by Stel Pavlou
Was that confusion on the grub’s face? He wasn’t sure. “Did you just ask me what I am?”
“I’m sorry, they, er . . . did a wipe on me.”
“A real good one too, by the looks of things,” said the grub. “I’m a girl, you dumb lug.”
A girl. With big, dark eyes and a way about her that was nothing like a boy. As the news that he’d lost his memory sank in, the confusion on her face gave way to hurt.
“Do you remember my name?”
Daniel shrugged. What could he say? “Sorry.”
“I’m Nova,” she said, utterly crushed. “Remember?”
Daniel shook his head.
She glanced back over her shoulder. “They’re coming. Fourteen hours to go. You can do it, you always did.”
And with that she snapped the hatch shut.
“Wait!” Now that he had some light, the bars running along the inside of the metal plates were visible. Just a short jump and he could hang on. Pulling himself up to the hatch, he pushed his head against it and peered out through the crack he’d managed to make.
In every direction there were grubs—and they were all girls.
“Holy drote . . .”
There had to be other Racks somewhere.
Daniel dropped back down to the ground, his heart racing, completely unable to process what he’d just learned. The mines were way bigger than he’d imagined. And there were . . . girls. Well, that just about blew his mind wide open.
As he spun around, lost in thought, his F-light spun with him, casting a glow over the entire back wall. There, under the pale, yellow light, Daniel saw his name carved into the stone. And next to it his name again. And again.
And again.
Twenty, thirty times. How many times had he written his name? How many times had he been here before?
“Gee,” he said to no one in particular. “You’d think I’d know better.”
When they did let him out, the girls were long gone and the boys had returned for a new day in the mine.
They marched him to the checkpoint, making it clear that there would be no rest. His day began now, just like everyone else’s.
When it was his turn, Daniel stepped forward.
“Good morning, forty-one eighty-two,” said the Overseer, his spindly finger delving into the socket in Daniel’s head. “Your efforts in the war will be rewarded.”
“No, no,” said Daniel. “Your thanks is reward enough.”
He’d taken barely a step when the blast-pike lit up the small of his back with a—
Ssssnappp!
“Get moving!”
This time Daniel held his tongue. So they’d wanted to teach him a lesson. Well, he’d learned a good lesson, all right. It just wasn’t the lesson the Overseers had had in mind.
8
IN THE BELLY OF THE SNAKE
Section Five of the Snake had grown during Daniel’s absence. Now it wormed its way fifty or more paces deep into the rock face, with massive fissures running throughout the tunnel head.
Blink and a gang of grubs were sorting through a heap of rubble looking for any sign of relics when Daniel arrived with his bait-box in hand.
Blink didn’t look up from his work; he just said, “Sleep well?”
Setting the box down, Daniel just looked at him, only to realize that some grub he’d never seen before was already dabbing the gloopy end of a scent marker all over the wall at the end of the tunnel. “Hey!” Daniel called out.
The boy didn’t respond.
“Hey!” Daniel said, marching over. “What do you think you’re doing?” He grabbed the marker from the kid’s hand.
The kid looked shocked. “I’m sorry!” he said. “I was just doing what they told me to do—”
“Well, don’t. This gets screwed up, I’m the one going back in the hole.”
The kid held up his hands and backed off. “I’m sorry.”
Daniel shook his head, checking to see if the marker needed a refill on his way back to Blink. “Why didn’t you tell me about Nova?” he said.
“And say what? I don’t know her—you do. Anyway, how was I supposed to know if she’s still alive? It’s not like we get much contact with the other Racks.”
“Who is she to me, anyway?”
Blink heaved another large rock onto the waiting skid and shrugged.
“I never talked about her?”
“Once or twice.”
Daniel doubted that. Not with the way she acted. Something wasn’t adding up.
“Eighteen seventy-three,” an Overseer announced from back down the tunnel toward the Workings. “Vacate Section Five.”
Blink bowed his head. “Yes, Master Overseer.” He signaled to the rest of the gang to start heaving the skid full of rubble out of the tunnel. “You know,” he said, turning to Daniel on his way out, “I don’t got all the answers. Some of this you’re going to have to figure out on your own. Take a look around, I got my own problems to deal with. We all do.”
“I’m sorry,” Daniel offered, watching him leave, a pang of guilt burning in his gut. Not because he had upset Blink, but because he suddenly realized that in one respect he had already been set free.
Whether by accident or by design, when the Overseers had wiped his mind, they had also deleted Daniel’s memories of hopelessness. From his point of view everything was new again; he had no idea what was off-limits, because he had forgotten what those limits were.
But for Blink and everyone else it was different. Not only had they not forgotten what they had been through and what the consequences were, but they wore their despair like blinders.
If only Daniel could make them see the obvious, that life didn’t have to be this way.
Daniel returned to his work with renewed purpose. Roughly, he began dabbing the scent marker all over the wall at the end of the tunnel. “There’s got to be a way out of here,” he muttered to himself. “There’s got to be . . .”
Now that they’d filled his head with baiting techniques, maybe he could get Alice to smash them a way out of here.
He checked the bait-box, and it seemed to be in a pretty good spot. He peered inside to make sure the drote was awake. It spat at him.
