by S. D. Perry
She had to duck for a bit to get through a narrow spot, but the going was mostly easy—carved passages of stone, worn smooth by water, and chunky holes where the walls had been ripped out in more recent floods. Deep cracks opened into chambers of strange formations, thousands of years of chemical reaction—water dripping through the limestone, creating weak acids that could hollow out mountains and fill them with marvels, crystal chambers, vast pillars, echoing pits. It was no wonder so many indigenous cultures believed that caves were sacred places, or that the Maya travelers had chosen to use up so much of their precious color here.
She reached another marked tunnel that opened off the passage she was in, but there was a symbol she hadn’t seen before on the wall next to it: a blue circle. A well? She thought she was west of the one where she’d lured the Trinity killer to his death, but she wasn’t certain.
The passage was rocky, the floor uneven and sloping slightly upwards, curving west, but it wasn’t especially tight. She left her mark and then started up.
She moved quickly over the rocks, steadying herself against the wall. The passage was drier than the one she left below, more rock than dirt. She hit a curve a few meters in, and knew from the sound of her breathing and the feel of the air that it opened ahead.
Lara stepped up into a small room, two meters tall at its highest, barely wide enough for her to turn with her arms outstretched. A dead end, except there was a small painting on a smooth surface of the wall, bright lines of blue paint next to a directional compass.
A circle means a dig room. She leaned in to study the markings, not sure what she was looking at. Short lines of blue paint in seemingly random columns. She counted them. Thirteen lines, spaced out over five columns. The Maya believed that there were thirteen heavens, it was a holy number… But why the groupings? Three, one, two, four, three. She leaned closer, squinting. There were shadows between the marks, thin blurs… Had there been more lines originally?
Lara took a picture, then turned and hurried back down to the tunnel, turning north again. Ahead somewhere, a salamander started screaming, its cry taken up by two, three more of them before the sounds died away. She could hear bats moving, faintly, a hollow rustle of sound that stretched and spun before fading back to silence.
She reached another Y passage with an arrow pointing down and passed it by. After a long slog through a winding corridor infested with tiny white spiders, she was starting to think about going back when the passage opened up, presenting her with three choices. One was a dead end; both of the others had the Y marking, tunnels that connected to others. There were no arrows, and red was the only color used.
Lara looked at her compass and chose. She made her mark, and kept moving, deeper into the maze.
* * *
Sergei had just made it back to the small, crap-filled chamber to which he’d been assigned when he thought he heard shots behind him, outside—but he also heard a rush of sound like an oncoming wave, and then a big fucking bunch of bats streamed out of the passage that led down to the maze, whirling frantically through the room and squeaking like rodents, their leathery wings flapping in his face. Sergei hunched in the tiny dark chamber and waited it out, purely miserable. He was cold, he had shit all over his gear and he was still angry that Croft had slipped away from him. How foolish he’d felt as the minutes ticked past and he slowly realized that he was alone and watching an empty room. He hoped Mitchell would get her and cut her up good.
But quickly, please God. He only wanted to get out. He’d had a bare moment of reprieve talking to Reddy, standing at the mouth of the tunnel in the warmer air. It had still been horribly dark, the chamber beneath the drop overhung by the rim of the opening, but he’d been able to see starlight pouring down from the round hole high overhead, shining down on living green trees not twenty meters in front of him. Unfortunately, there had only been so much to say, and then he’d had to turn his back and return to this cold, stinking pit.
When the last of the flying rats had whisked out, he tapped his radio. “Reddy, this is Sergei, do you copy? Did I hear shots?”
Nothing.
Sergei tried again. “Commander, message relayed, in position. Do you copy?”
A crackle of static and a buzz.
That’s just fucking great. It was reassuring to know that if anything else went disastrously wrong, they were all cut off from one another. He’d known this already, but the confirmation made him feel angrier, and he far preferred anger to dread. Maybe one of the hostages had tried to escape, and had been filled full of holes. Good.
