The Walls Come Tumblin' Down

“In many lives I’ve been a stranger. I’m one who’s travelled far away. In many times there’s been unkindness, but we’ll rise again one happy day [...] So lend your hand to all burdened travellers. Lend your coat, your bread, your home. For some day too, you’ll be the stranger, and you’ll find there’s friends along the road.”

-from “Long Road Home”, traditional song

Yan cradled her broken fingers: the pinky and ring on her left hand. She should probably have been grateful that the Green King didn't break anything important. They would probably heal fine. She had ripped the cloth of her skirt with her teeth and wrapped them up as best she could. It would at least keep them still. It was impossible to see what she was doing, still in the dark, and so her hand felt larger than life, a throbbing, magnified mess. In her mind's eye, it bloomed to five times its usual size, dragging on the ground behind her as she paced. She kept it cool on the stone floor, drooping it off the side of her bed as she lay to sleep.

The Green King hadn't even gotten anything useful from her. It wasn't as though she made a point of memorizing star charts to point out planets that the Fleet had their eye on. Even when she had told him random pieces of information about Kino and Sid, it wasn't anything that had strategic importance. She started making up stuff, just so that he would shut up and go away and leave her alone and stop breaking her fingers. So what if they thought that Sid had a secret double life when she said he disappeared. He had run away once. That didn't mean anything. There was nothing they could get out of that information.

She was given food, again. She didn't even manage to stay awake to see the girl come in. It felt like the moment she laid down to sleep, she passed out. It was difficult to know how long she had been asleep. Now, with the light gone, there seemed to be even less passage of time. But she was able to grope and fumble her way to the table, and eat the unwrapped food that was left there.

She thought for a while, resuming her usual back and forth across the floor. She re-visited the scene from the day before over and over. The Green King's voice played on a repeat track in her head. Back and forth, back and forth. The short laps turned into long minutes, the long minutes turned into a half hour. As she paced, she felt dizzy. Her thoughts slipped away from her like. Her thoughts slipped away. Her thoughts. She–

Yan realized something was happening. She stumbled to the toilet and stuck her finger down her throat, trying vainly to make herself throw up. The food had something in it, something new this time. A panic seized her as she thought that it might be meant to kill her.

Halen stood behind her. "If they meant to kill you, a knife would be faster."

Yan puked into the toilet. Not much came out. She stood and went to the sink, drinking as much water as she could. Maybe she could flush it out. She choked, spluttering water everywhere.

Anger and fear were the only emotions that cut through the haze that whatever she had been drugged with brought on. She saw shining spots on the edge of her vision. Her heart was racing. She yanked at the chain on her ankle. If she didn't escape right now, she would die. Someone was coming down the hallway to kill her. Someone was holding a knife to her throat. Someone was pounding her broken fingers onto the floor. Someone was putting acid in her mouth. She wailed and pounded the floor as horrible visions wrapped themselves around her brain. There wasn't any way for her to think clearly. She sobbed, choked on her sobs, curled up into a ball on the floor.

It felt like a million years of being haunted and battered. She didn't even think to use the power, but when she came out of it, so many hours later, she knew that she wouldn't have been able to. Yan lay on the floor, miserable, and thought about her situation as her mind cleared. The thoughts came crawling back, like feeling returning to an asleep limb.

She didn't know if that had been an intentionally bad trip, a drug cocktail made just to torment her, or if it had simply been something made to sedate her that had backfired. It didn't particularly matter. If there was one thing that Yan didn't want, it was getting drugs in her food.

And that meant that she had a time limit on her escape. She had to escape before anyone noticed that she had stopped eating, and obviously before she starved. She could conceivably flush food down the toilet for a while, but she was sure that there was an infrared camera monitoring her every move in her dark cell. If she was too obvious that she wasn't eating, she would be caught out, and probably drugged in a much less pleasant way. Not that she would have described this as pleasant in any way, but it was better than being stabbed with a needle, or any other method.

They had to know she was going to stop eating as soon as she realized what was happening. Or maybe they thought it was supposed to be a painkiller for her broken fingers. Ha. That was funny. She delicately touched her bandaged left hand. It still felt hot and swollen. She gently dropped it down onto the floor where she lay. It didn't matter if her eyes were open or closed; she saw the same thing either way.

Yan almost missed the buzzing of the light.