“I hope he gets you good,” said Daniel.
Taking one last look around, Daniel headed back up the tunnel, satisfied that everything was ready for an Overseer to come set the scent marker gloop on—
. . . fire.
The gloop was already burning. He could smell it—heck, the drote could smell it, ornery little dootbag. How was that even possible? He couldn’t see any smoke coming from any of the marks he’d left on the wall. . . .
He glanced down at the scent marker in his hand. The one the boy had given him. It had been rigged to heat up. Smoking gloop was oozing out onto his glove.
“No, no, no, no, no . . .”
Too late. The smoke had already reached the bait-box, triggering the timer. That drote was jumping out in sixty seconds like it or not.
He had to warn them. He had to get down that tunnel and tell them to get that Hammertail out of here. Breaking into a run, sweat dripping off his face, Daniel raced down the passageway, only to find Pinch Servilles with Alice around the next bend.
“Oh dear,” Pinch said, pretending to be shocked. “Something wrong with your equipment? How did that happen . . . ?”
With a smirk, Pinch held up Alice’s leash.
“No, wait!” Daniel pleaded.
Too late. Alice was already loose—
Click!
The bait-box had opened!
Daniel threw up his hands. “Alice—stay! Staayy! Alice . . . ?” Daniel may as well have been talking to himself.
The animal’s nostrils flared. He knew fresh drote when he smelled it. With his ears flattened, Alice pawed, then ground—and charged—
“No!” Daniel cried, backing up. “Bad boy! Noooo . . . !”
Yeah. Waste of time.
Daniel flipped around, running back the way
he had come, down the tunnel and toward a dead end. There had to be somewhere he could hide—
Drote! Scrambling up his leg, trying to reach the smoking scent marker he still had clenched in his fist. Dropping the marker, he struggled to rip his drote-wrangler glove off while the creature hung on for dear life, licking at the smoking gloop—
There! He flung the glove over his shoulder, the drote leaping after it.
Behind him, back down the tunnel, he heard the first Alice-sized smash!
Then another. Closer this time.
Smash! Smash!
And before he knew it, he was out of tunnel.
With nowhere to go and nowhere to hide, Daniel watched helplessly as the two animals duked it out in what should have been the most lopsided fight ever. Except—Alice couldn’t turn around—
The drote ran up one wall, onto the ceiling, leaping over the Hammertail’s back, smoking scent marker hanging from its mouth, and all Alice could do was flick his tail. His natural instinct to spin around and really wind up for a strike had been completely taken away from him. He slammed one shoulder into the wall in one direction, then tried it again in the other, but nothing worked.
And boy, did the drote know it. Sitting just a couple of paces behind Alice, just out of reach of his clubbed tail, the scrawny little rodent licked the scent marker feverishly, safe in the knowledge that he was untouchable.
Alice, his massive face just inches from Daniel’s, snorted in disgust. Daniel watched him pawing the ground. He watched the animal’s mind ticking over until—he knew that look.
“Don’t do it,” Daniel begged. “Come on, Alice, I got thrown in the hole for you.”
Whether Alice understood a word Daniel was saying made no difference now; Alice had already made his mind up. His tail really had freedom of movement in only one direction and he was happy to take advantage of it. With one almighty flex, Alice used his entire body to thrash his tail up and down, smashing the tunnel roof into oblivion—
Rubble rained down on the drote, followed by boulders so big it would be a miracle if the creature survived.
Crraaaackkkkk!
The fissures crisscrossing the tunnel head began expanding until the entire section began to cave in—
Daniel dropped to his knees, shielding himself with his arms, his mouth filling with dust. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t breathe—
And then the most extraordinary thing happened.
Alice nipped at Daniel’s dugs, pulling the boy under his chin for protection as though he were his calf, pushing the flat of his head up against the wall so that his entire body became one enormous shield while boulders rained down on his back for what felt like an eternity. . . .
When the chaos subsided, Alice strained to get back up on his feet, his grunts and snorts growing ever more desperate with each lunge. But the Hammertail would not quit, even as Daniel gasped for air, until he shook off their temporary tomb, emerging into a far larger tunnel head than had been there before.
Pulling Daniel out with his teeth, Alice gently nudged him until he rolled onto his side, coughing up a lung.
“You had to do it,” Daniel complained, reaching for his water pouch and chugging as much as he could.
He sat up, trying to get his bearings. Even by the glow of the single remaining wall light, the situation became obvious: the tunnel was completely blocked.
“Great going . . . Just great.”
Alice sneezed.
“Bless you.” He craned his neck, looking up to see how far the roof now extended. Quite a way by the look of things, which was good. “At least we won’t be running out of air anytime soon,” he said.
He got to his feet, scratching around for some miraculous alternate route out of there. There was none, but at least—
What the heck was that?
In the dim light, a burnished artifact, silvery and ghostlike, sat embedded in the newly exposed rock face.
Daniel edged closer. He had no memory of the hundreds of artifacts he’d no doubt dredged up from the mines before the wipe, but he’d bet a thousand Passava roots he’d never seen anything like this.
