The school day came to an end for Alex as it always did; with dozens of students filling the hallways in crowded clusters just as they had been in the morning. Alex walked out of his last class of the day and pulled his cellphone from his pocket as soon as he entered the hall. With school hours over, Alex planned to meet up with his friend Seth in front of the school building, where ordinarily he and Nickole would be picked up by their mother. He flipped open his phone and typed a text message to Seth, “Hey Seth, I’ll meet you out front.” He made his way quickly to the nearest staircase where he would descend to the lower floor. The doors to the stairwell were being held open by the groups of students all heading down. Alex pushed his way through the hordes and down the stairs. Once at the bottom, he felt his phone vibrate. He opened it up to see a response text from Seth which r

Alex revived from his black out to a throbbing pain in his temple. There was a sharp ringing in his ears as he struggled to open his eyes. At least, tried opening his eyes but could not tell the difference. The space around him was even darker than the closure of his eyelids. He was dazed and disoriented from the cave in. Alex’s eyes flew open and he hurried to his feet. As he tried to stand up, he bashed his head off of a low hanging beam. The incident had caused most of the mine’s structure to cripple, but he could not see a thing in the intense darkness. Alex cried out and put a hand to his head as he fell back against the wall. He was breathing heavily and beginning to panic. He brought himself down on all fours and felt around the tunnel. His hand suddenly came upon a familiar object. Alex gasped as he found the flashlight Hetrick had given him. He scrambled to find the button to turn it on and a dim

It was late into the night, but Rowan found no sleep. It was not often that she was able to truly relax behind the walls of the Citadel. Many mixed thoughts would rush through her head while she sat awake with burning eyes.  Her quarters was built mostly of a wooden structure and the walls were hung with the hide of deer and bears to keep the space insulated and warm, and the bed she was sitting on was nothing more than a roughly sewn mat on the floor. In her hand, Rowan was fiddling around with a small, carven necklace. It was one of the last things handed down to her by her late grandmother and she never let it out of her sight. Sometimes, just like tonight, when she was alone in her Citadel quarters, she would remove it from her neck just to grasp it in her hands. It helped her recall days long ago, before her home was taken; days when she would watch

Miles away, it had also been a long, sleepless night for Nickole. All of her mind was centered around the events of the previous day. She was a twelve-year-old girl who had witnessed her brother vanish in seconds inside the darkness of an unstable, abandoned mine. It was traumatizing, and no matter how many times Alex’s friends tried to assure her that he was going to be alright, Nickole’s irrational mindset caused her to visualize the most horrific possibilities. What chewed Nickole up almost as much was the part she played in Alex’s predicament. For months, all she wanted was to strengthen the old relationship she had with her older brother. Their mother had been so protective and sheltering ever since their father left, and while Alex was out with his friends for most of the afternoon, she hardly had any time during the day to spend with him, if he even spent time with her at all. The one time she had

The day was beginning to wear into the afternoon, and yet Alex found himself making no progress finding his way out of the mountains. He had followed the irregular ridge as far as he could, but when the terrain became too rugged and steep for him to continue, he was forced to turn away. Now his aimless path had led him deeper and lower into the mountain ranges. He was exhausted and quickly dehydrating. He was certain that as long as kept heading in one direction, he would eventually come to the end of the mountains, or at least to some sort of civilization. Still, no matter which way he went, he could be miles away from anything, and there was no guarantee that the terrain would even be traversable. How did this happen, Alex wondered. How, in the course of one day, did he manage to get himself into a situation like this? Nothing about it made sense. As the sun rose higher into the sky, the soothing heat o