Page 81 of Xerxes Ascendant
But Kyle wasn’t there to see him collide with the concrete. He only heard the dull, sickening thud of it as Akira took hold of Kyle and wrenched him away.
More bullets smacked into the ground at their feet, chipping away at the already uneven and churned up concrete. Kyle ran without thought, pouring everything he had into forcing his legs to move faster, and didn’t see the gouged hole in the ground before they were almost on top of it. He tensed, preparing to stop, but Akira’s fingers tightened around his. Blind trust carried his feet forward into nothingness.
They leapt into the abyss together.
As the pair of them fell through the jagged gap in the concrete, that unique feeling of weightlessness clutched at his stomach once more, tearing ruthlessly at his insides. But this time, Kyle didn’t have chance to adjust to it or learn to find the exhilaration within the fear.
For the drop was brief: within a second or two of their reckless leap they were engulfed by a cold, unflinching embrace that jarred Kyle’s ankles and swept swiftly up over his head with an appalling stench. The shock of it was enough to make him gasp, rewarded with freezing water surging hungrily down his throat.
He kicked and struggled against the intangible foe.
Whatever they’d landed in was deep enough that his feet hadn’t hit the bottom. He couldn’t see a thing, and was no longer sure which way the surface lay. The water clung greedily to his shoes and clothes.
With Akira’s hand having been wrenched from his on impact, Kyle had never felt more alone than he did in that moment. He’d spent his life among other people, with other breaths and heartbeats never more than a handful of metres away. Walls were thin, streets were crowded, and Xerxians were used to living shoulder to shoulder, packed in between the thick metal walls of the city.
But this? No matter how far and in which direction Kyle stretched his limbs, he encountered nothing. Straining fingers closed on themselves. His feet kicked uselessly, not meeting solid mass.
Kyle’s awareness had narrowed to himself – the desperate flailing of his limbs, the burning in his chest and stinging of his eyes – and he hated how lonely it felt.
How sad, how pitiful, for himself to be all he could see and feel.
And then an arm wrapped around his waist andpulled.
Kyle kicked. Now he had direction to guide him…now he hadAkira, his movements, while still jerky and desperate, bore meaning. Purpose.
He fought to propel them both to the surface, limbs cutting through the water with a calm determination that had replaced the panic, and they emerged up into the suffocatingly noxious air.
Kyle choked in thick gasps and struggled to remain afloat.
“What…what is this?” he asked when he’d regained his breath. It looked like they were in some kind of tank, with low,slick walls surrounding them on all sides. Beyond that was dull grey concrete.
“Waste processing plant,” Akira told him grimly, bobbing up and down in the turbulent foam next to him.
Waste processing.
Oh, those fucking stars. They’d delivered them a safe landing...in the Uppers’ shit.
“We’re lucky,” his boyfriend added. “This is twice-treated water.”
It didn’t smell like it. It stank like it needed at least another fifteen rounds of filtration until it even measured up to the sludge that was capable of bursting from the Level E pipes, and Kyle fought not to gag.
Ah, well. They could have landed on yet more concrete and shattered every bone in their bodies – although he trusted Akira had known what lay beneath before he’d encouraged them to jump – so lucky was indeed what they were. Kyle would never complain about getting to live.
Although he’d admit that survival was becoming precarious. Kyle found himself continuously sinking, and needed to flap his arms to keep his head above the surface of the foul water. There was nothing to hold onto, nothing to stand on, and-
“Akira! I can’t...whatever the fucking word is...can you?”
“I can swim.”
“How well?”
“Well enough,” he said grimly. “The Upper I used to serve as a slave had a pool.”
Kyle almost laughed, but his throat hurt from swallowing the water and whatever else might still be in it. Of course those who lived on the surface had fucking swimming pools, while Lowers regularly died from scarcity of water.
“Kick your legs,” Akira instructed, and put his hands on Kyle’s thighs to redirect his fumbling efforts into sideways, frog-like movements that better held him afloat. The approving nod Kyle received when he managed it on his own a few moments later made him feel warm and proud.
But then a choppy wave created by Kyle’s earlier flailing disruptions bounced back from the edge of the tank and hit Akira in the face. While he coughed it back out, Kyle wrapped his arms tightly around his man’s waist and tried to lift him free of the water.
