“If it was at all because of me,” I said, “I want to say I’m sorry for that last night. It was kind of... impulsive. It didn’t really mean... I don’t know. I was just a dumb kid, you know?”
The silence that followed my fumbled words made me wince. I shouldn’t have brought this up. Bad timing.
“What are you talking about?” Temi finally asked.
Now I was the one who didn’t speak for a moment. She couldn’t possibly not know what I was talking about, could she? “That last night we hung out before you left, and we went walking out to the canyon in the moonlight.”
“Yea...”
“Well, I kissed you, right?” I said in a rush. “That’s what I’m talking about. I thought it might have offended you or made you think I was nuts and not want to talk to me again because you were afraid I’d... I mean, I wouldn’t. It was like I said, an impulse. I, uhm, date guys now.” We could have been crawling through a volcano tube full of molten lava and my cheeks wouldn’t have been any hotter. I resolved to stop talking before I made myself more uncomfortable, if that was possible.
“Oh,” Temi said, the single syllable doing nothing to relieve the awkwardness cloaking me.
I told myself not to say anything else. I’d uttered what I’d needed to. Time to drop it and pay attention to what we were doing. The sound of trickling water had grown louder. I hoped that meant we’d reach our destination soon, whatever that destination might be.
“I’m not sure how to say this in a way that won’t be insulting,” Temi said, “but...”
I cringed, certain the answer would slay me.
“I don’t remember that,” Temi finished.
For the first time, I stopped and turned to face her. “You don’t remember it?”
Temi spread a hand. “I mean, I guess I do, but I didn’t really think anything of it at the time, and I’d forgotten about it until now. Mainly what I remember from that night was going over and over in my head whether to run away from home. I appreciate that you were there... but I was so focused on myself that I don’t remember anything you said. Or much of what you did, I guess.”
I managed to wait until my back was to her again to roll my eyes. All this time, I’d wondered if I’d irrevocably offended her, and she didn’t remember it. Unbelievable. I continued down the tunnel. Well, as clear as the air was now, I ought to be able to shoot straight bull’s-eyes with my bow.
“I’m sorry I never wrote,” Temi said. “I meant to, but I was really busy and then it seemed like it’d been so long that I thought... I don’t know. I thought you’d think the way my parents did. That I was wasting my life smacking a little ball around a court. Yaiyai made a point of writing and telling me your SAT scores when you took them and that you were on your way to college. I had the distinct impression she wished you were her adopted granddaughter.”
“Please, you must have been smoking something out there in Florida if you think my SAT scores impressed anyone. It’s not like Harvard was knocking on my door, eager to offer me a scholarship.”
“Hey, they were good. If you didn’t get scholarships, it’s because you were more interested in roaming the desert, poking your nose into old caves and pueblo ruins, than doing extracurricular activities at school to impress admissions officers.”
Huh, I hadn’t realized she’d followed my school career at all, or that her family had. By then she’d been winning junior tennis tournaments all over the world; my accomplishments had been nothing in comparison.
“So,” I said, “basically we haven’t talked in nine years because we were worried about what the other person was thinking about us?”
“Apparently,” Temi said, a smile in her voice.
A whisper of damp air brushed my cheeks. It seemed like a good time to focus on what we were doing.
“I think we’re getting close,” I said. “Close to what, I couldn’t tell you.”
My flashlight had been playing along the same monotonous gray stone, but it glinted against something bright, and I paused. A golden vein streaked along the ceiling. I withdrew my utility tool, pulled open one of the knives, and scraped at it. Flakes of the soft ore fell away.
“Huh.”
“That’s unexpected,” Temi said.
“And apparently not what our guys are looking for, because they didn’t pause to dig any out.”
“Are we going to pause to dig any out?”
“I suppose we could scrape away few flakes. Technically, you’re not supposed to do anything more than recreational gold panning and metal detecting in parks. I’d say this qualifies as a more in-depth excavation, though, since we didn’t dig the tunnel, the interpretation could be a little fuzzy.”
“Who would know?” Temi sounded amused.
“I would, I guess, and knowing my luck, I’d get caught. I already have enough people ragging on me for going rogue. No need to truly do anything illegal.”
“Ah.” Temi ran a finger along the vein. Maybe she was less worried about her reputation.
She followed after me when I trundled off again though. We could always come back later.
The breeze grew more noticeable as we continued, and the next time the view changed, it was because the beam from my light disappeared into darkness. Our tunnel ended, the walls disappearing as it opened into a chamber. I crawled to the edge and probed the blackness with my flashlight. It shone onto water some twenty feet below us, water filled with jagged stalagmites that would feel none-too-comfortable to fall on. An underground lake stretched for as far as my light could reach. In places, thick stone columns rose out of the water, reaching to an arched ceiling ten feet above our ledge. Other chambers and tunnels waited, their openings too dark and distant for my light to pierce. This cave was much larger than I’d expected from the blob on Simon’s screen.
“I guess it was a mistake not to bring the kayaks,” Temi observed.
“Too bad they weren’t the folding kind.”
