Gravity (Male x Male)

Chapter 19 - The Reflection

Bad plan or not, I was here now, and it seemed silly not to check the rest of the rooms while I could. Listening for any sign of movement, I crept forward to the next door and slid my eyes up to the window. Scanning the room, I saw a shadow move in the corner. That had to be my mother.

"Mum," I whispered through the keyhole. I got no response. I repeated myself slightly with a more forceful whisper, not daring to speak any louder. "Mum." The shadow moved slightly closer.

"Damon?" Mum's voice came back at me from the other side of the door, not much louder than mine. "What the hell are you doing? You need to get out!"

"Shhh," I responded, as I thought I heard footsteps approaching in the darkness, and I slipped back around into the alcove where I hoped the complete blackness would smother any sign of me. Evidently someone had heard something happening down this way and had come to investigate.

The soft footsteps advanced towards us. They'd definitely heard us then. I could hear my heart thumping and the blood rushing in my ears, and it sounded so loud to me that I silently prayed that the other individual couldn't hear it too. I held my breath when it sounded like the person had stopped outside the door to Mum's room. The situation was far from ideal - they were about three paces away from me and I was trapped in an alcove.

The silence that followed seemed to last an eternity. Cold shivers spread throughout my body and I knew I needed to breathe again soon. I exhaled as quietly as I could before I ran out of oxygen completely, as I knew that otherwise it would result in gasping loudly. I replaced the air in my lungs just as slowly, hoping I wasn't making any noise.

I heard the scout shuffle closer to me, and I instinctively backed away slightly. Only one step, but it was enough that they could have heard it.

"Damon?" a familiar voice hissed through the darkness.

"Keleon?" I whispered back. "How did you find me?"

"Good hearing," he replied, so low I could barely hear it. He whipped himself round and joined me in the alcove. "You were supposed to stay on the ship."

"I remembered something," I explained just as quietly. "These storage rooms have doors rather than forcefields. They need a key. I thought Mum might be put in one of them when the forcefields went down, and she is. Third door from the left. But we'd need to get a key from one of the security guards, and I have no idea how to do that."

"What's a key?" asked Keleon.

"It's a way of locking and unlocking doors that they used to use on Earth a long time ago," I whispered. "It's a piece of metal that needs to be the right shape to fit into the lock."

Saying those words out loud gave me an idea.

"On second thoughts, forget the security guard," I backtracked, taking Keleon by the hand, and quietly moving us over to the door of the room Mum was in. "We don't need a key. We just need something the right shape."

I lifted Keleon's finger to the lock of the door.

"I know you don't have control over your body," I whispered, "but now would be a really good time for a shift." 

I hoped that whatever it was that triggered a shift would get itself inside my head and decide that the best outcome would be to allow him to pick the lock. I realised it had worked when I heard him push his finger into the lock and waited, then turned it in the direction I indicated.

The resulting click sounded deafening in the otherwise silent corridor, and the echo didn't do us any favours either. 

Why were these manual locks so loud?

I pushed the door open slowly, trying to create as little noise as possible. Unfortunately, the door creaked loudly, and I knew anyone remotely in the area was going to have heard it. I cursed under my breath, and silently wondered whether the G.I.A. personnel had put Mum in a room with a noisy door deliberately so that they'd hear if she got out.

Either way it was too late. Footsteps were coming in our direction from the northern end of the corridor. We needed to move.

"This way!" I hissed as started pulling both Mum and Keleon towards the southern end of the corridor, and into the lab at the end of it. We'd have to cross the lab to another corridor and keep moving quickly to get to the southern entrance.

The natural light from the stars through the large window meant that the lab was lighter than the corridor. As we entered the lab and started to move across it, five silhouetted figures came through the southern entrance, blocking our escape route. Four figures arrived from the northern end of the lab, from the same direction as we'd just come from. The three of us stood close together in the centre of the lab in a defensive position, but my heart sank as I recognised we were surrounded, and the odds weren't in our favour.

"Damon, we just want to help you," said one of the voices from the north end of the room. It was a familiar phrase from the last three years of my life, but I now knew better than to believe it.

I heard a click and then a hissing sound, and within a few seconds, smoke started rising from around our feet. Keleon ducked into it, and I realised he'd let off one of his smoke grenades so that we had some cover at least. Perhaps creating some confusion would help us get out of here. I grabbed Mum's hand and ducked into the dense smoke to join Keleon, but he had already disappeared into the smokescreen. I could only just about make out my mother, so there was no way I'd see him now. I assumed he'd headed south, since that was our best chance of escape, and with smoke tickling my throat, I pulled Mum in that direction with me. The grenade was still hissing which covered a lot of the noise we made. I heard another click from in front of us as another one was released.

A commotion in front of us made me stop suddenly. There were shuffling noises and some sharp intakes of breath. Mum pulled on my arm quietly and, when I followed her guidance, I found myself underneath one of the benches at the south end of the laboratory near the door we needed. We squeezed up together as much as the space would allow and tried to see what was going on through the smoke.

"We've got one of them," a female voice came from the southern end of the lab. My stomach twisted. 

Mum was still very much with me, which only left one person they could have.

"Get the gold cuffs on in case it's the shifter," came another voice, male and closer to us this time.

Shit. Keleon was right about them knowing a Vacillator was involved in my previous getaway, and they apparently also knew gold stopped him shifting.

"Already done, sir," the first voice confirmed.

"OK, let's see which one we've got," the male responded, the smoke dissipating now.

This wasn't good. If he had gold handcuffs on him already, he wouldn't be able to slip out of them by shifting.

Panicked and shaky, I watched helplessly from our hiding place as I heard the click of a cigarette lighter.

Through the fading smoke my eyes searched, hoping to see that they'd made a mistake and cuffed one of their own in the confusion that Keleon had created with the grenades. As the flame moved higher and towards the prisoner, I saw him more clearly.

I felt a sharp twist in my gut and involuntarily sucked in a breath, as the figure's profile came into view.

Because the last time I'd seen that face had been as a reflection in a mirror.

Keleon had shifted – and now he looked exactly like me.