by Jett Lang
As he restarted his descent, Queen crouched and tested the stability of the initial rung. She knew it was bolted, but she gave it a harder press with her boot before shifting around. She attached the flashlight to the right side of her armor. Her fingers gripped the cold metal rung, and poisonous butterflies flittered around in her stomach. Pressurized dread latched onto her skull, her body, squeezed all the conditioning out of her system. The sound of her own fettered breathing was punctuated by a metallic clang as she took a step down for every one of Jack’s.
“There you go,” Jack said from beneath her. “Nice and easy, Queen. We got plenty of time.”
“Thought you said–” She sucked in air. “–we’re running late.”
“We’ll be runnin’ especially late if you take a fall,” he reasoned with envious calm. Just as she refused to stop, so did Jack, his hands free of the rungs whenever her boots pressed down upon them.
The circle of LED light over dull grey concrete and steel was her focal point, her legs assuming the task of guiding her as the light-circle slid downward another notch, then another. Jack’s voice every half dozen paces, echoing the same encouragement, word for word.
“There you go. There you go. There you go.”
Word for word. Step by step. Down.
※
It took them fifteen minutes to reach the end of the ladder, or so Jack informed her after consulting his armor’s built-in wristwatch.
“Making good time,” he said, but she hardly registered his words. Her concentration was on the light that seemed a greater companion than the man whose back it shined on.
Having rummaged through his duffel bag, Jack lit the way with another torso-mounted LED, powered so low that it provided less than five feet of visibility. Much to Queen’s unease, the horizontal tunnel was shorter than her by several heads. Both she and Jack were forced to creep hunchbacked through an abandoned system of pipework, electrical boxes, and generators, all of it silent and inactive. There was barely room for them to pass between the inert infrastructures.
Jack paused at a fork in the tunnel. She passed her light over a dust-caked generator to her left. It was curved and molded against the chalky concrete wall. Someone had carved the words ‘Never free. Never safe’ into the side paneling.
“That bodes well,” she said, but her teammate didn’t seem to hear her.
“This way.” He rounded a corner without looking back.
She gave the words one last glance before she headed toward him. Around the corner, and–
Nothing.
“Jack?”
She took a step into the dust-laden blackness. He didn’t respond. When she tried once more, she found herself unable to get the words out properly. She grasped for anything nearby, found the edge of what felt like a keycode panel or breaker box. The ends of her fingers stabbed against it as she leaned on the wall and attempted to control her breathing. Each inhale summoned swirls of dust. She’d always known her internal filtration system would pay for itself.
When the panic subsided, she lifted her head and released her grip on the dirtied metal panel. Her LED cast into the shadows; still no indication of where Jack might have gone, or why so quickly. She had been distracted by the words on the side panel for only a few seconds. He would have said something if she was lagging behind.
“Jack,” she whispered. She crept tentatively along, withdrew her firearm from its holster. “I’d appreciate it if you’d stop fucking around now.”
No other sound filled the decaying air. No reply from Jack or anyone else that might have been lurking in the tunnel with her. She must have missed a side passage; her panic was making her amateurish. She needed to double back.
A gasp for breath that wasn’t hers. An inhuman sort of breathing, filled with wet clicks, a purr. She turned on her heel and gripped the Winnow in both hands as she walked the tunnel. The breathing followed. She raised and leveled her weapon, and earned a hungry inhalation from somewhere in front of her.
She took one step back, another, listened as the thing ahead of her matched her steps precisely. It was keeping well beyond her light. Sensitive to it, maybe. She had heard of arena owners dumping rejected animals into unused sewer systems or subterranean installations. Anyplace away from cities, towns, or tourist locations. No sign of glimmering eyes or the tooth-shine of an open maw.
Alone with some monstrous tunnel-lurker. What a lucky woman.
