As the squad headed the new direction, Tikaya cast a longing gaze at the corridor that led to the living quarters. If any personal affects remained after all this time, she could learn much about the people from studying them. After they found Rias, perhaps they could go back.
Soon, doors marked the passage, taller and wider than normal, and without knobs or latches. Symbols denoting laboratories adorned some while others remained plain.
Someone walking closer to the wall than the center of the tunnel triggered a door to slide upward of its own accord. The man cursed and lurched back into line. Tikaya glimpsed a landing overlooking what she guessed to be lab stations-all the furnishings were oversized by human standards. A hand on her back encouraged her to hustle forward and catch up with Bocrest.
“ Should we check some of these?” she asked.
“ I’m not exploring anything until we catch up with our lovelorn guide,” Bocrest said.
Up ahead, the scouts stopped before a closed door. Agarik and another knelt to check something on the floor while the third man stood guard. After a moment, Agarik jogged back to the group.
“ What is it?” Bocrest asked.
“ Blood.” Agarik glanced at Tikaya. “A lot of blood.”
Her hands tightened around the journal. If Rias was hurt-or worse-because he had charged in here to look for her, it would be her fault.
When they reached the spot, the size of the dark puddle only increased her dread.
“ Human blood,” the tracker said after a taste. “Plantigrade print over there, but definitely not human.”
He pointed to a second puddle halfway under the door. A bloody print more than twice the size of Tikaya’s foot lay beside it. Dots at the end of the toes suggested claws.
“ Bear?” Bocrest asked.
Tikaya, remembering Rias’s tale of the tunnels, said, “I doubt it.”
A man screamed somewhere beyond the door. Rias? She lunged for the door, triggering the opening mechanism, but Bocrest caught her before she crossed the threshold.
“ We’ll get him,” he said. “You wait here.”
He waved two fingers, and the scouts slipped in first, fanning out on a landing with their rifles raised, ready to fire. Tikaya shifted her weight from foot to foot and eyed a bow stave and quiver attached to a rucksack. The man carried a rifle and pistol too; surely, he could spare the weapon so she could-
“ Clear on the landing,” Agarik said.
“ Sergeant Karsus.” Bocrest nodded for the man to take over the lead.
Without words, and faster than Tikaya expected, the marines shucked their rucksacks and split into two teams. They filed down stairs on opposite ends of the landing and disappeared from her sight. Only Bocrest remained with Tikaya.
Ignoring his hiss of annoyance, she twisted free of his grip and stepped inside. The landing overlooked a cavernous room that stretched a hundred meters or more. Thick thirty-foot-high columns supported the unadorned black ceiling. Empty floor dominated the front third of the room, and she could only guess at the furnishings beyond. She decided to think of them as lab stations and storage cabinets, though even the lowest counter rose taller than the approaching marines. The height and arrangement blocked much of the floor view as the stations created a maze of sinuous yet symmetrical aisles, some wide, some surprisingly narrow. As with the tunnel, light from an indiscernible source illuminated everything.
A cry of agony echoed from the center, and she glimpsed a blur of black before it disappeared behind a row of twenty-foot-tall cabinets.
“ Sprites-licked idiot,” she cursed, whirling to look for a bow amongst the discarded gear. She was not sure whether she meant Rias or herself. If, after all he had lived through, he died to some random animal attack…
Tikaya spotted the bow stave she eyed earlier. The marine had left it in favor of the rifle. She stuffed the journal into her rucksack, then untied the bow with fingers too irritated to fumble with fear. She yanked the quiver free as well. Stringing the weapon was a struggle, and she prayed the draw wouldn’t be too heavy for her.
“ Let my men do their job, Komitopis.” Rifle crooked in his arms, Bocrest leaned on the wall by the door, which had slid shut again. His voice was more sympathetic than she had ever heard it, and he did not try to take the weapon from her, but he did add, “You’re staying with me,” in an implacable tone.
She succeeded in looping the string over the limb of the bow. “I’m not going to-”
“ I’m not going to lose you as well as Starcrest. We need someone to read this grimbal shit.”
Noise in the corridor made them spin toward the door. Tikaya nocked an arrow while Bocrest raised his rifle. In the lab behind them, the men stalked in silence, and she had no trouble hearing the fast, heavy footfalls outside as they grew louder-closer.
Bocrest cursed, probably regretting that he had sent all his men below. The footfalls thundered to a stop outside the door. Tikaya drew the arrow, ignoring the strain between the backs of her shoulders. At least her shoulder no longer vexed her.
The door slid open. She held her breath.
The tunnel was empty.
The tip of her arrow wavered as her muscles quivered from the effort of holding the draw. She glanced at Bocrest, a question on her lips.
Then a head popped around the jamb and disappeared again. It happened so quickly she doubted her sight. Then a familiar voice spoke with wry humor.
“ Can I come in?”
“ Rias!” she blurted, even as Bocrest shouted, “Curse you, Starcrest.”
Rias slid out from behind the wall. “I hope that’s a yes.”
They lowered their weapons as he joined them on the landing. First Tikaya noticed a garish black eye and fingermarks bruising his neck, then saw the sweat bathing his face, saturating his hair, and dripping from his chin. His chest, framed by the straps of his rucksack, rose and fell with rapid, deep breaths. He wore all his weapons too-in addition to the rifle he carried, pistol, cutlass, and knife challenged the ammo pouches and powder tins for room on his belt. He must have been back to camp since the fight.
“ I can’t believe you left without me,” Rias said, eyes darting as he took in the lab.
“ But I saw you with Ottotark,” Tikaya said. “He said-I thought you went in the tunnels looking for me.”
Rias dragged a sleeve across his brow, not quite hiding a grimace of shame. “No, I didn’t believe him. I just had to… I almost lost it with him. I needed to get away, to think.”
Tikaya sagged against the railing with relief.
Disgust curled Bocrest’s lip throughout their exchange, and he finally jabbed his rifle toward the lab below. “If you were behind us, who in the empire are my men trying to rescue down there?”
“ I don’t know.” Rias glanced at Tikaya. “Maybe someone we can question if we recover him alive?”
Bocrest raised his voice for the benefit of the men below. “Starcrest accounted for. Continue with retrieval operation.”
“ Treat them like grimbals,” Rias called. “It takes a cut to the neck or shot to the eye to kill. And, above all else, do not break anything in here.”
The last command seemed strange when a man’s life was at stake, but the grimness in Rias’s mandate kept Tikaya from questioning it.
A shot fired, and a roar came from the center of the lab. Something crashed against a cabinet, and Rias winced. “Not good. Wish I’d had time to do a briefing.”
He glared at Bocrest who in turn glared at Tikaya.
“ This is your childish sergeant’s fault,” she said, “not mine.”
“ Why couldn’t the cryptomancer have been a man?” Bocrest glowered at Rias. “Though after all that time on Krychek, you probably wouldn’t have cared.”
Rias raised an eyebrow. “I am armed, you realize.”
Another roar answered the first, and Bocrest’s head snapped back toward the lab. “There’s a second?”