Reid wakes to whispering voices and shadows hovering over him, passing in front of his closed lids. Someone holds his right hand gently, fingers stroking the skin. His mind tells him it’s Leila. He takes another moment of personal quiet before opening his eyes.
It takes a little effort. The dust has bonded them together, gumming his lashes and making him blink over and over before he can see. It still feels scratchy, like there is more of the stuff left in his eyes, but he can see and is alive and Reid is very, very grateful.
Milo’s is the first face Reid focuses on. The boy is hard to miss, hovering right above Reid, tear tracks running through the powdered rock on his face. His giant brown eyes notice Reid is awake and widen even further. The boy cries out, a low and pathetic sound, and collapses almost on top of his friend, hugging him awkwardly, choking sobs low but vibrating through Reid’s chest.
Reid tries to speak but can’t. His throat is clogged with chalk. It’s an effort to clear it, especially from a prone position, but he manages. “It’s okay.” Reid gets those two words out after working up just enough spit to swallow and clear his vocal cords. “I’m fine.” A miracle. More words. He’s pretty sure he’ll be okay after all.
Milo squeezes Reid harder before sitting up. Both skinny hands rise, push the tears away with aggressiveness that smears large tracks in the dust, making a mess of Milo’s already dirty face. “We thought you were dead.” The hitch in his voice makes Reid smile.
He’s amazed at himself, that he can smile. That he wants to. But he is alive and that is more than he was expecting. And maybe deserved. “Thanks for not giving up.”
Milo’s grin is lopsided and weak but for the first time since Drew died they are friends again.
Reid slowly pulls himself into a sitting position, coughing several times as the strain makes his lungs rebel. When he is finally upright, he looks around. “What happened?”
“You passed out,” Leila says. “Marcus was unconscious when we pulled you out but he’s fine. Just a knock on the head.”
Reid remembers the silent sneakers. “There was someone else under there,” he whispers, understanding already there’s no hope. He doesn’t have to look at Leila to know he’s right, but he does anyway. He gets to his feet with her help, Milo eagerly supporting his other side. He slowly tests his body to be sure he really is fine. He is dizzy just for a second before his head clears. Eyes turn toward him, a wave of relief reaching out to hug him almost like Milo had done as each of the kids smiles at him, their filthy faces shining with happiness.
That his continued existence is enough to make them happy actually cheers Reid up a little.
He makes his way forward, fingers brushing over a head of hair here, a turned up cheek there. They touch him back, whispering to him words they don’t need to say. They are glad he is all right.
Reid continues forward, feet dragging more and more as he goes, not wanting to look in the hole, to see who they lost, but knows he must. He has to bear witness to the kid who died, the one fallen with him and Marcus but who will run no further.
No matter what happens from here on in, Reid knows it's something he will do for each and every kid in the pack who doesn’t make it. He can only hope someone will remain behind to do it for him.
The kids managed to uncover the lost boy’s body, all bent and bloodied. They’ve laid him out on a slab of rock, straightened his limbs as best they could. Reid’s heart clenches at the sigh of the mangled corpse, the crushed chest and protruding arm bones, the pool of blood next to the missing face. It doesn’t disgust him, though. He’s grown so accustomed to the sight of death Reid can see past the blood and exposed tissue and into the reality that this was a child.
“He died quickly, at least.” It’s little comfort, but Leila is doing her best so Reid just nods. She’s right, anyway. He just wishes he could remember the boy’s name. Someone should. It’s important, isn’t it? He’d want someone to remember his in that last moment of acknowledgement. As proof he ever existed, even to one other person.
“Owen,” Leila whispers as if reading his mind. It’s enough to connect the sneakers to the boy.
Owen. Reid will never forget.
“Are we just going to sit here?” His anger rolls over in his gut at the sound of that voice. Marcus forces his way toward the gaping hole in the rocks although Reid notices he refuses to look at the dead kid lying there. “The hunters could be here any minute.”
Reid doesn’t say anything, just glares. Marcus tries to glare back but he has no spine, as far as Reid can figure, and soon backs off. Reid turns back to Leila with a soft sigh, trying to dispel some of his furious energy without taking it out on Marcus.
“Anyone else hurt?”
She points a little further up the tunnel and Reid goes to see.
Three kids huddle under a light bulb, staring eyes terrified. One has a bandage around his forehead. The second has his arm in a sling made from the hem of his T-shirt. He looks so lost Reid wants to comfort him. The third is skinny little Megan.
