Author's Note: Sorry guys, this chapter is a little long. Hope you enjoy it (lots of things explained in this one)! Don't forget to press the star and comment.

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17 - Cello
We're nearly at the stairs, when the singing starts.

Your smile makes me
Feel completely golden
I guess I wanna hold you tight
'Till we grow grey n' old

It's a fast cheerful song, the kind that shoots right into your stomach and makes you want to dance madly, I don't know why, but I pause and turn my head.

True, you won't be my queen
Or even a bride in white
But we're two souls that can be one
So let's walk one road tonight

I catch sight of the spike-haired man onstage; with his evil glare and crooked smile, strumming on his electric guitar, smoke rising all about him; he embodies the perfect rock n' roll image. I know what this song is about and while I want to dance to it, I also don't want to hear another note. I turn back towards the stairs, grab Syianne by the arm and begin ascending.

Can't you tell? Can't you tell?
Oh baby, can't you tell?
We're on a road to no place good
We're on the road to hell

"Hey!" A hand catches my wrist and I stop on the stairs and turn to look at Minty. "You're leaving already?"

"We're tired," I say, pulling my hand away. She stares at me, the hurt in her eyes very obvious.

"Don't you wanna hang out?"

"Later," I tell her and continue walking up, leaving her behind.

I say my love, to hell
We're on one road, one road, one road
We're on one road to hell

By the time we reach our floor, the song is just an indistinguishable jumble of noise and beats. I feel like there's a dark monster inside my stomach and I let go of Syianne's arm as I fish for the key to our room. I reach the door numbered 215 and unlock it.

"I really thought we had a connection, you know?"

My head jerks up. Minty is standing right by the door with her back against the wall, I don't really know how she got there, maybe there's another set of stairs on the other side of the corridor. I forget to wonder how she knows my room number.

"Listen, I'm sorry, but I don't think we'd get along."

I turn to grab Syianne –

But she's gone.

Minty pushes into the room, wearing a nasty grin as she catches the front of my shirt and pulls me in after her. We're just inside and she reaches past me slamming the door shut. She comes closer and I have no choice but to edge away until my back meets the closed door. This girl has me trapped.

She looks at me intently, her grey eyes still doll-like. "I have a very good sense for these things," she says, coming sickeningly close to me. "I like you, for real."

"Uh – " is all I manage to say before she presses her body to mine and starts kissing me.

And, well, although it's embarrassing to admit, I guess I kiss her back because she's gone to all the trouble of starting it. I might be a bit shy and inexperienced, but it's not like she's ugly or unattractive, she's actually the exact opposite of unattractive.

That is, she's attractive.

Things get rather heated up with her. I'm worried about Syianne, I shouldn't be doing this but my mind keeps going blank, I don't even get the chance to think of what's going on. But then she does something completely unexpected, she's suddenly digging her very sharp nails into the side of my head, in that soft spot right above my ear, and she pulls a huge black slug out of my skull.

I see it in her hand and I felt it, actually felt it as it slithered out from my brain.

"OW! Shit, OW!" I shout, staggering away from her. My hand covers the side of my head, which is oozing and wet now. But there's no hole there, it just burns so bad I can barely move. "What the fuck did you just do to me?!" I gasp.

I stare at Minty who is holding the slimy slug with both her hands. It's about as long and thick as her arm. It wriggles about, struggling with her grasp.

"Someone slugged you, baby," she says earnestly to me, and then I notice that she isn't wearing the black plastic jewel I glued onto her face.

She's got a genuine champagne-coloured Jewel, the real thing and it definitely wasn't there before. "I've got it!" she yells loudly, her whole body tenses and dances as she struggles with the slug. "What do I do now?"

The door bursts open and Syianne rushes in.

Followed by the man from whom we were running.

He's taller than I am and his long dark raincoat hugs his body ominously. He has shortly cropped hair, black as night, chocolate brown skin and sapphire blue eyes that match his sapphire Jewel. He looks straight at me and smirks. "Let's kill it."

*

I stumble back until I fall to the floor. "Syianne! It's him!" I cry. "It's him. He was chasing us! He wants to take Risa!"

She looks at me and wrinkles her forehead, then she turns to the tall man. "What's that black stuff coming out of his ear?" she asks.

"It's the trail the slug leaves; he'll be raving for just a bit longer until it all comes out," he answers.

Betrayal. Syianne betrayed me. I feel a fist tighten over my heart. I can't believe it, I trusted her, she's supposed to be my cosmic twin, but she's in cahoots with them. I know it; she sacrificed me to save herself. You can never trust quiet girls with big eyes; it's a mask after all.

My entire body is shaking uncontrollably, I don't have anywhere to go and there's nothing I can do. I briefly think of jumping out the window, but we're three stories high and there's no way I can get past the bars. I have to distract them somehow and make a run for the door.

