FINISHED
I did it. I really did it. *dies*
There are a total of 50047 words here. I'm betting that this story is not even a quarter of the way finished. Jamie's has barely begun. Emma's is going to be so fleshed out that it will only be marginally recognizable by the time I'm done.
I am so proud of myself.
Half of this was written in the past week. I drank so much Earl Grey... Wow.
Here, have some nanowrimo:
Zane just looked away from her. “We have to go further.”
There was a long tunnel ahead of them. It wasn’t a hallway at all, just a roughly hewn hole in the rock.
“What is this?”
“The smoke has to go somewhere.” At the look on Emma’ face Zane added, “It only becomes dangerous when they’re actually doing the burning, when it’s just a regular fire it’s perfectly safe. And we won’t be here long, but we have to hurry, okay?”
Reluctantly she took his hand and stepped up into the rocks at the tunnel’s entrance.
There were small rocks and things al over the floor, and twice Emma tripped and had to be caught before she plunged face-first into them. The first time Zane smiled at her. The second time he glared a little first, and she felt for a moment that she had got in over her head. Then he said quietly, “Be careful, yeah?” and she nodded, because she couldn’t do anything else.
Emma felt like the silence between them was really awkward, but Zane certainly seemed fine with it. She made a couple of attempts at starting some sort of conversation, but got not real response, just a few murmurs.
“Here.” Zane stopped in the middle of the tunnel, and braced his hands on the wall, leaning his whole weight onto a section of it.
“What are you doing?” Emma asked, rather confused. It was like he was trying to push the stone away from him, but there was obviously not a door or anything.
“Sometimes… the magic here… it needs a little help.” Zane gasped out as he pushed harder on the wall. “Try to open it with your powers, you’re stronger that way.”
Emma almost giggled at the thought of being stronger than Zane, who obviously had quite the set of muscles. But then she realized that he was right, because her powers hadn’t been taken yet. There was a sort of rush of pride that zipped straight through her at the thought. What was that, I’m not… magic isn’t… She didn’t have time to wonder though. A puff of smoke was calmly drifting towards them up the tunnel.
“Now, Emma, if you can!”
She knew she could. The problem was that she hadn’t done it yet, and she wasn’t as sure as she should’ve been. What if she took just herself to the other side again, or took Zane halfway and got him stuck? She could kill him-he would die if she didn’t get this right.
“Emma, sometime today!” Zane was pushing harder against the wall now, as if that was going to help. They both knew it wasn’t.
“Okay!” Emma snapped at him. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath-which was full of smoke. Immediately she was plunged into a coughing fit that Zane sharp voice reminded her they really did not have time for.
She closed her eyes again, this time trying not to breath, and pictured the open wall-no, that was wrong, she wanted the wall sliding back, she didn’t know what to picture behind the wall if it was completely open.
“Emma!” Zane was on the verge of coughing, she could hear it. And he was scared.
She pushed, not with her arms, but it still felt like she was using them, to slid the stone away into nothing. Then she heard a loud thud and snapped her eyes open. The wall was gone, and Zane, who had still been pushing with all his might, had fallen right through it. He was grinning at her from the floor. Then the smoke started to sting her eyes and she went through quickly, letting the wall reappear behind her as soon as she was through.
“Emma! You did it!” Zane seemed to be filled with unmerited happiness.
“Yeah?” So what?
“Yeah, so I don’t know anyone else who could have done that! The stone won’t be keyed to your magic until after my-my Master takes your powers away. It shouldn’t have opened for you at all.” Then something occurred to him. “And you’ve done it twice.”
Emma blushed. “Actually, I’ve only done it once.”
“But, you said….” Zane looked to her for an answer.
“The wall didn’t actually open that time. I was trying to get out and I sent myself through it instead.” Emma flushed, rather embarrassed at her lack of finesse.
“You did what?” Zane roared. He sounded really angry.
“I… I messed up and went through the wall instead of opening it.”
“Emma, Emma, do you realize… you are so…” Zane stopped and looked at her. “You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?” Obviously she didn’t know what he was going on about, otherwise she wouldn’t look so confused.
“Emma, you teleported. That’s supposed to be impossible. Also very dangerous, mind you, and you could have died, almost everyone who tries does. They get stuck in the stone. And you did it without even trying. That’s amazing.” Zane was looking at her… rather hungrily, actually, and Emma took a step backwards.
“Right, so, um… now that we’ve established that I’m awesome, and stuff… where do we go next?” The room didn’t have any exits that were visible, and Emma didn’t think she was going to be able to open a bunch more walls very soon. She was getting tired, and she had a little bit of a headache.
“Nowhere,” Zane replied simply. “We’re hiding.”
Emma turned and faced him, hands on her hips. “Nowhere? We go nowhere?”
“Zane shrugged uneasily under her gaze. “I was just thinking of somewhere that would be safe to hide. This place is. Unless you want to go back out there and get caught now, then try to escape again later without any magic, while you’re tired from punishment.”
He was right. “So how long can we safely stay here?”
“Forever, if we want.” He shrugged. “We’re magic. We can breathe this air, we can live without food. The only thing we might die of is boredom, honestly. It’s a very real possibility actually, if you get too bored, your magic decides to play, and sometimes it plays by not sustaining you anymore. I think we can manage for a little while though. Perhaps there’s a tunnel up ahead that leads out.”
At the brightening in Emma’s eyes, he added, “I don’t think there is though, because I never found it.”
“And how long have you been exploring down here? Isn’t this an odd place to spend your time?”
“Not when you’re a child!” Zane defended. “All kids like exploring.” Then he quit talking and turned his face to the wall quickly, not meeting Emma’s eyes.
“Zane? You’ve been here since you were a kid?” Emma touched his shoulder lightly.
He jerked away. “It’s not like that! Not like you think, I wasn’t… he didn’t capture me or anything.”
“Then how did you get here?” Emma asked softly.
“I… look, you can’t get mad, okay?”
“Okay…” What was he about to tell her that might make her angry?
“When I was a kid, my uncle and I both had magical powers. But mine were hard to control, I had a lot. It… it manifested too early for me to handle, and I gave some of it to my uncle because I couldn’t handle it all on my own.” He took a deep breath. “The plan was the give it back as I got older and learned to control it. But my uncle… he was power-hungry. He didn’t want to give up the extra power once he got used to using it. So he kept it. And he figured out how to take more without my permission.”
Emma didn’t know how to react… that sounded too much like…
“It’s rape, Emma. Taking what you want without asking and against a person’s permission, violating their mind and soul to have something of theirs that you think should be yours-it’s worse than rape, even because you can’t ever get it back. If I raped you right here, you could one day eventually open up to another man and have sex with him without it being a horrible experience. It takes time and healing but it can be done.