Aside from the tunnel, I didn’t see any signs that people had passed this way. In fact, the flashlight chanced across more veins that sparkled in the distance. That assured me more than anything else that people had never been down here. Amazing. As a girl, I’d dreamed of discovering undiscovered places; I hadn’t expected it to happen in Prescott, Arizona.
Movement at the edge of my vision made me jerk my flashlight in that direction. Something landed in the water with a splash. Something big.
“What the—”
A large, dark head popped up in the water. My heart sank. The familiar oily black form of the predator looked in our direction. For a long moment, it stared at us, and in that moment, I told myself three or four times that it couldn’t fit into our tunnel and that we were safe as long as we remained where we were. But the creature didn’t head toward us; when it started swimming, it veered in the opposite direction, toward those tunnels at the back of the lake. I lifted the flashlight toward the ceiling. There was a dark hole in the stone up there with water dribbling from one side. The predator must have found some other entrance to the cave system and come out of that opening. The drips made me wonder if it linked to the lake somehow. Maybe there was an entrance nobody knew about underwater up there. However the creature had arrived, its presence didn’t reassure me, not at all.
“There’s no way we can warn Jakatra and Eleriss, is there?” Temi asked.
I’d been more concerned about warning Simon. “No, if they have a phone they stole from Elizabeth and Maude Somersett along with the Harleys, I don’t know their number. I doubt any of us has reception down here anyway.” I pointed behind us. “Let’s find Simon.” And preferably another way down. I didn’t fancy jumping onto those stalagmites. Although, with the creature trolling the cave, maybe we needn’t jump down at all. If it wasn’t guarding the entrance anymore, it ought to be an excellent time for us to head back to the surface and escape while we could.
We didn’t have to go far to find Simon. He was on his way to find us. Before we reached t
he intersection, he popped into view ahead and waved enthusiastically.
“I found the way into the cave,” he said.
“We found the monster,” I said.
His waving hand drooped. “Down here?”
“It found another way in. As much as I’d like to explore this place and as much as I’d like to see that creature out of commission, I don’t think we’re capable of taking it on, and right now, it’s between us and the others, so we can’t count on them and that sword for protection.”
Simon’s shoulders slumped.
“Look, we can still wait outside the hole or by their motorcycles and see what they come out with.”
“Agreed,” Temi said.
“I wish I’d at least caught some pictures of it,” Simon said. “You didn’t take one of it swimming, did you?”
“Sorry, no. But there’s some gold back there.” I jerked a thumb behind us. “We can come back before the general populace finds this place and collect enough to pay the bills for a few months. No need to keep ads—or sensationalist pictures—plastered all over our business site.”
Simon shrugged in defeat and turned around.
We made it back to the intersection and climbed up the way we’d descended. The smooth walls didn’t offer any handholds, and soon we were all streaming with sweat. Temi never complained, but I heard hisses of pain, though she tried to stifle them. The leg she favored stuck out behind her, so she was using only her arms and her good leg to climb up the slope.
I kept waiting for the light to appear ahead of us, but it never did. My brow furrowed in confusion when we came to a dead end. I pointed my flashlight at the coarse rock blocking the way.
“There’s only one tunnel, right? We didn’t go up a wrong one somehow, did we?”
“No,” Simon said, his voice grim and without the confusion in mine. “This is our tunnel.”
The truth dawned on me. “Oh.”
The creature had blocked the exit.
CHAPTER 24
Pushing against a boulder isn’t comfortable under any circumstances. I recommend it even less when doing it in a four-foot-wide tunnel with two other people trying to help. After suffering Simon’s hair up my nose and Temi’s elbow in my back for a small eternity—at least thirty seconds—I backed off and slumped to the ground. The others sighed and sank to their butts as well.
I pointed at Simon’s nose. “I want you to remember this the next time you wish to insult, demean, or stick your tongue out at a man-slaying monster.”
Simon opened his mouth as if he’d protest, but then he flopped against the wall. “Yeah, I am feeling a bit like the fox in the hunter’s trap.”
I rolled to an upright position, insomuch as I could in the low tunnel. “Let’s see this other exit you found.”
“We’re going into the cavern?” Temi asked.
“I don’t know. We can take a look. Didn’t you want to warn the others?”
“It may be too late by now,” she muttered.
“If they’re dead, we have to get that sword so someone can put it to use on the monster,” Simon said.
“Someone, not us,” I said. “Maybe we could recruit some uber warrior to use it.”
“Do they have uber warriors in Prescott?” Temi asked.
“I’m sure there are black belts in some martial art, not to mention all those soldiers who rolled in. At the least, there are better fighters than us. Besides—” I pointed at the boulder, “—we’re not getting out that way without explosives, and I forgot to pack the TNT.”
I started sliding back down the tunnel. At this point, I was willing to risk being horribly slain for the chance to stand up straight and stretch for a few seconds.
“I think they use C4 these days,” Temi said, crawling after me. With her stiff leg and six-foot frame, she had to be aching for a chance to stand up even more than I.
“Yeah, but we don’t have any of that,” I said.
“You have TNT?”