One thing that had given her hope, right before she had lost herself to the drug completely, was that she had managed to imagine Halen again. That was her only hope now, since the Green King realized that she could use the power while he was torturing her. It felt… pretty bad to admit that was what was happening, and to think that it was probably going to happen again. Not that it wasn't obvious, but she had spent so long here without anyone doing anything to her, and now they finally decided to, and–

She knew her limits now, and she had found that they weren't really that far away.

It was really only a small step, to go from torturing her to killing her. She had to get out.

"What am I supposed to do?" she asked aloud, to no one in particular. She didn't think that anyone would answer; she was just back to her normal muttering to fill the silence.

How easily she slipped into her fantasies when she wasn't trying! And now that they was her only hope of escaping, they refused to come to her.

She may have fallen asleep there on the floor. Time and consciousness did funny things, when she was alone there in the dark.

There was a bright light in the center of her vision. A flashlight, the shining of the stardrive, God, maybe. She didn't move, didn't speak. It went away.

Yan thought about it again, focusing through the twinge of pain in her brain that came whenever she thought about anything too much. Open eyes, closed eyes, it didn't matter. Just imagine, conjure, bring into being that bright point of light. If it was God, then let it be God, and let God help her escape here. If it was the stardrive, let her be back in that shuttle with the young Halen, and let that be the ticket to her escape. If it was the flashlight, let it be held by a friendly hand. She thought she saw something at some points, but as she got excited and seized upon them, they went away.

Eventually, she had to get up. Her back ached. As always, it was difficult to get up with her stiff neck. She couldn't just curl up onto herself. Instead, Yan needed to roll onto her stomach and get up that way, on her hands and knees.

She found more food on the table when she went to check. So the light had been the flashlight, coming in to deliver her next few meals. Yan sat down at the table, like she always did when she ate. This time, though, she brought the pieces of food up to her mouth, then carefully dropped them down her shirt. She tried to be inconspicuous about it, but her internal image of what she would look like on the camera probably didn't match up with whatever the infrared camera was actually seeing. Assuming there was one. Yan thought it would be beyond stupid not to constantly monitor a prisoner, even if they were in the dark. She slowly pretended to eat as much as she normally would in a meal, then carefully walked over to the toilet, trying not to spill any of the food she had dropped in small pieces down her shirt. She kicked down her skirt, sat, and dropped the food in between her legs into the toilet bowl. There. Mission accomplished.

Her stomach grumbled, and she drank tap water to calm it. This wouldn't be sustainable for long. The hungrier she got, the less she'd be able to focus. Given how little she was able to bring her visions back already, that didn't bode well. She wished she could stop putting so much pressure on it, but pressure was all she had, beating down on her from all sides.

She paced some more, going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until she had exhausted herself. She didn't want to think of how many kilometers a day she walked, going forward and backward the same six steps, bare feet slapping the stone floor. Too many kilometers.

When she could walk no more, and her stomach was screaming at her to eat something, she sat down on her bed. She tried to imagine the light again. That was the simplest thing. Just stare into the darkness long enough, and she'd see it. She raised her right hand up to her eyes. There must be a light illuminating behind them, because in the complete darkness of the room, she could see her hand, right there, plain as if she was in sunlight. She raised and lowered her fingers. The light was just behind, just, just, if she could hold that in her head. She had to force herself not to think about how it was all just an illusion, her brain tricking itself. In her brain, she knew she was just recognizing the feeling and bodily sensation of holding up her hand and connecting that to the knowledge of what her hand should look like. But she had to ignore that, or it wouldn't work. She had to let herself be swept up in the fantasy that there was a light in the room.

She closed her eyes. She lowered her hand. The faintest light remained. She could feel, or she pretended to feel, her body creeping forward, crawling infinitely across the stone floor on hands and knees toward the light. Yes. This was a good fantasy. Closer. Go closer.

Her fingers ached. Her knees burned from scraping on the stone. The light grew brighter.

She crawled forward. Off in the distance, there were stars, but she was there in the center of this vast expanse. A cold stone floor, a long chain dragging behind her. A shuttle, perched on the ground. A young man leaning against it.

That wasn't God. She stood.

"What are we doing here?" Halen asked. "Did you wreck my stardrive?"

"I need you to help me," Yan said.

"With what?"

"Getting out of here."

"Where's here? I think we might be dead. This is the place you go when you make a stardrive wrong, isn't it?"

"Forget about the stardrive," Yan said.

Halen crossed his arms. "You almost wrecked my shuttle."

