“It must be programmed to close on restart,” North said, sounding sick.
I didn’t respond. We’re trapped, I told myself, because clearly my brain wasn’t grasping it. If it were, I’d be freaking out, and I was just sitting there, completely still, staring at the wall. You couldn’t tell there’d ever been a door there.
“Rory?” I heard North say.
“There has to be a way to get aboveground from here,” I said calmly. So calmly, it caught me by surprise. But my mom hadn’t let me down yet, and she’d sewn two orange Xs on my blanket. There had to be another way out.
“All I see are elevators,” North replied. “Two Gnosis elevators that require key card access. But the door we came through, it has to open from the inside, right?” His voice sounded tight. Panicky.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’m not sure the Few would risk someone discovering a way to open it. But I don’t think we’re stuck. I think there’s a way to get from this room all the way outside.” I pointed at the terminal screen. “You finish what you need to do. I’ll get us out of here.”
North looked skeptical, but he nodded and brought his eyes back to his screen, which was now lit up with the Gnosis login box.
I jogged around the periphery of the room first. The two elevators North saw and an alarmed door marked EMERGENCY EXIT were the only visible ways out. There wasn’t even a bathroom down here. I scanned the ceiling next, but it was ridiculously high up, so even if there’d been an opening, we never could’ve reached it. If there was a way out of here, it had to be in the floor. Starting at the opposite corner of the room, at least a football field from where North was sitting, I went row by row, combing the cement beneath the mesh grating. All I saw was smooth concrete. My stomach twisted in knots. Had I been wrong?
I waited for words of comfort, some assurance from the voice that there was a way out. But I didn’t get any. I hadn’t gotten any, not since we hatched this plan. Not once had the voice promised me that we’d get away with this.
I looked up again, and this time my eyes caught the security camera mounted on the wall to my left. I froze.
Oh, my God. The cameras. If the reboot reset the door, it probably turned the cameras back on too. I opened my mouth to scream North’s name but quickly shut it and went sprinting toward him with my head down instead.
I was halfway there when the toe of my shoe caught the grating and I went flying. My hands hit the ground first, hard, metal digging into flesh, and my knees banged down right after. My eyes smarted with the pain, but I quickly forgot it when I saw what was beneath me. A round manhole cover in the concrete with the letters έξοδος engraved into its face. I didn’t know what the letters meant, but I was pretty sure manhole covers didn’t come standard with Greek engraving. My eyes swept the floor, looking for a way to get beneath the grating. It was lined up against the bottom edge of a nearby server bank, so I almost missed it. A latch.
I scrambled to my feet and went running toward North. Without saying anything, I pulled his hoodie up over his head. “The cameras,” I whispered in his ears. His whole body went rigid. At that exact moment, the speakers above and around us began to scream with a shrill, piercing sound. We’d been seen.
“I found a way out,” I said, my lips pressed to North’s ear, and tugged on his arm.
“Wait,” he said. “I can delete the footage. I need to delete the footage.”
My nails dug into his forearm. “There’s no time.”
“The Gnosis complex is six miles away,” he said, already typing. A flurry of windows opened and closed as he flew through the network. “Even if there’s an underground train between here and there, it’ll take them at least five minutes to get here. I can do this in sixty seconds. I saw the feed earlier. I know where it is.” The sweat on his brow was back, but he was determined. I stared at the two elevator doors, my heart pounding so hard my ribs ached. “Done,” North said finally, pushing back his chair so hard it went flying.
I took off toward the manhole, North right on my heels. The latch did exactly what I thought it would, freeing a portion of the grate, which lifted like a cellar door. Once beneath it, we relatched the grate and, on our hands and knees, started twisting the manhole with our fingers in the pick holes. It turned easily. Moving it was harder. It must’ve weighed fifty pounds, and on all fours it was difficult to get enough leverage to lift it, especially with the alarm screaming in our ears.
We’d just gotten it to the side when we heard the elevator doors whoosh open. Go, North mouthed, and pointed down the hole. I peered into the blackness. It was impossible to tell how far down it was, but since there was no ladder, I figured it couldn’t be that far. So I eased my legs into the opening then slid around onto my belly and lowered the rest of my body down until I was hanging just by my hands. When my face passed beneath the floor, I was hit with the stench of rotten eggs and a terrible fear that I’d made a mistake. “Please,” I murmured, kicking off my left shoe with my right foot. Please don’t let me break my neck, please let this work, please don’t let them find us. When I heard the shoe hit rock a second later, I let go.
I kept my knees bent, so when my feet landed, the impact pitched me forward, onto my hands. The ground was rough and prickly beneath me, like coarse stone. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet down, but the light from above did little to illuminate the dank space. I heard shouting and running above me and a sliding sound as North tried to move the manhole cover back into place before he dropped down. He had his fingers through the pick holes and was trying to heave the metal disk over as he dangled from it, his feet just above my head. With a jarring clang it slipped into place, leaving us in complete darkness. North landed with a soft thud beside me.
“Do you think they saw you?” I asked him.
“Let’s not wait to find out,” North replied. His face lit up as he turned on his phone’s flashlight. He revolved slowly with his hand extended, the weak beam revealing the smallness of the space we were in. The stone walls shimmered in the light, as if they were flecked with gold and might have been beautiful had their presence not meant that we were trapped. I felt a pressing, suffocating weight pushing in on me. The opening we’d come through was now sealed with a heavy metal plate. Even if I stood on North’s shoulders, I wouldn’t be able to reach it, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to lift it enough to slide it over.
“Rory,” I heard North say. “There’s an opening over there. It’s narrow, but it looks like it was made to pass through.” I followed his light and saw a slit carved in the rock behind me, almost hidden in a shadow. “Let’s go,” he said, and took my hand.
The ground slanted down on the other side of the slit, taking us farther into the earth instead of toward the surface. The passageway was tight, the walls on either side grazing North’s shoulders as we walked, and the ceiling was too low to stand up straight. As we inched down the rocky slant, crouched so as not to bang our heads, I focused on my breath, refusing to panic again. If we really were stuck down there, there would be plenty of time to freak out once we were sure of it. The sulfur egg smell got worse as we descended. “What is that?” I asked, pulling my shirt up over my nose.
“I don’t know,” North replied. “But I’m really glad we didn’t eat before this.”
A few minutes later we reached flat surface again. A room, bigger than the first one, but with a lower ceiling. North could stand upright, but only barely. The walls around us were textured and uneven and looked bronze when North shone the light on them. There was only one way forward, another tunnel, this one rounder and more uneven, as if it’d been there longer. As we moved toward it, North’s light caught some writing on the wall. It was a drawing, crudely done, of a mine cart moving toward a tunnel. Seeing the image, it clicked. We were in the old pyrite mine. The shimmer in the walls wasn’t gold but its cheap impostor. It was ironic, or maybe just fitting, that the Few had commandeered this space for their empire. They’d built their castle on a foundation of fool’s gold.