[chaptered] Breaking Zero Kelvin - Chapter 3 (Rumours and Revolutions)
Title: Breaking Zero Kelvin (Multichapter)
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Kazuyuri
Genre: Fantasy/Scifi
Summary: AU. They are two runaways, chased out of society through a deep-rooted stigma though they have no say in it at all. Only relying on word-of-mouth rumours and a set of sketchy directions, they now have to set out on their own journey to accomplish the impossible: escape.
Notes: Written for NaNoWriMo 2011.
Character list here.
Previous chapters: prologue | 01 | 02
~
03: Rumours and Revolutions
Day melded into night, and Tae no longer knew how to tell what time of the day it was in the world above. It was day when they rode the motorcycle through the tunnels, and night when they got too tired and decided to sleep.
“Kei?” she asked one night, a couple of full days after they had left District 13. “Why are you so sure that Central won’t come after us if they find these tunnels?”
He was silent for a while, poking at the curry that was cooking in the can above the stove.
“There is a legend that a witch I used to know told me, back home in District 18,” he said slowly. “The first witches dug these tunnels with their magic, bit by bit. Other witches came to know about this via word of mouth, and they pitched in to help, building networks of tunnels beneath their own districts. Several years later, there was a powerful witch whose power was to create barriers, and she traveled throughout the whole country through these tunnels, making barriers that only allowed witches to pass through. These barriers were created over the openings, so Central wouldn’t be able to get in.”
The fire crackled, and Tae sighed.
“It’s only a rumour though, right?”
“Tae, as witches we live on rumours,” Kei said dryly. “Even Salem city itself is a rumour, but most witches on the run head in that direction anyway. Nobody has ever come back to say that it doesn’t exist, which means either they actually found it or they all died during the journey. I’d prefer to believe the former.”
“Alright,” Tae murmured tiredly, then decided that a change of subject was in order. “Is the curry ready?”
Her stomach growled as though in affirmation, and Kei snorted as he poked at the curry some more.
“Patience, young grasshopper,” he told her in an exaggerated tone, and she rolled her eyes.
The curry was ready soon enough, and as they ate it slowly Tae mentally took stock of their supplies.
“We’re running out of fuel,” she said slowly. “If I’m not wrong there’s slightly less than one full jerry can of it left. And only enough food to last at most one or two more days.”
Kei groaned, stretching out his legs.
“We’ll just have to drive faster and eat less, then. I hope we reach District 12 soon.”
He had dug out the baby name generator from his bag after finishing off his half of the curry, and she stared at him curiously.
“Are you creating a new alias now?” she asked, quite bemused.
Laughing, Kei shook his head.
“I do this ever so often, to check that some other person named Kei hasn’t been revealed as a witch. If Kei becomes a blacklisted name I’ll need to change my alias, won’t I? Besides, I can check to see what’s happened to my friends. If Central kills a witch, the name becomes available again, so as long as their name is still listed as a witch they’re probably safe.”
She watched as he murmured some names to the machine, each and every one of them causing it to flash red.
“You seem to have a lot of friends who are witches,” Tae commented when he was done.
“There were 8 of us,” Kei said, a nostalgic tone seeping into his voice. “We were all from District 18, but when we had to escape we split into four pairs, since traveling in a big group is risky. I’m glad to know that Macchan’s the only casualty so far, and that their original aliases haven’t been blacklisted yet.”
Handing the device to her, he continued: “Do you want to check, too? People caught for crimes against Central also get their names blacklisted.”
Accepting the device, she cradled it in her lap.
“Tae,” she told it, and breathed a sigh of relief when the device flashed green.
Suddenly, she remembered Erena. She had been shot at by the Central officials - what had become of her?
“Erena,” she whispered, and the device flashed a bright red.
She’s alive, Tae thought to herself, a hint of relief running through her. Blacklisted, but alive.
~
That night, she dreamt of stereotypical black witches in rags and of metallic drones shooting down innocent people left and right.
Help! she shrieked in her dream, but nobody responded. She tried to run, but the sidewalks rose up around her to form an inescapable prison trapping her and a sinister drone.
