"There, there."
Liam shuddered, breath hitching. Was that good?
Alim resigned himself to putting in a little more effort, scooping his arms under Liam's torso to see if he could lift him into sitting upright. It was easier than Alim expected, though Liam was stiff to his touch and wouldn't open his eyes. Adjusting them both to lean back against the cave wall behind them, he kept one arm around Liam and placed his other hand on Liam's chest, measuring his breaths.
One-one. One. Half-one. One-one-one.
Completely arrhythmic. "Breathe in through your nostrils." Liam shuddered again, but Alim repeated himself until Liam obeyed. "Hold it. Now, let it out—slowly." Liam's body still racked with tiny, rapid convulsions, but he was able to do as Alim instructed. They repeated this four times before Alim felt the tension begin to leave Liam. His body began to curl into Alim—not in convulsion but seeking comfort—and he turned his head to nuzzle against Alim's neck.
Alim felt as though he had absorbed Liam's tension. As much as he welcomed the heat of another human's body in his current circumstances, he was somewhat repulsed by his most hated enemy's desperate and feeble grasps for support in his suffering. At the same time, that instinct switch was still turned on, and he could not bring himself to push Liam away. Especially considering that all three of them would need each other to escape the mess Jack had dropped them in.
Liam's eyes were still clenched tight, and soaking dark blond curls stuck to his forehead and dripping water onto his eyelids. When Alim reached to brush his hair aside, Liam flinched at the touch, but he took in a deep breath without prompting that was almost unwavering.
"Better?"
Liam swallowed, light shifting off the sheen of seawater clinging to his throat. "Yes, just… just give me a moment more." His breath was hot against Alim's neck, and Alim tried to cling to the truth that Liam was his enemy, though he couldn't explain his own need to preserve their animosity given the circumstances. To distract himself from Liam's vulnerable closeness, he glanced toward Sylvestra.
She sat slumped about a yard away, her clothes lying in a heap next to her. She was still shaking, but donning the wet clothes wouldn't help her any with that. She just stared out at the water, at the ancient vessel bobbing out there and emitting a listless glow. Beyond it, the glow illuminated only more stone sparkling from moisture and salt. Pretty, but no good in getting them back to safety.
"Do you suppose we're back on the mainland?" Alim asked. "Or are we still under the same island?" It didn't seem possible, given the underwater tunnel they had traveled. He also wondered at the likelihood that they had managed to come up in an air pocket, rather than hit solid stone above them. There must have been many caverns like this, perhaps across several islands, linked by submarine tunnels. If the demons had once occupied the coastal islands, it was entirely possible that these caves were not at all naturally occurring.
He wondered again about the surviving demon, the orange one whose fiber he still wore around his wrist. Sylvestra stood and interrupted his thoughts.
"Either way, we need to get back to the surface. We've outsmarted the water, and now we need to best the earth." She slipped on her boots and picked her clothes up but only held them in a tangled cluster in one fist. Were the situation not so dire, Alim might have marveled at the way the water clinging to her skin glistened at the top of her breasts, or the manner in which her soaking bloomers plastered to the curves of her hips.
Well, maybe the situation wasn't too dire to ignore it.
If she caught his staring, she didn't remark on it. Instead, she gestured at Liam. "Get him up. We have to see if there are any paths in this cave that leads to open sky."
"We can't give him a few more minutes?" Alim asked, not entirely opposed to a respite for himself, either, but Liam was already struggling to push himself up.
"I'm fine. Nothing to be done for the smell of saltwater, but… It's passed. I will be fine." His legs wobbled a bit with his reassurances, but he was able to stand on his own, facing Sylvestra with a stony look of determination. The expression softened when she met his gaze. "I owe you my thanks. You—"
"Little good that does me if we're trapped down here." She turned to Alim, slapping him in the head with her wet bundle of clothes. "Get up. We're not going to escape Professor Puberty's deathtrap for us if we wait around here to get hypothermia."