“I can’t do that. My magic is gone, and I can’t get it back, can’t use it again, ever. It’s like… raping you and then sewing up your vagina and keeping you locked in a room.” Emma’s face was full of horror and Zane seemed to realize he had chosen a rather drastic metaphor. “I know it sounds horrible, and maybe I shouldn’t have said that to you… but that’s how it feels. And I’m helpless here, we all are. Except you.”
He wasn’t really being accusatory. But he was right again, and she knew it. She could help some of these people. She could help him, and Cessa. But...
“I just want to go home to my mom.” Her voice broke a little, and then she realized what she had just said, and how impossible it would be-not only could she not get out, her mom was set to be burned tomorrow.
Zane was watching her as tears began to stream down her face, and he seemed completely at a loss for what to say. He just watched her crying helplessly for a moment.
“I do too,” he finally volunteered. “I haven’t seen her since I was eleven. That was a long time ago now, and I don’t even know if he left her alive when he took me.”
Emma wiped a tear from her eye viciously, rather angry at herself for breaking down. At least, angry at herself for breaking down in front of Zane, over something that she honestly couldn’t do very much about.
“They took you? He took you?”
“Well, I haven’t always lived in a bunch of carved out caves you know. I was a normal person once, with a family. I had a younger brother.”
‘What was his name?” Emma was eager to have a semi-normal conversation, so she concentrated on a seemingly insignificant detail.
“Juno. My mother named him that because he was born there, and he had funny eyes when he was born or something.” The sentence sounded like something he had said multiple times before, and it was definitely something an eleven year old would say. Emma giggled a little.
“It’s a nice name. I bet you teased him about it mercilessly.”
“I did. I wish I hadn’t now.” His tone brought into her mind the gravity of the situation.
“I’m sure he understands.” She said gently.
“I’m sure he’s dead.”
Emma didn’t know what to say to that.
“My uncle isn’t as bloodthirsty now as he was when I was younger. He used to kill his victims after he stole their magic. Until he realized he would need servants, and decided to raise an army, that was what he did. He burned a lot of bodies back then, and kept very few henchmen.”
“That’s… that’s horrible. I can’t believe someone would be like that.”
“It’s my fault.” Zane looked straight at her, and she knew that he thought he was telling the truth. She also knew that he probably wasn’t, because he had the melodramatic air of someone whose blaming themselves when they don’t need to. She’d seen it in herself, back when she was little and thought it was her own fault that she didn’t have a father.
“He didn’t have the power at first to do what he did. There’s a reason we’re only each given a bit of power. No one should be too terribly power than any other person. Some people have special talents, and more strength in one area than someone else, but no one has too much excess raw power. No one should be able to forcibly take power from anyone else, because we should all be equal enough to keep it from happening. Of course, it’s also just indecent to take other people’s power, but you can’t rely on decency. I was told that.”
“Zane… you didn’t…”
“I did. I was told, over and over, about how I was just supposed to learn my powers myself, and not try to get out of it, how it was dangerous for him to have that much power. But I whined and moaned and refused to learn how to control until my parents finally agreed to let us do it, just because I was beginning to be a danger to others without any training, and I refused to train because I scared of my power.”
“How old were you?” Emma asked. Surely he had been too young to make such a decision on his own. Surely it couldn’t be his fault.
“Old enough.”
Ah. So he probably hadn’t been then. She hit him in the back of the head.
“Ow!” he rubbed the spot. “What are you, spastic?”
“No. I’m sensible. Stop whining about things that probably weren’t your fault at all, except in that you were a child.” When Zane opened his mouth to protest, she cut him off. “Even if it was your fault, it’s over now, and there’s no reason for either of us to be crying about anything now. We’re rather in a tight spot, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Fine,” he agreed sharply, obviously not really agreeing. That was fine with Emma. She cared a little about him being upset but not enough to indulge it when they were trapped in a room where they could very well die, while her mother was out somewhere else she could very well die too.
He was pacing the room, and Emma sat down in the middle of it, cross-legged. It was an echo of one of the yoga poses Melanie had always taken when she was stressed. After a moment of calming down for herself, and him as well she hoped, Emma asked, “So. What are we going to do? We have to get out of here, get to my mom, and get out of this place completely. You know the tunnels and such better than I do. When is the best time to go?”
Zane thought for a moment, and for a moment he looked as if he were going to go back to his angsting. Then he set his jaw and said, “We can’t leave here for a good hour or so, because of the smoke outside.”
Emma thought of something. “Why does the smoke affect us when the magic protects us from places with bad air and no oxygen?”
“Magic is a helping kind of thing. When there is no oxygen, it make sit so we can breathe whatever there is. But if there is something in the air that is actively bad for you, like smoke, it won’t stop the smoke unless you actively try to fight it. And that sort of magic usage drains you quickly, and is very precise. You have to focus on still getting some clean air in while keeping all the smoke out. I don’t think you could do that, not for both of us, and you could dispel some smoke, but not all of it, because it would keep coming at us from the fire. So, we wait.”
“Okay. So once the smoke is cleared, we leave again, go back and get my mom. Will I be able to get to her, do you think?”
“Well. She’ll be being held somewhere different, with several other people who are set for… for being sent into the world, tomorrow. The hardest part might be getting her out without getting caught because there will be one guard, and several other prisoners who are witnesses. Also, I don’t think they’ll take to kindly to being left there to die, but I don’t think it’s wise to try to escape with more people than we can afford.”
Emma nodded. “This is going to be hard, isn’t it?” She had known that the whole time, she had known it was risky, but she… she hadn’t counted on dealing with other people. They’re all going to want my help. And Emma had always been terrible at telling anyone no.
“I know you don’t like it, and I honestly don’t think it’s probably the best idea, but… Emma. Have you thought about trying to go up against my uncle?”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that man. Ever. And she certainly didn’t think she could even hurt him much less try to… what would she be trying to do, anyway? Kill him? Beat him in some sort of odd magical battle that she would have absolutely no luck it, because she didn’t know how to use the power she had, and he had a hell of a lot more? “I can’t do it, Zane. I wouldn’t know what to do to fight him anyway, and he’s a lot more powerful than me. I’d… god this feels crazy. Magic. Honestly, it’s not even supposed to be real!”
Zane smiled sadly at her. “I know. I was raised around it, and I still couldn’t deal with it. But Emma. What else are we going to do?”
Emma met his eyes and set her jaw. “Something else. We’ll go get my mom tonight and come back here, and we’ll find a way out.”
“How? How the hell do you expect to do that? Just waltz in and get her? The guard would love that, wouldn’t he? He’ll wink and let you by, no problem! And everyone else who’s being held with her will just sit calmly as you leave with her, right, and let you lock the door back behind you? Of course they will! After all, they want to die tomorrow.” At the sound of the anger in his voice, Emma started. He was really angry at her, and probably right. She was angsting just like he had been, and she’d shut him up. Why shouldn’t he do the same to her?
