“Wick,” I muttered, “you have to come out of it. You have to help me here.”
Then I noticed the head of a fox staring out at me from about twenty feet away, protruding from the wall as if a trophy. First thought: The fox is ghosting through the wall, the fox is uncanny. I’m dying. This is a hallucination. There will be a white light soon, following behind.
But then I realized I was looking at the fox peering out of a hole in the wall, and not so much the confirmation of fresh air below as air being pulled into that hole, and after the crack-passage, that hole would be more than sufficient … if it led the same place as the stairs.
The fox disappeared. But we would be going down into her den. We would be following those teeth, those jaws, that bright, animal-wary stare.
I considered that a moment.
“Wick—come over here. Bring the pack,” I said.
No response. He wasn’t far, but he’d sagged, as if sleeping, and when I went over I found he was barely conscious. Somehow I got him awake again, if delirious, made it clear we needed to go down into that hole. I told myself the nod he gave me meant he thought the hole might indeed lead to the same place as the stairs. I had a sick feeling in my stomach that wasn’t just hunger. Because I couldn’t know for sure. Because I don’t think Wick would have known if fully alert.
But we weren’t going to climb back up. We weren’t going to stay where we were and wait to die. If I left Wick behind to explore, I couldn’t be sure I would make it back up. If I left Wick behind, I might never see him again, and he might die alone.
“Wick, you understand, don’t you?” I was just speaking to reassure myself. “We have no real choice. I know you’re sick, but stay with me.” Stay with me, Wick, a little longer.
Wick had to go first or I couldn’t nudge him awake or push him forward if he became comatose. The pack had to go in front of both of us given the tight fit.
If we plummeted to the center of the earth, that might take care of all of our problems.
WHAT LAY WITHIN THE COMPANY BUILDING
We found the seventh level. The hole did lead there. We snuck in like mice, but in the dust the tracks of so many animals I would have guessed a menagerie or army had passed through there. Clandestine or not, that tunnel had been in use, but I saw no sign of the fox. We came out into a wide, high, featureless space with the blocked-off entrance behind us and an archway ahead leading to a warren of passageways and rooms.
A sense of abandonment infected the corridor, the archway, even as a faint white glow from the walls hinted at an illumination via microorganisms that had faded over the years. An antiseptic smell had faded, too, or been driven out by the musty-sharp scent of animal fur. The place had a sense to it of something about to reanimate but stuck—that it would never quite come back to life. Yet there was also a kind of thrum or hum or subtle fracture-like vibration in the background.
The room Wick hoped would help—with its stores of medicine—was only a corridor and a corner away. I propped Wick opposite the exit hole and followed his directions through the archway to the infirmary … only to find it ransacked. We had gotten there late. Whatever could be carted away had been taken—medical instruments, fixtures, chairs, even the tabletops.
But I was thorough. In a forgotten corner, I found four of the nautilus pills. They looked old and shriveled. I gently picked them up with shaking hands and dusted them off. As ever, we would limp along, we would endure but not thrive, but I was grateful for that small mercy. One per month. I had bought Wick four months, maybe five, if he survived the venom. I took them along with the other dregs, just in case Wick could use them, too.
I was only gone twenty minutes. When I returned, Wick still lay there. I got down on a knee and made him take the nautilus pill, which he reached for with gratitude, awareness, drawing in a deep breath.
“It’s still down here. It’s all still down here,” he said, wheezing.
“But someone plugged up that stairwell for a reason,” I said. That lost doorway, from this side, looked sealed with cement or stone. Someone had done a thorough job.
“Did they?”
Either he’d reclaimed a piece of his former self from the medicine or was more lucid because he had finally found an undamaged part of the Company, a place he recognized as home.
“Is there anything else down here, Wick?” I asked. “Something I should know about?”
“No,” Wick said. “Take as many supplies as we can and leave.”
But that’s when I saw it—in the light. Over the animal tracks, over my boot prints and Wick’s, in that same dust, another pair of boot tracks. And no one else there with us in the corridor.
“Who was here while I was gone, Wick?”
“No one.”
“No one?”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“Did you hear anyone?”
Wick shook his head.
There had been the sense of the level all around us as a vacuum bubble—no sound, so still and silent—and I had been lulled by the sudden generosity of air and space. But that feeling was gone now.
I had only a knife on me. We had a desperate need for more supplies—food, water, anything the place could offer. I couldn’t take Wick with me, would be unable to drag him back to the hole if he lapsed again; he still had bear venom in him.
And I knew this place, I realized as I ventured farther. I’d walked these halls before—and I told myself it was because of the Balcony Cliffs. The way that Wick, due to some hidden impulse or nostalgia, had mapped our excavations of the Balcony Cliffs almost one-to-one to this level of the Company building.
Maybe I would never get to the bottom of Wick’s secrets.
*
I left Wick the knife. I brought him to the infirmary, hid him in a corner so he couldn’t be seen from the doorway. I put the pack beside him, made him put the remaining nautilus pills in his shirt pocket.
I told Wick I would return soon, and I went exploring. I went to see what that place’s version of the swimming pool might look like. Would it be disgusting? But mostly I was following the boot prints in the places where the dust revealed them and the light caught on their tread. I didn’t know if it was the right decision, but it was my decision.
As I went, I picked up the audience I had expected when I had gone to the infirmary. With each room I passed or looked into, I saw further evidence of their plans and their dominion, their furtive steps joined mine. Two, then three, then six, keeping pace beside me, looking up at me in an unnerving way: The little fox that had followed Borne, or its twin. Mouth open, eyes glittering. And her companions, some of them in the guise of foxes and some not. All of these shadows in that shadowed land, and me feeling lucky I was just passing through. That they let me.
I slipped through those hallways as easily as they did—like I belonged or like I’d been here before.
But I couldn’t have been here before, could I?