“I’m okay,” she whispers in her tiny voice. “Honest.” Her hand is wrapped in the remains of someone’s shirttail. “Just a scratch.”
“A rock crushed it,” Leila says softly. “Eric here has a broken arm and I think Brandon has a concussion.”
Reid is nodding, knowing it could have been so much worse. It’s not until then he thinks of what happened, that slow motion moment still frozen in his mind and he spins on her, panic coming back.
“Cole?” He remembers throwing the boy, but was he in time?
“I’m here.” Leila didn’t have to answer. Cole appears at her side, though he refuses to look up, just shuffles his sneakers against the tunnel floor, hands stuffed in his back pockets.
Reid squeezes the boy’s shoulders. Cole looks up, startled and guilty and contrite all at once.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Reid says.
Tears well in Cole’s blue eyes, brim over. “Thanks,” he whispers.
“Reid, Leila!” Milo pops up from the rock pile, his fuzzy hair full of dust. “You need to see this.”
Reid gets back there first despite his reluctance to return to his tomb, but makes room so Leila and Cole can both have a look. Alex stares up at Reid from where he huddles in the hole. His hands are shaking but he doesn’t move, just points and hugs himself.
Reid ducks his head and peers under the pile. Is that a leg? Another kid lost? At first his heart plummets, his guilt far stronger than Cole’s could ever be. But then he notices something is strange about that leg. The skin is withered, gray.
“Looks like a mummy,” Cole says.
He’s right, too. Alex points again. Another body, this time with the head out in the open. Reid flinches from the empty eye sockets but is beginning to understand. This is a girl, he’s pretty sure from the length of her hair. And she too looks shrunken, as though drained of life and left an empty, dried up husk.
“I don’t think the hunters killed them,” Alex says. “They have all their, um. Parts.”
They all stare for a long time, as though unable to break free of the sullen sadness the empty shells cause. Reid looks around the pit, his plan to uncover them completely dashed at the sight of the gigantic rocks they would have to move.
“There must have been a crack in the wall,” Milo says, so quiet and yet filling the empty space with the sound of his mourning. “I’m thinking these two squeezed in to hide and never left.”
Makes sense. Chances are if these two go this far they’d be half dead already unless they found the water, too. His mind stumbles along with them, clutching each other’s hands, maybe crying softly as they went. Finding the place to hide, huddling together. Going to sleep curled around one another and never waking up.
Considering the alternative ends this place offers, Reid thinks it would be a good death.
He shakes himself loose of his imagination. There is nothing he can do for them now, or the dead boy with the silent sneakers. Reid offers Alex his hand and helps him free of the pit. Only then does he shudder, realizing this is the very hole they pulled him out of and wonders how close he lay next to these dead kids, unknowing.
“So much for us being the first ones to find the mine.” Milo hops up on his own and hugs himself. Reid curses silently. He hasn’t said anything to them about his belief about this place and hoped they wouldn’t make the connections he did about this being only a maze. It appears to be inevitable now.
For the first time since he met Marcus, Reid is grateful he speaks up and breaks that dangerous train of reasoning with his usual thoughtfulness.
“At least the hunters didn’t get them.”
Reid clenches both fists, the pain in both enough to make him weak and get his anger under control before he surges to his feet, not looking at Marcus or anyone but the two mummies in the bottom of the hole.
“Dead is dead. Isn’t it?” Reid turns away and leaves the rubble behind.
They gather further up the tunnel, the gentle slope upward offering some hope. He is grateful this is the one surviving and that all the kids chose. They are seventeen now, and three injured enough to slow them down, but they are alive and that is what matters.
“They’ll hold us back, you know.” Marcus won’t look at Megan and the two boys. Reid hears sniffling from the hurt kids, knows the three are afraid of being left behind. This time he doesn’t hold back when his temper takes over.
“Tell you what,” Reid says, letting out all the venom he’s feeling, all the rage and frustration and need to drive Marcus’s face through the back of his head into the words he speaks, “if you don’t like it, you can just leave.”
Marcus stares at him like he’s crazy. “What are you talking about?”
“You heard me,” Reid says. “Get lost. Or shut the hell up. Pick one. But you can’t have it both ways.”
Marcus retreats into his sullen pout and grumbles and grouses to himself but in the end, as Reid knew he would, Marcus stays.
***