Alim struggled to his feet, his legs sore from sitting on the stone ledge and rubbery from the swim before. No longer absorbing heat from Liam, the wet chill from his clothes left him feeling too drained to move, even as a desperate voice in his head begged him to find someplace warmer. The only feasible direction he could see for them to go, however, was to follow the stone ledge deeper into the cavern.
"We don't have much choice," Sylvestra said, as though reading his thoughts and primal instincts. It was spoken without much sympathy, as though her companions were an enormous burden on her.
"Let's not further delay," Liam said, and strode past her to walk further into the cave, probably just as eager to get out of sight of the underground lake as anything else.
*~*~*
The ledge led them into a tunnel, which included a number of weather-worn ridges that suspiciously resembled steps. Intellectual interest might have piqued at the possibility that demons had designed these tunnels, but Alim was in agony from the climb. His damp shoes made every step precarious, his legs and ass ached and cramped, and soon they were too far from the abandoned pod to properly see anything. He was able to roll up his sleeve to expose the demonweave bracelet with its delicate glow, but it wasn't enough light to avoid running his toes into stone outcrops every three steps.
He didn't know how long they followed the tunnel before Liam halted up front. "It branches."
"Oh, hell." Sylvestra pushed her way past him, examining their options with the little light available to them. "Well, if one goes further up, the other probably goes further down. Meaning if we make the wrong choice…"
Liam shook his head and pointed ahead of them. "No, worse than that." Alim stepped closer to help illuminate what Sylvestra apparently couldn't see. The tunnel continued straight ahead, but there were three distinct openings leading elsewhere—two along the left wall, and one along the right. There were no discernible markers to help guess where any direction might lead them, assuming none were dead ends.
They could only guess. And they were all exhausted, freezing, and without food or fresh water. That didn't allot them much time to waste on backtracking.
"I think we should continue forward," Sylvestra said, her conviction limp.
"I agree," Alim said.
"Why?" Liam asked. "We could at least go a few yards into the others to see if they slope upward. We shouldn't discount them."
Alim crossed his arms over his chest. "This main pathway is clearly not a work of natural geological design. Someone built it, and these off-branching tunnels are smaller. They must have been additions, or perhaps natural erosions. Either way, this path goes somewhere important."
"'Important' to whoever built it does not necessarily mean that it goes above ground."
He had a point, but Sylvestra stepped in to Alim's defense. "If the branching tunnels are works of nature, they might not go anywhere. We have to try something, instead of standing here bickering until we die."
Liam glared at her, then at Alim, before gesturing down the tunnel.
They continued forward down the main way. Other branches appeared and were ignored. Some of the openings were too small for Liam to fit through without ducking, and one was clearly caved in. Their current course was unimpeded, but at a certain point it stopped sloping upward, and at times Alim even wondered if the path was beginning to decline. Still, they continued in bitter silence.
Again, Alim did not know how long they walked before he noticed Sylvestra shaking next to him. Well, he had noticed her shaking before, but now her teeth were clacking, and it was annoying. Desperate himself for some r
elief from the cold, he held out an arm to her, offering a half-embrace as they walked. She sneered at the suggestion.
"My skin is only just now starting to dry. Your damp sleeves won't do me any good."
Alim retracted his arm. "Well. Pardon me for being gentlemanly." He didn't see Liam reach toward him from the other side, and the press of cold cloth as Liam pulled him in for his own embrace shocked a yelp out of him. He wouldn't have minded hurting Liam's feelings by telling him that he would rather freeze himself into an ice sculpture than touch him, but Alim didn't believe that sentiment at the moment. The wet clothes put a bit of a detriment on it, but warmth from Liam's arms and side—both absurdly large in their musculature, given that Liam was a scholar—did cut away at Alim's discomfort. His physical discomfort, at least.
They continued, and soon the tunnel walls around them began to expand. The ceiling had been a close fit for Liam for most of the walk, but now it rose high enough that he could not have reached it with an outstretched arm. The space between the walls widened, as well. At first wide enough to fit the three of them side-by-side, soon it was wide enough for four, and then six. Eventually, they followed the reverse-funnel into a cavern so expansive that the glow from the bracelet no longer reached the walls or ceiling.
