I dreaded to think what we’d look like to anyone who should glance our way now.
Which was all the more reason to do it quickly.
I cut a line.
The gateway shimmered, opening wide and bursting with light—
“In!” I whispered, already going.
Through lights, I swirled. I wished I could twist behind me to see if they had come fast enough—but forward momentum was retained, and in this surfaceless space between worlds I had nothing to brace against to turn, so I had no choice but to hold my breath as lights whizzed by, reds and greens and vibrant purples like a rainbow poured into water—
Then I was out, and blind.
20
Not blind. It was just dark, that was all. And there was light somewhere; we’d seen it in the compass, so incredibly frail but absolutely leaking in weak shafts into this deep grey expanse.
Heidi dropped in behind me. Though I couldn’t see, I could tell by the sound that she’d landed spryly, infinitely more graceful than my stumbling lurch into the darkness.
I hoped she was the only one, that she had followed behind me and closed the gateway on Carson, bringing my entourage down to one—but then he came, staggering awkwardly like he’d been shoved.
“Hey!” Heidi snapped.
“Sorry—geez, it’s dark.”
“You’re stepping on my ankles!”
“S-sorry!” More scuffling. “Does anyone have a flashlight? I can’t see—”
“No one can,” I whispered. “Just stay quiet, all right?”
“But—”
“Shut up,” I hissed. “You want some cave monster to come and find us?”
“Are we in a cave?”
There was a thump of flesh, closely followed by a breathy “Oof!” from Carson. Sounded like Heidi had elbowed him. He quieted after that though, so I would make a rare point of thanking her when we knew the coast was clear.
I waited, trying to absorb every sound in the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Trickling came from somewhere. In the opposite direction there came an occasional click, very light, as though some small creature had crawled over loose stone and sent one or two pebbles rolling no more than six inches.
If there were any other noises, I could not detect them—although given how heavily Carson was breathing, practically right in my ear, I’d probably miss a rock band playing just feet away, amps turned all the way up to eleven.
“Okay,” I whispered at last, digging in my pocket for my flashlight. “We’re clear.”
Thankfully I’d had some spare batteries in my hideout, since I hadn’t managed to reclaim the confiscated pair from the police station. Even more thankfully, despite being submerged in the ocean of another world, it still worked.
I brought it out and clicked it on.
Cave. High-roofed, dark, empty. The ground tended downward on our left, climbing much more steeply on the right.
Carson exhaled in relief. “So we’re in the right place?”
“Looks like it.”
“What was the other side of the boundary? It looked like a campfire.”
“Fire nymphs,” said Heidi. “Hostile. You’d have needed asbestos knickers to get through that.”
Carson gripped my shoulder with a panicked hand. “But there are none of those fire things in here, right?”
I shrugged out of it, shooting him a dirty look he probably didn’t catch as I swung the flashlight around. “You see anything glowing and red?”
“No.”
“Then we’re probably in the clear.”
“At least here,” said Heidi tightly.
“Right. Which is why we should move. Come on.”
“Which way?”
I gave a mental double-check to my research. “Left,” I said, pointing. And thank goodness for that: it was much easier to traverse in this direction. “Watch your step, though.” I threw this over my shoulder to Carson. I trusted Heidi could move. Him, on the other hand … knowing my luck, he’d step into the trickle, his feet would go out from under him like a cartoon character stepping on a banana peel, and then he’d sail out of sight, yelping every time his coccyx slammed stone until even that sound was a distant memory.
It would rid me of him, though.
Not that I was anywhere near cruel enough to entertain just abandoning him if he did vanish into the bowels of this world. It would make life a heck of a lot easier if I were, though.
I picked my way across rock. The tunnel’s floor rose and fell in knobbles, sleek and rounded. Not a lava tube, by the looks; I’d not traversed one myself, but I’d seen enough photos in my research to know this uneven a floor was not typically a feature. No, this cave had been carved by water, eroding the softer material and softening the remaining edges over the millennia. It was kind of pretty, though I couldn’t help but wishing I’d packed better footwear.
Now that my eyes did not need to fight the pitch, and my ears, though still pricked, were no longer listening as intently for danger as when we’d first stepped through the gateway, I could let my other senses loose.
The air was beautifully cool on my skin; not remotely like the chill of the April breeze outside Pret a Manger. A definite dampness hung in it. I’d gone camping in France a couple of times when I was younger, and most mornings awoke with a sheen as though dew had permeated my tent and condensed on me instead of the grass. If we were to camp out here for a night, I was certain we’d all wake with that same covering of moisture.
The smell was gloriously earthy. A soft watery tang hung in the air too, tainted with the coppery tang of unfiltered particulates. I could drink in the scent all day—especially having spent the past two and a half months in London, riding stuffy tube carriages filled with endlessly re-breathed air, or walking busy streets thick with traffic, exhausts coughing smoke into the sky every hour of the day. Here was natural. And unlike those stupid bottles of overpriced water “sourced from a mountain spring” (a dodgy tap off an allotment in Peckham, more like), this kind of natural was exactly what I craved.
