"Go," Silas shouted, and he didn't give me a chance to answer.
He went left, with his long coat billowing out behind him like a crow's wings. I followed. I made a bang with each big step from my heavy boots against the metal floor. My wrist was cuffed with iron and felt like it was dragging my shoulder down. Even though the cuff weighed a ton, I didn't want to take it off. Without the cuff's weight, I thought I might float away and disappear.
"Where do we go?" I screamed. My chest was tight, and filled with gasping for air. "The way we came is blocked!"
Silas kept yelling, "That way is DOA!," but he couldn't stop checking out the tops of buildings. "We're in the Unwritten, and it's a mess—it's a good place for the Council's guards to lose us since the Unwritten isn't complete...so, don't touch anything you can only see through!"
As we moved to turn around the corner every piece of the market suddenly no longer made sense.
Instead of our metal walled market now we were in a half constructed place sort of drawn. Rather than the buildings reaching tall into the sky they had thin blue drawn lines and when one of the street lights went on and off several times I could see directly down into a solid concrete pathway.
"The Failure in Architecture," Silas muttered under his breath. As he crossed the bridge from one side to the other without going through the middle of it, he noted, "This is what the Council uses for dumping trash and garbage." He continued, "Any unfinished books, broken plans, or dreams they've created that are too large to create, and we have created a graveyard of failed attempts for those items. You find it here in this graveyard."
In the background, the sound of distant, loud, and sharp screams pierced the silent air.
When I looked back, my blood turned to ice. Looking back, I realized there was more then one Snatcher. Several were crossing over the tops of the buildings in the marketplace below us; there were no less than twelve of them. They were all moving quickly and awkwardly as they flew through the air. They could not have crossed the bridge. Instead, they were jumping from the rooftops, across the bridge to the other side of the road. As their bodies passed, they left behind blue light trails in the gray sky.
"Oh no!" I screamed.
"Jump now!" shouted Silas. He pointed to the middle of the bridge where nothing was except the sky above and the pit below.
"There's nothing there," I told him.
"Don't CARE about what's there!" he yelled back. "Care about what WILL BE there! You're a Shaper… SO SHAPE!"
He jumped out into the middle of empty air. For about one second he was in the air above a huge pit of nothing that went straight down. Then his feet hit the void below, and the blue outline of a safety floor appeared beneath him but gave out groaning sounds because of Silas' weight.
I didn't have Silas' skills, however, and the Snatchers were closing in on me. I could see their sharp-pointed teeth in their mouths, and I could smell the electrical charge in the air.
I jumped off into the void.
The wind was like a brick hitting me in my stomach when I first went off the edge. There was that one moment of free-fall again and I thought for sure that I would have no weight and I was a mistake that was ready to be erased. My iron cuff began to get hot against my wrist. I could feel the London bridge in my brain make me feel like I had gotten heavy.
I am real. I'm here.
My boots cached a solid thud against the "invisible" floor. The entire bridge shook, and the blue lines turned red as they struggled to hold me back. I scrambled across and fell onto the solid side just as the first Snatcher reached the gap.
The monster stopped. He stared at the empty space I crossed. He made a noise that was nothing more than the screeching sound of a broken violin string.
"I-it-It's not able to cross," I gasped. "Why can't it?"
"Because it doesn't have a soul to make the bridge real," Silas said. He grasped my arm and dragged me a quarter turn toward an alley. Weaving their weight through were other jibber-jabbering filing cabinets. The filing cabinets farted out jets of steam from their drawers, whistles singing, and thousands upon thousands of plaintive whispers cried in rich and sumptuous tones.
"Don't pay any attention," Silas cautioned. "Those are Discarded Drafts; once you hear your own one, it will pull you into the drawer and you'll be stuck in there for eternity."
No matter how hard I tried to ignore them, one voice sent chills down my spine. It was a high-pitched, sweet voice, and I could have sworn it was my baby sister, Sarah.
"Ethan?" it called out to me. "Why did you leave me here? It's so dark here."
I could hardly move. My foot was stuck to the ground. My iron cuffs rattled so badly that they numbed my arm.
"Ethan, move!" Silas yelled, but I was already behind him.
The rusty-looking drawer next to me creaked just enough to open an inch, and then I saw a pale, blurry hand reaching out to me.
"Sarah?" I whispered.
As I was about to reach for the hand, I saw the Snatchers moving up to hide behind the filing cabinets like oversized spiders, clinking their teeth, waiting for me to give up. The blurry hand grabbed my sleeve; it was so cold, it felt like it absorbed all of the warmth from my body.
"Ethan, return to the bridge," the voice whispered to me from the dark drawer. "The water was not cold enough to drown you, yet was it?"
The dark memory of a river in London invaded my mind again. I was ready to jump into that river again. The alley was fading, and the Snatchers were getting closer.
I looked down at the iron cuff. It was a pale color, which did not reflect my true weight. I was losing my "weight." I was starting to believe the voices and wanted to be in a dumpster.
"No," I replied. I grabbed my other hand around the cuff. It burned my hands, but I did not care. "I do not want this to be the end of my story."
I punched the opened drawer with all my strength.
Bang!
The bang sounded like thunder in a library. The filing cabinet exploded into thousands of pieces of paper. The pieces of paper took to the air like a blizzard. The hand was gone. The voice was gone.
I spun to face the Snatchers; I had stopped running.
Want a story? I snarled, my iron cuff lighting up a fury filled purple. I'll give you that!