Carefully scraping away the dirt with his bare fingers, he exposed the curved metal edges of a mechanical fossil. He could feel it vibrating, as though it were alive; as though it wanted to leap out of the rock at him—
The Overseers would want to see this.
“Of course!” Daniel exclaimed, fumbling around in his tool belt. The Overseers would gladly dig them out for this!
He pulled out a familiar-looking device, a small, notched cylinder that Blink had first shown him over a week ago, or however long it had been when he’d first taken Alice down into the Snake. What the heck had he called it?
A Regulator.
A tracking device to alert the Overseers to your impending death. Problem was, they already knew where he was, but they didn’t know what he’d found. There had to be a commlink on this thing somewhere—there!
He set it to transmit and, as loud as he could, cried, “Relic!”
9
THE SILVER RELIC
It took what felt like forever to dig him and Alice out.
The Overseer raked a battered finger over the crumbling sediment of the mine wall, exposing the ancient artifact to the damp air. The object appeared to be a silver hexagon, about the size of Daniel’s hand, with a crystalline, almost snowflake-like pattern folded into the metal. Although knowing what it looked like did nothing to explain what it actually was.
The Overseer cocked its head, setting off a brief but shrill click before making a series of deep, animalistic noises. This time there was no translation. If it was speech, none of the grubs had ever learned to speak it, but it certainly elicited a response from other members of the Overseer troop. An exchange of grunts over the commlink sounded more like an argument, until finally the Overseer stretched out an armored hand and tried prying the artifact from the rock.
The silver relic would not budge.
Undeterred, the Overseer pulled out his blast-pike, rammed it into the mine wall, and fired.
Craaaackkkk!
Daniel threw an arm over his face as the surface layer of rock shattered into a thousand pieces.
While the dust settled, the Overseer tried again. Still the artifact would not move.
For his part, Alice was both unimpressed and growing increasingly bored. The Hammertail let out a long, self-satisfied fart.
The Overseer slowly glanced over his shoulder, before turning his icy attention back to Daniel. He aimed his blast-pike at the artifact.
Daniel knew what he had to do. “Fetch another drote!” he called to the grubs gathered at the entrance.
The Overseer walked back to his troop, ready to meet the cohort of Overseers who were marching down the Snake to see the discovery for themselves.
Whatever it was he’d found—it was important.
Daniel worked quickly. Unclipping a new scent marker from his tool belt, he dabbed it in two or three places around the silver relic, just as before. Only, the blast from the Overseer’s weapon had injected so much heat into the rock face, the gloop was already starting to smoke—
Daniel blew on it, waved his hands—whatever he could think of to try to clear the smoke away. The last thing he needed was a repeat of the Alice fiasco all over again—
Daniel froze, the silver relic gleaming in his eyes.
It had moved! It was still moving, vibrating rapidly, dust falling from it like sand in an hourglass.
Maybe he could get it out? Without thinking, Daniel stretched out his hand, only to feel a wave of power surge through his fingers.
“Ouch!”
He jerked his hand back. What was this thing?
With an almighty whompff the silver relic blasted out of the rock face, smashing into Daniel’s chest, knocking him flying—
He hit the ground with a crunch, and lay stunned, wheezing for air.
Maybe somewhere else in the universe, that might ha
ve been enough to prompt a little help, but here in the relic mine the rules were different. The Overseers ignored him, oblivious to what had just happened and concerned more with the quality of a drote one of the grubs had returned with and whether any of the other grubs could locate the bait-box—
Daniel pulled himself up onto one knee, searching in the dirt. The silver relic—where was it? If he could just—
Craaaackkkk!
Daniel glanced back over his shoulder. The mine wall crumbled, sloughing off in sheets like skin peeling off a snake, revealing a massive doorway sinking down into the earth and a hidden chamber cloaked in shadow beyond its threshold.
10
BEYOND THE THRESHOLD
The entire troop of Overseers lit up their blast-pikes in a defensive crackle of electricity—but nothing emerged from the chamber except for a cool, damp breeze. As grubs from all over the Workings moved closer to see the discovery for themselves, one of the Overseers declared, “Sixteen thirty-three, go check it out.”
With absurd pride in his voice, Pinch Servilles said, “Yes, sir,” and, grabbing the F-light from his belt, launched an orb and headed into the chamber.
Alice let out a vicious growl as he passed by.
“You tell him, Alice,” Blink remarked from the shadow of the Overseers.
Daniel held out his hand, eager for help getting up, but Pinch just ignored him on his way past. “You’d better find that relic, Coldstar, or you’ll pay for it.”
“What a dootbag,” Blink whispered under his breath.
“Careful, Darkada,” Pinch taunted, standing at the threshold to the darkness. “Wouldn’t want you to take another beating.”
Pinch peered into the darkness, but the chamber was so vast that the F-light’s feeble beam couldn’t penetrate very far. There were shapes. Rows and rows of them, but it was impossible to know what they were exactly at this distance.
Daniel gingerly tried pulling himself up. He didn’t just hurt, he had stars in his eyes, and when he tried to stand his ribs bristled with pain. He grunted, clutching his chest to find—
Cold, hard metal pulsing under his fingers.
