It was a whole new experience for Alex Mars as he trudged through the sand just like he had a few weeks ago after being expatriated freshly-however, with the others. And somehow, those 'others' were also Prodigies, and had the same goals as him.
Though he had more weight and luggage to carry and the memories kept resurfacing from time to time, he felt much different than the last time-
-and he meant it positively.

The person allotted to each batch of luggage changed often-Alex Mars' huge water tank, especially, got circulated into the hands of the others, for it was one of the heaviest things they were carrying.
Just as they had all experienced before, the desert tested their limits as if they had to be punished for challenging its power and its greatest weapon-the sun and the moon, which sky-rocketed and dwindled the temperature very easily and made them suffer. In the day, the crown of their heads grew hot, their feet got hot, and their shoes' rubber soles melted like a candle being morphed and melting down from the fire on top of it. Every movement was difficult, every breath easily got painful in merely a few hours after the sun rose to brag its strength as the strongest weapon the desert possessed-each day.
However, they had a huge water tank and covers to shield themselves from the sun. So they drank the water and hid beneath the fabric until the moon rose.
The moon wasn't any better. It brought the night along with it, and, the cold along with it. A wind danced with the grains of sand, just like how Alex Mars remembered it had done in the past, and also, wrapped itself around each of their ankles, and just like with the sun, they hid beneath the covers together, seeking refuge from the thin thing.
However, though both of them had their own pros and cons, Alex Mars loved the night. It was because of the stars, of course. He was never sure if he liked them because of how they had saved him from the fringes of death before, or if they were still being a lucky charm for him.
No matter the reason, he always stayed up, wide-eyed to see the stars before he let himself sleep. Sometimes, Miles stayed up with him, only because he was curious why his friend was so obsessed with the chillingly cold night, and often fell asleep even before all the stars were present in the sky. And other times, Lyra stayed up with him, and her ability to bear her drowsiness was much better than Miles' efforts.
One day, she asked him why he adored the stars so much, and he answered honestly, telling the two occasions when they had saved his life, saved himself from quitting and killing himself. And she listened as if she was listening to an old fairy tale being told by a grandparent. She sometimes leaned onto him, or sometimes just lay on the covers, watching him and the stars as a background scenery. However, they always went to sleep with Miles between them, and after both of their heads met the ground to sleep, the didn't talk a single word between.
And as if nothing had happened, they all got up the next morning usually at about 5 in the morning, and set off, closer to their birthplace each hour, each minute, each second. The covers, along with those hours and minutes and seconds used to shield them all from the sun and moon, wore down, while the water tank got lighter and lighter and lighter along with one of the Polarick boxes.
But they were never worried, for they had allotted how much they would drink and eat each day, and though every hour was uncomfy and hard to endure beneath the sun and the moon, Alex Mars could swear that he was actually enjoying the trip.
But that didn't mean that he wanted to stay in the desert with his friends forever. His heart also willed to find his family and push them out of the Military's and the soon-to-be-coming Rebels' way. He still had high hopes of killing the enemies of his life and finding the Martyr. So, he kept encouraging his group to move forward and forward, and even though Melanie and Miles both didn't have any alive family members, they followed his orders and they kept moving on and on...
-until they finally stumbled upon the sewers at last, after 4 days of relentless walking.

Since they had known that the sewer's entrance would exist 15 kilometers away from the border of the country, but never knew exactly where it was located, nor how it looked like, how the discovery of the sewers came about was quite unprecedented.
When all of their four brains agreed that there were only about 15 kilometers left with the country, they stopped proceeding on and started to look around the desert for anything that was unusual about the desert. However, that method never worked, for even if there had been the entrance to the sewers right beneath their feet, meters-deep sand would be covering the thing up.
"This is a blind search," Miles complained, looking up at Alex, and they both acknowledged that each of their faces had darkened a bit, despite the effect of the covers. "I'm going to rest for a while," With that, the bigger boy grabbed the water tank-which was now only one-fourths full and drank a huge gulp before hiding himself beneath a pile of covers and snoring away straight.