“Get a grip, Emma.” His voice was quieter now, but it was just as tense.
Emma didn’t reply.
“What am I supposed to do, just walk in and say, hey guys, I’m going to lead you all somewhere, but I don’t know where, and you can’t talk, and if we get caught you’ll probably be tortured and killed, and by the way, there are so many of you that we very well could be caught in the next five minutes? Oh, and don’t step on the guard on the way out?” Emma was laughing rather hysterically, and Zane looked at her like she was nuts. She probably was.
“Okay, so either its impossible to save your mom at all, or it’s going to take us being really cruel to a bunch of other people. Can you be that cruel, Emma? Can you leave a bunch of innocent people there to die? Can you rationalize that?”
Emma sighed. “No. God, this sucks.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It really does. And I’ve been living here for years. You’ve been here three days. Or four. Whichever it is, it’s not very long. So quit whining.”
“Oh, I see. You’ve made huge moral decisions everyday the whole time you’ve been here I suppose.” Emma’s scathing tone was like a whip coming out of her mouth, but she couldn’t stop it.
“That wasn’t fair.” Zane told her qujietly. And it hadn’t been, but she didn’t particularly care at this juncture she was ready to be angry and she didn’t hjave to be rational if she didn’t want ito.
“Whatever.”
“Emma, don’t be difficult. We have a couplf of hours, not forever. You can’t be angry at me now;. Do it later, focus now.”
“I ahevn’t noticed you doing very much focusing, mr. It’s all my fault any of us are here. Do you want mke to blame you and save you at the same time?” She really was being creuel now and it felt nice. She hadn’t let her anger get hold of her since-since that scene in the classroom, so long ago now it seemed. Really it was only a couple of weeks, but it was also a whole lifetime.
“You’re right, okay? I do blame my self and I do want to be saved and I don’t care if that’s selfish a horrible. I may not be human in the true sense of the word but I’m a magic-user, not … not perfect.” he trailed off, and both of them were spent. They couldn’t yell at each other for hours, and she knew it, and so did he.
“We’ll go out and get my mom. We’ll play it by ear. The guard will have to be knocked out, and maybe we can hide the rest fo the p;eople here if we wait till nighttime when no one’s around. There’ll be a huge search, but your’ the only one who know about this room, eright? If it works, it works. If not… if not.. nothing. Nevermind. It will work, because it has to.” Emma said decisively. “There’s no way to get further up the tunnel, is there?”
Zane shook his head. “No. It gets so there’s jut abrely room to stick your arm through, and there are no more hollows intn eh stone after this one. There are a efw more lower tdown tjhan this, but they back up against very thing walls to other rooms that are used daily. There’s a chance someone could hear us-actually, there’s a chance someone would lean against the wall and fall through it, come to that.”
“Okay. So we come here. And then we figure out what tyo do. DO you happen to know how many people ther will be being held with my mom?”
He shook his head again. “No clue. Some days it’s up to twenty, on others, only one or two. Most days, none, but… there’ve been a lot of keshki lately.”
“What does that word mean?” Emma was asking a lot of questions, but this was one she’d been wondering for days. She’d decided it must be something about her being a new person, but she wasn’t sure.
“It means… it mean a new magic user, but it denotes power. I don’t know why people have been using it for you, it just seemed to fit. There’s something about you that says you’re powerful, I suppose. Even my uncle used it.”
“Did he? Yeah. He did. Hm. Does that mean he thinks I’m powerful?”
“Definitely. How…odd. He doesn’t normally admit to things like that, to being weaker than someone. I use it as almost a term of respect, because you are much more powerful than I am, but he… he was either ridiculing you, or he was very impressed.”
“That’s good to know, I suppose. Zane, what am I going to do when we have all these people here if there’s no way out? We won’t die of lack of oxygen, but they will, and ina pretty short amount of time, too.”
Zane dropped to the floor, facing her. “Shit.”
Shit, indeed, Emma thought. She didn’t say anything out loud. She felt rather awkward, sitting here on the floor of a natural cavern with a boy she found very attractive, talking about letting people die-or dying trying to save him. Why couldn’t I be a normal sixteen year old?
It was silly question though, and one they didn’t have time to answer. “Zane. I need to….” She was going to say she needed to be doing something, but that wasn’t true. She could take a nap for all she cared. Well, perhaps not a nap, she a a bit too mentally occupied for that, btu she wasn’t bored or restless. She would be fine if she meditated for a bit. “I need to know about you. Not about your uncle, and all of this. About you. Why I should trust you.”
Zane was regarding her carefully. “You’re not afraid to ask difficult questions, are you?”
“No.” That was a lie. She was normally scared to death to ask anyone anything that might be a touchy subject. The past few days had been different though, and she didn’t have time to be careful of someone’s feelings. She was acting a lot like Melanie, when she stopped to think about it, and that startled her. She had never been like that before. She was the shy one, the one who followed the rules-most of the time-and didn’t put a tow out of line. She had a temper, but it exhibited itself so rarely that not many people besides her mother saw it. Besides, Melanie had never had a temper like hers.
“Fine. If you want the truth, you should no that there is nothing about me that you should trust. I don’t think my uncle is controlling my mind at this point, otherwise I would never have been allowed to say half of what I’ve said to you so far. But I have been controlled for a long time now, and there’s a great chance that if we get caught, I will be used against you before I am punished myself. In fact, that probably will be my punishment.
“You don’t know anything about me other than what you’ve seen, and most of what you’ve seen has been a lie. I don’t like dumplings. My name isn’t really Zane. I have nothing to do with prisoners, despite what I told you. I steal things when I have time and energy, and even when I know I shouldn’t.”
He placed a small hair barrette on the floor between them. “That was in your mother’s pocket. I took it when you two were talking yesterday.”
Emma looked at him with wide eyes. What on earth had she gotten into?
“So I’m sitting on the floor in a cavern I could get away from without getting lost to save my life with a kleptomaniac who lies to me everytime he speaks, even when he the option to tell the truth?”
Zane just nodded, the picture of seriousness. Emma burst into laughter and threw herself at him in a hug. “You are so ridiculous. I don’t believe this, and I know it’s all true.”
Zane was speechless. He half-raised his arms in an attempt to clumsily return the hug, which Emma couldn’t have explained if she tried.
“Tell me your real name,” she commanded from somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder.
He was quiet for a minute. He still hadn’t quite completed the whole hugging back thing. “Bernard. I hate it. Please don’t ever use it. Or any variation of it. At all.”
Emma burst into laughter and pulled away. “Right then. Got it. Now your favorite food.”
“. . . Spinach.”
This made Emma laugh even harder. “No wonder you lied. I would never have believed the truth.”
“Yes well. Now you know why you can’t trust a word I say.” Zane looked at her, as if pleading her not to trust him too much.
