Chapter 86
- Kaysi -
It was the silence that spoke first.
A silence that hummed like something just screamed, and the sound hadn't caught up yet. It had a false sense of peace, the kind that settles heavy on your shoulders, thicker than fog, too still to trust.
I opened my eyes slowly, and at first, everything was black.
No, not black—colorless. The kind of void that drinks in the light and memory alike. But something was there. A warmth. A weight.
I blinked again, and my body throbbed like it had been slammed through time itself. I tried to move, but I was half-crushed under something. No—someone.
"What the—?" I muttered softly, my voice hoarse. My breath was dragged from the thick air mixed with dust and sulfur.
I blinked a few more times to adjust my vision. It slowly fixed. I lay lying on top of someone familiar. Too familiar. Did I fall on him?
"Evan?"
He was unconscious, his body sprawled out on the ground, bloody and bruised, but alive. Barely, I could see he was breathing.
And that is when it all came crashing back, hitting me!
The moment I tried to get up, leaving Evan off of him broke my fall, and my skin touched the soil of the Abyss. It triggered—that place—my memories exploded like a dam breaking. I screamed so loud with no sound.
I clutched my head. The world felt like it was going to fold in on itself, spinning too hard for me to stand.
Every fragment of who I was, my whole life, who I had been before becoming a waymaker, before Becky and Micah joined me, and Baby slammed my mind like a dozen shattered mirrors fusing back together.
No, I remembered it all!
The last memory I had was Josh beating the crap out of me, his eyes wild and not himself; he was the phoenix demon. The pain echoed shadows tearing at my soul. The pain. The betrayal. The near-death.
I looked at my scars. "Odd?" They were aged from my last memory, as though time had passed.
Some scars, physical scars that changed with age, remained, but the mental scars lingered like a bitter aftertaste, this one of heartbreak. I never quite swallowed the pain I chose to forget in middle school years ago—Evan and I clung to each other. His times of heroism. Also, how he stole my first kiss once, under the sweet warmth of the springtime sun.
I thought back as I softly touched my lips, remembering that moment I would never have with anyone else again. My face felt hot.
I also felt a surge of emotion when he said goodbye, like she was just another mistake he didn't want to carry into high school. So many mixed emotions overwhelmed me.
Now, here he was. Unconscious beside me. Years later. After everything.
I quickly pulled myself together, ignoring my trembling hands and body.
"Of course it's you again," I whispered bitterly.
'Sigh..." I dragged Evan into a more upright position, leaning him against the wall of what looked like a crumbling obsidian cavern. The walls glistened with veins of red light pulsing faintly, as if the whole place were alive and watching.
I tore a few strips from my shirt and started bandaging a gash on his temple and chest. As well as splinting his broken wrist.
"How did we even get here?" I whispered again, more or less talking to myself. "I am going nuts here."
Evan stirred.
My breath, and I gasped.
"Evan?"
His eyes blinked open slowly, dazed. He groaned. "Kaysi...?"
I didn't mean to, but I felt my jaw clench at the sound of my name in his voice. He said it so casually, like it was no big deal.
"Yeah. It's me. Are you awake enough now to tell me why I woke up here in this hell next to you?
He winced. "Portal. Benjamin... died. Opened it to drag me down. You—you grabbed me."
I blinked. So I had chosen to come to this place? That part was still fuzzy. Before the snap of full recollection, my last clear memory was darkness and a storm.
"Great. So I volunteered for this." I leaned back, crossing my arms, thinking. I'm sorry everything is blurry—life up there, I mean.
"I don't understand why we are here or why nothing makes sense."
"What do you mean?"
"You're here, I am here. I believe this is the Abyss. I had heard about it before when Baby trained me. So the only thing I can gather is that you went after Benjamin, and I went after Josh at the same time and ended up going through the same portal and landing in the same place."
"Kaysi...That's not funny."
Evan looked at her then—really looked—and the weight of her words must've hit him.
"What?"
"Until now, I just discovered from Benjamin that Josh is even alive. For all we know, he has been dead for almost a month since the lab bombing."
"What the hell are you talking about?" I jumped to my feet. "Josh tried to kill me!" I lift my shirt to show him my broken ribs and scars. They were gone, only old trails from ghosts of the past.
"I...I...don't understand?"