"It's not real. It's just a metaphor."

Halen laughed. Yan clung to the vision, keeping it steady. "You tell yourself that."

"I'm trying," Yan said. "I don't want to die in here."

"Then let's take the shuttle and go. Get out." Halen pointed up at the stars.

"I'd love to," Yan said. She pointed at her chain. "Help me with this, first."

"That's not just a metaphor, too?" Halen asked. "You sure you get to pick and choose what's real and what isn't?"

"If you argue with me too much I'll–"

"You'll?"

Yan gasped. She had been holding her breath in concentration for too long, and the vision fell apart. She was back in her dark room. It took so much effort to sustain something that had once been so effortless. It was just like a prayer, or meditation, both of which had become so useless to her in this cage. Where once she could have slipped into those ways of thinking easily, now that she had spent so long dissecting them and trying to purposefully use them as refuge, they felt hollow and useless, like the shed skin of a snake.

But. This was the best she had done so far, and it gave her a boost of confidence where there had been none. Even if she hadn't quite made it to using the power, she still had gotten back into that state.

One thing that puzzled her was the near-constant presence of Halen in these visions. Why him? Was it just because of her previous complicated feelings? The way he treated her? How he had once been trapped? It seemed like she should be seeing Sid, or Sylva. She knew both of them so much better. But maybe that was why they didn't show up. She could imagine things about Halen, so her brain had room to fill in the gaps. With Sylva, she would have to constantly be checking against what she knew.

And who knows? Maybe there was some sort of deeper psychology to it. Father figure. Whatever. Yan scowled and lay down on her bed, facefirst on the mattress. She wanted to sink her teeth into it. Her stomach growled. Sleep for dinner.

The next day she repeated the process. Fake eating came first, dropping each morsel down her shirt and wishing desperately that she was actually eating them. Then she paced herself into exhaustion, trying to think up strategies for forcing her mind into some sort of state where she could imagine something, anything. She needed to trick whatever was monitoring her brain into letting her use the power. Then she sat down on her bed and tried again, staring off into the darkness for hours on end until the tedium that seized her relented, and she fell down into that well of imagination that had once been simply a comfort and distraction, and was now salvation.

The blank, endless stone nothingness was the easiest to visualize when she was trying so hard, so she returned there again. The chain stretched endlessly behind her, disappearing out into the darkness. Halen stood there, without his shuttle this time. She stood as well.

"Help me break the chain," she demanded.

"How?"

"You pull that end and I'll pull this end," Yan said.

"Doubt it'll do anything," Halen said. "You're crazy, you know. I can tell."

"Doesn't matter."

He grabbed the end of the chain anyway, and Yan picked up the slack in her hands. They both pulled against eachother, feet scrabbling on the stone floor, until Yan toppled over, the chain in her hand unbroken. She hit the floor with a heavy thud, and was jolted out of her reverie for a moment, finding herself not on her bed where she had thought, but instead on the actual floor of her cell. Her fingers throbbed. She closed her eyes, breathed steadily, and tried to get back.

The light grew brighter around her.

"Can you saw through it?" Yan asked, her voice sounding like it was coming from herself through a thick fog.

"With what?"

Halen was so far away, standing as though on a distant shore. Between them, Yan tried to resolve the darkness into a meaningful shape. There was a saw blade. She forced Halen to walk forward, slow, plodding steps, and he came into clearer detail. He picked up the saw.

"And you think this will cut it?"

Yan took the saw from Halen without answering. He held the chain taught against the ground, and she dragged the saw across it, in slow, steady strokes. Back and forth. Rhythmic. The same as breathing. The scrapes of the blade against the chain were her thick gasps in the soupy air of her cell. Focus. Back and forth. A simple action here. A desire to accomplish something. That could translate into the power somewhere else.

How much would she have to saw? She had to believe that she was making a dent in it. A dent appeared. She kept her attention to a laser point, no matter how difficult it was.

The chain broke in half. She dropped the saw. It clattered to the ground, and the lack of sound jolted her out of her dream. She fumbled around on the floor of her cell, picking up the chain that held her leg, inspecting every link, feeling every piece, testing the slack, finding the one point–

Where the chain was broken cleanly in half, as though by a saw blade. Yan stuffed her hand into her mouth and bit it, so that she would stop herself from screaming. She checked it again, barely able to believe what she was feeling. She held the two halves of it in her hands. Tears trickled down her cheeks.