He doesn’t want to hurt me. It was the proud assumption of a teenage girl who thought she could love an intriguing, attractive man, even though he had exhibited exactly zero endearing qualities thus far. Somehow Emma knew this at a basic level, but damn it, she wanted to trust him. And at this point, she had no choice but to trust him. If she didn’t, she would be on her own, and then she would certainly fail at whatever mission she had apparently been thrown into.
“Fine. I won’t trust you, but you’re giving me the only information I have, and without any information, I’m pretty much hopeless. So I don’t really have a choice but to act like I trust you,” Emma informed him. The hug she had thrown at him a moment ago felt dishonest and she didn’t know now why she had done it. “if you don’t have anything to do with prisoners, why do you know so much about how they’re dealt with?”
Zane sighed. “When we first started doing this, and the Master had only me and a couple of thugs working with him, I would come and watch the burnings. They kill the humans first, of course, and then burn the bodies, but they don’t let the bodies preserve in any way, and I… I liked the smell of boiling blood. I’ve always been good at picking out smells, and even though the rest of the organs and such smell terrible, boiling blood has this.. this sharp, metallic, vivid smell. It’s like smelling life.” He gave a short bark of laughter. “I was a rather demented child.”
“Right.” That hadn’t been the answer that she was looking for at all. But it was an answer, and probably an honest one. She didn’t think that he could have made something like that sound as real as it did.
Zane sccoted back to lean against the wall. “You hate me now.”
Emma scooted over to join him. “No I don’t.”
He glanced sharply at her. “You should.”
“I don’t always do what I should. I can hate you later if I decide that’s a good idea. Until then I need your help, and we have to work together, and if you keep trying to convince me that we can’t, I think I’ll hit you again.”
“I just want you forewarned of what might happen, that’s all. I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t work together here-well, I am, but I know we have to at this point. I just don’t want any nasty surprises waiting for you at the worst possible times, you know?”
Suddenly Emma had a vision of the Master calling Zane Bernard and telling him to kill her mother. That would be a horrible time to learn his real name.
“How very… considerate of you.”
They settled down to wait out the next few hours, as the smoke cleared. Emma tried not to think of where it was coming from, and Zane took a nap.
Zane was taking a nap because Jamie felt that it was decent reflection of how he and his mother were passing their time. He like, Emma, was contemplating dead people. His mom was sleeping. She slept a lot more than he thought she should. The doctors said it was normal, but to be honest, he was BORED. It was selfish, but he really wante dher to wake up so his life could gp back to normal. Really, what twenty-four year old man wanted to be spending all his time in a hospital?
It had been a week. A week of no tremors, a week od Nathan and Jess leaving, a week of silence, sitting in a hospital room and typing, typing, typing. Emma an Zane (or was it Bernard?) had come a long way. Their plot was progressing too quickly now rather than not progressing at all. He was about to hit a dead spot, but hadn’t done so yet, and consoled himself with the idea that before he hit the dead spot he would go back and revise all that he’d written so far, making it gleam and shine in a literary manner. He couldn’t wait, really. But he had promised himself to rescue Melanie first, before any big revision happened, because he rather loved her, in a an authorish sort of way. She was still his favorite character… and Emma was acting far too much like her. He’d do something about that.
A nurse came in while he was taking a break. She had a pretty smile, and he smiled back, and tehn she left. She’d done something with the tubes going to his mum’s arms.
“Is it chicken today, Mum?” She was asleep, she couldn’t hear. She wouldn’t laugh at the idea that he was treating her like she was in a coma.
His phone interrupted his one sided conversation. He had borrowed Nathan mobile, and Jess had called and given Myra the number, dirty bitch that she was. He’d really wanted to avoid talking to his agent any time in the near future. She was going to kill him.
“Hey Myra.”
“Jamie.” Her vo0ice was even but rather hostile, as if she were still considering whether or not to be angry at him for trying to drop off the face of the planet for fear of his deadline.
“Did you get me a new deadline?”
He could almost hear the saccharine sweet smile coming over the phone when she replied in the affirmative.
“Well, when is it.”
“Yesterday,” she deadpanned, and Jamie was shocked into silence. When he didn’t reply, she told him, “I’m serious. But I suppose you can claim extenuating circumstances, seeing as you’ve been emotionally traumatized.”
Jamie once again thanked whatever god there was for his agent. “I’ve been very traumatized.”
“And you’ve nearly finished the book, haven’t you? Because honestly, Jamie, you’ve been working on this one for nigh on a year, and it’s only supposed to be a simple juvenile fiction. Those normally take about a month.”
Jamie rubbed the back of his head. “Yes, well… I think it might have turned into… something more… than that.”
“Are you saying you want a new genre? Because publishing companies don’t take to those too well, especially if the change puts you very far behind a deadline. You aren’t very for behind the deadline, are you Jamie?” Her voice said she knew that he was, and that he’d better not be very soon. In fact, he’d better not be by tomorrow.
“I’m not very. The emotional trauma has been negligible, but you can exaggerate it to the editor if you’d like. I’d like it.”
“Fine. Jamie, I can’t save your arse again here. You will have the book finished, next week, or they will drop you. You are getting far past grace period, and well into disgrace.”
“I understand. I’ll get on it.”
“Good boy. Now, I have to get going, book signing for one of my other clients in five. Ciao!”
And she was gone. Jamie breathed a sigh of relief. He hated talking to Myra. She wasn’t a bad person, she was just very stressful, and he was always doing something that made the situation worse, like needing exaggeration of emotional trauma to reach a deadline. And even if he did actually finish by the next week, it would be with no revision whatsoever, and the book would be rejected out of hand. Great, considering that his renjt was now due in three days and he’d definitely lost his day job.
He called Nathan. The phone rang for a while and then he heard, “You’ve called Jamie and Nathan’s flat. We’re not here, so leave us a nice message and we’ll get back to you A-S-A-P.” There was a bit of background noise that was the two of them arguing about whether or not to spell out ASAP, and then there was a beep.
“Nathan, hey, it’s Jamie. Just wanted to let you know-with much regret-that I’ve lost my job. And I haven’t finished the book. So rent might be a bit late. I’ve got nearly half what I need, I’ll ask mum about the rest when I talk to her about hospital bills, assuming she ever stays awake long enough to do so. Sorry mate.”
He hung up abruptly. That had been probably the least tactful way to tell Nathan he wasn’t going to have the money, but at least he’d done it. It had been really tempting to just stay quiet and lay low for the next week or so, and ignore calls from him.
He really, really hoped Nathan had the money. If he didn’t, they might get evicted, assuming their building was still structurally sound enough to live in after the earthquakes that apparently still rocked London every few days. The building was old, after all, and a lot of them had fallen under the pressure after the third or fourth tremor. Theirs was still standing, but who knew how long it would continue to do so?
So Emma's characterization went kind of haywire, as did my typing skills. Oh well. That's for... tomorrow. Because it'll be December!
