The Normals | ✓

T W E N T Y - O N E

The two Masks from before, mine now switched with Captain, reattach our restraints and lead us to the doors. Arden and his Mask peel off to exit through another door, one that probably leads to his side of the room I woke up in. Captain, gripping my arm with one hand, uses the other to open our door and gently pushes me forward once it opens. Up close, I am painfully aware of how powerful and strong she is, and dearly hope I don't do anything stupid. We start down the hall, our footsteps echoing lightly.

"Is Sniper really dead?" Captain asks, once the door has closed behind us.

The question catches me off guard, and I have to nod my head to make up for the lack of words. She swears quietly next to me.

"How?"

"A Mask," I say quietly. "I tried, but I couldn't save him."

"Always getting into trouble, wasn't he..." Her voice breaks at the end of the sentence, but she keeps a strong grip on my arm.

"Bear?" I ask.

"Getting worse every day," she replies. "And dragging others down with him."

"How much longer does he have?"

"He won't make it, Arthemis. Don't waste your energy hoping."

We reach the end of the hall and the door slides open. "There must be something he can do, right?" I ask. "What's he still got to fix?"

"Everything," she replies, giving me a push through the threshold. "We can't speak to each other anymore, so consider this a goodbye."

I turn to the door and face her. "What? Captain--"

"Bye, Arthemis. Good luck."

"Captain stop," I say, starting toward her. But she just gives me an apologetic look through her mask as the door slides shut between us. I hit the door with my fist. "Captain! Come back!"

But no matter how many times I yell through the wall or claw at where I think the opening should be, nothing changes.

Turning around with a sigh, I realize that I can't see Arden. I look around the room for him, but he isn't here. It takes me several minutes to realize that I can walk all around the room -- which is significantly smaller than before -- and so the transparent wall must have somehow switched for an actual one. I locate said wall and tap on it. "Arden?"

"I'm here," comes his muffled reply. "The woman that brought me in here made the wall actually visible. It's so that we can change."

My glance strays to the pile of clothes I threw on the ground in my attempt to get to Captain. "Right."

"Have you changed yet?"

"No," I reply, yanking off my shoes and socks. "Have you?"

"The shirt feels weird. Back at home my clothes are so much softer than this."

"You're gonna have to get used to it," I tell him, pulling on the pair of loose white pants they've given me.

I've barely finished zipping up the grey jacket and lacing up the boots when the wall between us suddenly disappears, fading out from the white it had been before. Arden is on the other side, a pair of black pants and a tight-fitting black shirt complementing his dark hair.

He adjusts the shirt. "This shirt is so... I don't know. I just don't like it. Is this what you wore when you lived here? "

It is, I realize. The black shirt and pants, with the addition of the grey jacket he's tying around his waist, make up the outfit of everyone who lives at the Core. I look down at my own outfit; the white pants, the light grey jacket and boots, and the white shirt, and silently hope that this means I'm not going back to the Core.

The doors slide open again, revealing two new Masks. They have us pick up our old clothes -- I take the food-and-sketchbook box with me, too -- and they lead us to another part of the vehicle we're in. As we walk down a hall lined with various big windows, I glance their way. We're flying low above a thick forest now and the sun is beginning to set.

"Look at the sunset," I say to Arden. "Aren't those colours beautiful?"

"What?" he asks, and I realize he can't see colour.

"Never mind," I reply. "You wouldn't understand it anyway."

I go back to looking at the forest as we walk by. Large, leafy trees cover the ground in a thick sheet, occasionally interrupted by a body of water or clearing. As we pass one of the latter, I see the ground there is covered in tons of tiny glowing things. They snake up the trees around them, reaching almost all the way up their trunks.

"Moonflower," Arden says, noticing my gaze. "They grow in patches and glow at night. Sometimes I used to go to the outskirts of the city to go harvest them with Gw--" He interrupts himself, clamping his mouth shut and turning away from the windows.

We continue on.

The Masks open one of the doors and take us inside, to a circular room lined with sinks, mirrors, and things of the sort. "You can clean yourself up here," one of them says. "You have ten minutes."

Ten minutes seems more like five, in the span of which Arden has nicked his face multiple times with a razor and I've made a mess of the floor in my attempt to wash my hair while keeping my body dry. The Masks come to collect us, only glancing at the wet floor and Arden's wincing face, and bring us to one last room.

This room presents itself to us after we descend a short flight of stairs right at the end of the hall. It's a fairly big space, with circular booths lining the walls and a long path going straight down the middle. Although there are people -- Masks -- in some of the booths, the room is dead silent. They must have some sort of invisible wall separating them from us, I realize, as I watch one of them talk without making a sound.

The Masks lead us to an empty booth and tell us to sit down. We do, and as soon as my body hits the seat, my legs feel frozen in place. Arden, who is next to me, voices this feeling.

"Don't worry," one of them says, "this is just because we're landing soon. There will be an official announcement right about..." He pauses and looks around. "Now."

As if on cue, the speakers around the room crackle to life to tell us we're landing. The few Masks who aren't in a booth walk over to one and sit down, looking unbothered by the frozen sensation my entire lower body is feeling.

There's a humming sound that reverberates around the room. I can feel it in the walls, in the floor.

And then the windows and all the lights black out.

Arden and I draw in a breath at the sudden darkness but it doesn't last long. A few words light up on the table in our booth. NOW LANDING, it reads.

Slowly, the light returns to the room. It takes the form of two strips of bright, pulsing light stretching from one side to the other in two unbroken lines. I recognize it as a pathway, most likely lining the one I saw when the lights were on. The humming gets louder and I feel as if I'm slowly falling, and then there's a clunk and a small sensation of hitting the ground and the landing sign on the table disappears.

The two Masks stand up. "Get up."

I find I can, that my body has been liberated, and Arden and I exit the booth on wobbly legs. In the low light, I can see the Masks spilling from their booths and following the glowing pathway. We join them, slowly advancing in a silent line. I don't know where we're going or even where we are, but I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

However, my stomach drops when we pass out of the ship and I immediately recognize my surroundings. The hangar, where Sniper and I stole a ship, is where I am currently standing. Everything even looks the same, except that the ship we stole is missing and in its place -- I turn around to get a good look at the vehicle we came in -- in its place is probably the biggest plane I've ever seen.

We're back at the Core.