"Okay, Mint, on the count of three, you let it go and we both blast it," says the tall man.

"Ready!" the treacherous Minty cries.

"One," he says, "two."

Minty's body tenses.

"Three!"

Yellow and blue sparks fly through the room, but the slug falls to the floor with a soft splat and begins crawling forward.

"Dammit! Missed!" cries Minty.

"Get it, quickly, before it goes back into him!" the tall man calls as he shoots sparks from his fingers burning holes in the carpet.

Minty joins in, and I swear I see them strike it a few times, but the thing just continues slithering towards me and fast. I scramble to my feet; I don't want that black slug touching me.

"Tiger, it isn't working!" Minty cries.

"I noticed." Tiger frowns.

The slug is inches from me and I've got nowhere to go. Minty and Tiger, are desperately shooting it with these strange sparks emanating out of their bodies.

"I'm out!" Tiger cries, Minty stops her spark-shooting as well puzzled by her ineffectiveness.

Risa leaps out of my pocket and very matter-of-factly, eats the slug.

She licks black ooze off her lips and burps loudly raising a cloud of black smoke.

*

I lie on the lower bunk on my side as Syianne sponges black goop off the side of my head with one of the doorstep's hand-towels and a basin of water.

"The question is," says Tiger after he sips his tea. "Who slugged you?"

"It can be any of them," Minty says. "Slugging is black magic, so any of the blacks could have done it."

"Even Leolan?" Syianne asks. "You said you were on his team."

Minty laughs, "Any of them except Leolan. Why would he slug you and make you run from Tiger if he was trying to recruit the both of you? I mean, my bet is that it's that Risa witch.Wasn't she all over you just before the meeting?"

"It can be Leolan," Tiger says. "It can be Risa, it can even be Sagastus or Rimtake, you don't have to touch someone to slug them."

"So I was running away from you because of that thing?" I look at the trail on the charred floor.

"The black stuff that gets released into your bloodstream to be more accurate. It's a control mechanism. It bends your to a certain purpose though takes at least two days to have full effect. We'll never know what the slugger intended you to do," Tiger says. "I was actually coming to you not because Leolan sent me, old Flent did."

"Old Flent? Is he that ancient Undefined?" I ask.

"That's right. Minty and I are on Leolan's team, but after you left the meeting, Flent asked me to go after you and make sure you two weren't harmed. You know, you have to respect someone who is over 300 years old, even if you're on someone else's team."

I nod on the pillow. It feels rather embarrassing to know that my paranoia came from being drugged by one of the blacks.

"When I saw that you two were impossible to track, and then you even split up, I realised what was happening and had to go back and ask for Leolan's help." He puts his cup down. "He was very eager to oblige. It wasn't really hard to track you, what with that incident on the news and this being the cheapest place in the city."

"That reached the news?" I bite my bottom lip.

"An armed man being ripped apart by a strange beast in Heign Valley certainly stands out. They're not allowed to report anything about us Jewels, so it was more like a passing headline, but it was enough for us. Arranging this concert was a piece of cake and then Minty did what she does best, which is flirting and illusions. She has a knack for making herself look like an ordinary human girl."

"It was so cool, what you two did," Minty says with open admiration. "Walking out on the Core – it was priceless, they were furious!" she giggles gleefully.

"Does that means we're in trouble?" Syianne asks in a dry voice, trying to sound like she couldn't care less.

"There's nothing they can do," Tiger says. "That was what made them even angrier, if that's possible." He chuckles. I guess the Core isn't particularly popular.

"But when you're walking out here and are so ignorant and aren't even wearing uniforms," Minty shakes her head, "everyone around you is in trouble."

I sit up, suddenly fired up again. "Well, we wouldn't be so ignorant if someone told us something, anything. We're constantly being kept in the dark, Syianne and I have questions that need to be answered right now."

"Calm down. I'll try to answer what I can," Tiger says. "Minty, can you go downstairs and tell Leolan that things are taken care of – and do change out of that silly outfit."

She gets to her feet and looks down at her clothes. "It's adorable though!" she says and giggles, Tiger shakes his head. "Alright!" Minty's clothes instantly transform into the Zephyr uniform before she twirls out of the room.

He watches her leave before turning back to us. "First things first, in the Zephyr, you can only ever trust yourself, even if you're on a team. I mean, Minty is cool, but she's way too cunning, she's a master at illusions and shape shifting, that's yellows for you. Don't trust anybody, but yellows and blacks are the worst."

I scratch the back of my head. "Somehow I could tell," I mumble, blushing.

"So ask your questions, friends," Tiger says.

"Is it true that after we've been inside the Zephyr we can't touch ordinary people because they'll die?" Syianne bursts out.