Though he also knew that it was a total blind search and also wanted to topple back onto his butt and have some rest, Alex Mars knew that it would be very irresponsible as a leader. So, in the end, he decided to try out a new way.
And what his brain came up with at last with a bit of possibility was this: dig, dig, and dig. Dig here, dig there, then dig some more over here. Dig for your life.
It was insane, but compared to just looking at the sand to see anything strange was a bit more insane, so he went straight to work.
Somehow, Miles had brought a single shovel that people might use to clear away snow in the early 2000s(now, the newest generation didn't know what the hell snow was and were more familiar with sand), and Alex extracted it from one of those huge bags, just pinpointed a spot, and started to-
-dig.
He didn't dig ferociously, for it would extract him of strength soon, but dug calmly and according to a slow rhythm. Though the sun baked him right to the skin, and especially his head and back, he still liked the way he could force something down into the earth, and also liked the sound of it, and Unmuted his Muters to hear it better-the scrunching, soft schmrf sound as the sand gave in to his shovel and feet. Soon, without getting tired too much, he had shoveled away a feet into the ground, and by then, all the others-including Miles-had found his behaviors peculiar and crowded around their leader, who seemed to have finally gone insane under the baking sun.
However, with their Prod brains, they also realized that this might work, so grabbed anything they had, jumped a feet down into the tiny, slippery hole their leader-who-wasn't-insane-afterall had created and started digging, too.
So they dug for hours like that, back ached, sweat raining down each of them like hell and during all those other days walking in the desert, this time, somehow, was the time when he felt the most eager need to have a steamy, hour-long shower. But he kept digging, no matter what.
"This is a-" Miles panted like an old dog which had just been forced to run 10 miles. "-a blind dig," he finished, standing up straight, with his hands sprinkled all over with sand(he had used his hands to dig-just like how a dog would). He swore a string of swears including 'that fucking sewer' as he hopped out of the hole, got back on the covers and started snoring all over once more.
It was only a matter before Melanie slowed down, breathe also quite ragged for a Prodigy. Soon, she said at last, "Alex,"(saying his name in a very apologetic and sympathetic look that had the message 'you're crazy, and I'm sorry for it' scrawled beneath her facial expression). "Maybe, this' wrong," "It's a 'maybe', Melanie. And a maybe means a one out of two possibilities of failure. And the other one out of two possibilities of success is still there," Alex refuted as best as he could, but Melanie gave him a straight, non-pretending glare(woah, for the first time in his life) before going over to Miles.
Depressed, Alexa Mars looked down back at the hole they had dug, and with great surprise, still found Lyra digging into it slowly but silently.
"Those two don't have back names-as you said before, that means that they have little hope in their hearts," She finally said when she felt his eyes on her and felt the need to feel their void of sound with her words.
"Yeah," He replied before digging after her.
So they dug another 30 minutes, sweat now flowing as if a faucet had been turned on. Drops of sweat dripped off the bridges of their noses or chins and landed on the sand-and to be exact, those drops didn't land, but just got soaked into the grains of sand as soon as they 'hit' the sand.
Alright, maybe this was worthless. Maybe, he had just taken the wrong space to dig. Or maybe, they all had underestimated the distance left between them and the country. maybe-
"Jesus on a pogo stick!" Lyra Cannes was gasping before he could think up of the next words, and he looked up with astonishment as she looked down at the sand beneath her feet, eyes huge. She eagerly hit the sand(if that's possible) with her shovel(which was shorter and smaller than his) and, through his Unmuted ears, he also clearly heard it this time-a slight thud.
It was as if they had found an oasis, and they both just hoped that it wasn't a mirage as they dug deeper, faster than ever before, sand getting kicked and jostled out of the hole they had created so fast as if they were being dug up by eager dogs looking after a giant bone. And as they worked, something started to be unearthed extremely slowly, but still, it was better than nothing.
