The rest of the journey was uneventful, and it was many hours of monotonous trudging before they left the passage and came out into what at first Will took to be another cavern. But as they moved forward, it soon became apparent that the space was something altogether different from any of those they'd been in before.
"Hold up, Will! I think I can see lights," Cal said.
"Where?" Chester asked.
"There… and more over there. See them?"
Both Will and Chester peered into the seemingly unbroken blackness.
To catch sight of them, they had to look just off center — attempting to view the lights directly blotted the dimly blinking specks from view.
In silence, they turned their heads slowly from one side to the other as they took in the tiny points, which were spaced at random intervals across the horizon. The lights seemed so far away and vague as to be gently pulsing and shifting through a haze of colors, similar to stars on a warm summer's night.
"This'll be the Great Plain," Cal announced all of a sudden.
Will took an involuntary step backward. It had begun to sink in that the expanse ahead was truly vast. It was daunting: The darkness made his mind play tricks on him, so he couldn't tell if the lights were in the extreme distance or, indeed, much closer by.
Together, the boys edged forward. Even Cal, who had spent his life in the immense caverns of the Colony, had never before encountered anything with dimensions like this. Although the roof remained at a relatively constant height, fifty feet or so from the floor, the rest — a yawning, endless gap — wasn't visible even with their lanterns set to full beam. It stretched before them, a slice of continuous blackness unbroken by a single pillar, stalagmite, or stalactite. And, most remarkably, gentle gusts of air wafted around, cooling them down a degree or two.
"It does look massive!" Chester put into words what Will was thinking.
"Yeah, goes on forever," Cal rejoined indifferently.
Chester turned on him. "What do you mean, forever? How big is it, really?"
"About a hundred miles across," Cal answered flatly. Then he strode off, leaving the other two standing side by side.
"A hundred miles!" Will repeated.
Chester suddenly blew his top. "Why doesn't your brother just tell us everything he knows? This place doesn't go on 'forever.' He's such a jerk! He either exaggerates everything or never gives us the whole story." With the sourest of expressions, he leaned his head to one side and then the other as he mimicked Cal. "This is Crevice City… blah, blah… her is the Great Plain… blahbiddy-blah…" he spat, his words clipped through his anger. "You know, Will, I keep getting the feeling that he's holding things back just so he can get one up on me."
"On us," Will said. "But can you believe this place? Mind-blowing." Will was doing his best to change the subject and knock Chester off a course, which, it was clear, would eventually lead to a violent collision with his brother.
"Yeah, it's sure blown my mind," Chester replied sarcastically and began to probe the darkness with his lantern, as if trying to prove Cal was wrong.
But it did seem as though the space stretched on forever. Will immediately began to theorize about how it could have been formed. "If you had pressure against tow loosely bonded strata from… from a tectonic movement," he said, overlaying one hand on the other to demonstrate it to Chester, "then it could be possible for one to just ride up over the other." He arched the top hand. "And, bingo, you could get this sort of feature. Like wood grain splitting when it gets damp."
"Yes, that's all great," Chester said. "But what if it closes up again? What then?"
"I suppose it could — after many thousands of years."
"Knowing my stinking rotten luck, it'll probably be today," Chester muttered dolefully. "And I'll be squashed like an ant."
"Nah, come on, the chances of that happening right now are pretty small."
Chester grunted skeptically.
13
In a cleverly disguised entrance in the empty cellar of an old almshouse up in Highfield, not far from Main Street, Sarah stepped into an elevator. She slung her bag down by her feet and, hugging herself, made herself as small as she could. Backing into one of the corners, she looked miserably around the interior. She loathed being confined in the constricted space, with no means of escape. The sides and roof of the elevator were panels of heavy iron trelliswork, and the interior had been coated with a thick pasting of grease, the remaining traces of which were spiky with dirt and dust.
She heard a brief, muffled exchange between the Styx and Colonists hanging back in the brick-walled chamber outside the elevator, and then Rebecca entered, unaccompanied. The girl didn't give Sarah as much as a glance as she swiveled sharply around on her heels, one of the Styx ramming the gate shut behind her. Rebecca pushed and held down the brass lever by the side of the gate and, with a lurch and a low grinding noise from above, the elevator began to descend.
As it went, the heavy trellis cage creaked and rattled against the sides of the shaft, this din punctuated occasionally by the grating squeal of metal on metal.
They were being lowered to the Colony.
However much she tried to contain it, a new sensation was building in Sarah, pushing up against her fear and anxiety. It was anticipation. She was returning to the Colony! Her birthplace! It was as though she had suddenly been given the ability to go back in time. With each foot the elevator dropped, the clock was speeding in reverse, regaining hour after hour, year after year. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined she'd ever see her homeland again. She'd dismissed the possibility so irrevocably that it was hard for her to grasp what was now happening.
Taking several deep breaths, she unclenched her arms and straightened her back.
She'd heard about the existence of these elevators, but had never actually seen, let alone ridden in, one before.
Sarah rested her head against the trelliswork and, as the cage bumped its way down, watched the side of the shaft. The glow from Rebecca's light illuminated it, revealing that it was pocked with innumerable regular henpeck gouges. These were a testament to the work gangs who had dug their way down to the Colony almost three centuries ago, using only rudimentary hand tools.
As the different rock strata flashed by, giving up their brown, red and gray hues, Sarah thought about the blood and sweat that had gone into establishing the Colony. So many people, generation upon generation, had toiled for all their natural lives to build it. And she had rejected it all, fleeing to the surface.
At the top of the shaft, now several hundred feet above her, sound from the winch raised in pitch as it shifted up a gear, and the elevator accelerated in its descent.
This mechanical means in and out of the Colony was a world away from the one she had taken for her escape twelve years ago. Then, she had been forced to climb the entire way, using a stone staircase that spiraled up a huge brick-built shaft. It had been long and arduous, especially because she'd been hauling young Seth after her. The worst part had been her final emergence into the open air onto a rooftop via the inside of an age-old chimney stack. As she had scrambled to get some sort of bearing on the crumbling, soot-coated sides, all the while dragging the crying and confused boy behind her, it had taken every last drop of her strength to hold on and stop them both from slipping and tumbling down into the well below.
Don't think about that now, Sarah scolded herself, shaking her head. She realized how utterly spent she was from the day's events, but she had to get a grip. The day was far from over. Focus, she urged herself, glancing at the Styx girl traveling with her.