"Ah, it's a bit complicated," answers Tiger. "It's not exactly accurate to say that you can never touch them after you've been in, but as long as you're charged, you'll kill, or thoroughly maim any non-Jewel you come in contact with."

A strange noise escapes her throat; I can only imagine she's thinking about her future with the football player.

Tiger notices her expression as well, and his eyes soften. "Don't despair little pup," he says. "See, I'm totally out now, so I can touch other people almost without a worry. I used up all the Zephyr energy I absorbed tracking you two."

"Almost?" I ask.

"Well, even when you're out you have to wait at least two weeks for all traces to be gone. But don't let that worry you."

"You mean," I say, "we should worry about other things?"

"'Course."

"What's an Overflow? What're LUs? What's a Spare?" I'm thirsty to get as much information as I can. "What's the Core so worried about? Why does Leolan want to recruit us to his team?"

Tiger whistles. "Hold your horses; I said I'll answer anything I can." He pauses as he appears to go through my questions in his head. "First, an Overflow is something that happens when you somehow absorb more energy than your body's capacity. The capacity grows with time and practice, but every Jewel should always know their limit and when to stop absorbing. There are different degrees for Overflow and most of them just feel like really rough hangovers and are harmless." He fixes me with a look. "Unless you have a full Overflow, in that case, you'll have to get help. Only a special device called ADI595 can extract the necessary amount of energy out of a Jewel's body."

Syianne and I exchange glances. "What if you don't get help?" I ask

"You die a terrible and painful death," Tiger answers with a shrug. "Power attracts things. Most cases, the things that get attracted to Overflows are anti-energy units - AEUs. Part of the job of serving the Zephyr is coming out into the city and destroying accumulated AEUs that get attracted to the Zephyr. It's routine clean-ups. But not everyone can do that, only those on teams."

"Those winged bug things," Syianne muses, "were AEUs?"

"You mean Thergs? They look like winged cockroaches with pinschers." Tiger wrinkles his nose. "Nasty little mites, they pick people's bones clean."

We both stare at him in dumbfounded silence.

"Anyway, the funny thing is these AEUs are destroyed by the very energy they're attracted to if it touches them in the right sequence. So if you have a complete Overflow, the person helping you simply has to draw out the energy from your body with the ADI595 and destroy every AEU in a ten-mile radius."

We both nod.

Tiger scratches his head, "What else did you ask about?"

"LUs?" I offer.

"LU stands for Light Units, that's what we use to measure energy so we can all know how to measure our energy capacity. My energy capacity is 5.8 LU, Last time I saw Leolan's was 11.23, a middle-aged Black like Sagastus would be over 25 LU."

"Very logical," I say.

"Next question?"

"What does it mean that one of us is a Spare?" Syianne asks.

"Good question," Tiger says. "Well, keep in mind, I don't know much about this subject, just some stuff I heard here and there."

"Go on," Syianne urges him.

"Okay, so they say that one day, the Zephyr is going to stop pooling here, at Rockdem, and that the end of the world will come." He waves the notion away with his hand. "It's one of the old stories. Supposedly we'll know that this is happening when the Zephyr will start creating Spares to save itself. I don't know if this is just a story they invented to keep us in line, or maybe we really are doing something wrong and your arrival means that the end of the world is coming."

"Seeing how anxious they are about us, we might very well be the bearers of bad news," I say, though I think an idea like 'the end of the world' is a bit far-fetched. I'm not willing to believe every old story even if Risa Medrick does. Maybe, if the Zephyr is some ultra-complicated and powerful computer system, creating Spares is some momentary error, or maybe a self-fixing method.

"Is that really what they're worried about?" Syianne asks. She can't believe such a far-fetched idea either.

Tiger nods. "I guess, and also, in case you haven't noticed, the Zephyr is a highly bureaucratic place, the most distressing things for bureaucracy is an exception to any rule. Oh, and there's also the fact that for the past five years or so Black energy has been becoming harder and harder to come by. It was always the rarest inside the Zephyr, it would take at least seven hours inside to absorb a satisfactory amount, but these days they have to go farther and deeper."

"You mean, the Black Jewels are at risk of becoming powerless?" I ask.

Tiger moves his head from side to side looking skeptical. "Some people think so, even inside the Core, some of the coloured Jewels have become cocky. But to me it seems bogus. Plus, they're working on solving that problem. It's all a matter of releasing sources of trapped Black energy within the Zephyr."

I turn onto my back and stare at the bunk above me. If I were a Black Jewel and absorbing energy was such hard work, I'd think twice before using the energy I absorbed. "So someone used their hard-earned energy to slug me," I muse, "which means they felt they had good reason. What did making me paranoid achieve?"