There are a total of 50047 words here. I'm betting that this story is not even a quarter of the way finished. Jamie's has barely begun. Emma's is going to be so fleshed out that it will only be marginally recognizable by the time I'm done.
I am so proud of myself.
Half of this was written in the past week. I drank so much Earl Grey... Wow.
Here, have some nanowrimo:
Zane just looked away from her. “We have to go further.”
There was a long tunnel ahead of them. It wasn’t a hallway at all, just a roughly hewn hole in the rock.
“What is this?”
“The smoke has to go somewhere.” At the look on Emma’ face Zane added, “It only becomes dangerous when they’re actually doing the burning, when it’s just a regular fire it’s perfectly safe. And we won’t be here long, but we have to hurry, okay?”
Reluctantly she took his hand and stepped up into the rocks at the tunnel’s entrance.
There were small rocks and things al over the floor, and twice Emma tripped and had to be caught before she plunged face-first into them. The first time Zane smiled at her. The second time he glared a little first, and she felt for a moment that she had got in over her head. Then he said quietly, “Be careful, yeah?” and she nodded, because she couldn’t do anything else.
Emma felt like the silence between them was really awkward, but Zane certainly seemed fine with it. She made a couple of attempts at starting some sort of conversation, but got not real response, just a few murmurs.
“Here.” Zane stopped in the middle of the tunnel, and braced his hands on the wall, leaning his whole weight onto a section of it.
“What are you doing?” Emma asked, rather confused. It was like he was trying to push the stone away from him, but there was obviously not a door or anything.
“Sometimes… the magic here… it needs a little help.” Zane gasped out as he pushed harder on the wall. “Try to open it with your powers, you’re stronger that way.”
Emma almost giggled at the thought of being stronger than Zane, who obviously had quite the set of muscles. But then she realized that he was right, because her powers hadn’t been taken yet. There was a sort of rush of pride that zipped straight through her at the thought. What was that, I’m not… magic isn’t… She didn’t have time to wonder though. A puff of smoke was calmly drifting towards them up the tunnel.
“Now, Emma, if you can!”
She knew she could. The problem was that she hadn’t done it yet, and she wasn’t as sure as she should’ve been. What if she took just herself to the other side again, or took Zane halfway and got him stuck? She could kill him-he would die if she didn’t get this right.
“Emma, sometime today!” Zane was pushing harder against the wall now, as if that was going to help. They both knew it wasn’t.
“Okay!” Emma snapped at him. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath-which was full of smoke. Immediately she was plunged into a coughing fit that Zane sharp voice reminded her they really did not have time for.
She closed her eyes again, this time trying not to breath, and pictured the open wall-no, that was wrong, she wanted the wall sliding back, she didn’t know what to picture behind the wall if it was completely open.
“Emma!” Zane was on the verge of coughing, she could hear it. And he was scared.
She pushed, not with her arms, but it still felt like she was using them, to slid the stone away into nothing. Then she heard a loud thud and snapped her eyes open. The wall was gone, and Zane, who had still been pushing with all his might, had fallen right through it. He was grinning at her from the floor. Then the smoke started to sting her eyes and she went through quickly, letting the wall reappear behind her as soon as she was through.
“Emma! You did it!” Zane seemed to be filled with unmerited happiness.
“Yeah?” So what?
“Yeah, so I don’t know anyone else who could have done that! The stone won’t be keyed to your magic until after my-my Master takes your powers away. It shouldn’t have opened for you at all.” Then something occurred to him. “And you’ve done it twice.”
Emma blushed. “Actually, I’ve only done it once.”
“But, you said….” Zane looked to her for an answer.
“The wall didn’t actually open that time. I was trying to get out and I sent myself through it instead.” Emma flushed, rather embarrassed at her lack of finesse.
“You did what?” Zane roared. He sounded really angry.
“I… I messed up and went through the wall instead of opening it.”
“Emma, Emma, do you realize… you are so…” Zane stopped and looked at her. “You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?” Obviously she didn’t know what he was going on about, otherwise she wouldn’t look so confused.
“Emma, you teleported. That’s supposed to be impossible. Also very dangerous, mind you, and you could have died, almost everyone who tries does. They get stuck in the stone. And you did it without even trying. That’s amazing.” Zane was looking at her… rather hungrily, actually, and Emma took a step backwards.
“Right, so, um… now that we’ve established that I’m awesome, and stuff… where do we go next?” The room didn’t have any exits that were visible, and Emma didn’t think she was going to be able to open a bunch more walls very soon. She was getting tired, and she had a little bit of a headache.
“Nowhere,” Zane replied simply. “We’re hiding.”
Emma turned and faced him, hands on her hips. “Nowhere? We go nowhere?”
“Zane shrugged uneasily under her gaze. “I was just thinking of somewhere that would be safe to hide. This place is. Unless you want to go back out there and get caught now, then try to escape again later without any magic, while you’re tired from punishment.”
He was right. “So how long can we safely stay here?”
“Forever, if we want.” He shrugged. “We’re magic. We can breathe this air, we can live without food. The only thing we might die of is boredom, honestly. It’s a very real possibility actually, if you get too bored, your magic decides to play, and sometimes it plays by not sustaining you anymore. I think we can manage for a little while though. Perhaps there’s a tunnel up ahead that leads out.”
At the brightening in Emma’s eyes, he added, “I don’t think there is though, because I never found it.”
“And how long have you been exploring down here? Isn’t this an odd place to spend your time?”
“Not when you’re a child!” Zane defended. “All kids like exploring.” Then he quit talking and turned his face to the wall quickly, not meeting Emma’s eyes.
“Zane? You’ve been here since you were a kid?” Emma touched his shoulder lightly.
He jerked away. “It’s not like that! Not like you think, I wasn’t… he didn’t capture me or anything.”
“Then how did you get here?” Emma asked softly.
“I… look, you can’t get mad, okay?”
“Okay…” What was he about to tell her that might make her angry?
“When I was a kid, my uncle and I both had magical powers. But mine were hard to control, I had a lot. It… it manifested too early for me to handle, and I gave some of it to my uncle because I couldn’t handle it all on my own.” He took a deep breath. “The plan was the give it back as I got older and learned to control it. But my uncle… he was power-hungry. He didn’t want to give up the extra power once he got used to using it. So he kept it. And he figured out how to take more without my permission.”
Emma didn’t know how to react… that sounded too much like…
“It’s rape, Emma. Taking what you want without asking and against a person’s permission, violating their mind and soul to have something of theirs that you think should be yours-it’s worse than rape, even because you can’t ever get it back. If I raped you right here, you could one day eventually open up to another man and have sex with him without it being a horrible experience. It takes time and healing but it can be done.
