Red Sky: Chapter 26
“I’m escaping,” Max said.
He had been leading me down a different tunnel every morning. Even if we found a rich deposit of ore that could be mined easily for days, Max would dismiss it and go down a completely new tunnel searching for a sharp bend to the right. Always a sharp bend to the right. It took me a couple days before I figured out what he was doing and confronted him.
“Do you remember the tunnel I told you about, the one I marked with a freeze light?”
“Yes.”
“That’s our way out. The guards won’t see us once we get to the top. They’d think we’re still down here. We would have all day to get away.”
“Why would the elevators work?”
“They have to work. They might want to work the mine again."
I narrowed my eyes.
“We would need a key or something to turn them on.”
Max smiled his goofy smile. “I have that key.”
“It’s a master key. Dom, my previous partner, stole it from Big Shoes. He was a pickpocket. He did it for fun, to see if he could. I buried it with the freeze light. That key will activate the elevators and open the doors to get back into the prison so we can get to the hover bay. That’s how we’ll escape.”
My narrowed eyes stayed narrow as I looked at Max. First, there was a secret tunnel and now there was a secret key.
“Even if everything went perfectly, they would just shoot us out of the sky when we tried to fly away. Hovers aren’t meant for long flights. It wouldn’t be hard to catch us.”
Max didn't respond. He had taken off halfway through my last sentence, running away from me, looking for the sharp bend to the right that would lead off the red moon. I followed behind.
“And what if there's been a cave-in and we can't get to those elevators. We’d be stuck in this other mine and have to find our way back. We could end up lost and wandering around for days or weeks.”
Max was still leading me down the tunnel searching for the bend. I was annoyed he was ignoring my sensible objections. The old Max never listened to me either, but the old Max never listened because he was too busy telling his stories. Now he was ignoring me not because he was caught up in some distant past, but because he was in a future that would never happen.
Finally, unable to get him to slow down, I shouted, “It’s only five years.”
Max stopped and looked back at me with a heartbreaking look of disappointment. I was disappointed in myself, too. I said the words the same way Goodwell always said them, the same way Hades said them.
“What I mean is it’s probably not worth the risk. There’s a reason you didn’t try to escape with your old partner. Ray was right, the best thing is to keep our heads down and survive. Look, he’s gone now and back on Earth. He made it. We can make it, too.” The words were hollow, I recognized that even as I said them. After the box, the idea of surviving the five years didn’t mean the same thing.
Max continued to look at me with that heartbroken look. “Is it only five years?” He asked.
“Yes,” I lied, trying to convince us both.
Max took out his hammer and chisel and started chipping away at the wall. The search for the sharp bend to the right was over for the day. I joined in with the pickaxe and work took us away from talk of escape. There was no way we could ever be successful in getting off the moon. That I truly believed. The best we could hope for was some kind of glorious suicide. I wasn’t ready for that suicide.
The banging of hammer on chisel filled my ears for the next several hours. I scratched the wall with my axe making little progress. I didn’t look over to Max as we worked. Maybe I felt guilty, I don’t know. I didn’t have anything to feel guilty about, but I still felt it anyway. Finally, I looked over to him. The banging had increased in frequency and volume, Max was working furiously, not in his usual methodical way.
Blood streamed from his left hand. “Are you okay?” I asked startled by the sight of the blood. Max didn’t look at me, he kept working, the blood dripping in a steady flow. He had bashed his thumb with the hammer and hadn’t even noticed.
“Are you okay?” I repeated. Max still didn't respond, only picking up his pace, chiseling a deeper groove in the same spot.
I stopped him by physically taking the hammer out of his hand. I pointed at his thumb. “That doesn’t look good. Let’s trade.” I gave him my axe and he gave me the chisel. We went back to work in our spots along the wall.
“We could hide in the clouds.”
“What?” I hadn’t expected him to say anything.
“We could hide in the red clouds until the rebellion came to save us.”
“The rebellion?”
“I still hear them, only for a few seconds, but I can hear them.”
“What do they say?”
Max shook his head. “There’s too much static. But I can hear them.”
He looked at me with hopeful eyes. I nodded, not knowing what to say. The nod made Max happy somehow. Maybe he took it as a sign of approval, I don’t know.
“We should get to work if we’re going to have anything to show for today,” he said as he started on the wall with the axe. I started in with the chisel. Visions of the two of us hiding in the red clouds filled my head. Max was already in those clouds, but the rebellion wasn’t going to rescue him. I was the only one who could bring him back to the ground.