It floated closer and closer to her, its laser gun shining the same ominous red as the cameras in its eyes.
She scrambled backwards, mouth open to scream in fear…
…and her eyes shot open to see another face bending down over hers, eyes lit by the dim flicker of the handheld lamp.
Kei’s face flushed dark red as he sat back, raising the lamp.
“You okay?” he asked. “You were tossing and turning…”
“Nightmare,” Tae muttered shortly. “I don’t feel like going back to sleep now.”
Casting a glance around, Kei stood up, stretching.
“Let’s leave, then. I’ll pack up and then we can go.”
~
Tae bent down to pick up the stove, and stopped as she realized something was off with her hand.
“…Kei…?”
“What?”
She raised her left hand, revealing four separate fingers where there should have been five.
“I think my power caused my third and fourth finger to fuse together,” she said. “It still works pretty much like normal but it looks weird, somehow. I guess this shows that my power works on living tissue, but now I have no idea how to separate them…”
Kei walked over and picked up her left hand to inspect.
“…This is crazy,” he said at last. “I’m not sure how to get it back to normal, but for now we’ll need to work on controlling your powers so this doesn’t happen again.”
Tae frowned.
“You don’t know how to teach me to control them though, can you?”
“No,” sighed Kei. “No.”
~
Every time they stopped the motorcycle, he would watch as she tried to call out her power to fuse her practice pebbles together. Every time he would try to give her advice, but every time she had to return five separate pebbles back to her pouch, shoulders sloping in disappointment as they climbed back onto the motorcycle.
Her confidence dwindled as quickly as their food supplies did, and by the time they finally reached a red wooden sign reading District 12 they had gone without food for an entire day.
“Wait down here,” Kei instructed, as he took out the foldable ladder and set it up. “I’ll go check what it’s like up there.
The manhole cover was rather obvious once there was light shining on it, and Tae watched as Kei gingerly lifted it up a little to peer outside.
“It’s night time,” he called, replacing the manhole cover. “It should be easier to sneak around than in the day time.”
He signaled for Tae to climb up, and waited till she had nearly reached the rung his feet were at before lifting the manhole cover and crawling out. Tae climbed out as well, and looked around her to see an alley with high foreboding brick walls on both sides.
The area was pretty silent, though there were sounds floating out from the various apartment buildings scattered around. A peek through the open window of one showed that the inhabitants were watching a flat screen with colourful dancing characters on them.
“It’s called a television,” Kei told her as he dragged her away from the bright window of light. “Most people watch it to entertain themselves, though the shows are pretty brainless, if you ask me. It’s just bright colours and brainless dialogue. You’ve never seen one?”
“No,” Tae replied dazedly. “The only kind of entertainment we had at the convent was our textbooks. We used to have something called a ‘library’ but it’s gone now. It used to have books of all kinds, apparently, but I heard that Central came and confiscated them all.”
Kei shrugged.
“Typical Central,” he said. “They think books can inspire people to revolt, so they get rid of them. The same thing happened really long ago, I think, in Block Fourteen.”
“Block Fourteen?”
“We live in Block Thirteen,” Kei explained. “The country next to us is called Block Fourteen, though I think in the days before the Great Revolution it might have been called…China, I think it was. They had an ancient emperor who burnt all the books simply because he was afraid of revolution.”
“We’re not going to have a revolution here though, are we?”
Snorting, Kei shot her an incredulous look.
“A revolution has already started, Tae. We are the revolution.”
~
After a while of wandering through shadowy alleys, they came to a convenience store, already closed for the night.
“It’s locked,” Tae said. “How are we going to get any food?”
Shaking his head, Kei motioned to the back of the shop. They crept towards it in silence, and a stack of cardboard boxes came into Tae’s field of vision.
“Stores always throw out whatever food they can’t sell,” he told her. “Mostly fresh food, which we can’t take because it’ll spoil, but packaged food nearing its expiry date also gets thrown out.”
Fishing out a canvas bag, he began to rummage through the cardboard boxes, occasionally pulling out a bag of dried fruit, some crackers or a tin of peanuts. Finally, they had found enough to fill their bag.
