Ethereal Underground (Ethereal Underground Trilogy) (7 page)

“Finlay came by looking for you,” she said. Ash perked up at the mention of his friend. Why would Finlay think to look for him here?

“Really? What did he want?”

“To check on you. He helped me carry you back home
last night.”

“How convenient,” he grumbled. When he had introduced them a few months ago, he had given Finlay strict orders to stay away from Arie. The last thing he needed was for Arie’s heart to get smashed like the dozens of other girls Finlay left in his path.

Arie put her hands on her hips and scowled.  “I’m not a child anymore Ash, I have been of age for a few years now. You can't keep protecting me from every guy out there. Besides, Finlay didn’t even stay; he was in a hurry to get somewhere.”

“I need to get out of here without being seen.” He wanted to look outside, but the units in the eighth layer didn’t have windows as it was too dangerous. Too many criminals, too many thieves.
Ash wasn’t sure who would be watching. Fallen or keeper.

“Are you afraid to be seen with me?” Arie whispered. The look on her face made Ash’s eyes fall to the floor. He had always been afraid of leading her on, but she knew the rules; she also knew that he broke them quite often. He walked over to where she sat and pulled her into a tight embrace. He let his hand run through her hair and inhaled deeply. She always smelled like flowers, a smell that calmed him. Her body fit perfectly against his. She was his best friend and he would never hurt her.

“I’m not afraid of anything Arie; I’m just trying to protect you. The keepers are pretty mad at me right now. I don’t want to give them reason to believe we are…together.” She nodded and gave him a quick kiss on his cheek. He knew she would understand. She had met the keepers before and knew how strongly they took the keeper oath.

“You know that’s never stopped you with the girls before,” she teased. Ash
chuckled before letting her go.

“Well that was before…” He let his sentence trail off; he didn’t want her to know about how much trouble he was in with the keepers, she didn’t need anything else to worry about. All she knew right now was that he was taking a sabbatical while the higher up keepers, the Officials, decided what to do about Ash’s recent bouts of dishonesty and unruliness.

“Let me wake dad, he can sneak you out through the tunnels.” Arie started to walk towards her father’s room; he quickly grabbed her arm to stop her.

“Uh, no thanks, last thing I need is your hung over father questioning why I was here last night and why I am wearing his clothes. I can make it through the tunnels myself.” The tunnels ran below the city. They weren’t too dangerous, but if you didn’t know your way, you could get lost in them forever. Ash wasn’t worried, he had used them a few times before and he was confident he knew his way home through them.
He just wanted to stay away from the guards who were at the entrance to the ninth layer. The ninth layer was forbidden. All he wanted to do was to go home and take a hot bath. He needed a smoke and he needed some time to think about what had happened earlier. He also needed to travel up to the surface later that day to appear at the conservatory.

He was curious as to why Arie wasn’t pushing the situation. She was always so eager and excited about everything; that was why he liked her so much. They were alike in so many ways, but she didn’t seem to push the fact that he had mysteriously healed. Trying to be helpful, he grabbed his empty plate and glass to clean up the table.

“Let me help clean up before I go.” Unfortunately, his movements were a little too hurried and he knocked the glass of water over, spilling its contents all over the table.

He cursed and swiftly picked the cup up. “Sorry…” he mumbled. He put his hands out, not sure of what he was trying to do. He couldn’t mop up the spill with his hands. He felt stupid for just standing there, but for some reason he couldn’t move. He was frozen in that spot. All he could think about was how stupid he felt for knocking over the water and how badly he wanted to clean it up. He heard Arie scrambling through the kitchen, looking for a towel.

He felt his hands start to get warm and a tingling feeling shot through his fingers. The pain was dull, like his entire hand had fallen asleep. Within a matter of seconds, he saw the water lift up from the table. He was still in too much shock to move, so he just stood there staring at the water. It was floating in midair. It shimmered in a bulbous form a few inches off the table. Unable to believe what he was seeing, Ash blinked a few times and lifted his hands to rub his eyes. Maybe he was still dreaming. He looked at the spilled water again; it was back on the table. He was really out of it; maybe he needed to sleep this off. Deep inside, he felt that something was off. He didn’t feel quite right or normal that is. Whoever or whatever that girl was, she had done something to him.

