for him, something shocked me in the back. At first I thought I’d imagined it—that my brain was searching for an answer and had created the shock on its own. But then it happened again, and I knew.
“Alex is close,” I sputtered out as I felt another spark, this time in my fingertips.
“What?” Laylen asked, looking confused.
“He’s close…I can feel him.”
Realization slowly rose in his expression. “The electricity?”
I nodded, and then we were running, following the path of electricity like an invisible trail of bread crumbs, which would hopefully lead us right to Alex. We kept running and running, going further into the cave, letting my electric sensors steer us as the sparks grew hotter and hotter, until they were going so wild I thought I was going to combust into flames. And when we reached a pair of silver doors, with the Foreseers mark on the top of each one, I knew Alex had to be behind them.
“You think he’s in there?” Laylen asked as I reached for the doorknob.
I nodded, slowly turning the handle, and pushed open the door. And what I saw made my stomach churn. People wrapped in chains that were binding them to a crystal ball the size of a football stadium. And all those people…well, they looked dead.
Chapter 20
I stood there, my hand still gripping the doorknob, my mouth agape. The people looked like corpses; their skin as pale as a ghost, their eyes sealed shut, their bodies strapped to the massive crystal ball that burned brightly like the sun. They were dead. They were all dead. Alex was dead. I couldn’t breathe.
“Calm down, Gemma.” Laylen’s voice was soothing “They’re not dead.”
I dropped my hand from the doorknob, unable to take my eyes off the crystal ball, the people, the chains. “Are you—are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. The crystal’s collecting energy from them,” he explained. “If they were dead, they wouldn’t be useful.”
Calm down. You won’t be useful if you’re freaking out. “Okay, so where’s Alex.”
Laylen stepped cautiously into the room, and I followed. Luckily, there didn’t seem to be anyone awake hanging around in there, like a Foreseer guard or something. The coast was all clear. So why did I still feel like I was going to throw up?
“Maybe we should split up,” Laylen suggested. “You head right and I’ll take the left?”
I nodded, and he headed off to the left side of the crystal ball. I headed to the right, searching the peoples’ faces as I moved around the burning crystal. It was difficult to feel the electricity in here because the crystal seemed to be radiating off an intense amount of electric energy. But if I really concentrated, I could feel the difference between the crystal ball’s electricity and Alex’s.
With every chained up person I went by, I grew more nauseous. Yes, Laylen had warned me that what I would see would be bad, but I never pictured it like this…so sickening. What made it even worse was that it wasn’t just the chains that were securing the people to the enormous crystal ball. There were also tubes coming out of their skin that extended up to the crystal ball, like how an IV attaches to its a bag.
If this was how Foreseers collected their energy, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a Foreseer anymore. If you asked me, Foreseers weren’t much better than Water Faeries. Whether they were feeding off humans fear, or their energy, they were still feeding off of them.
My sickening feeling nearly exploded out of me when I spotted Alex chained to the crystal ball, tubes jabbing out of him.
“Laylen!” I yelled as I ran up to Alex’s lifeless body. “Over here.”
For a moment I just stood there, staring at Alex, in a state of shock. But then I snapped out of it and began pulling the tubes out of his skin, one by one. They were small tubes and didn’t go in very deep, but each one left a tiny hole that dripped blood. “Laylen!” I yelled louder, looking for a way to get the chains off of Alex. “How the heck do I get these unlocked?”
Alex’s eyes shot open, and I let out a gasp. He stared at me, his normally bright green eyes dulled over, and I wondered if he even recognized me. He looked so…weak. I had never seen Alex look so weak. It was strange.
“Are you okay?” I asked worriedly.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.