“This should last us at least a week,” Kei said, sounding satisfied. “If we leave tonight I think we’ll be able to last until District 11.”
He hefted the canvas bag, and stopped to think.
“Wait,” he said. “We can only leave tomorrow, I think. We’ll need to haul petrol back as well, we’re running out.”
~
They had run back to the tunnel entrance to drop off their food, and come back up with their nearly-empty jerry cans.
The petrol station was empty - not much of a difference from the daytime, since many had long stopped using petrol-fuelled cars - and filled up their jerry cans in silence. They had brought up four jerry cans, so each of them took two as they began their walk back to the tunnel entrance.
Tae was hyperaware of each sound she made as they walked past sleeping houses on the hard concrete, as there was hardly any conversation now. Behind her, she could hear the petrol sloshing around in Kei’s jerry cans as well. Finally, they reached the manhole cover again.
They climbed slowly, carefully down the ladder, and when they finally put the heavy jerry cans down Tae breathed a sigh of relief, sagging to the ground.
“I forgot to get water!” Kei gasped. “I’ve been going without it for a while, but I don’t think I can actually survive without it for long more so I should get some.”
“I’ll go with you,” Tae said, dragging herself up and ignoring the groaning protests of her arms. “I don’t want to be left here alone in the dark.”
Sighing, she hauled herself up the ladder again, and followed Kei as they walked back to the convenience store they had plundered a while ago. Kei began to search for thrown-out liquids while Tae kept watch.
“Shit,” Kei groaned. “There are empty packets here, so there were actually thrown-out drinks, but someone else seems to have taken them already. Looks like we’ll have to try our luck at another store…”
The situation was the same at the grocery store next door, and the general store after that, though they managed to salvage a six-pack of water from behind an ice cream shop.
As Kei lifted up the water, Tae froze as the sound of crunching footsteps approaching reached her ears.
“Listen,” she whispered, and Kei froze as well, slowly putting down the water and reaching into his pocket for his gun.
A hoarse voice came, quiet but laced with suspicion.
“Who goes there?”
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Kazuyuri
Genre: Fantasy/Scifi
Summary: AU. They are two runaways, chased out of society through a deep-rooted stigma though they have no say in it at all. Only relying on word-of-mouth rumours and a set of sketchy directions, they now have to set out on their own journey to accomplish the impossible: escape.
Notes: Written for NaNoWriMo 2011.
Character list here.
Previous chapters: prologue | 01 | 02
~
03: Rumours and Revolutions
Day melded into night, and Tae no longer knew how to tell what time of the day it was in the world above. It was day when they rode the motorcycle through the tunnels, and night when they got too tired and decided to sleep.
“Kei?” she asked one night, a couple of full days after they had left District 13. “Why are you so sure that Central won’t come after us if they find these tunnels?”
He was silent for a while, poking at the curry that was cooking in the can above the stove.
“There is a legend that a witch I used to know told me, back home in District 18,” he said slowly. “The first witches dug these tunnels with their magic, bit by bit. Other witches came to know about this via word of mouth, and they pitched in to help, building networks of tunnels beneath their own districts. Several years later, there was a powerful witch whose power was to create barriers, and she traveled throughout the whole country through these tunnels, making barriers that only allowed witches to pass through. These barriers were created over the openings, so Central wouldn’t be able to get in.”
The fire crackled, and Tae sighed.
“It’s only a rumour though, right?”
“Tae, as witches we live on rumours,” Kei said dryly. “Even Salem city itself is a rumour, but most witches on the run head in that direction anyway. Nobody has ever come back to say that it doesn’t exist, which means either they actually found it or they all died during the journey. I’d prefer to believe the former.”
“Alright,” Tae murmured tiredly, then decided that a change of subject was in order. “Is the curry ready?”
Her stomach growled as though in affirmation, and Kei snorted as he poked at the curry some more.
“Patience, young grasshopper,” he told her in an exaggerated tone, and she rolled her eyes.
The curry was ready soon enough, and as they ate it slowly Tae mentally took stock of their supplies.