Panic washed over Alim in sickening wave, and he was abruptly sympathetic to Liam's anxiety condition as they were encased by endless shadow. Sylvestra seemed no more thrilled about their current surroundings, her shoulders sagging as she stared out at the expansive blackness.
"No…"
They could continue stumbling about in the eternal dark, hoping the cavern floor didn't drop out into some bottomless pit at any point. And what other dangers might be down there? Tar? Toxic fumes? Poisonous insects? Another underground lake with more frigid sea water? It almost didn't matter. Without even walls to follow, they would never find a path to the surface.
Of course, no one said any of these possibilities out loud. They were all scholars, after all; each was intelligent enough to deduce the truth on their own.
They would die down there.
Sylvestra dug her fingers into her hair, grasping at tangled locks plastered together with damp sea salt. "Oh, hell. Shit fucking damn it."
Liam released Alim and took a step toward her. "I know how this must sound coming from me, but now is not the time to panic."
She ignored him, kneeling into a squat at she kept tugging at her hair. "I should never have agreed to this project. I didn't want to. But how would it have looked if I had said no? They would have thought me…"
"Belligerent," Alim finished for her. Maybe talking her through her ranting would calm her down. Or perhaps Alim just wanted an opportunity to get in a bit of his own before his body failed in that miserable pit. "That was my fear, if I had turned down the offer."
Sylvestra glanced over her shoulder at him, but instead of solidarity in her hazel eyes, there was fury. "Yes. And because I got trapped into playing politics again, I am now going to die in this cave with the two most asinine people I have ever had the misfortune of meeting. Jack aside, of course."
Alim bristled, his fingers curling subconsciously into fists. "Me? What have I ever done?"
She stood and whirled on him, as though the anger were the only thing keeping her on her feet. "You embarrassed our entire department with your little 'side business', and you've always openly resented me for taking my job, which I was offered by the board after fair consideration. I earned my position, but all of your pouting about how I 'stole' it from you undermined my authority even after your reputation was destroyed. Even the lowliest lab attendant was convinced I paid or slept my way to my job and ignored half of what I said or achieved because of that. And in spite of that, our department still flourished under my leadership, so bite my ass."
Apparently she had been going easy on him during their talk on the docks. He thought he might have preferred being punched in the throat. "I'm not responsible for your team disrespecting you. That's a statement on your ability to lead them. I was only blowing off steam—I have a right to be disappointed that I didn't get the job, don't I?"
"Both of you, stop it!" Liam stepped between them, regaining his usual hulking aura of intimidation. Not that it mattered—no fear could override Alim's anxiety toward that endless darkness curtained all around them. "You can have this brawl at the nearest pub once we've found a way out."
Sylvestra only turned her rage on him. "You know, for all of Alim's slacking and self-entitlement, at least his pathetic presence is a buffer against you."
Liam met her glare. "Me? You have an issue with me?" He asked as if he genuinely didn't know, and Alim's confusion at his response watered down his own anger.
Sylvestra's hands clutched the sides of her bloomers, the fabric crunching as a thin layer of dried sea salt cracked under her grip. "When we found that dead demon," she said, her voice quiet but smoldering like embers, "I was nearly sick to my stomach at the thought of bringing it back. Studying and recording some spectacular finding or another only for you to walk off with it and slap your own name on it. Again!" The last word, shouted, echoed half a dozen times across the unseen walls around them.
Liam only frowned. "What are you insinuating?"
"Don't play innocent. You stole my research on the silk sacs—the discovery of individualized genetic sequences within demonweave. The groundwork for his silly bracelet experiment—" She jabbed a finger in Alim's direction, and he flinched. "—and the foundational theory that leads us to believe that this orange demon might still be alive. Those were my findings, and you stole my work before I could publish it, wrote your own damn paper—or copied my notes and slapped some sentences around them, more like—and became the star researcher of the entire Pinnacle University. I did all of the work—all of it—and you got the accolades. You got the respect, the grants, the conferences. Did you even know half of what you were saying in any of those keynote speeches you gave?"