The thing made a noise that was a feline growl and insect chitter all at once. Cold flush over her skin. She continued backing up, one careful step after the next. She unzipped a packet on her belt and fished out a small, emergency flashlight. Clicked it on. She turned her head to follow the narrow beam as it lit the darkness to her left. She had to spot that side passage, and this was her best shot. The creature remained in hiding, out of sight.
Shooting blindly wouldn’t help so close to her objective. There had been no mention of guardsmen in the basement, but there hadn’t been a mention of tunnel beasts, either. A cave-in would help tremendously; whatever didn’t crush the monster might crush her, and she’d be done with this.
Fat chance. The maintenance tunnel, even in its disused state, appeared to be of sturdy foundation. No cracks in the concrete, no signs of decay in anything but the electronics.
So she would keep her fingers curled around the trigger, ready to end whatever was stalking through the shadows and waiting for either of her two flashlights to wink out. Waiting for her equipment to fail, for her to fail. She’d done plenty of that so far, and some castoff mutant wasn’t going to bring her to that juncture again.
She grimaced at her own weakness. Jack, the ladder, the tunnels. No. She couldn’t let anything cripple her like that again.
She passed an offshoot of the tunnel she’d missed after she had lost track of Jack. It was the only branch she had spotted since turning the corner; he must have taken it. She backtracked into that passageway, watching behind her as the emergency flashlight lit a path of more junked electronics and dead power nodes. The chitter-growl continued ahead of her.
“Jack,” she hissed. A clicking purr replied. In the cone of light, nothing except the neat wreckage of an abandoned project. She could feel the creature there, just past the border of light and dark. The dream of an engineer starved for a crowd-pleaser. An exiled dream, a nightmare – one that she hoped she could kill with ease if it simply came into view.
The creature was clever, despite its abandonment and whatever life it had had in the tunnels. It wanted her to be frightened. It wanted her to trip up. She’d relied on Jack too much since the start, was stumbling around in the dark like a greenhorn out on her first assignment.
She fought to recover her reason. Wayne had undoubtedly requested the beast be brought here. That made the most sense. No one to bother it. In lieu of unlucky thieves or spies – or assassins – though, someone had to feed it. No signs of blood or bone on her way down, which meant its lair, if it had made one, lay deeper inside. Closer to her than she wanted to think about. She had to get her head on straight, or she’d end up as the freakish thing’s snack. Or things’. The thought made her shudder. She directed her extra flashlight behind her. The dim cone showed her concrete and electronics and little else.
The passageway was shortening. She would have to crawl soon. Crawl in all this blackness. Her heart pounded in her chest, beating and beating. She realized she’d stopped, and was just standing there. Flashlights directed toward opposite ends of the tunnel. Dim light, chitter-growl, chitter-growl, and no trace of Jack. She bit her lip. He’d left her. He’d seen her come unhinged back at the camp, and he’d gone. Smart move. She didn’t blame him.
The thing had stopped moving when she did. It lowered its hungry voice until there was silence, and that was somehow worse. Drumming in her chest, in her head. The dusty walls and ceiling slid nearer on hidden tracks. The space wanted to move. The space wanted to crush her.
A voice called out to her in the dark beyond her flashlights. She
swiveled her head from one to the other. The sound repeated. Coming from ahead, not from the crawlway behind.
“Jack?”
A muffled noise that might have been a reply in the affirmative. She could hear footsteps coming around the bend she had taken maybe a few minutes prior. The footfalls caught the attention of the creature too, and its chitter-growl turned on the new threat. On the potential prey.
A triple-burst of molten orange from the end of the passage. Jack’s shadow spread and vanished an instant before a hot spray of melted gore splattered across Queen’s chest armor. Immediately the material began to pop and sizzle. The creature hit the ground with a gentle thud somewhere close to her. She was working frantically to remove the caustic body armor from her torso. The butler had latched it far too tightly, and she could feel that foreign blood melting deeper, the layers of flak and gel slowing the flow no better than a silken gown. Smell of burning plastic and the sound of searing blood. Too much like her dream. Her faceless mother and melting Little Self threatened to snatch her into the dark.
