• Scattered Dreams
    Part Two

    I couldn’t see anything outside of the patch of light that came through the single window. What looked like a birdcage, big enough for a person, hung in front of me, thin silver bars crossing each other over glass suspended a rough half metre from what looked like a parlour floor. Sleeping inside was the girl. Motionless beyond the glass she looked calm and, with her eyes shut tight, almost normal. Long, ill-fitting shorts, something like a grey wife-beater, and the blanket wrapped around her shoulders- if it hadn’t been for her hair, a startling shade of silver, and the fact that she was napping in a birdcage, I might not even have taken a second look, besides to see a rather pretty face.

    I hadn’t realised I’d been kneeling until my knees started to ache. I stood and stretched, still unable to see anything past the little pool of light I stood in, and then I heard the scream from the dark. After the complete silence surrounding the birdcage, it shocked me and I stumbled backward, hitting the cage, which swung against my weight. I fell back, staring around in bewilderment and the birdcage swung back, hitting me with momentum enough to send me sprawling to the edge of the pool of light. I sat up rubbing my head as the cage steadied itself behind me. There was another scream, farther away than the first, and then another, closer. A loud bang came from somewhere far in front of me, and the floor shook, everything rumbling angrily.

    The girl in the cage still slept, looking undisturbed by either the shaking ground or the earlier swinging of the birdcage. I stood as I heard an explosion to my right, cringing at the deafening noise. I pressed my fingers against the glass and shouted to the girl, who didn’t stir. I shouted again and pounded on the glass. I yelled again and again and pounded the glass hard enough that I thought it should have cracked, and still there was no response.

    Around me the screams grew louder, closer, and the explosions, which I couldn’t see no matter how hard I stared into the dark expanse surrounding me, grew more violent. My fist throbbed from hitting the glass. Somehow I had to wake her up. Whatever was happening, I thought it was something we had to escape from. But no matter how loudly I yelled or how hard I pounded the glass, nothing made her move, for all I knew, she might very well be dead.

    I sank to my knees, my hand still pressed to the glass, and willed her eyes to open. “Wake up,” I said, “Please, just-“ another explosion boomed, the closest yet, and I cringed and pounded with both fists as hard as I could against the glass, bellowing, “Wake up!” Inside the cage the girl’s eyes snapped open and I jumped up, my fists still on the glass.

    “We have to leave,” I shouted, “something’s happening to this place.”

    Black eyes bored into my own, confused and suspicious as the girl sat up, then the floor shook again, feeling as though the entire world was shifting. She fell, hitting her shoulder against a glass wall. Frantically, she waved me over to the other side of the cage and pointed to the keyhole placed in the glass there. I shook my head; I didn’t have a key and I hadn’t seen one, either. Still, I scrabbled at the glass, trying to find the edge of a door somewhere to pry open, but there was none, my fingers merely slid over seamless glass. From inside, the girl tried to help as the floor shook again and screams surrounded us. The dark the noise came from was terrifying; I couldn’t see who was screaming, or, more importantly, what, in the endless blackness, was making them scream.

    Another explosion rattled at the birdcage and the girl leaned toward the keyhole. “That window will lead you away from here,” she pointed behind me, “You can escape that way.”

    I glanced at the window from where the pool of light poured, and shook my head. “No,” I said through the keyhole, “I’ll get you out.”

    If we had the key… I thought, then stuck my hands in my pockets. My keys, of course, weren’t there; they’d fallen out of my pocket when I’d fought with Byron. Knowing this, I started when my fingers closed over the sea glass, which Byron had been holding. I turned it in my fingers and sighed, knowing it was useless. An explosion nearby threw me off my feet and set the birdcage swinging.

    “Go!” The girl in the cage shouted over the sound of crumbling rock, but I shook my head again as I stood and tried to steady the cage. The sea glass in my hand met the glass keyhole with a light click and put forth a sudden blinding light. It expanded in my hand until I found myself holding a long silver staff, made, apparently, of the finely twisted bars of the birdcage, which was now bare glass. I looked from the metal in my hand to the glass encasing the girl and motioned for her to step back. She did and I raised the staff, then swung it at the glass. The tip, where a knot of ornately twisted silver clasped my piece of sea glass, connected, and a clear blue light flashed. There was a noise of shattering and the transparent walls exploded outward in a burst of powdered glass. I raised my arm to cover my eyes, but the girl grabbed my wrist and pulled me after her, racing toward the window. She dragged me with her onto the shallow sill, where we were faced with a pure, blinding light, and then we jumped.