“In our storage locker in Phoenix,” Simon said. “We found some old unexploded sticks while we were scavenging around the Superstition Mountains. Don’t tell the manager. It’s not legal.”
“Legal? Is it safe?” Temi asked.
“No,” I said. “The sticks were tucked at the bottom of a crate of dusty mining helmets and lamps we found on an old claim. We’re lucky we didn’t blow ourselves up coming down the bumpy road out of the mountains.”
At the intersection, I headed right this time. Simon’s tunnel was shorter than ours had been and we soon reached the cavern again. The passage had sloped downward, so we didn’t come out so high up on the wall, and there were a few feet of a granite shoreline beneath us this time instead of pointy rocks. The underground lake stretched to the left and the front, but a narrow ledge ran along the cavern wall to the right.
A crash came from somewhere ahead, like rock toppling onto rock. I doubted that was Eleriss and Jakatra, but at least they’d hear it and know something else was down here with them, assuming they were still alive. If the monster had made the noise, that meant it was relatively far ahead of us. Good.
Simon peered over my shoulder. “We going out or staying here?”
I exhaled slowly. “We can’t get out the other way, so I think our best bet is to catch up with the others and hope they can help us escape. The predator dropped through a hole in the ceiling, but it was thirty feet above the water. I don’t see how we could get out that way. Also, if we were to stay here, and the creature finished whatever it’s down here doing, then it’d have nothing better to do than stake out these tunnel exits until we ran out of food and water and hunger drove us to desperation. If we’re going to try and get past it, better to do so while it’s distracted.”
“You’ve been thinking about this a lot, haven’t you?” Temi asked.
“I’ve thought about little else for the last ten minutes.”
I probed the cavern with my flashlight, making sure there wasn’t anything inimical crouching in the darkness, before dropping down to the granite beach. While I waited for the others to join me, I studied the uneven stone ceiling overhead, wondering if any more holes might lead out. I had a feeling the creature had found a special way in, one that involved holding one’s breath for a few minutes and navigating all sorts of ups and downs through a watery passage. If there were easily accessible entrances, we’d see bats and other signs of animal visitors.
“It’s stale smelling in here.” Simon shrugged off his backpack and pulled out a yellow and black device.
“Methane detector,” I told Temi when she looked at it curiously. “Though it’s not as if we can get out if the cave is full of methane, so I’m not sure I’d like to know.”
“You just want to nod off and fall in the lake and drown?” Simon asked.
“Sounds like a better way to go than decapitation and mutilation.”
“You know,” Temi said, “when I decided to drive across the state to ask if you’d hire me, these aren’t the sorts of conversations I imagined would be common during the work day.”
“We’ll have to update our pamphlet,” I said.
Simon returned the gas meter to his backpack and issued a thumbs up. “The levels aren’t any worse than in your average dairy barn.”
“Comforting.”
I headed off along the ledge. The uneven ground and the need to jump across channels of water made the going slow, and Temi gestured for Simon to go ahead of her. I made sure not to outpace her. Splitting up would be crazy. Being down here at all was crazy.
Another crash boomed from up ahead. The sound made me think of stone columns being tipped over. I hoped that creature wasn’t trying to bring down the cave on our heads.
I kept our pace steady and even. I wanted to catch up with the others—and their sword—but I was afraid we’d run into the creature first, and I couldn’t imagine my bow or whip harming it. We needed a weapon that could make a dent in the predator’s hide. Preferably a dent in its heart. If it
had one. Maybe the creature was made entirely of plastic, or maybe it was some mechanical construct with a plastic hide.
The new thought jolted me so much that I slipped and almost ended up in the lake. I recovered, shaking off a steadying hand from Simon, and continued on, but it surprised me that I hadn’t thought of the idea before. Its power, resilience, and cunning would make more sense if it was a machine or robot than if it was an animal. What if it had a brain full of circuits rather than blood cells? It hadn’t eaten any of the people it’d mauled, so maybe it didn’t need to take in sustenance—it was killing because it’d been programmed to do so. Heck, maybe some battery powered it, or maybe it had a tank and stopped to fuel itself at the gas station when nobody was looking.
My snort was almost a laugh.
“Glad you’re finding our situation amusing,” Simon whispered.
“I had a funny thought. What if our monster is a robot instead of a living, breathing predator?”
“Yeah, I had that thought too,” Simon said.
“You did?” And here I’d felt original.
“Right after we learned about the plastic.”
A third cacophonous smashing of rock came from the shadows ahead. We’d made some progress following the ledge, and those crashes no longer sounded quite so far away.
“I’m not sure I should admit to another thought I’ve had,” I whispered. I don’t know why I was whispering—that creature probably knew where we were—but it seemed appropriate to the dark setting.
“That it’s trying to push down supports to cave in the ceiling?” Simon asked.
“Yeah.”
Temi grunted, and I glanced back in time to see her catch herself on the wall.
“You guys can go ahead if you want,” she said. “I’ll catch up.”
“Animal or robot, I’m not in a big hurry to come face to face with that thing,” I said. “I’m also not sure how we would stop it from pushing over supports.”