Illumination

The buggy rumbled through the night, headlights piercing through the blackness like knives. Jack stared out the frosted window, her face illuminated by the light of her wrist monitor. Her heart rate was high, but her older brother, Robin, had told her that was normal. Still, she couldn’t help but look around and wish that she was back home.

At this thought, Jack balled up her fists and pressed them into the ythafone-lined seats of the buggy. Even beneath the layers of padding that made up her insulation suit, she felt numb all over, like icy spiderwebs were clinging to her skin.

“Hey, Jackie, how’s it going?” Robin called, turning around to face her from the driver’s seat. His eyes sparkled from behind the foggy visor of his helmet like diamonds.

“Don’t call me that,” Jack answered stiffly, but she couldn’t help but smile as he turned back to the road. After a moment of silence, she added, “Fine. I don’t know how you drive through this mess.” She glanced out through the misty windshield at the road ahead. The two bright headlights, powered by Illumination, were almost completely white. Jack could only distinguish faint, blue streaks of the icy cliffside they were driving up, as well as the outline of the road ahead, which came and went like the cold.

“Well, maybe when you’re older you can go to buggy school like me and learn,” Robin teased her. He laughed but it sounded hollow and unusually quiet. A pause swelled in the air as Jack picked at a stray thread on her uniform sleeve. “Hey, why have we stopped?”

Jack looked out the window, fingers pressing against the pane. Coils of dark fog wrapped around the buggy. Ice crystals flurried past the Illumination headlights, lacerating the air. Ahead, she could see the beams of the other buggy facing ahead.

Robin turned on the radio comm. “Codename Bird calling in. What’s going on?”

A crackle came from the radio, then, “This is, uh, Victory to Bird from buggy 2X-T. It appears we’ve arrived at the summit, but the path down is blocked.”

Robin frowned as he peered out the window. “Not possible. Why can’t we see the colony’s Illumination Beacon?”

A pause. Jack’s heart began to beat faster as the silence overwhelmed them. Then Victory answered, “That’s probably why we’re coming in the first place.”

“Victory, you’re joking. They really expect three mechanics and a buggy driver to fix an Illumination Beacon?” Robin sputtered incredulously. Jack couldn’t help but bite her lip in agreement. She’d only just graduated from the mandatory engineering program. Fixing something as big as an Illuminator—the giant beacons that provided light and energy to large colonies of survivors—seemed like an impossibly large task for three new recruits.

“Look, you know I don’t make the decisions here. You have a problem, you talk to the General.” The radio went dead for a moment, then crackled back to life. Victory continued, this time in a warmer tone, “We gotta find another way down or else we’re going around.”

“I’ll go look,” Jack announced, glad to get out of the cramped buggy.

“Be careful, Jackie,” Robin warned, nodding at her as the buggy side doors opened with a hiss. Jack shivered, unbuckled her seatbelt, and swung her legs out over the side.

Thin wisps of fog collected at her feet as she stepped out and switched on the Illumination feature on her helmet visor. A powerful beam of light parted the darkness in front of her to reveal that she was standing at the top of an icy cliff that dropped swiftly down into darkness. Jack bent down and shakily touched the ground for the first time with her hands. The ice felt crystalline under her grasp, and she couldn’t help but wince at the chill, even with her insulated gloves on.

“Look down to the right. There should be a steep path leading down that curves around the front of the cliff. Liam—sorry, Victory, says it’s blocked.” Robin’s voice came crackling over her helmet’s comm link.

Jack crept to the edge of the cliffside and bent down, looking around for a path. “I see the path,” she radioed back. “Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of debris scattered around here. It’s blocking part of the path. I think we could move the debris aside and drive down.”

“Well let us know when you’ve stopped sightseeing,” another voice radioed in. It was Strikeout, otherwise known as Bailey Katadolo, the strangest, most mysterious girl in the entire colony. “We’re all waiting on you, Squeak.”

Jack, somewhat miffed, shrugged her pack off her shoulders and opened it up, pulling out the thick coil of climbing rope that was stashed inside. The rough fibers of the coil chafed her cold knuckles as she removed her safety gloves and looped one end of the rope around a nearby rock. Her heart beat rapidly and it felt like the clattering of tiny snow deer hooves on her chest. She backed up slowly to the edge of the cliff, keeping a firm grip on the end of the rope.

She let out more of the line and lowered herself down. The tips of her boots just touched the cliffside. Sweeping the beam of her helmet’s Illuminator across the path, Jack was just about to climb back up to report when she saw a flash of red light among the debris. What was that? She blinked and there it was again, flashing on and off.

“Hold on, I think I see something,” she radioed the others, lowering her line even more. The rope groaned as it stretched taut. Jack held her breath and reached down to grab the flashing object.

It was a flare, smoking crimson coils as it sputtered and struggled to stay alight. The number 298 was etched on the side of the flare using some crude instrument and there was a wad of paper stuffed into the other end. 298...that’s the number of the colony we’re going to! Jack thought frantically. Why would someone from the colony hike all the way out here?

Jack let go of the rope with one hand and pulled out the paper that was stuffed into the tube. The line wobbled but held as she shakily brought the note up into the light of her Illuminator.

There were only two words written on the paper in unsteady handwriting.

“Don’t come.”

That’s when the rope snapped and Jack plummeted into the never-ending abyss of darkness.