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“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!”

                                Jane Taylor, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

                “23 seconds.”

                I stop crawling and look back at Patrick. “What?” I ask as we stay sandwiched in the space between the levels of the underground world. “23 seconds what?”

                “The period from one lightening to the next was 19 seconds.” He says. He glances past me at Slate, then back to me. “Now it’s 23 seconds.”

                I glance back at Slate. She just rolls her eyes and starts crawling again. I look at him. “Well, I found it interesting.” I say before I start crawling.

                I hear Patrick mumble something that definitely contains profanity before he starts crawling as well.

                But as we get closer, the light rises up again, then settles. But it doesn’t come back within an instant. I stop and look over at Slate. She gives me a look and then we keep crawling. There’s some light, but it’s very, very faint. Still, after being in all that darkness, faint is a hell of a lot better.

                As we go along, we can finally see the edge of the ceiling/flooring/whatever/just want to get out from underneath it. And it’s not even. The edge is ripped and torn. Not only that, but as we approach, the plates on the floor start to rattle as we crawl over them. And then something occurs that I never thought I’d feel.

                Scent

                The wind kicks up, a breeze skating through the narrow space of our world and it carries with it the dusty smell of the desert. I can smell the salty odor of cacti and the dusty hills beyond. I’ve only been out west a few times for riding shows, but I know that smell of the deserts out west. Anyone who’s been out there more than five minutes knows that smell.

                “That’s fresh air.” Slate says, her eyes wide in the dim light.

                And we all start to crawl faster.

                We scurry like roaches up to the edge of the flooring.

                The first thing I can see is down into the landing where the ladder meets the ground. The normally flat plate is covered in a layer of water. The clear, murky liquid can’t be too deep because I can still see the deck lights beneath the surface. But I crawl right up to the edge and look up.

                And through the torn edges of the metal superstructure rising up above us, I can see the night sky.

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