Don’t you dare cry out. Don’t you dare ask him for help.
She unsheathed the knife on the right side of her belt and cut out of the bindings in four rapid slices, yanked up the worthless armor and tossed it onto the creature’s corpse. She patted herself, making sure none of the blood had found its way to her undershirt or arms. She was fine. It hadn’t gotten on her. She repeated that to herself over and over again under her breath.
“Shit, that thing almost had your number,” Jack said, closer than she’d expected.
The beam from his flashlight fell onto the creature’s mandibles. It looked like someone had bred a bobcat with an enormous spider. Furry, slender, many-eyed. About as big as her, but thinner. Small wisps of steam arose from the bubbling blood around its mouth. Jack nudged the tip of his boot against the top of its bristly head, stepped over it when it didn’t show signs of life.
“Sorry, Queen. I thought you were right behind me.” He brought the light up too close to her eyes.
She squinted. He lowered the light so that it fell upon the emergency flashlight she had dropped getting the chest armor off. Jack bent and picked it up. Her Winnow, too.
“Should have stayed closer,” he said as he handed them to her.
Yeah, you should have. She checked her sidearm. A bit of dust. Undamaged. She holstered it. “Let’s just go.”
“We’re almost there. Wish they’d packed us an extra set of armor.”
“These bags are heavy enough. Can you take point?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Jack took the lead. The truth was that she was glad to be out of the armor, even if it meant she was exposed. She could breathe again, and the walls weren’t quite so close. She stepped over the creature’s body, and left.
※
The end of the maintenance tunnel was sealed shut. Queen guessed it had been a double-door entrance at one time, but now it was closed by a steel plate as wide as the tunnel itself. At least the ceiling was higher on this final stretch, so they had room to work. As she rummaged through her pack, she wondered why the rest of the passage had been so compact. A robotic workforce? That was as likely an answer as any. The mechanics that had been in Chamber’s desert hangar were about the right height for this place. Or that bartender that almost killed me.
Jack inspected the plate. Reinforced, he suspected, and bolted to the concrete. The explosive charges they had packed would be too dangerous in such a close space, and besides, they made too much noise. Queen pulled a canister of highly corrosive and certainly illegal acid out of her bag. It was supposed to melt through almost any metal, but it was a small can, and Five-Nine had warned them it could take time to work. It’d tried to tell her about separate chemicals coming together in the can after the cap was released, how she had to shake it just so. She didn’t care how it worked, as long as it did.
Jack fished out his own spray-can of acid. The blue plastic cap gleamed with off-the-shelf newness. He shook it, and the liquid contents sloshed and fizzled within. Once Queen had finished doing the same with hers, Jack went to one knee and started spraying out half an oval. He rose up steadily as Queen lowered herself, until her spray ran dry almost exactly where his had begun. Acrid fumes in her nose, even with her filtration on. The metal was already sizzling in the wake of their rudimentary oval. They couldn’t let any part of their bodies touch the acid, especially this soon after using it, so an oval made the most sense.
They stood back several paces. Jack whistled, rocked back and forth on his heels. “That’s got some kick to it. No wonder it ain’t sold over the counter.”
She tossed her can into a corner, heard it clatter on the concrete floor. The can would destroy itself with a reserve of acid imbedded between the plastic housing. Wouldn’t leave a single trace. Sensible.
“And now we wait.”
“How long d’ya think it’ll take?” Jack said with a childish wonderment that caught her off guard. He was watching as closely as safety allowed, their blue-white flashlights trained on the melting steel.
“Ten minutes, or thereabouts. We can make up the time when we’re inside.” She gestured to the spray-can still in his hand. “Get rid of that.”
He raised it up to his ear, listened to it like a seashell, like some ocean voice was going to give him all the answers. As if he’d hear anything but the sizzling of chemicals that could melt his flesh in a second or less. She rolled her eyes. He was just a big kid under it all.
“Do you want to melt part of your face off?”