She remembered that she needed to be careful. She couldn't be seen on the infrared doing anything that might let people know she had broken out. Her head hurt fiercely.

She wasn't broken out yet. There was still the matter of the door. Now, it was even more urgent that she get it open, because if anyone came in and saw that her chain was broken, they would definitely put her back on drugs by any means necessary. Or just decide she was no longer necessary and kill her. That was a possibility.

She swiped her tears away from her face, calmed her breathing, and tried to go back to that place in her mind. It was harder, this time, because her body was flooded with adrenaline, and her mind was screaming down its thoughts like a runaway shuttle. Deep breaths. Calm breaths. Hand in front of her face. Imagine the light shining behind it. Walk towards it.

Slowly, she crept towards it through the walls of her imagination. The light illuminated everything, a harsh circle on the ground. No chain held her ankle here, anymore. She felt as though she could run forever. She was free. Almost.

A door stood in the center of the light. She had imagined it there. After all, it would be probably easier to focus the power on something she could see. Halen stood at her right shoulder, his hand heavy on her arm. This wasn't the young Halen; he was the one she had known and met.

"Can you open it?" Yan asked.

"You have to open it yourself," he said.

"And what's on the other side?"

"Freedom."

"But danger, too?"

"Yes, that too."

"How should I do it?" Yan asked.

"Just pull. You can open it."

She walked forward. His hand slipped off her shoulder. She put her hands on the doorhandle. It was warm and solid in her hands. She twisted it. She pulled the door. It was heavy. It was so heavy. She put her whole body weight behind it, her bare feet sliding on the stone.

"Help me," she grunted.

"You have to do it," Halen said.

"But I can't!"

"You can. You have to."

"What if I don't?"

"You'll die. You have to open it."

Yan strained, the muscles all over her body heaving with effort, her fingers stretching and scraping on the handle. It burst open like there was a massive pressure difference, and Yan fell heavily backwards.

She opened her eyes.

Dim light was spilling in through from the hallway, along with dust. Her head hurt. Yan raised her hand and touched her forehead. It was bleeding. Something had hit her. She took a deep breath and coughed. Her mouth was full of dust.

It took a moment for her to process what she was seeing. She had ripped the door off its hinges, and taken chunks of the stone wall with it. She stood up off the floor, wincing as the change made her head throb and her broken fingers grazed her legs. She was surprised that no one had come running. She needed to start running. She wouldn't be able to fend off gunshots in this state, and that was the only thing that made her a competent fighter under the best of circumstances. She couldn't turn her head, had broken fingers, and couldn't use the power. She was as good as useless. But she was going to try.

She scrambled out through the wreckage of the door into the hallway. There was still no sign of anyone. Her eyes were having trouble adjusting to both the new light and the longer distances. After so long being cooped up in such a small room, she had forgotten what it felt like to focus her eyes on something far away. She didn't have time to think about that now.

Yan picked a direction and ran right. Her feet got scratched on some of the rubble from her destruction of the door, but she ignored it and continued. There were two doors at the end of the hallway. One had a light on behind it, the other was windowless. She tried the windowless one first, hoping that it was an exit. It was locked. She saw the keyhole on the door. How old fashioned.

Behind her, Yan heard footsteps from far down the hallway. She couldn't turn her head, so she did the only other thing she could, which was to try the door with the light in the window. It swung open, and she stepped through. She quickly closed it, and took stock of the situation.

Yan could have sobbed with relief at what she found. She was in a little office room, with a cozy looking armchair tucked into a corner, set up with a television in front of it, silently playing some movie or another. Asleep on the chair was the woman that Yan had seen during the nights. Her head was turned so that the flat side was hidden, and a line of drool slipped out of her mouth and gathered on her beige dress. A single key was strung on a scrunchie bracelet on her wrist.

The girl stirred, rolled her head to the side, and yawned widely with her eyes closed. Yan froze. She didn't know what she would do if the girl woke up. She needed that key. It was probably the key to the outside world. She turned and searched the room for any sort of weapon, found only the desk lamp on the rickety little office desk. That would be solid enough. Yan reached over toward it, trying to be as silent as possible. The girl opened her eyes.

Yan yanked the desk lamp out of the wall plug and held it up menacingly. The girl seemed to take a moment to process what was going on.

"The key," Yan demanded in Old Imperial, the only language that the Green King seemed to speak. "Give me the key."