Their final work was a metal manhole, and you must have all laughed as they leaned back to marvel at their discovery, staring at it as if they had just unearthed some huge artifact.
Though a manhole are the most common things in the world today(the 2020s), they were simply so taken aback that they now sat down and examined the patterns on the thing that decades ago, must have been stepped on by thousands of people each day as they went to work, school, clubs, dates, et cetera. The thing had simple criss-cross stripes on it and in the center were the letters: NEW YORK SEWER. They finally got their senses when they read the word 'sewer', and shaking their heads out of their amazement, they dug deeper into the sand around the manhole, unearthing a few meters of asphalt road.
Woah, Alex thought. He just felt as if he had been teleported and been in some time machine that had somehow sent him to the early 2000s or something. He kind of, quite stupidly, walking on the short stretch of the road, and even over the NEW YORK SEWER manhole cover as if he was going to high school on the road.
"Al, help me lift this thing up," Lyra had kneeled back down onto the road near the thing, and he sat down next to her, and they dug their nails, which had sand grains and sweat beneath them, into the tiny gap between the steel plate and the asphalt. After a few seconds of feeling as if their nails would be wrenched away from their fingers, the thing came off, revealing a narrow hole it had been covering beneath all the sand for decades, and sending up a shoot of some foul smell that we all know that sewers emit.
"Hell," Alex said, tilting his head into the hole, but not enough that he would tumble down the rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland. There was a single steel ladder bolted onto the wall of the narrow, vertical tunnel.
"Get the others," He finally told Lyra, who had been looking down the hole over his shoulder, and she got out of the sand hole they had dug with so much effort. We only go through this, and we'll be in the city...Alex Mars couldn't still believe how easy things had turned out to be, as he swung a single leg inside the thing, then the other leg, before grabbing the first bar of the ladder and pushing his head under the surface, not minding the smell.
It was as if he really was Alice himself, though he wasn't falling down a rabbit hole. Just one second, his eyes had been staring at the boiling, yellowish sand around the hole, and the next second, he was staring at the dirty rim of the dark hole and the ladder-and there wasn't even sand in here. It was just as if a thick cover of sand had landed on the innocent manhole cover.
He guessed that God had finally decided to pity them after their horrible travel through those tens of kilometers through the hot and cold sand through day and night, through sweat and goosebumps.
By the time the others rushed to the hole and peeked inside, he had already climbed some 10 feet below the surface, and was enjoying some cool air down there after so many days of only feeling the heat. Though Miles thought aloud that his shoulders won't fir too well in there and Melanie complained that they hadn't brought a lot of flashlights and Lyra was still quite unaccustomed to the smell of the sewer, they followed soon after the dark, hard-to-see, and bobbing head of their leader.

Alex Mars was reaching his foot out for the next bar when he instead found a cold, concrete surface beneath his feet and dropped down, arms aching from the tension and his previous exercise of digging the desert sand like hell. The smell hadn't gotten any better, if not worse, and though his throat was as bare as sand, he feared that the water would turn a bit smelly once he opened their galleon of water-and also, Miles-who had the water-had climbed down after the rest as the last, so he would have to wait.
He heard the others finally drop down after him a few minutes later and ignored the sounds they made as they tried to breathe in as slowly and little as possible and walked deeper into the void until Miles turned on his flashlight.
He found himself walking on damp, but even concrete, a narrow trough for the dirty water to flow freely dug just a few feet beside him, snaking along with the tunnel they all found themselves in-but the thing was, no water ran there. Only dirty, green stuff, as if taken from the bottom of the Loch Ness, was visible.
As they trekked on the damp concrete, they were all a bit curious on where the tunnel would lead them to, and also where all the water had gone, but decided to keep silent for now.
And just like they had dug with no other thought in their heads, they, this time, walked and walked and walked through the tunnel, hoping it would be leading them to their home a.k.a. a nightmare a.k.a. a place to show the peeps ruling there what they got.