City of Ruins

FIVE



The group stirs around me. Apparently they think I’ve just contradicted myself. I say we’re going to be safe, and then I suggest something reckless.

But I’m not going to justify anything. I need to see that site to know what we’re facing. I won’t get close. I doubt the lead guide will let me very close anyway. He seems a lot more cautious than I am.

I’m paying so much attention to the negative reaction from my team, I almost miss what the lead guide is saying.

“They didn’t die in one place.”

We all turn toward him.

He looks pleadingly at Bridge. “We do not always know where there is danger.”

Bridge raises his eyebrows as he looks at me. He’s asking if I want to change my mind.

“If we’re looking at the same stuff we’ve seen before,” I say, unwilling to use the words “stealth tech,” “then we need to know where it begins and ends. We have to map it.”

Mapping is a big part of diving. The more we know, the more detail it’s in, the better off we are. I realize as I say that we need to map that I’m moving myself back to a more comfortable, familiar position.

Apparently, I’m more on edge than I realize.

“Surely you have maps of the places you know are dangerous,” Bridge says to the guide.

“Of course,” he says. “We all carry them. We do not want to accidentally go down the wrong corridor.”

“Good,” I say. “Then we’ll be safe.”

“Don’t get close,” Bridge says, but it’s more for the guide than for me.

Still, I nod.

Roderick lets out the breath he’s been holding. He comes closer to our cart. “Maybe I should go with you,” he says.

I understand the implication. I’m the only one of this group who has the marker and can work in stealth tech. I’m also the only pilot on the mini-mission. If I’m somehow disabled, then the entire group has to rely on the Vaycehnese pilot, who clearly doesn’t have the skills Roderick and I do.

“I’d rather have you close to the exit,” I say.

He nods. He understands. He has to be here and be ready should we need to get someone out quickly. He knows I’ll contact him if I can.

We all wear small communicators around our ears. A single tap, and we can speak to each other. I’ve already tested to see if mine works down here. It does, although I’m not sure I can contact the others back at the hotel.

“You cannot talk her out of this?” the lead guide says to Bridge.

Bridge laughs. “Me? She’s the one in charge.”

“And that,” the guide mumbles loud enough for all of us to hear, “is why no one should ever listen to a woman.”

We all ignore his protest. Instead, I tap the top of the pilot’s seat ahead of me.

“Let’s go,” I say.

As I do, Mikk says to me, “Should we suit up?”

The guide hears. He turns toward us. “In your space suits?”

Mikk isn’t looking at him. Mikk is watching me.

“We have air here. We have cool air here. Drink your water and you will be fine,” the guide says.

But Mikk is waiting for my answer. They all are.

“We’re not going inside the area where they died,” I say. “We’re just going to figure out where that area is.”

“Those areas,” the guide says again. “There is more than one.”

“Still,” I say to Mikk. “We’ll just look. We won’t go deep.”

He sighs, but nods, then settles back in his seat. The pilot still hasn’t moved.

“I guess we should go, then,” Mikk says.

The guide hasn’t said anything. He’s still looking at me. “We cannot see all the death sites.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“They overlap,” he says.

I frown. I think I know what he means, but I’m not sure. The measurements of the station that houses the Room of Lost Souls have changed in the intervening years, as if the station is growing. Squishy, my stealth-tech expert, theorizes that the station is slipping out of one dimension into another.

If we are looking at stealth tech and not some localized phenomenon, then it would be logical to have the areas where the dead were found encroach on other areas.

“Show us what you can,” I say.

“From a safe distance,” Bridge adds.

That surge of resentment is back. But he hasn’t said that because the guide will listen to him instead of me. He’s said that because he wants me to be as careful as possible.

“I do not go close to those places,” the guide says. “I have warned my tours against them.”

And he’s trying to warn me.

“Let’s go,” I say, and this time the guide gives the order. The cart moves forward, deep into the chamber, the strange blue lights reflecting off the cart’s surface like sunlight on the edge of a shuttlecraft.

We pass four corridors before turning down one. Mikk is using his wrist guide to record all of this. I’m doing the same. Carmak is watching everything as if she’s never done anything like it before.

I guess, if you don’t count the tourist dives I’ve taken her on, she never has.

“Do you have a spiel for this part of the tunnels?” I ask the lead guide.

He swallows hard, and then nods. After a moment, he leans forward. “We do not know how to date these,” he says. “The blackness looks the same throughout, but the lighting is different.”

He sweeps his hand upward. For the first time, I notice that the lights have changed from that cool blue to a frosty white. The air is even cooler here, to my relief.

I’m almost beginning to feel at home.

“Our own history says that the first settlers found these caves. They used them as a base while building the first city of Vaycehn.”

“Which means that someone was here before them,” Carmak says.

The guide looks at her. “We believe these tunnels have grown,” he says. “We believe they are natural.”

He says that with the conviction of a devout man who has just heard something potentially damaging about his own religion.

“Even the lights?” Mikk asks.

The guide shrugs. “We think some early settlers may have put them in.”

“Like you put in the blue lights in the chamber,” I say in my most agreeable tone.

The guide looks down. I feel a surge of excitement. They didn’t put in the lights. The lights formed when the black smoothness formed.

“What kind of records are there of that first settlement?” Carmak asks. “Did you find actual evidence of their existence?”