“I can’t do that. My magic is gone, and I can’t get it back, can’t use it again, ever. It’s like… raping you and then sewing up your vagina and keeping you locked in a room.” Emma’s face was full of horror and Zane seemed to realize he had chosen a rather drastic metaphor. “I know it sounds horrible, and maybe I shouldn’t have said that to you… but that’s how it feels. And I’m helpless here, we all are. Except you.”
He wasn’t really being accusatory. But he was right again, and she knew it. She could help some of these people. She could help him, and Cessa. But...
“I just want to go home to my mom.” Her voice broke a little, and then she realized what she had just said, and how impossible it would be-not only could she not get out, her mom was set to be burned tomorrow.
Zane was watching her as tears began to stream down her face, and he seemed completely at a loss for what to say. He just watched her crying helplessly for a moment.
“I do too,” he finally volunteered. “I haven’t seen her since I was eleven. That was a long time ago now, and I don’t even know if he left her alive when he took me.”
Emma wiped a tear from her eye viciously, rather angry at herself for breaking down. At least, angry at herself for breaking down in front of Zane, over something that she honestly couldn’t do very much about.
“They took you? He took you?”
“Well, I haven’t always lived in a bunch of carved out caves you know. I was a normal person once, with a family. I had a younger brother.”
‘What was his name?” Emma was eager to have a semi-normal conversation, so she concentrated on a seemingly insignificant detail.
“Juno. My mother named him that because he was born there, and he had funny eyes when he was born or something.” The sentence sounded like something he had said multiple times before, and it was definitely something an eleven year old would say. Emma giggled a little.
“It’s a nice name. I bet you teased him about it mercilessly.”
“I did. I wish I hadn’t now.” His tone brought into her mind the gravity of the situation.
“I’m sure he understands.” She said gently.
“I’m sure he’s dead.”
Emma didn’t know what to say to that.
“My uncle isn’t as bloodthirsty now as he was when I was younger. He used to kill his victims after he stole their magic. Until he realized he would need servants, and decided to raise an army, that was what he did. He burned a lot of bodies back then, and kept very few henchmen.”
“That’s… that’s horrible. I can’t believe someone would be like that.”
“It’s my fault.” Zane looked straight at her, and she knew that he thought he was telling the truth. She also knew that he probably wasn’t, because he had the melodramatic air of someone whose blaming themselves when they don’t need to. She’d seen it in herself, back when she was little and thought it was her own fault that she didn’t have a father.
“He didn’t have the power at first to do what he did. There’s a reason we’re only each given a bit of power. No one should be too terribly power than any other person. Some people have special talents, and more strength in one area than someone else, but no one has too much excess raw power. No one should be able to forcibly take power from anyone else, because we should all be equal enough to keep it from happening. Of course, it’s also just indecent to take other people’s power, but you can’t rely on decency. I was told that.”
“Zane… you didn’t…”
“I did. I was told, over and over, about how I was just supposed to learn my powers myself, and not try to get out of it, how it was dangerous for him to have that much power. But I whined and moaned and refused to learn how to control until my parents finally agreed to let us do it, just because I was beginning to be a danger to others without any training, and I refused to train because I scared of my power.”
“How old were you?” Emma asked. Surely he had been too young to make such a decision on his own. Surely it couldn’t be his fault.
“Old enough.”
Ah. So he probably hadn’t been then. She hit him in the back of the head.
“Ow!” he rubbed the spot. “What are you, spastic?”
“No. I’m sensible. Stop whining about things that probably weren’t your fault at all, except in that you were a child.” When Zane opened his mouth to protest, she cut him off. “Even if it was your fault, it’s over now, and there’s no reason for either of us to be crying about anything now. We’re rather in a tight spot, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Fine,” he agreed sharply, obviously not really agreeing. That was fine with Emma. She cared a little about him being upset but not enough to indulge it when they were trapped in a room where they could very well die, while her mother was out somewhere else she could very well die too.
He was pacing the room, and Emma sat down in the middle of it, cross-legged. It was an echo of one of the yoga poses Melanie had always taken when she was stressed. After a moment of calming down for herself, and him as well she hoped, Emma asked, “So. What are we going to do? We have to get out of here, get to my mom, and get out of this place completely. You know the tunnels and such better than I do. When is the best time to go?”
Zane thought for a moment, and for a moment he looked as if he were going to go back to his angsting. Then he set his jaw and said, “We can’t leave here for a good hour or so, because of the smoke outside.”
Emma thought of something. “Why does the smoke affect us when the magic protects us from places with bad air and no oxygen?”
“Magic is a helping kind of thing. When there is no oxygen, it make sit so we can breathe whatever there is. But if there is something in the air that is actively bad for you, like smoke, it won’t stop the smoke unless you actively try to fight it. And that sort of magic usage drains you quickly, and is very precise. You have to focus on still getting some clean air in while keeping all the smoke out. I don’t think you could do that, not for both of us, and you could dispel some smoke, but not all of it, because it would keep coming at us from the fire. So, we wait.”
“Okay. So once the smoke is cleared, we leave again, go back and get my mom. Will I be able to get to her, do you think?”
“Well. She’ll be being held somewhere different, with several other people who are set for… for being sent into the world, tomorrow. The hardest part might be getting her out without getting caught because there will be one guard, and several other prisoners who are witnesses. Also, I don’t think they’ll take to kindly to being left there to die, but I don’t think it’s wise to try to escape with more people than we can afford.”
Emma nodded. “This is going to be hard, isn’t it?” She had known that the whole time, she had known it was risky, but she… she hadn’t counted on dealing with other people. They’re all going to want my help. And Emma had always been terrible at telling anyone no.
“I know you don’t like it, and I honestly don’t think it’s probably the best idea, but… Emma. Have you thought about trying to go up against my uncle?”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that man. Ever. And she certainly didn’t think she could even hurt him much less try to… what would she be trying to do, anyway? Kill him? Beat him in some sort of odd magical battle that she would have absolutely no luck it, because she didn’t know how to use the power she had, and he had a hell of a lot more? “I can’t do it, Zane. I wouldn’t know what to do to fight him anyway, and he’s a lot more powerful than me. I’d… god this feels crazy. Magic. Honestly, it’s not even supposed to be real!”
Zane smiled sadly at her. “I know. I was raised around it, and I still couldn’t deal with it. But Emma. What else are we going to do?”
Emma met his eyes and set her jaw. “Something else. We’ll go get my mom tonight and come back here, and we’ll find a way out.”
“How? How the hell do you expect to do that? Just waltz in and get her? The guard would love that, wouldn’t he? He’ll wink and let you by, no problem! And everyone else who’s being held with her will just sit calmly as you leave with her, right, and let you lock the door back behind you? Of course they will! After all, they want to die tomorrow.” At the sound of the anger in his voice, Emma started. He was really angry at her, and probably right. She was angsting just like he had been, and she’d shut him up. Why shouldn’t he do the same to her?