The girl's eyes were wide, and she was forcing her whole body backwards into her armchair as if that could protect her. She said something incoherent and rapid, in a tone that sounded low from sleep and high from fear at the same time. Yan stepped forward, hoisting the desk lamp. The girl shook.

Yan pointed at the key on her wrist. She seemed frozen in place, unable or unwilling to move. Yan switched to holding the desk lamp menacingly in just her left hand, and leaning down to snatch the key off of the girl's wrist with her right. But that movement spurred her into action, and she lunged forward and dove past Yan towards the desk. She yanked one of the drawers open.

Yan tackled her, dropping the desk lamp to clatter to the floor. They wrestled. This girl was short and had bigger muscles than Yan did after being locked away, but Yan was taller, and could reach into the drawer first. She held the girl's head to the ground with her left, wrapping her legs around her waist. Her fingers scrabbled around in the drawer. She elbowed the girl to get her to move out of the way. Yan's hand closed around the barrel of a gun. She pulled it out of the drawer triumphantly, and flicked off the safety. She held it to the girl's head on the floor.

The girl, realizing that she had lost, started sobbing. Yan let go of her head and used her left hand to yank the scrunchie bracelet with the key off the girl's wrist.

For a moment, Yan sat there on top of her, just listening to the girl sob and contemplating what she was going to do. She inched forward a little to see if there was additional ammunition in the drawers. She opened them one by one, and found one small box of it. She still had her knees clamped firmly against the girl's body, holding her down, and the gun pointed at her head. Yan put the ammunition box in her mouth, since she had no pockets, and wanted at least one hand free.

The real conundrum was this: she was escaping, and now she was armed, but she had no idea where she was going and what sort of resistance she was about to encounter. Taking a– she hesitated to think the words human shield– along would probably help her chances of survival. She did feel pretty bad about it, but it wasn't like she actually would hurt or kill her. And, well, she had been kidnapped, and–

She didn't have time to justify it to herself. She snapped out of it and made her decision. Carefully, she inched off of the girl's back, into a standing position. She looked down on her as best she could, given that she couldn't move her neck, and kept the gun squarely aimed at her head.

Yan waved the gun to indicate that the girl should stand up. She didn't move. Yan bent down again, holding the gun at a safe distance, and tugged on the girl's arm to get her to stand. She was still crying, the tears running down her brown cheeks. Yan felt pretty bad about it. She didn't have a choice. She marshaled the girl in front of her, and Yan nudged her to open the door out of the office.

The hallway was abandoned, for some reason. Perhaps the guard or the person who had come to investigate what had happened to her decided that he needed backup. Yan couldn't fault him for that. After all, if they thought she could use the power freely, well, she wouldn't want to face her either. That meant that someone was definitely getting the Green King, who would be sure to stop her if he arrived. That was all the more reason for her to hustle.

She nudged the girl towards the other, locked, door, and handed her back the key. She pointed to it. Yan kept her back to the girl, just so she could see if anyone came down the hallway after her. The door clicked open, and Yan turned back around. There was a set of stairs there, with another door at the top. She hoped the same key could be used for both. Yan shut the bottom door behind her and nudged the girl up the stairs. She moved slowly, but with a gun at her back, she couldn't help but move.

This door's lock was a fingerprint sensor, but it had a red light on it. When Yan manhandled the girl to put her finger on it, it beeped and didn't open. Yan would have laughed hysterically, had she not had a mouth full of bullets. She had made it so far just to be stuck by a door on automatic lockdown.

What was worse was the fact that whoever had set up this locking system clearly didn't care about this girl that Yan was holding hostage, since she had been abandoned in here with Yan. She was really starting to feel bad about her decision to kidnap her, or whatever this was. Wasn't really a human shield, since the Green King, whenever he arrived, would have the control to stop Yan dead in her tracks, without harming a hair on this girl's head. Yan could threaten to shoot her herself, but she–

This was getting off track. She needed to open that door. Her left hand went to the place behind her jaw where the chip was supposedly lodged. She needed that out. She needed it out immediately.

Yan searched around the edges of the door for any way to open it.

"I could use some help here, Halen," she mumbled through the obstruction in her mouth. "I don't want to die in here."