“I’ve got to go, I’ll see you around.” Ash spun around and bolted from the apartment. He needed to get out of there before anything more strange happened. He also had a meeting on the surface with the Officials
, and he couldn’t be late.

He had found his way through the underground tunnels easy enough. Once home, he tried to get cleaned up for his meeting. In the shower, he tried to recreate the control over the water, but he couldn’t make it work. He was so curious as to what had really happened last night that it was driving him crazy. He needed to have a clear mind for when he met
with the Officials. The blonde girl and Loki would have to wait for another day.

A short time later, Ash
began his trip to the surface. The trip was surprisingly quick. The direct tunnels that Ash flew the ship up through were nearly deserted. The citizens of Cabalin weren’t afforded the luxury of fuel, and the fuel that the keepers made on the surface cost as much as one normal person made in a day. This kept the citizens from moving around from city to city. It kept them stranded in one layer. Not too many people were willing to walk through the underground tunnels either. Ash’s ship belonged to the keepers, and the only reason he was allowed to keep it was to appear before the Officials in situations like this. It had only been a few weeks since they had forced him on a sabbatical. At first, living underground had seemed exciting and adventurous, but after a few days Ash longed for the warmth of the suns on his skin. The lights that hung from the ceiling of the underground didn’t feel the same to him. They were built to mimic sunlight, but it just wasn’t the same. Each of the nine layers contained one city. Each city was completely different from the other. They had different layouts and temperatures. The eighth layer was the most populated layer. It was where Ash lived, in a small home near the Underground. It was easier for him to run home after a fight to get cleaned up. Most of his friends lived there also. It was an urban terrain with the highest crime rate, biggest stores, and where most of the trading happened. The seventh layer consisted of family units; the sixth and fifth layer contained the middle class environments with factories and hydroponic gardens. All the layers above the fifth were considered superior. These layers were where the most important citizens live, and housed the swankiest stores, spas, and other luxuries that helped the rich pass the time.  The important citizens never had to work for their gems, but somehow they always seemed to have enough. Gems were the official form of currency, and most of the citizens accepted payments with them or bartered with items. 

As the surface neared, Ash could hear the rumbling of the generators as he left the
underground sphere. The dome surrounded all the cities; it enclosed them in the ecosphere. The generators above the dome cleaned and recycled the air and another set of generators below the sphere recycled the waste.  Ash had never traveled past the eighth layer to see the generators, and he never wanted too. The ninth layer was the home of all the banished creatures on the planet. Some of them were original inhabitants; others were citizens who had broken the law. The few openings out of the ninth layer were heavily guarded to keep the banished inside. 

Once Ash had broken the barrier of the
sphere, he noticed how bad the surface looked. It had only been a few weeks since he last saw it, but it had defiantly changed. The suns was brighter and the air looked dirtier. In the past few decades, the land had slowly started to die off. The soil became dry and the enrichment that once flourished across it had withered away into nothing. The oceans had dried up and the animals had disappeared. The aging process of the inhabitants had also begun to speed up. When the mortal species first came to the planet, they had all started to age slowly. Before, it wasn’t unheard of to live for hundreds of years. When the planet changed, so did the lifespan of everything on it. Now most species were lucky to see age forty. Everything that had once been beautiful about the land was gone. Ash hadn’t been born yet when the land flourished, but the stories he heard were enough to understand why so many people had once coveted the planet.

Ash parked his ship in his usual spot outside of the cube shaped conservatory and jumped out. He had felt so groggy that morning, but now his body felt full of life.  He stepped outside and stretched his hands over his head. He straightened out his keeper uniform. When he appeared before the Officials, he was required to wear his dress robe.
It was long and black with the keeper emblem stitched in over the breast. The keeper’s symbol consisted of a large triangle with a star at the top, and within it was a key with a “k” in the circular portion at the top. A pair of matching pants and button up shirt completed the ensemble.  Ash remembered to put on a serious face as he neared a few keepers that stood guard outside of the conservatory.