“So,” Carson said, “where are you from, Heidi?”
“Err—Croydon?”
“And you have a pendant thing as well?”
“A what?”
“Talisman,” I muttered without glancing back.
“Oh. Yeah. Mine’s a bracelet, see?”
“Um … kind of. Mira, could you—”
“I’m not lighting her up for you, if that’s what you’re asking. You’ll just have to wait to see it when we get outside, or get back to London.”
“We’re going back to London?”
“Well I’m not planning on spending my life in a cave. You are free to do whatever you please, however.” I moved my compass into the beam of my flashlight again, squinting at its face. “Now could you please shut up for a minute? I need to concentrate.”
The rocky surface made our trek slow. My flashlight didn’t help matters: it was a dinky little thing, the sort you’d clip onto a keychain. Even in the sheer, almost all-encompassing darkness, the shaft of light it cast was still dim. No more than fifteen feet ahead of us was illuminated before the dark crept in again.
We’d gone maybe three hundred feet from our starting point when the ground leveled out, although it felt like longer. Still knobbled in that awkward, uncomfortable way, the flashlight’s reflection glinted: water had pooled, forming little islands. It was no more than maybe two or three inches deep at the most, but I still pointed it out to Heidi and Carson, and made deliberate effort to step on each of the miniature knolls.
“There’s a light up there!” Carson suddenly bleated.
“Hey!” Heidi shouted. “Stop grabbing me!”
“Sorry—”
She huffed, stepping away from him and falling in alongside me.
“Told you,” I muttered.
“The light—!” Carson said, joining me on the other side.
I looked away from my compass, which was currently showing what looked
like a war-torn city if the crumpled buildings and cratered streets were anything to go by, and followed Carson’s finger.
Sure enough, there was a single point of bright light up ahead. It came through a hole in the ceiling, which I realized now was even higher than I’d thought. Two by three inches wide, this tiny shaft explained the practically invisible glow in the face of the compass on King William Street.
Directly beneath it, we stopped to look up.
So high above us, and so small, it was impossible to tell what the sky might be like out there; clear blue, cloudy, decked in storm clouds. Against the darkness of the cave, the light was simply a white glow.
“Well, we’re not getting out that way,” Heidi said.
“Right.” I started to move again, flashlight sweeping, its dullness was terribly obvious again now.
Soon the distant trickle restarted. I’d thought we left it behind, but there was another in front of us as the cave began its downward crawl again.
It split off into two directions. The leftmost was larger, and by the look of the sheen underfoot, this was where the tiny stream continued on its way. The right-hand path, meanwhile, was far smaller. Rather than the path forking, this was more like a tendril extending from a trunk; the hole loomed out of the wall, four feet wide but almost eight tall. The flow of water had made it just as smoothly misshapen as the floor.
“Which way?” Heidi asked.
“Left again,” I said, and commenced leading.
“Can you see London yet?” Carson asked.
“Not yet. We’ve got a ways to go.”
“Unless,” Carson piped up. “Unless … unless this is one of those places where time passes differently, and we’re so far in the future that London has—”
“Turned into a crimson bog?” Heidi asked.
“It could happen.”
“Time can condense hours,” I said, “not however many thousands of years it takes nature to reclaim the biggest city in England. Pretty sure the only way it gets abandoned now is if humanity bombs itself into oblivion. Or if Liam and Cheryl break up.” They both looked at me, Heidi rolling her eyes and Carson with blank ones. “What? They’re adorable together.”
“The temporal shrinkage is related to the gates, anyway,” Heidi said. “That’s where you get out of sync. As soon as you’ve set foot in a place, one second there is just the same as a second anywhere else on planet Earth.”
“Oh.” A second of quiet, broken by the soft babble of water. “But what if—”
“Sorry. Bored now.”
After another leftward turn, Heidi picked up the conversation. “How do you know we’re going the right way?”
“Because I conduct thorough research.” I flashed a sarcastic smile she probably didn’t see in the darkness.
“Books?” Carson asked.
“Uh huh. Not the sort you’d find in the London Library, though. That’s another one for your sightseeing list, by the way. I expect you’ll be right at home there.”
Within another hundred feet, the path forked again, both rising this time. Water spilled down from both routes, draining into the small “pond” at the bottom. Springs? Maybe. Could be the remnants of the water source that had carved this place out.
Still no sign of London, I confirmed with a look at my compass—but then I knew that. We had yet another left-hand turn, which I directed us on.
Quiet descended between us again. Our feet on rock broke it, steps careful—or not, in Carson’s case; he scuffed every few feet, occasionally biting back grunts as he stubbed his toe where he’d miscalculated a step.
“How much farther?” Heidi griped after ten minutes.
“Not much.”
“Aren’t there any slightly quicker ways to where we’re going? Or any brighter?”
“I should’ve bought a bigger flashlight,” Carson muttered.
“Or one at all,” Heidi grumbled. “Better still, a flashlight and a muzzle.”
I shook my head, huffing a breath out of my nostrils. This was getting to be too much like corralling children.