“We’re running out of fuel,” she said slowly. “If I’m not wrong there’s slightly less than one full jerry can of it left. And only enough food to last at most one or two more days.”
Kei groaned, stretching out his legs.
“We’ll just have to drive faster and eat less, then. I hope we reach District 12 soon.”
He had dug out the baby name generator from his bag after finishing off his half of the curry, and she stared at him curiously.
“Are you creating a new alias now?” she asked, quite bemused.
Laughing, Kei shook his head.
“I do this ever so often, to check that some other person named Kei hasn’t been revealed as a witch. If Kei becomes a blacklisted name I’ll need to change my alias, won’t I? Besides, I can check to see what’s happened to my friends. If Central kills a witch, the name becomes available again, so as long as their name is still listed as a witch they’re probably safe.”
She watched as he murmured some names to the machine, each and every one of them causing it to flash red.
“You seem to have a lot of friends who are witches,” Tae commented when he was done.
“There were 8 of us,” Kei said, a nostalgic tone seeping into his voice. “We were all from District 18, but when we had to escape we split into four pairs, since traveling in a big group is risky. I’m glad to know that Macchan’s the only casualty so far, and that their original aliases haven’t been blacklisted yet.”
Handing the device to her, he continued: “Do you want to check, too? People caught for crimes against Central also get their names blacklisted.”
Accepting the device, she cradled it in her lap.
“Tae,” she told it, and breathed a sigh of relief when the device flashed green.
Suddenly, she remembered Erena. She had been shot at by the Central officials - what had become of her?
“Erena,” she whispered, and the device flashed a bright red.
She’s alive, Tae thought to herself, a hint of relief running through her. Blacklisted, but alive.
~
That night, she dreamt of stereotypical black witches in rags and of metallic drones shooting down innocent people left and right.
Help! she shrieked in her dream, but nobody responded. She tried to run, but the sidewalks rose up around her to form an inescapable prison trapping her and a sinister drone.
It floated closer and closer to her, its laser gun shining the same ominous red as the cameras in its eyes.
She scrambled backwards, mouth open to scream in fear…
…and her eyes shot open to see another face bending down over hers, eyes lit by the dim flicker of the handheld lamp.
Kei’s face flushed dark red as he sat back, raising the lamp.
“You okay?” he asked. “You were tossing and turning…”
“Nightmare,” Tae muttered shortly. “I don’t feel like going back to sleep now.”
Casting a glance around, Kei stood up, stretching.
“Let’s leave, then. I’ll pack up and then we can go.”
~
Tae bent down to pick up the stove, and stopped as she realized something was off with her hand.
“…Kei…?”
“What?”
She raised her left hand, revealing four separate fingers where there should have been five.
“I think my power caused my third and fourth finger to fuse together,” she said. “It still works pretty much like normal but it looks weird, somehow. I guess this shows that my power works on living tissue, but now I have no idea how to separate them…”
Kei walked over and picked up her left hand to inspect.
“…This is crazy,” he said at last. “I’m not sure how to get it back to normal, but for now we’ll need to work on controlling your powers so this doesn’t happen again.”
Tae frowned.
“You don’t know how to teach me to control them though, can you?”
“No,” sighed Kei. “No.”
~
Every time they stopped the motorcycle, he would watch as she tried to call out her power to fuse her practice pebbles together. Every time he would try to give her advice, but every time she had to return five separate pebbles back to her pouch, shoulders sloping in disappointment as they climbed back onto the motorcycle.
Her confidence dwindled as quickly as their food supplies did, and by the time they finally reached a red wooden sign reading District 12 they had gone without food for an entire day.
“Wait down here,” Kei instructed, as he took out the foldable ladder and set it up. “I’ll go check what it’s like up there.
The manhole cover was rather obvious once there was light shining on it, and Tae watched as Kei gingerly lifted it up a little to peer outside.
“It’s night time,” he called, replacing the manhole cover. “It should be easier to sneak around than in the day time.”