Three passages led out of the room he was in—the tunnel south to the upper levels of the site, the tunnel north, back to the drop and the living world, the real world, and the passage that opened west over the maze. It was marked with a red X. Sergei moved over to check it out, wincing at the crunch of bugs beneath his boots, the sharp reek of bat piss.
He had to duck to get into the passageway. The rough rocks ran only a few meters before they tipped down into a slide, too steep to get down without a rope. Sergei shined his flashlight down the chute of rock, and caught his breath—the passage opened up about two meters down into a darkness so deep that his beam couldn’t find the bottom of it. The void was framed by dirty rocks and black holes on all sides, descending as far as he could see.
As he gazed down at the abyss, he heard the far screams of the demons, the sounds curling up like smoke.
“Fuck,” he murmured, and heard it whisper down through the open space, into the black.
Sergei swallowed. He imagined the things down there looking up as the tendrils of alien sound filtered down to them, imagined them reaching up from the bottomless pit, pale and clawed, worming through the tight rocks like eels, stretching long bodies over the gaps in the passage to find the source of the strange noise. To find him.
Nope. No thank you. He quickly backed out of the tunnel. Harper thought that the target might come up from there? It was an actual hellhole.
If she came up, if anything came up, he would hear it, though. And he had the advantage, a clear line of sight into the depths; he couldn’t miss if he fired down the chute.
Or you could stay out of there entirely and just kill anything that comes out.
Not the worst idea. He looked around for a place to lean or sit in the chamber that wasn’t awful, but there was nothing. Vermin crawled across the shitty floor, the rocks were covered in slime and crap. There were a dozen bats still climbing around on the ceiling. One of them dropped suddenly and flitted away north, to the open night sky, to freedom.
Sergei resisted the urge to shoot it. Fucking bat.
He squatted in the nasty dark and waited.
* * *
Lara didn’t know the hole was there until she stepped into it.
She had tried to keep to the upper layers of the maze, heading progressively north, and had taken a rough, rocky passage that sloped down a bit. A curve near the bottom was puddled with thick, wet mud, loose rocks poking up from the accumulation. She couldn’t quite step over the slick jumble but there was a flat bit of stone sticking up from the middle that she could reach.
She steadied herself against the wall and stepped forward, pushing down on the stone with her boot. Solid. She shifted her weight forward—
—and the rock started to sink, fast.
Lara pushed off of the stone and dove as far forward as she could, landing on the hard rocks at the other side of the slick and scrambling ahead. Her stepping stone and a half-meter chunk of packed mud dropped away into the dark. A small chorus of chirps came up from below.
She looked into the new hole. Her headlamp revealed a narrow pit of jagged walls, riddled with thin cracks, a dead end at three meters. A few salamanders had their strange heads sticking out of the cracks lower down, chirping at the fallen rock and its crust of mud at the bottom.
The hole was just wide enough for her to have fallen in and been shredded on the way down. She turned away, her chest tight at the remin
der of how easily she could die down here and what that would mean for Trinity’s aims…
Don’t. One problem at a time. Lara moved ahead, forcing her thoughts back to her escape. She’d be getting to where the labyrinth curved east soon, under and around the north end of the site. Even if Trinity hadn’t marked the passage that led back to the surface, the bats at this end of the maze had to get out somewhere, and they generally left behind plenty of evidence that they’d come through. Not necessarily passages she could use, but it would cut down on exploring dead ends.
She was midway down a short passage between two narrow chambers when she found the dead salamander. It had been gutted, a long, clean slice curving across its belly and off one side, pale, glistening entrails seeping from the line. A few roaches crawled over the white flesh like disease.
Freshly killed, by a blade. Mitchell? The Russian had said she had a new knife, and implied that she might prefer using it to a pistol. Lara wondered if Mitchell was the cool-eyed blond in Mexico who’d been after Marin. Trinity wasn’t big on recruiting women as soldiers, they tended to stand out.
