VALERY KONINGSBRUGGE

I threw Molly to the ground and out of the way. I punched Earl in the throat, where his Adam's apple was lodged. My hands were not mine as I continued to beat his face to a pulp.

After the fact, one of his eyes was puffy; his bottom lip bust and bleeding and his nose broken and crumpled.

Then I would think to put him out of his misery so I strangled him. Earl was on his knees now, not me. And I had a weapon much more dangerous than a protterer to keep him in line and hopeless.

Air escaped his mouth for the final time, an essence of evil latching onto me. But Earl hadn't been malevolent, he did this to survive. Everyone was acting out of proportion because of the need to survive.

I set Earl's body on the ground and closed his other eye. May he rest in peace and become a sea animal, although he had not given this type of mercy to the Wayfarers he slaughtered.

"NOOO!" Ben yelled from under Val. It is a scream from deep within that forces its way out of his mouth. It fades away only to be accompanied by the rattling of the underwater station. I reach for the automatic door and stare outside.

Shakily as it was, I make out the currents in the water that are attacking the station, pressuring the glass. Ben was doing this. His Compeller powers were at their peak, spiking rapidly. Cracks formed in the glass above us and under us and leaks pooled through.

The underwater station could not hold up any longer. I look back at Ben, hoping to stop him with one bubble dispensed from my mouth. The water beside him shifts and a spike reaches out and stabs Val in the head.

The pharmacy is a mess and all of the items have been tossed from the shelves. Before I can make a move, I hear a loud shattering sound and water rushing immediately.

I turn around but I feel the wave of water before anyone and it isn't how I imagined to be entombed...

                                                                      ...

I wake suddenly, every thought in high definition. My eyes take in every ray of light and without a doubt I know I am dead. I lift my hand to my face, wishing it to be the fin of a humpback whale.

It is certainly not, and I am confused about the exposure of light that hangs above me. I squint my eyes to make out a line or a shadow, but there is nothing but the blinding light. And the light wavers, moving from one eye to the other as I can tell from the epicentre of the light.

I reach my hand out to the light and I touch something hard. The light is removed from my eyes and is revealed to be a Floater snice with a torch to check my consciousness. I didn't know why I needed a snice, I wasn't ill or anything.

But it was routine to be checked up by a snice after what happened. A whole underwater station collapsed. And I had been in the station when it had happened.

Now I was in a flabjow station designed to provide medical treatment for the sick and injured. I was neither and I persuaded the snice that I wasn't.

The Floater snice told me everything that had happened while I was in a coma for months. Floaters searched the wreckage of the underwater station for survivors.

They only found three people because everyone had evacuated beforehand due to a mass killing of peacekeepers which I myself was the target of.

I was among the three, with Jennifer and Molly. Ben was nowhere to be found. It was suspicious considering he would have been at the mercy of the high court if he were found and identified by the evacuated as the mass killer.

The snice told me that he had treated the girls at this flabjow station and left them in the care of an adopter. He mentioned the adopter being an older man with a determined outlook and particularly interested in underwater volcanoes.

The benign snice rescinded any diagnosis of a disease in my medical report and let me go early. As I stood in the middle of the flabjow, I could feel the station's salubrity affect me directly. I was free of my duties as leader because I had no clue where my pack was.

So I would chase Ben and the girls down until I found them. I asked directions to the closest underwater volcano and took a pod down there. It was an active volcano but not necessarily erupting at the moment.

As I had wildly suspected, a pod was docked at the base of the underwater volcano, seated in the sand. Three people in Iko suits, one taller than the rest, trekked towards the mouth of the volcano which was bubbling beyond control.

Molly was a Wayfarer, but the newer model of the Iko suit weighed her down and gravitated her to stand on sand. It did the same to me as I stepped out, running after them.

Rather bouncing with one foot in front of the other, since the water was still strong down here and bringing variations to the concept of gravity. I met them near the opening of the volcano, with nothing to do but blankly stare at them.