Her first thought was to shoot out the security system on the door. It couldn't hurt. She grabbed the collar of the girl's dress and hauled her back down a few steps and forced her to the ground. There was no sense in exposing her to more shrpanel than was necessary. Yan stepped back as well, and took aim at the fingerprint sensor. Just as she was about to fire, the girl kicked out her leg, and sent Yan tumbling backwards down the steps. The shot went wide, hitting the stone wall and spraying pieces of stone. The noise of it in the tiny hallway was unbearable, as was the sick feeling of her stiff neck and head slamming into the floor. Yan's vision blacked out for a brief moment, and her teeth clamped down on the ammunition box. Though her vision was swimming, her ears were ringing, and her body felt like it had been dropped off a cliff, Yan kept her wits about her as much as she could.

The girl dived at her from further up the stairs, wrestling for the gun. Yan was desperate and vicious, and elbowed the girl in the face to keep her as far away from the gun as possible. The girl couldn't reel back, because they were both tilted upside down on the stairs, but she moved enough that Yan could shove her off her body.

Yan kicked backwards, braced herself against the back door, and stood shakily, keeping the gun aimed at the girl. Yan had smashed the girl's nose so hard that it started to bleed. She felt… pretty bad about that. She pulled the makeshift bandage off her broken fingers and handed it to the girl so that she could staunch the flow of blood. Yan didn't take her eyes off of her, but she didn't want to feel like she was now the one hurting another person. It couldn't really be helped, but…

The girl put the scrap of cloth to her nose and stood. They looked at each other warily, and Yan gestured for her to climb back up the stairs. She had to think of another way out of this stairwell. She certainly wasn't going to turn around and go backward; it was probably the same situation on the other side of the hallway, and she didn't want to waste time finding that out.

Her head was swimming from both the adrenaline pumping through her body and from the impact of hitting the floor a moment ago, as well as the low blood sugar that came from not eating in so long. She ran her fingers along the edges of the door, checking to see if the hinges could easily be broken. She wasn't going to try to shoot anything out again, because that had ended so badly before.

Yan tried to stop and breathe. She didn't know how long it would be before the Green King arrived, but she couldn't control that, so she just had to take the time to think. Stop. Breathe. Focus. The chip in her head throbbed with pain whenever she focused in that particular way. She tried to shift her thoughts sideways, to the imaginative space where she could use the power abstractly, but her heart was pounding, and she had to keep her eyes open to make sure the girl didn't try anything. She had to imagine seeing, just out of the corner of her eye, a flicker of something. She had to.

She could feel Halen, standing right behind her on the stairs, towering over her.

"What do I have to do?" she asked. Her voice sounded clear in her head, even though she was mumbling through the box in her mouth. Halen shoved her forward a little bit.

"The same as you did before."

She stumbled the rest of the distance up the stairs, and put her whole weight onto pushing the door open. This wasn't exactly like before, because it was pushing rather than pulling, and because it was real instead of completely imagined. But if she could just trick her brain enough–

Opening locked doors was the easiest thing all Academy students did. They just went up to them and they opened. It didn't take any conscious thought, for those eight year old sensitives to want to go behind a locked door. They just leaned on it and pushed and–

The whole door collapsed outward in a rush of power that she felt leaving her, and Yan fell flat on her face, the gun trapped underneath her stomach. Her fingers screamed in pain as she lay on top of them. She stood up as quickly as she could, and blinked rapidly to clear her vision. She was outdoors, for the first time in God only knew how long.

It was night, and the stars in the sky were shockingly bright and clear. They drove pinpricks into her vision as she stared up at them. The air was cool and and smelled like water. A light breeze tugged at the dusty remains of her skirt. She took a deep, snorting breath in through her nose. A wild animal released from her cage, at last, at last.

She was on some sort of hill; the door was built directly into a rocky hillside, and scrubbly grass stretched down over the shambles of rocks. They stabbed at her already cut feet as she began traipsing down the hill, gesturing the girl forward, heading down towards whatever lay shaded by trees off in the slight distance. She passed solar panels that provided the energy for this outpost.

Though she didn't have the time to think about it, Yan couldn't help but wonder where she was as she ran. Clearly, this was a low tech facility, somewhere disconnected from the main power grid of whatever planet she was on. Now that she was outside of her cell, she could see that the place had little in the way of security. She was probably the only prisoner, and they had counted on her being unable to use the power to escape. Joke was on them.

And yet, for such a disconnected place, it was teeming with life, and open to the elements. It wasn't any domed mining colony on some forsaken chunk of rock. This was a whole, live planet.