Doesn’t matter, and don’t form any expectations. Open your senses. Work with reality. Be aware.
Lara clicked off her headlamp and stood in the dark, turning her head to listen to either end of the passage she was in. She heard the soft backdrop of whispers, distant movement, echoing chambers of ticking insects, dripping water. Over the miasma of bat-related smells, the thin metal tint of the salamander’s blood, and her own sweat. The air was cold and still and perfectly lightless. She had no feeling that there was anyone else close by, but her senses could only tell her so much.
They didn’t try to hide the salamander. Did they want her to know they were down here, or were they just passing through, and the creature had gotten too close? The kill was recent or there would be more insects, but that didn’t help much. Whoever it was could be anywhere—a level up or down, crouched ahead in a tunnel. Perhaps the killer had waited a meter inside one of the dead ends she’d passed by, and was coming up behind her even now.
You can’t know, give it up. You can go back, go up, or move forward.
The well she’d been planning to drop into up top could be no more than a hundred meters west, and perhaps a bit behind her. If she wanted to go up, that was probably her closest option. Which will put you back into the exact situation you were trying to get away from: walking into an ambush. At least down here you might be able to get around them. And there’s more than one direction to run if you can’t.
Well, maybe, depending on what the salamander-killer was planning. Not all of the passages were narrow, and some of the branch chambers were meters across, filled with dead ends and alcoves, lots of places to hide.
Lara unclipped the small LED and checked the compass and her watch. She’d made good time up to here, but it was back to stop-and-start, which she should have been doing anyway. She tucked the light into her sock once again, resigned to ducking for the rest of her walk. Even that bare glow at her feet was more than she liked, but she couldn’t go blind in the maze, and she could cover the light in a second with a finger. She’d be ducking, anyway.
With the bow or the Remington in hand? She’d prefer the bow—less chance of telegraphing her location, causing a cave-in, or being hit by her own shot—but as competent an archer as she was, the gun was the better choice. If she had to run, it was a lot easier to blast at a pursuer than to stop, nock and draw.
On the other hand. Muzzle flash would strobe in the blackness. Firing would put a target on the shooter, whether it was Trinity or her pulling the trigger.
This is your life now, considering the best way to kill people.
No. The best way to survive. The only way. If I die in this labyrinth, who’s going to stop Dominguez?
The thought she didn’t want to have, that made the dread flush up from her belly in a wave. Lara took a slow breath, turning the volume on her thoughts down to zero. She moved ahead, through a small chamber with clear puddled water on the floor and then into a large, slightly tilted room with a number of passages leading out. She examined them quickly by the light of her shaded torch. There were a half-dozen openings, high and low, mucky and slightly less mucky. Two of the passages weren’t marked, the rest had arrows and letters. The ones that the bats clearly used the most were an opening due west, marked with a down arrow, and two of the north-facing entries, both marked as connecting passages.
She covered the light, considering. She didn’t want to go down, although it was entirely possible that the passage to the climb out was another level beneath her, or two, or five. Level wasn’t even the right word; it implied some kind of order. The labyrinth was honeycombed with passages, cracks and wells and chambers.
And you can rule out the most likely before you start second-guessing.
She quickly examined the stones and muck at her feet, looking for signs that someone had walked through, but it was too rocky and wet. She turned off the light, back to the bare glow of the LED, and moved quietly across the chamber, stopping to mark the tunnel on the left before easing into it. A salamander cried somewhere behind her and she waited for the echoes to die before she continued. The passage opened up ahead of her. She couldn’t see it in the scant light but she could hear it in the air, the way the salamander’s distant call curved back at her.
Lara crept to where the rocks opened up, waited for a full minute, listening, and then crouched into the wider space, stepping carefully, lightly—
A whisper of movement, a press of air. Someone was stepping up behind her from the right, fast.
Lara didn’t think. She dropped the Remington and brought her hands up, finding an extended limb just centimeters over her head. She grabbed the arm and twisted it, pulling it in as she stood. She heaved the assailant up and over her shoulder, throwing as hard as she could.
