The Sluice of the Forgotten

My fists smoke in the darkness.

I look at this black rock grafted to my right arm. This frozen magma that just refused a trivial gauze knot. Shame twists my neck. I clench my jaw until the enamel cracks.

Fire does not sew wounds.

INTI.Δ's injunction rises beneath my skin, raw, stripped of pity. The true flame cauterizes. It demands the march.

I stand up. My boots scrape the damp floor of the purification plant. I cross the room, stepping over busted pipes to reach the main sluice. This massive wall, poured in a single block, shuts off the path toward the old collectors. They flooded this space decades ago. They sealed the last local strikers alive in here. Their bones sleep behind this meter-thick partition. I press my obsidian palm against the freezing concrete.

The cold tries to bite. I push it back.

My body temperature spikes. Four hundred degrees. Eight hundred. A thousand.

The cement sizzles. Bubbles of liquefied rock burst on the surface. I strike.

The impact shakes the foundations. The steel rebar turns red, bends, yields in a whimper of tortured metal. A breach opens. Vapor from the underground rushes into our rat hole. It carries the smell of ancient earth and steeped rebellion.

Jolanda flinches. She aims her flashlight at me. Lio wakes up stumbling over his iron bar, eyes wide at the magma pooling at my feet.

This free draft of air carries the steady echo of Stability sirens. The Obsidian Sector knows we are forcing the doors.

"We leave," I sign to Nita in the feverish dust.

Staying here means crusting over in a tomb. I walk toward the gaping opening. Heat streams from my shoulders. Mutation cannot be awaited in the shadows, cowering like a scared beast. It must be ripped out into the light.

How many of us will reach the surface before the assault?