The muscles in Liam's neck flexed as his jaw clenched. "I know that topic front and back. I could have recited those presentations in my sleep."
"Well," Sylvestra said with a sick sweetness coating her acerbic tone, "at least you're a thorough plagiarist."
"Sylvestra, we're in a dire situation. This isn't helping."
"So you don't deny it?"
Alim shifted where he stood, his feet starting to sting from walking so long on solid stone. What a miserable way to die. He had always thought the worst way to die would be incineration, but at least a fire would have been a bit more exciting. Fire was pretty, at least, whereas both Liam and Sylvestra were looking bedraggled and unattractive at this point.
He jolted out of his wandering thoughts when he noticed Liam staring directly at him, his gray eyes as harsh as the stone floor. "What?" Alim asked. Sylvestra turned to look at Alim, too, seeming confused by Liam's sudden focus on him before realization dawned on her expression.
"Are you… not going to say anything?" she asked.
Alim's stomach sunk.
Sylvestra had just openly accused Liam of his greatest academic crime, and Alim had not thought to express an iota of surprise at the revelation.
Alim squinted at Liam and growled, "You… How dare you?"
Too late. "You knew?" Sylvestra asked, her voice pitching and echoing all around again.
"What was I supposed to do, Sylvestra? Stir the pot? At Pinnacle? I imagine you didn't say anything for much the same reason. I didn't find out until after Liam destroyed me, anyway. If I had said anything, everyone would have thought it was just a desperate lie to get back at him, and you would have looked foolish by association. As you've already passionately observed, I've caused you enough trouble in that regard as it is."
Her lips quivered with fury as he could see her trying to piece together her next insults or accusations, but Liam cut in before she could. "We've all had long enough careers to provide plenty of opportunity to make mistakes," he said. "I'm sure you've done things that
you're not proud of, Mistress Geruz. I do wonder, after all, where you obtained those demon cadavers for your original research."
Sylvestra's eyes widened as her anger tapered off, and Alim took advantage of her shock to make a bid for the moral high-ground, saying, "Indeed, Mistress Geruz. Demon bodies aren't just lying around for the taking every day. So how did you get your hands on an entire demon for your silk sac research, when my scavengers could only dig up a fistful of fibers for my project?" He paused, and questions of ethics vanished entirely from his head. "Wait—Farrah!"
Any guilt or anger lingering in Sylvestra or Liam's expressions washed away, too. Both rushed in closer to Alim as he held up his wrist. "What? Did you get it to do something?" Sylvestra asked. The orange glow illuminated the desperate hope in both their faces.
"Well, no. But maybe I could. Demonweave is more potent when it comes into contact with strong human emotion."
"Yes, for magic," Liam said. "But you're no mage."
"Listen, that research about mental links between siblings is not… entirely baseless." Just mostly. But he had little to lose from trying. Holding out his arm and wrapping his free hand around the bracelet, he focused on the faint staticky sensation that it radiated.
He thought about his sister, sardonic and forgiving and the one person he trusted at Pinnacle. He thought about her innate curiosity and the thoughtful pauses she always inserted into her speech and how she worked so hard, achieved so much, did everything right that Alim had ever done wrong. Alim allowed himself to be taken over by desperation and love and annoyance and a cold fear that he would never see her again. The tangling emotions seeped into his bones and filled his lungs with an impulse to scream, but he focused his feelings on the bracelet and Farrah.
Are you there? Can you hear me?
Alim squeezed his eyelids shut, crushed with a heavy feeling of impotence at his own voice echoing in his head, unheard by anyone but himself.
"Farrah? Farrah, are you there? Please, please hear me, Farrah. We need help!"
A Study of Fiber and Demons Page 7
