Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 146

Chapter Twenty-Two

                I don’t know how long I’ve been in the cell. One of the problems of living forever is your sense of time. Sometimes minutes feel like seconds, hours like minutes. The last year feels like it’s rocketed by without so much as a hello. Forever is an awfully long time to live in.

                Windermere came back after an hour like she promised. I rebuffed her advances again and demanded to see my friends.

                Panic set in a long time ago. I’m past panic. I don’t know how they’ve managed to do this. What right did they have to lock us away when we’ve done nothing wrong.

                When I died I realised that a lot of things about the afterlife were amazing. The travelling , the freedom. People like Windermere made one thing abundantly clear. People never change. This council seem to love everything the human race has always proved it loves: power and control.

                I close my eyes. I reach out again and do another check on Elle and Yates. They’re still there. I see Yates alive with worry, and Elle pacing her cell in a blind fury. At least they haven’t taken them anywhere else.

                I concentrate on Elle. I try to visualise every part of her, every feeling, every thought. I see her like a fireworks display. Every part of us is written on our consciousness. If I look close enough and pay enough attention, I can read her like a book. Deep inside I see a sadness and a worry, but it’s hard to see, masked by an air of flippancy and the call to adventure. There’s so much on her that I can’t read, so much I can’t know.

                ‘I wish you could hear me, Elle.’ I don’t know if I said or thought the words.

                ‘Easton?’ comes a voice.

                ‘No way,’ I think.

                ‘Easton, is that you? How are you doing that?’

                ‘I’m just thinking, I’m concentrating on you.’

                ‘Okay, slightly creepy, but whatever,’ she thinks back. ‘This is new.’

                ‘I know, right!’ I think. ‘Cool though.’

                ‘So are we basically superheroes?’

                ‘It’s certainly going that way.’

                ‘Have you discovered your super strength yet, Easton, because this telepathy’s cute and all but it’s not getting us out of the cells.’

                ‘Is it the same over there as it is in here? Bed, locked bar door?’

                ‘Pretty much, I’ve been trying to dig a tunnel under a loose stone,’ she thinks.