“Get a grip, Emma.” His voice was quieter now, but it was just as tense.
Emma didn’t reply.
“What am I supposed to do, just walk in and say, hey guys, I’m going to lead you all somewhere, but I don’t know where, and you can’t talk, and if we get caught you’ll probably be tortured and killed, and by the way, there are so many of you that we very well could be caught in the next five minutes? Oh, and don’t step on the guard on the way out?” Emma was laughing rather hysterically, and Zane looked at her like she was nuts. She probably was.
“Okay, so either its impossible to save your mom at all, or it’s going to take us being really cruel to a bunch of other people. Can you be that cruel, Emma? Can you leave a bunch of innocent people there to die? Can you rationalize that?”
Emma sighed. “No. God, this sucks.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It really does. And I’ve been living here for years. You’ve been here three days. Or four. Whichever it is, it’s not very long. So quit whining.”
“Oh, I see. You’ve made huge moral decisions everyday the whole time you’ve been here I suppose.” Emma’s scathing tone was like a whip coming out of her mouth, but she couldn’t stop it.
“That wasn’t fair.” Zane told her qujietly. And it hadn’t been, but she didn’t particularly care at this juncture she was ready to be angry and she didn’t hjave to be rational if she didn’t want ito.
“Whatever.”
“Emma, don’t be difficult. We have a couplf of hours, not forever. You can’t be angry at me now;. Do it later, focus now.”
“I ahevn’t noticed you doing very much focusing, mr. It’s all my fault any of us are here. Do you want mke to blame you and save you at the same time?” She really was being creuel now and it felt nice. She hadn’t let her anger get hold of her since-since that scene in the classroom, so long ago now it seemed. Really it was only a couple of weeks, but it was also a whole lifetime.
“You’re right, okay? I do blame my self and I do want to be saved and I don’t care if that’s selfish a horrible. I may not be human in the true sense of the word but I’m a magic-user, not … not perfect.” he trailed off, and both of them were spent. They couldn’t yell at each other for hours, and she knew it, and so did he.
“We’ll go out and get my mom. We’ll play it by ear. The guard will have to be knocked out, and maybe we can hide the rest fo the p;eople here if we wait till nighttime when no one’s around. There’ll be a huge search, but your’ the only one who know about this room, eright? If it works, it works. If not… if not.. nothing. Nevermind. It will work, because it has to.” Emma said decisively. “There’s no way to get further up the tunnel, is there?”
Zane shook his head. “No. It gets so there’s jut abrely room to stick your arm through, and there are no more hollows intn eh stone after this one. There are a efw more lower tdown tjhan this, but they back up against very thing walls to other rooms that are used daily. There’s a chance someone could hear us-actually, there’s a chance someone would lean against the wall and fall through it, come to that.”
“Okay. So we come here. And then we figure out what tyo do. DO you happen to know how many people ther will be being held with my mom?”
He shook his head again. “No clue. Some days it’s up to twenty, on others, only one or two. Most days, none, but… there’ve been a lot of keshki lately.”
“What does that word mean?” Emma was asking a lot of questions, but this was one she’d been wondering for days. She’d decided it must be something about her being a new person, but she wasn’t sure.
“It means… it mean a new magic user, but it denotes power. I don’t know why people have been using it for you, it just seemed to fit. There’s something about you that says you’re powerful, I suppose. Even my uncle used it.”
“Did he? Yeah. He did. Hm. Does that mean he thinks I’m powerful?”
“Definitely. How…odd. He doesn’t normally admit to things like that, to being weaker than someone. I use it as almost a term of respect, because you are much more powerful than I am, but he… he was either ridiculing you, or he was very impressed.”
“That’s good to know, I suppose. Zane, what am I going to do when we have all these people here if there’s no way out? We won’t die of lack of oxygen, but they will, and ina pretty short amount of time, too.”
Zane dropped to the floor, facing her. “Shit.”
Shit, indeed, Emma thought. She didn’t say anything out loud. She felt rather awkward, sitting here on the floor of a natural cavern with a boy she found very attractive, talking about letting people die-or dying trying to save him. Why couldn’t I be a normal sixteen year old?
It was silly question though, and one they didn’t have time to answer. “Zane. I need to….” She was going to say she needed to be doing something, but that wasn’t true. She could take a nap for all she cared. Well, perhaps not a nap, she a a bit too mentally occupied for that, btu she wasn’t bored or restless. She would be fine if she meditated for a bit. “I need to know about you. Not about your uncle, and all of this. About you. Why I should trust you.”
Zane was regarding her carefully. “You’re not afraid to ask difficult questions, are you?”
“No.” That was a lie. She was normally scared to death to ask anyone anything that might be a touchy subject. The past few days had been different though, and she didn’t have time to be careful of someone’s feelings. She was acting a lot like Melanie, when she stopped to think about it, and that startled her. She had never been like that before. She was the shy one, the one who followed the rules-most of the time-and didn’t put a tow out of line. She had a temper, but it exhibited itself so rarely that not many people besides her mother saw it. Besides, Melanie had never had a temper like hers.
“Fine. If you want the truth, you should no that there is nothing about me that you should trust. I don’t think my uncle is controlling my mind at this point, otherwise I would never have been allowed to say half of what I’ve said to you so far. But I have been controlled for a long time now, and there’s a great chance that if we get caught, I will be used against you before I am punished myself. In fact, that probably will be my punishment.
“You don’t know anything about me other than what you’ve seen, and most of what you’ve seen has been a lie. I don’t like dumplings. My name isn’t really Zane. I have nothing to do with prisoners, despite what I told you. I steal things when I have time and energy, and even when I know I shouldn’t.”
He placed a small hair barrette on the floor between them. “That was in your mother’s pocket. I took it when you two were talking yesterday.”
Emma looked at him with wide eyes. What on earth had she gotten into?
“So I’m sitting on the floor in a cavern I could get away from without getting lost to save my life with a kleptomaniac who lies to me everytime he speaks, even when he the option to tell the truth?”
Zane just nodded, the picture of seriousness. Emma burst into laughter and threw herself at him in a hug. “You are so ridiculous. I don’t believe this, and I know it’s all true.”
Zane was speechless. He half-raised his arms in an attempt to clumsily return the hug, which Emma couldn’t have explained if she tried.
“Tell me your real name,” she commanded from somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder.
He was quiet for a minute. He still hadn’t quite completed the whole hugging back thing. “Bernard. I hate it. Please don’t ever use it. Or any variation of it. At all.”
Emma burst into laughter and pulled away. “Right then. Got it. Now your favorite food.”
“. . . Spinach.”
This made Emma laugh even harder. “No wonder you lied. I would never have believed the truth.”
“Yes well. Now you know why you can’t trust a word I say.” Zane looked at her, as if pleading her not to trust him too much.