She stumbled as she ran, but she kept going, heading down to the bottom of the hill. There was a bit of a clearing there, before the grass gave way to bushes which gave way to stubby, fat trees. The girl was in front of her, keeping ahead only by virtue of not wanting to be in Yan's direct reach. She turned her head (how Yan envied that), and cried out loudly, yelling something in a language that Yan didn't know.

Yan had time to pivot on her foot before the Green King's power grabbed her whole body and froze her like a statue. She could see him, coming out from around the other side of the hill. He was alone, but he was more than dangerous enough all by himself. Yan couldn't move.

The girl stood, frozen between them, seemingly unsure of what was going on. The Green King called out to her, speaking in that same language. His voice was rough and unfriendly. The harsh lights of the prison behind him lit up his eyes, and they gleamed disturbingly. His whole face was flickering with wild shadows. He walked forward, but he was still a good thirty meters away, over rough terrain.

The girl stepped a little to the side, inching away from Yan. She looked worried that Yan was going to reach out and grab her at any second, and she kept glancing back and forth between them.

Yan was frozen, her face twisted into a pained grimace, her body tilted unsteadily, halfway through a step. Tiny pebbles skittered down her bare feet as the wind inched her to the side. Without her permission, her legs steadied themselves. Her right hand, the one holding the gun, checked the already down safety, and raised the gun to her own head. She fought it every fraction of the way, but it was no use. Her body was out of her control.

She still had the ability to cry. The Green King hadn't managed to take that from her, apparently. The tears rolled down her cheeks. She closed her eyes.

"Drop it," Halen said in her ear. "Drop it. Simple."

She could still feel the metal of the gun in her hand. She could still feel the wind brushing past her, and smell the water somewhere in the distance. She made a choked little noise deep in her throat.

The Green King said something else to the girl.

"Drop it now," Halen continued.

She was in that white space, all alone. Just her and the gun. The spotlight came down from the ceiling. Halen wasn't there. She was frozen, even here, with the gun to her head.

"You have to put it down," Halen said again, his voice all around her.

"I can't," she sobbed. "I can't."

"If you don't do it, you're going to die. Right here."

Yan was alone in the shuttle, the gun still pressed to her head. "You don't want to die in here," Halen said.

"I can't move."

"You moved before."

The tears were streaming down her face. She had no long how long this was lasting in the outside world, but inside her head, this dark moment stretched on and on forever. If she died here, she would be trapped in this shuttle for the rest of eternity. No one would find her. No one would be able to. She was choking on her own tears.

"Drop it. NOW," Halen was yelling at her like she had never heard him yell before.

She screamed, not knowing if it was just in her mind or out loud. It hurt.

Her fingers uncurled from the gun, and it fell to the ground.

She opened her eyes. The scene unfolded in front of her faster than she could process. Most of her body was still frozen with the Green King's power, but the gun was sliding down the rocky ground at her feet. The Green King was yelling something incoherent and charged forward towards Yan, his face red and his teeth bared. The girl first scrambled back, then looked between the sobbing Yan and the enraged Green King. Something changed on her face– the side of her bloodied face that could move, anyway– and she lunged to the ground, grabbed the gun, and fired it into the Green King's shoulder.

He fell to the ground, screaming, and his power over Yan immediately broke. The girl was standing stock still, looking shocked down at the gun in her hands. Yan started to run down the hillside. It was only a matter of time before the Green King realized he wasn't fatally wounded and got up to chase her. The girl followed, still clutching the gun. She darted in front of Yan, more nimble than she first looked, though her gait was lopsided. Yan followed her down the slope, into the bushes, crashing through the underbrush.

The line of trees was thinner than Yan had thought from the hill, and they broke out of it after less than a minute of running pell-mell through the growth. Distantly, they could hear the Green King yelling somewhere behind them, but there was no accompanying sound of him crashing through the trees after them.

They emerged from the growth onto a rocky beach, on the shore of an ocean that stretched off to the too-wide horizon. Only tiny waves created by the wind lapped the shore– there was no moon here to make tides, or at least none that Yan could see. The girl ran headlong across the rocky beach toward a distant pier where a few small boats were docked. Yan followed, and the girl didn't stop her or threaten her with the gun.

The pier was shaky and wooden, and Yan stopped short on it. The girl pushed the small of her back, sending her tripping into a shallow boat with just a simple motor on the back. The girl deftly untied its moorings, hopped in herself, and started the motor up. It purred into life, and the ship lept away from the dock, leaving a massive wake behind.