Carson reached my side and asked, “If you made us a port—a gateway now, where would we end up?”
Going by the sand-colored stone buildings laid out on the compass’s face, probably Uzbekistan. “Nowhere we want to be,” I answered.
“And—and are there ever borders on this side to avoid too?”
“Plenty,” I answered.
“But those gateways all lead out to our world,” Heidi put in. “It might be London on one side and Antarctica on the other, but you’re always coming out on planet Earth. It’s when you’re going from Earth to the worlds beneath that the gates could lead to anywhere—and I mean anywhere.”
“Mira said it was like—like loads of crumpled up pieces of paper, laid under London. And where they connect is where you open gateways.”
“Crumpled up balls of paper?” Heidi made a ‘huh’ sort of noise with her throat. “I never really thought of it like that. But yeah, that sounds pretty—”
“Found it,” I cut across.
Heidi and Carson stopped and peered.
“It’s just dark,” Carson muttered.
“I think I can see something,” said Heidi. She bowed closer, squinting. “Although whether or not it’s London …”
“It’s definitely London,” I told her. “Hold this, can you?” I passed her the flashlight. She took it, and I gripped my talisman, pointing to the nearest wall. “We’ll cut through here.”
I sliced open a gateway with a downward swipe.
The glow from its edges was dazzling compared to the flashlight beam. I squinted. It felt like someone had switched on a floodlight and pointed it right at me.
“See you on the other side,” I said, and I stepped through.
The other side was, as promised, dark.
I realized, too late, that I’d left the flashlight in Heidi’s hands. Damn it.
Carson blundered through next. Then Heidi popped in, preceded for half a second by the weak beam of my flashlight. After the gateway and its interior lightshow, it was once again terribly dim. If only Decidian’s Spear had transformed itself into a big ol’ Maglite.
“Thanks,” I said, taking it from her.
“Where are we?” Carson asked.
“King William Street tube station.” I swept the flashlight around. “Abandoned, obviously.”
The station was derelict, looking a bit like Carson’s post-apocalyptic London had come to pass. Split into two sections, we’d come out on the top level. No getting on a train from here—the platform was down a set of stairs—but the curvature of the ceiling and walls was telltale. A squared steel pipe ran along the very center, tube lights mounted to the either side of it. We could find a switch, but there was no way in a million years that they’d turn on.
The tiles were dirty. Dark stains marred them in full clusters. These had a very sooty look to them, as though a fire had been ignited directly underneath. Corresponding stains were reflected on the floor. In some places, tiles were missing, leaving rectangular holes.
Stale air invaded our noses, worse for the time we’d spent in the cave system. It did not quite have the unpleasant taste of the traditional Underground; there were no passengers to bring coughs and sniffles and leave them lingering. But there was an unpleasant scent amidst the trapped oxygen: like mildew, almost, but it caught me much deeper in my lungs.
“Geez,” Carson breathed. There was a note of horror in his voice. His eyes had gone wide, eyebrows drifting high above the delicate frames of his granddad glasses.
“You wanted a tour of London, didn’t you? I’d say you’re getting one.”
“I wanted to see nice places.”
“This isn’t nice?”
“I’m with Carson on this,” Heidi said. “This place gives me the creeps. Our destination is through here?”
“Somewhere,” I confirmed.
I led the way, flashlight sweeping.
The uppe
r level was long, and split into several rooms, each more or less the same as the last. A metal beam rose to the ceiling in one, blue paint chipped to high heaven. The entire bottom two feet had either been stripped of paint entirely, or been dyed black. The curious child in me wanted to run a finger along to check, but I knew better. If that was a coating of something, it would surely be smoke, and the black fingertip I gave myself would take a long, long time to wash off.
The tile stains changed color, becoming coppery orange. These looked like they came from something leaking, streaking earthward and fading.
On either side of a doorway were several posters.
Carson dawdled.
“These are from the war,” he said.
We backtracked, me only really because Heidi had.
“The station was used as a makeshift air raid shelter in World War II,” she explained.
Carson bowed to peer at a smaller sign tacked on beneath a poster advertising national security certificates.
“‘Special notice to late arrivals and early risers,’” he read. “‘Please spare a thought for your fellow shelterers and refrain from making any unnecessary noise.’” He looked up at me and Heidi in turn, eyebrows knitted. “The German fighter planes couldn’t hear people in here, could they?”
Heidi shook her head in disbelief. “Read the next sentence.”
He squinted at it. “‘Please remember others may be asleep’—oh.”
She and I exchanged a look. Like I had found myself doing more and more this past day and a half, the hard fight against rolling her eyes was readily apparent on her face.
“Come on,” I said. “This place stinks; I want to get out of here as soon as possible.”
Stairs led between the station’s upper and lower level. Another tatty WWII poster remained at the bottom: a cartoon of two women talking, above the captions “Don’t forget that walls have ears!” and “CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES.” The wallpaper of the room the women sat in was a stylized version of Adolf Hitler’s face repeated over and over. Here, like the cave, the floor was damp.
The World Beneath (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 1) Page 13