Tiger shakes his head. "We'll never know now because we stopped it before it achieved anything. If we would have let it run its course, we might have lost you. It's hard to separate a slug from a person once it becomes fully intergraded in their system."

We ponder this in silence. Even though the information flow is somewhat relieving, I hardly feel satisfied; I really don't think I get what's going on. I move on to the next subject, hoping it will clear some things up. "So, why would Leolan want to recruit us?"

This time Tiger shakes his head and frowns. "Sorry pals, this one I can't answer, there's such a thing called team loyalty and you can't disclose your team-leader's plans."

My eyes narrow with skepticism.

"Relax," he says, his teeth flashing blindingly white in his dark face. "It can't be anything bad for you. Being recruited to a team is the biggest privilege you can find in the Zephyr, it's the best kind of life with the best kind of job. If you disregard Jewel colour, this is your ticket into the highest rank there is. You will be elite Undefined. While Leo's got his own reasons, you'll never get offered a place on a team unless you're truly special and can really help with the team's effort."

I look at Syianne, but she's looking at Tiger with an unreadable expression.

"But I can tell you this," he adds with an afterthought, "Leolan wants you on his team under the condition that it's both of you. He says that either one of you alone has no value."

"Cello can absorb a lot of power and I can draw it out without using a device," Syianne observes. "Together we're almost as strong as a Coloured Jewel."

I don't say anything about this. Sure, my heart speeds with excitement. But it's also sinking in confusion. I feel like I'm missing something – the punch line of the joke perhaps.

"And what's the team's effort?" I ask. "What do the teams do?"

"It's hard to explain the technicalities," Tiger says. "Tomorrow both of you will be appointed your very own Guide who'll teach you the basic ins and outs of the Zephyr. There's the routine AEU clean-ups which are our responsibility; we're like super heroes protecting Rockdem from evil influences, if you'd like to think of it that way. Then there's the inside Zephyr work we have, investigating certain unstable regions, uncovering the qualities of the deeper layers. I can try to explain it now, but I might end up getting you more muddled than you already are. Team work is never boring."

"I have a question." Syianne raises her hand as if she's in class.

"Shoot." Tiger smiles at her, and it's hard not to like him. Even though it may all be a lie, he seems to genuinely care.

"Why do most of the people in the Zephyr seem so young?"

I look at Syianne as she asks this question and my mind is going through all the faces I saw out there today. She has a point. While I did see a few middle-aged and even elderly people among the Jewels, the great majority of them looked to be in their 30's, 20's or teens. The ages should have been more evenly spread out.

"Ah." Tiger lowers his gaze and moves uncomfortably in his chair. "See?" he looks up at us, "Now that's something you should be worried about."

We're both so silent we can hear Tiger's breathing despite the loud music coming from downstairs. "Every now and then the Zephyr takes someone and never gives them back. In the past, it used to be very rare, it'd happen only one or two every few years and only to those who went alone into the deep unexplored areas. But lately the Zephyr's been really greedy, it just takes and takes and doesn't seem to be satisfied. At first there were patterns, first all those over forty, then anyone who was overweight or just freckled, but now the Zephyr's expanding horizons. Last year, it took a pretty fourteen-year-old Purple Jewel on her very first Plunge."

"What happens to them?" Syianne asks in a breathless voice. "Does anyone know?"

"Every Jewel, before their very first Plunge is tagged with a micro-chip that sends a signal to our computer system. So the signal goes on for a few days, until I guess they starve to death. We lost Henry from our team not long ago, good guy, green Jewel, strong-minded type of person — he went in alone that time. I watched his signal on the monitors every day after that, until one day he was gone."

The inside of the Zephyr is unfathomable, but being stranded in there, dying of hunger or having the life sucked out of you — I can't even imagine.

Syianne visibly shudders."Is there any way to prevent this?" she asks.

"Well," Tiger brightens up, "we're experimenting these days with Plunging in pairs, it's less efficient but it seems to be working because the Zephyr won't take two at a time. And joining a team is always best. The Zephyr doesn't take the blacks, so if they're near you, your chances of survival are higher."

Neither of us are comforted – how could we be? I suddenly envy the receptionist – at least she isn't going to die young.

But even though it's life-threatening, I can't stop trying to imagine what it's like. What is this deep, dark place that givens Jewels the power to do extraordinary things? The pool of magic that flows and flows through the world, it calls to me. I can feel a strange yearning to go there, deep in my blood. No matter how many warning lights will be flashing in my mind, no matter how many dangers are involved, I know I'll go in there. No matter what anyone tells me about the Zephyr, today, or tomorrow, or in ten weeks, I need to go in. That's how strong and suicidal curiosity is. As I listen to Tiger's words, I know I won't be able to live my life if I don't solve the mystery that is the darkness at the edge of sight.

I came to the Zephyr not as magic's slave, but so I can leap into oblivion.