Ash gave a nod to one the guards as he walked closer. “I’m here to appear before the Officials.” The two other guards stared at Ash with blank faces. “
Always so serious
,” Ash thought.  One of the guards, whom Ash recognized as a keeper a few years below himself moved to open one of the large doors. The sound of explosions in the air caused Ash to jump backwards. The sound of an attack was something all the keepers had grown accustomed to. No one else even flinched.

“Underground life has made you soft.” A teasing voice caused Ash to straighten up and look over at the open door. In the doorway stood his former partner. Jedzia was dressed identical to Ash and her long black hair was pulled tightly into a bun on top of her head. She was almost ten years older than Ash, but she still looked young and vibrant.

Ash walked through the doors and felt a tremble of fear as it slammed shut behind him. “I didn’t expect you to be here,” he told her.

“I am here to witness on your behalf. It is rumored that the keepers are in disagreement about your sabbatical.” Ash had been afraid that would happen. A rouge keeper was not unheard of, and those that could not keep their emotions under control or take the job seriously were never heard from again.  Ash reminded himself to keep
a straight face. The last thing he wanted the Officials to see was his anger, or even worse, his fear.

Jedzia
glanced over at him with a perceptive look. “Calm down Ash. Your offence is not too serious. You think that other keepers have not gotten curious and snuck underground?”

“This is different, and you know it.” He didn’t want to talk about the situation out loud. When he talked about it, it made it seem even more real.  He stopped in the hallway and looked around. The keeper conservatory was a huge cubed shaped building that housed the training facilities and all of the war supplies they used. It was brown on the outside to mask it from attackers, but even if a neighboring planet made it on the surface to attack, a large force field shielded it. A few factories sat on the outskirts of the perimeter, which were used as trading posts. The walls inside were white and bare. In fact, everything in the keeper conservatory looked the same way. They were not into decorations or aesthetically pleasing environments. If the object didn’t have a definitive purpose; it was not needed. Jedzia continued to walk, not bothering to stop when Ash had paused.

“They will not get rid of you. You have a strong keeper bloodline. The keepers are fading, that is why they insist we not mingle with the other races. We are the future of the planet. Without us, the war would surely destroy this planet.” She recited the words like they had been bore into her head since birth. They probably had been. Ash had always thought that power had gone to the many of the keepers’ heads. He sometimes forgot that she was one of them; Jedzia had been trained from day one to become an Official.

“I’m not sure there is much of a planet to save anymore,” he mumbled under his breath. The planet was dying; he didn’t understand why everyone was so insistent on staying here.
He didn’t feel the same loyalty to his homeland like many other did. The rebels, an underground terrorist group, wanted the planet to be returned to how it was before the wars, but Ash felt like it was all a few thousand years too late. The rebels only made his job as a keeper that much harder. He looked over at the keeper blade that fell from Jedzia’s side. He longed for the return of his own blade; if he was ever allowed to come back.

They neared the large white doors at the end of the hallway. This was it; another hearing to discuss his future with the keepers. They would gripe about Ash sneaking around and breaking his oath. Ash would complain about how the keepers should be allowed to socialize. They would answer with something similar to what Jedzia said. How they were the glue holding the planet together; and they had vowed to save it from destruction. It was all the same to Ash. He
would tell them he didn’t understand why they stayed on a dying planet. The war would never end, and the other planets would never stop trying to gain control over Cabalin. Jedzia tried to give him a reassuring smile, but it didn’t calm Ash’s nerves. The large double doors opened automatically to the Official Court.  Ash let a neutral expression take over his face as he walked inside. The round room was large with the same plain white walls. On each side were rows of metal desks; each with an Official placed neatly behind it. There were twenty Officials all together. Each Official had once been a promising keeper who now governed the laws and made all of the decisions for the people and planet. The keepers began as a warrior race that had traveled from far to find a new home. The race had once been pure, but throughout the centuries interspecies relationships had resulted in tainted bloodlines. Only a few full-blooded keepers had remained.