says.
And then the alarms go off.
—
Adam probably should’ve seen this coming.
Of course their one escape route would have alarms attached to it. Of course that drain in the floor isn’t just there to prevent standing water. And of course the gas rising out of it would make that god-awful headache come back.
“We have to hurry,” he says. “Come on! I can throw you.”
“Great.” Mira rolls her eyes as she walks over to him. “Just try not to crack my head open, tall guy.”
He ignores that comment. “On three.” He laces his hands together, and she puts one foot on them and shifts her weight onto it. “One… two… three!”
She pushes off right as he pushes up, and she flies into the air. She overshoots the vent, fingers skimming the top of it, but manages to catch herself on the way down.
“Kai, you’re next.”
He hesitates.
Adam sighs. He needs to get out of this gas — it’s only up to his knees, and his entire body’s already rolling with nausea. How Kai can just stand there, he has no idea. “You’ll be fine, I promise. Now hurry!”
Adam adjusts his force on this throw, and Kai goes flying straight into the vent with a screech. He takes a running leap to follow.
Once he’s off the ground, the headache starts to fade. Unfortunately, he’s also now in a small, dark space with no discernable way out.
“Guys?” Mira calls from up ahead, voice shaking. “I’m… starting to think I don’t like small spaces.”
“Yeah,” Kai responds. “Me either.”
Adam tries to breathe. He’s not totally sure if he manages it. “That makes three of us.”
“Do you think…” Mira starts, but she doesn't finish the thought. They inch forward, one after the other.
A few seconds later, a yard or so farther, and Kai’s voice rings out: “Well, don’t stop now. I’m on the edge of my seat.”
Mira snorts. The sound echoes strangely in the metal space. “Yeah, sorry. I just– someone had to have put us in that room, right? So I was thinking, maybe whoever it was, like… knew that the three of us don’t like small spaces. Maybe that small, empty room was some kind of…” she trailed off.
“Torture,” Adam finishes for her.
They fall silent.
After a while, Mira speaks up again.
“There’s something blocking me. I can’t see what’s behind it, but I think it’s another grate. Adam, can you squeeze past us?”
“On it.”
One very uncomfortable minute later, they can all hear metal clanging its way down a long, vertical tunnel. Adam reaches into empty space and grasps for something to climb with. His hand finds a metal rung.
“There’s a ladder,” he says. “Just reach until you’ve got a hold of it. I’m heading up.”
From there, it doesn’t take them long to reach the surface. He pushes a trapdoor open above him, and he sees a forest.
He was expecting a city or something, or maybe even a connected bunker, but this?
“Is it safe?” Kai says from below.
“I don’t know.”
“He doesn’t know if it’s safe.”
Then Mira: “It’s gotta be safer than going back!”
Well… Adam can’t argue with that.