Entanglement (YA Dystopian Romance) - By Dan Rix Page 0,51
tree.
Numb with pain, Aaron leaned over and clawed at the knots binding his ankles, but the fingers on his left hand felt weak, feeble. The gash in his arm had reopened. The wound pulsed, and he couldn’t get the rope around his heels.
Two pairs of hands seized his arms, and once again, the pillowcase smothered him. They hauled him into the woods, in and out of the toothed hollows beneath tree roots. Clots of fungus yielded under his face, squishing and splattering him with pus. The sugary odor nauseated him.
Then they jerked him to his feet, and the ground beneath him was solid—a slab of concrete. His toes hung off a ledge. Dominic pressed the knife to his throat, and Aaron realized they had taken him to an old water well.
Clive’s hands fished through his pockets and removed his cell phone. He breathed into Aaron’s ear.
“This is so you’re not a nuisance on my birthday,” he said. “While I fulfill my duty as Amber’s half, you can cry your heart out in a dark hole—”
Aaron elbowed him in the solar plexus, and Clive keeled over, wheezing. He felt Dominic’s foot crunch into his spine, and he lost his balance.
Aaron tumbled down the well’s black throat.
***
His stomach squeezed up into his windpipe as dank, rotten air whistled past him. He crunched into the opposite wall, twisted, and kept falling. When he finally hit the bottom, his legs crumpled. His ear gouged into the stone.
Then, except for the violent agony in his limbs and the slosh of moldy water, everything was silent. But at least his bones weren’t sticking out of his kneecaps. The well walls must have broken his fall.
Aaron pulled the pillowcase off his head, but it didn’t help. Perpetual blackness caved in on all sides. He reached forward and his fingers collided with cold, grimy rock, inches from his face. The well was hardly wider than his shoulders. His eyes adjusted, and he became aware of the dark circle of sky, twenty feet above him.
Aaron untied his feet and tried to climb. He wedged his fingers into the slimy cavities between stones and then kicked off the ground. He hung for a split-second, his body trembling with exertion, before he collapsed.
As he panted to catch his breath, decay soaked into his lungs, chilled his heart. The walls were too slippery. He’d never climb them.
In eight hours, he was due at the Chamber of Halves. Eight hours. And here he was at the bottom of a well. Clive and Dominic were not coming back to get him.
He was going to miss his appointment.
It was that simple.
Aaron pictured his nameless half waiting all alone in a dungeon at the Chamber of Halves, and he pitied her. Did she already know, as he did, that their channel was going to break?
Then the girl in his mind changed to Amber, and his stomach did cartwheels. He needed to be there in the morning for her. Suddenly, Aaron balled his fist and swung at the walls, tearing skin from his knuckles.
No way in hell did Clive deserve her, not in a billion years. In eight hours, Aaron would be there to teach him that lesson.
Just as soon as he got out.
Aaron squatted and raked the mud with his fingers. The air down at the bottom was heavier, weighed down and humid with infection, morgue-like. He half expected to find bones. But there was nothing so useful. He took inventory. Shoes, six feet of rope, shirt, pants, belt, and a pillowcase. Somehow, they added up to his escape.
But seconds passed. Minutes. His body cooled, and it became hard to think. The cold numbed his fingers, crept into the marrow of his bones. Then the shivering began. And it occurred to him, between convulsions, that he could die in this well.
Ten minutes passed. It was a terrifying kind of time, impaling him silently. Nothing came to him. He raked the bottom again. Still nothing. He searched the walls, probed for indentations, anything he could grip. Always nothing. Slowly, inexorably, the walls of his tomb were closing in.
After he traced the contours in the slimy walls enough times to memorize them, reaching higher and higher, Aaron finally discovered an irregularity.
Almost out of reach, he could just feel the lip of an opening in the side of the well. Maybe he could haul himself up. But then what? He’d still be fifteen feet underground. Still, it was worth a try.