The attacker let out a grunt when they hit—woman—but Lara heard her coming back up, the shift of cloth, another soft grunt of exertion.
Lara reached for where the Remington should have been and came up empty. No time! She turned and ran back through the passage in a crouch, unslinging her bow. She heard steps behind her.
She dove into the tilted room and rolled, grabbed an arrow, turning, drawing, letting it go low through the middle of the passage, a wishful shot, another arrow already in hand as she sidled backwards and up the gentle slope.
Bam-bam!
The shots whizzed past her and Lara targeted the muzzle flash, a strobe of white light that outlined the shooter for an instant. Lara marked her and pulled and released, grabbed another arrow, dodged farther right.
She didn’t hear the arrow land but she heard the woman gasp, and step back, heard the arrow clatter to the ground somewhere between them a beat later—and then she went entirely silent. She didn’t fall, or move, or breathe.
The woman—it could only be Mitchell, and from the flash Lara had caught, she was definitely the blonde from Mexico—was standing in the dark less than five meters from Lara, standing and perhaps bleeding with a gun in her hand, waiting for Lara to make a single sound.
Lara had an arrow nocked, but didn’t dare pull back. She didn’t dare breathe.
* * *
Mitchell stood in the cold black, listening, her head tilted awkwardly. The arrow had poked a neat hole through the cartilage of her left ear, just above her ear canal, and buried itself in the foam padding at the back of her tactical helmet. She’d jerked the projectile free and tossed it toward Lara, sidestepping when it hit the floor, but now she had to keep her head tipped over her shoulder so that the blood wouldn’t fall to the rocks. Blood had gotten into her ear canal, and she waited impatiently for the blockage to drain.
Croft was still in the room, and probably four or five meters roughly southeast of her. The woman was also holding still, not a shift, not a breath. If Mitchell fired and missed, Croft’s next arrow probably wouldn’t. And if Mitchell made too much noise, Croft might whip off anoth
er shot like the one that had pierced Mitchell’s ear. Mitchell had leapt to the side when she’d seen the bow up, managed not to take the arrow in her eye, but barely.
You won’t win this game, this one’s mine. Croft was good. Mitchell had barely heard her approach and couldn’t hear her at all now—the blood bubbling in her ear wasn’t helping—but Mitchell had learned how to play statue at a very early age, and was an expert in the craft. Croft would move first, she would give herself away and then she would be dead.
Croft was flawed. She hadn’t detected Mitchell waiting just inside the tunnel’s opening. She’d heard the knife coming and responded as a trained fighter. Stupid of her to drop her gun in the dark… But then, Mitchell had been thrown flat on her back, her perfectly executed kill move thwarted, so mistakes had been made all around.
Not a mistake. She’d left a calling card in plain sight, inviting Croft to play. She could have ended this talented creature with a finger pull, but had chosen to engage differently. And this was infinitely more satisfying—better than a shooting, richer than Croft’s blood, a true test of ability. Of control. Whoever got distracted first would lose, and—
The radio in her helmet beeped, and a broken transmission spilled out, Harper’s voice crackling into her right ear.
Mitchell dove as the arrow pinged off the top of her helmet, slamming it against her head.
She rolled and came up running, nine, ten meters before the wall, dead end to the south. She ran full tilt, didn’t hit her lamp until she knew she was close, pointing the CZ at Croft’s position and tracking with it—
Mitchell hit her light and fired at the same time, three rounds, the flare lighting up the empty chamber.
She turned to find her hole and hit the edge of it hard, before leaping inside, turning, raising the heavy gun.
She saw Croft disappearing back into the passage north, the one where she’d dropped her weapon. Mitchell fired but the round hit rock. Lara was already gone. The woman had run past her in the dark, using Mitchell’s movement and the echoes of the shots to cover the sound. They had to have passed within inches of one another.