She can barely contain the eagerness in her voice. The guide hears it and smiles for the first time.

“We found a lot of evidence,” he says. “You can find it all re-created in the City Museum of Vaycehn. The section on the first settlement takes up an entire floor.”

“What did you find?” I ask. “Furniture? Clothing? Equipment?”

“Yes to all,” he says. “We found so much that the museum staff is still cataloguing.”

“I’m sure there are items that can’t be catalogued,” Mikk says. He’s gone with me on many dives since the Room of Lost Souls. On the Dignity Vessels we’ve found, we’ve recovered all kinds of things, from spoons to devices that make music with the touch of a button.

He’s always been fascinated with those things, and he seems fascinated now.

“Yes,” the guide says, only now he’s leaned back, reluctant again. Does he think we’re going to loot their museum? Or does he simply not want to talk about things he does not know for certain? “There are hundreds of items we can’t identify. The City Museum has hired experts to evaluate these things.”

Experts. He says that as if we’re amateurs. I suppose, on some level, we are. We don’t care about Vaycehn or even Wyr history. We care only about the possibility of stealth tech in this place.

The guide suddenly sweeps his arm toward yet another corridor. “Down there,” he says. “The first two archeologists died down there.”

We are hovering in the corridor we’ve come down, several meters from the entrance to the other corridor.

“How close can we get?” I ask.

“This is close enough,” the guide says.

The pilot’s hands are gripped tightly on the controls. His knuckles have turned white.

“How far away did they die?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” the guide says, frowning at me.

“A meter? A kilometer? How deep were they in that other corridor?”

“Seven meters,” the medic says.

The guide glares at him.

“My father was on the recovery team.”

“They got the archeologists out?” I ask. We’ve had to abandon a corpse to stealth tech before we knew that I could brave it and survive.

“No,” the medic says. “But it was clear they were dead.”

“They were mummified, right?” I ask.

The medic nods. “He says he’s never seen anything like it.”

“Have you?” Mikk asks.

The medic closes his eyes. “Four times,” he says softly.

I put my hands on the side of the cart and ease out. The floor is slippery here too. I have to hold onto the hovering cart to get my balance.

I hate that part of gravity. I want to float to my destination, not walk toward it on unsafe surfaces.

The guide grabs my wrist. “I can’t let you do this.”

“I’m only going to the entrance,” I say.

His grip remains tight. “No,” he says. There’s real fear in his voice. “I told you, the areas change. If we’re wrong about where it begins, it will kill you.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Mikk says. “It can’t kill her.”

The guide stares at him for a moment, then looks back at me. “It kills everyone.”

“I’ll be careful,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I cannot be responsible for your death. If something happens, I will blame your recklessness. I will say you were warned and you ran away from us and we couldn’t catch you.”

“Cover your ass as best you can,” I say. “I have nothing against that. And if I’m dead, my reputation won’t matter at all.”

Mikk grins. The medic has gone pale. The guide looks ill, but he lets go of my wrist. His fingers have left red marks on my skin.

I resist the urge to rub it as I walk cautiously down the slick corridor. It feels even colder closer to the ground. The lights come on as I move—thin, white things that somehow manage to cover every centimeter of the place.

I am listening as much as observing. The active stealth tech that I have been near makes a series of sounds that my brain interprets as music—usually choral voices singing in harmony. The weaker stealth tech sounds like humming, and the tiny stealth tech I’ve encountered—my father had a working bottle experiment—had a sound so faint that I had to strain to hear it.

But I did hear it.

At the moment, I hear nothing except my own ragged breathing.

It takes longer than I thought it would to reach the branching corridor. I stop at the opening. There are no lights, and it is so dark down there that the hair rises on the back of my neck.

At least in space there is an ambient light. Nothing is ever completely black. Not like this. If I walk into that darkness, I will effectively disappear.

I try to remember. Did the lights come on as the cart approached an area or when the cart was already inside? I have a hunch the cart’s lights covered a lot. Maybe it was a motion sensor that made the lights come on.

I take a deep breath of that wonderfully cool air, then stick my hand into that corridor.

Behind me, I can hear the guide shouting. He doesn’t want me to do that much.

I wave my arm around, and after a moment, rows and rows of lights flicker on. When one is triggered, the others get triggered as well. I wager they get triggered at some set distance.

These lights have a rose tint to them. The area looks less black than a deep red, thanks to the lighting. That redness is oddly welcoming. I have a hunch we’re getting closer to the heart of these caves.

I keep my arm in the corridor and make a point of moving it so that I can continue to see. Deep in the corridor—maybe seven meters ahead, maybe farther—I can see shapes. I’m not sure what exactly. They might simply be reflections on the shiny walls, although my mind reassembles those shapes into furniture or boxes or tables. All seem plausible. But for what I know, those shapes could also be debris—

Or other bodies.

I pull my arm out before I have a chance to reflect on what I’ve done. The lights remain on for several seconds before they flicker off. The farthest away disappear first—a nifty design that won’t leave anyone in darkness too long.

My heart is pounding. It takes me a moment to catch my breath. I feel like I sometimes do when I stumble on a very important wreck.

I wait until I make it back to the cart to say what I’m thinking.

“We’re diving this.”

Carmak nods. The guide looks scared. Mikk grins.

“You saw something,” he says.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “I saw a lot of somethings—and I want to know what they are.”

* * * *