Jack dropped the can at his feet and kicked it into a corner, leaving the answers and his fascination to liquefy together. He cast his light into the dark corners and edges of the tunnel, checking, she assumed, for surprises. After finding nothing but cobwebs under one of the benches – which were set into rectangular alcoves – he unslung his duffel and laid it beside him on the smooth slab. Left no space for her. She took the bench opposite him, and weariness settled upon her the moment she sat down.
Traveling to routine executions wasn’t this tiring. No, the task before them was beyond routine. It had the potential to upset the balance of things dramatically. Just as Jack had warned Syntheia, killing Wayne would create a power struggle that could cause more harm than good, and the worst affected would be the working men and women the heiress so detested. The state of the world was a fragile, fickle thing. That Syntheia had spared Jack, despite the rudeness which he had shown, was a testament, she believed, to the truth of his caution.
Queen watched him as he sat across from her, her flashlight aimed at his chest by accident rather than the purpose of observance. He stared with glossy eyes at a canteen of water he held in his left hand as he took frequent but conservative drags. His neck and jaw bore shining black stubble that threatened to venture into the survivalist-beard territory. He sagged into the temporary comfort of the alcove. His broad shoulders, usually so even, were slumped. This was the man when he was not in control, bereft of career and free will. The purpose of his existence was in flux.
In all the uncertainty, there was one thing she knew: He was as tired as her. Maybe tired of her.
He took the longest drag from his canteen yet, tilted back to expose the outline of his windpipe. Rogue water droplets coursed downward, over the olive skin and thickening facial hair. He wiped there with the back of his hand. As he screwed the cap back onto his canteen, she noted how his trigger finger – the one she had broken disarming him of his Winnow in the forest – was slightly untrue. Inadequate doctoring. The fault of the slavers or Syntheia’s people, she wasn’t sure.
“Does it still hurt?”
“What?” he sounded surprised, like he hadn’t expected her to speak.
“Your hand.” She nodded at it, even if he couldn’t see in the tunnel gloom.
He looked at her with those dark, lustrous eyes that seemed to see her less and less with every new glance. He blinked, then went back to his canteen. Took a long d
rag. Said nothing. The acid was a ghostly exhalation in the silence, incessantly sighing.
“Never mind.”
She rearranged the articles of gear in her duffel, the act of organization somehow quelling her inner turmoil. She imagined it was something of a disappointment, sacrificing your career for someone who couldn’t be less grateful. Their relationship had never been assured. She could have killed him, instead of leaving him in the forest. If they hadn’t had the same contact in Grey Wolf Point, they might never have seen each other again.
You choose for yourself, or someone forces your hand.
Had her outburst forced his hand? Her inability to tackle the tunnel creature, or even make it down the ladder without prompting? She closed her bag with a loud zip and thought of the life she’d left behind. A four-room, spartan dwelling where all her nice things were aligned in clutter-less distribution. How everything had been, until recently. Nice things, no clutter. She glanced from her bag to Jack. Clutter.
“You know,” Jack said. “It’s not too late to do the right thing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wayne. We could give the game away, stop the other team. Hell, he might even offer us a job if we get to him soon enough and prove what we can do.”
Queen laughed. “Oh, because he’ll have forgotten all about Phillip’s aerial acrobatics and he’ll definitely overlook the fact that his darling daughter employed us to murder him.”
His look hardened. “The mess this’ll cause is bigger than the paycheck you’ll get. Don’t you care?”
“I care about getting out of here alive and securing a future.”
“And as long your future is secured, fuck everyone else, right, sister?”
“My future, your future. No one else’s.”
Queen got to her feet and adjusted a dial on her chest-mounted flashlight, brought the intensity to maximum on the burning oval on the steel plate.
“What keeps it meltin’ through instead of down?” Jack said. To himself, she suspected, but she answered him anyway.
“The robot said it’s a ‘liquid swarm of microscopic, corrosive-resistant bots, antithetical to medical gelatin.’ It’s designed to attack in the direction it’s applied.”