He doesn’t want to hurt me. It was the proud assumption of a teenage girl who thought she could love an intriguing, attractive man, even though he had exhibited exactly zero endearing qualities thus far. Somehow Emma knew this at a basic level, but damn it, she wanted to trust him. And at this point, she had no choice but to trust him. If she didn’t, she would be on her own, and then she would certainly fail at whatever mission she had apparently been thrown into.
“Fine. I won’t trust you, but you’re giving me the only information I have, and without any information, I’m pretty much hopeless. So I don’t really have a choice but to act like I trust you,” Emma informed him. The hug she had thrown at him a moment ago felt dishonest and she didn’t know now why she had done it. “if you don’t have anything to do with prisoners, why do you know so much about how they’re dealt with?”
Zane sighed. “When we first started doing this, and the Master had only me and a couple of thugs working with him, I would come and watch the burnings. They kill the humans first, of course, and then burn the bodies, but they don’t let the bodies preserve in any way, and I… I liked the smell of boiling blood. I’ve always been good at picking out smells, and even though the rest of the organs and such smell terrible, boiling blood has this.. this sharp, metallic, vivid smell. It’s like smelling life.” He gave a short bark of laughter. “I was a rather demented child.”
“Right.” That hadn’t been the answer that she was looking for at all. But it was an answer, and probably an honest one. She didn’t think that he could have made something like that sound as real as it did.
Zane sccoted back to lean against the wall. “You hate me now.”
Emma scooted over to join him. “No I don’t.”
He glanced sharply at her. “You should.”
“I don’t always do what I should. I can hate you later if I decide that’s a good idea. Until then I need your help, and we have to work together, and if you keep trying to convince me that we can’t, I think I’ll hit you again.”
“I just want you forewarned of what might happen, that’s all. I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t work together here-well, I am, but I know we have to at this point. I just don’t want any nasty surprises waiting for you at the worst possible times, you know?”
Suddenly Emma had a vision of the Master calling Zane Bernard and telling him to kill her mother. That would be a horrible time to learn his real name.
“How very… considerate of you.”
They settled down to wait out the next few hours, as the smoke cleared. Emma tried not to think of where it was coming from, and Zane took a nap.
Zane was taking a nap because Jamie felt that it was decent reflection of how he and his mother were passing their time. He like, Emma, was contemplating dead people. His mom was sleeping. She slept a lot more than he thought she should. The doctors said it was normal, but to be honest, he was BORED. It was selfish, but he really wante dher to wake up so his life could gp back to normal. Really, what twenty-four year old man wanted to be spending all his time in a hospital?
It had been a week. A week of no tremors, a week od Nathan and Jess leaving, a week of silence, sitting in a hospital room and typing, typing, typing. Emma an Zane (or was it Bernard?) had come a long way. Their plot was progressing too quickly now rather than not progressing at all. He was about to hit a dead spot, but hadn’t done so yet, and consoled himself with the idea that before he hit the dead spot he would go back and revise all that he’d written so far, making it gleam and shine in a literary manner. He couldn’t wait, really. But he had promised himself to rescue Melanie first, before any big revision happened, because he rather loved her, in a an authorish sort of way. She was still his favorite character… and Emma was acting far too much like her. He’d do something about that.
A nurse came in while he was taking a break. She had a pretty smile, and he smiled back, and tehn she left. She’d done something with the tubes going to his mum’s arms.
“Is it chicken today, Mum?” She was asleep, she couldn’t hear. She wouldn’t laugh at the idea that he was treating her like she was in a coma.
His phone interrupted his one sided conversation. He had borrowed Nathan mobile, and Jess had called and given Myra the number, dirty bitch that she was. He’d really wanted to avoid talking to his agent any time in the near future. She was going to kill him.
“Hey Myra.”
“Jamie.” Her vo0ice was even but rather hostile, as if she were still considering whether or not to be angry at him for trying to drop off the face of the planet for fear of his deadline.
“Did you get me a new deadline?”
He could almost hear the saccharine sweet smile coming over the phone when she replied in the affirmative.
“Well, when is it.”
“Yesterday,” she deadpanned, and Jamie was shocked into silence. When he didn’t reply, she told him, “I’m serious. But I suppose you can claim extenuating circumstances, seeing as you’ve been emotionally traumatized.”
Jamie once again thanked whatever god there was for his agent. “I’ve been very traumatized.”
“And you’ve nearly finished the book, haven’t you? Because honestly, Jamie, you’ve been working on this one for nigh on a year, and it’s only supposed to be a simple juvenile fiction. Those normally take about a month.”
Jamie rubbed the back of his head. “Yes, well… I think it might have turned into… something more… than that.”
“Are you saying you want a new genre? Because publishing companies don’t take to those too well, especially if the change puts you very far behind a deadline. You aren’t very for behind the deadline, are you Jamie?” Her voice said she knew that he was, and that he’d better not be very soon. In fact, he’d better not be by tomorrow.
“I’m not very. The emotional trauma has been negligible, but you can exaggerate it to the editor if you’d like. I’d like it.”
“Fine. Jamie, I can’t save your arse again here. You will have the book finished, next week, or they will drop you. You are getting far past grace period, and well into disgrace.”
“I understand. I’ll get on it.”
“Good boy. Now, I have to get going, book signing for one of my other clients in five. Ciao!”
And she was gone. Jamie breathed a sigh of relief. He hated talking to Myra. She wasn’t a bad person, she was just very stressful, and he was always doing something that made the situation worse, like needing exaggeration of emotional trauma to reach a deadline. And even if he did actually finish by the next week, it would be with no revision whatsoever, and the book would be rejected out of hand. Great, considering that his renjt was now due in three days and he’d definitely lost his day job.
He called Nathan. The phone rang for a while and then he heard, “You’ve called Jamie and Nathan’s flat. We’re not here, so leave us a nice message and we’ll get back to you A-S-A-P.” There was a bit of background noise that was the two of them arguing about whether or not to spell out ASAP, and then there was a beep.
“Nathan, hey, it’s Jamie. Just wanted to let you know-with much regret-that I’ve lost my job. And I haven’t finished the book. So rent might be a bit late. I’ve got nearly half what I need, I’ll ask mum about the rest when I talk to her about hospital bills, assuming she ever stays awake long enough to do so. Sorry mate.”
He hung up abruptly. That had been probably the least tactful way to tell Nathan he wasn’t going to have the money, but at least he’d done it. It had been really tempting to just stay quiet and lay low for the next week or so, and ignore calls from him.
He really, really hoped Nathan had the money. If he didn’t, they might get evicted, assuming their building was still structurally sound enough to live in after the earthquakes that apparently still rocked London every few days. The building was old, after all, and a lot of them had fallen under the pressure after the third or fourth tremor. Theirs was still standing, but who knew how long it would continue to do so?
So Emma's characterization went kind of haywire, as did my typing skills. Oh well. That's for... tomorrow. Because it'll be December!