He signaled for Tae to climb up, and waited till she had nearly reached the rung his feet were at before lifting the manhole cover and crawling out. Tae climbed out as well, and looked around her to see an alley with high foreboding brick walls on both sides.
The area was pretty silent, though there were sounds floating out from the various apartment buildings scattered around. A peek through the open window of one showed that the inhabitants were watching a flat screen with colourful dancing characters on them.
“It’s called a television,” Kei told her as he dragged her away from the bright window of light. “Most people watch it to entertain themselves, though the shows are pretty brainless, if you ask me. It’s just bright colours and brainless dialogue. You’ve never seen one?”
“No,” Tae replied dazedly. “The only kind of entertainment we had at the convent was our textbooks. We used to have something called a ‘library’ but it’s gone now. It used to have books of all kinds, apparently, but I heard that Central came and confiscated them all.”
Kei shrugged.
“Typical Central,” he said. “They think books can inspire people to revolt, so they get rid of them. The same thing happened really long ago, I think, in Block Fourteen.”
“Block Fourteen?”
“We live in Block Thirteen,” Kei explained. “The country next to us is called Block Fourteen, though I think in the days before the Great Revolution it might have been called…China, I think it was. They had an ancient emperor who burnt all the books simply because he was afraid of revolution.”
“We’re not going to have a revolution here though, are we?”
Snorting, Kei shot her an incredulous look.
“A revolution has already started, Tae. We are the revolution.”
~
After a while of wandering through shadowy alleys, they came to a convenience store, already closed for the night.
“It’s locked,” Tae said. “How are we going to get any food?”
Shaking his head, Kei motioned to the back of the shop. They crept towards it in silence, and a stack of cardboard boxes came into Tae’s field of vision.
“Stores always throw out whatever food they can’t sell,” he told her. “Mostly fresh food, which we can’t take because it’ll spoil, but packaged food nearing its expiry date also gets thrown out.”
Fishing out a canvas bag, he began to rummage through the cardboard boxes, occasionally pulling out a bag of dried fruit, some crackers or a tin of peanuts. Finally, they had found enough to fill their bag.
“This should last us at least a week,” Kei said, sounding satisfied. “If we leave tonight I think we’ll be able to last until District 11.”
He hefted the canvas bag, and stopped to think.
“Wait,” he said. “We can only leave tomorrow, I think. We’ll need to haul petrol back as well, we’re running out.”
~
They had run back to the tunnel entrance to drop off their food, and come back up with their nearly-empty jerry cans.
The petrol station was empty - not much of a difference from the daytime, since many had long stopped using petrol-fuelled cars - and filled up their jerry cans in silence. They had brought up four jerry cans, so each of them took two as they began their walk back to the tunnel entrance.
Tae was hyperaware of each sound she made as they walked past sleeping houses on the hard concrete, as there was hardly any conversation now. Behind her, she could hear the petrol sloshing around in Kei’s jerry cans as well. Finally, they reached the manhole cover again.
They climbed slowly, carefully down the ladder, and when they finally put the heavy jerry cans down Tae breathed a sigh of relief, sagging to the ground.
“I forgot to get water!” Kei gasped. “I’ve been going without it for a while, but I don’t think I can actually survive without it for long more so I should get some.”
“I’ll go with you,” Tae said, dragging herself up and ignoring the groaning protests of her arms. “I don’t want to be left here alone in the dark.”
Sighing, she hauled herself up the ladder again, and followed Kei as they walked back to the convenience store they had plundered a while ago. Kei began to search for thrown-out liquids while Tae kept watch.
“Shit,” Kei groaned. “There are empty packets here, so there were actually thrown-out drinks, but someone else seems to have taken them already. Looks like we’ll have to try our luck at another store…”
The situation was the same at the grocery store next door, and the general store after that, though they managed to salvage a six-pack of water from behind an ice cream shop.
As Kei lifted up the water, Tae froze as the sound of crunching footsteps approaching reached her ears.
“Listen,” she whispered, and Kei froze as well, slowly putting down the water and reaching into his pocket for his gun.
A hoarse voice came, quiet but laced with suspicion.
“Who goes there?”