Curious, she started toward it, realizing only after a few steps that Rook couldn’t see her. She hiked back and took his hand. “Why don’t you use your light?”
“I already saw everything there was to see here. Might as well save the batteries. It sounds like we might be down here a while.”
The comment reminded her that she still didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten here. “What happened?”
“You got caught in a wicked current. Not sure, but I think your rebreather might have gotten banged up, or maybe you were breathing too fast. You blacked out.”
“Then how did I — why am I not dead?”
“I caught up to you and buddy breathed with you for a while.”
She gazed into his confident but completely unaware eyes. “You weren’t caught in the current, were you? You came after me on purpose?”
“I wasn’t going to leave you. You’re—” he shrugged, and looked a little embarrassed, “you know, kind of important to me.”
Because she couldn’t think of any other way to deal with the overwhelming surge of emotion rising from her chest, she pulled him close, stood on her tiptoes and kissed him.
She might have gone on kissing him, but the sound of someone politely coughing reminded her that they weren’t exactly alone. She turned toward the dock again, and led the still somewhat euphoric Rook along by the hand. “So where are we exactly?”
“I’m not sure where you are — exactly,” the familiar voice of Deep Blue said, “but I think you are somewhere below Lake Victoria, and roughly two hundred and fifty miles from Lake Natron.”
Queen stopped abruptly. “What?”
“It’s hard to be more precise. Even though the q-phone signals aren’t affected by… well, anything… you’re in a three-dimensional environment that we’ve never really had to take into account. That’s the relative distance you would have traveled if you were on the surface.”
She heard Rook laughing and guessed this wasn’t the first time Deep Blue had given this explanation. “How long were we in that river?”
“A while,” Rook said with a shrug. He didn’t hear Deep Blue clarify, “Eight hours and twenty-two minutes.”
“Shit.” That explained why they were talking to Blue instead of Aleman. Evidently, whatever crisis had occupied their remote handler had passed. Now they were the number one priority. “We couldn’t have lasted that long on one rebreather.”
“This place is like the mother of all waterpark rides,” Rook said. “That current shot us out like a cannon. We ended up in a fast moving river. There were air pockets along the way, so we didn’t have to use the rebreather the whole time. Eventually, the river dumped into the lake over there.”
“So this is the end of the road?”
“Not even close,” Deep Blue said, a little too quickly. She could tell he was trying to stay upbeat. “You’re in a massive uncharted cave formation. Something that big is bound to have more than one outlet.”
“If it did, wouldn’t someone have found it by now?”
Even though Rook could only hear Queen’s side of the conversation, he seemed to sense her despair. “Queen, this isn’t a bottomless pit. Think about what we’ve already seen. That cave back there at Lake Natron… the mall? Somebody built that, centuries ago. And I think they were using that lava tube as a sort of superhighway.”
Her pessimistic retort gave way to raw curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“We were trying to figure out why they would build their marketplace there, remember? I think it was there because that was the end of the road… this road. An underground trading route.” He gestured in the approximate direction of the lake. “See that dock? I think this was sort of a transfer station. That lava tube might have been a shallow river before the lake flooded. Or maybe it was a dry road that connected with a river. The point is, if the mall was the end of the road, then there’s a beginning. We just have to find it.”
“He’s right,” Deep Blue said. “A couple of years ago, King found evidence of a vast underground network connecting America and Europe. It’s possible that these caves are everywhere, and that the ancients knew about them and knew how to use them. Maybe this is why there are underworld legends in nearly every culture on Earth.”
Queen relayed this news to Rook.
“Isn’t the underworld the same thing as Hell?” he remarked. She reached out and gripped his hand. “Whatever, right? If anyone can walk out of Hell, it’s us.”
It felt like a lie.
The dock might have been the end of one section of the Ancients’ underground trade route, but it wasn’t the dead end Queen feared. Instead, it seemed to be a sort of crossroads, with not one but five separate passages leading away. Three of them were narrow and seemed like unlikely candidates for Rook’s superhighway, but the other two were wide openings that showed visible evidence of human use — centuries of foot travel, or perhaps pack animals and carts, had worn a ribbon-like groove down the center of each tunnel.
Rook shone his light down each of the tunnels. “Which way?”
“Flip a coin?”
He gave her a reproving look. “Not falling for that again.”
“What?”
Rook shone his light down the passage that led out of the cavern on the wall opposite the lake. “I say we go this way.”
“There’ll be no living with you if you get lucky on the first try.” She leaned close and gave him another kiss, this time just a peck on the cheek. “But I hope you’re right.”
They walked for a while in silence, and in Rook’s case, darkness. The tunnel continued to slope down, deeper into the Earth’s interior.
“What do you think happened to them?” Rook asked after a while.
“The Ancients? Judging by the fact that the mall was underwater, I’d say the answer is obvious.”
Rook made an unconvinced grunt.
“Look at it this way,” she went on. “There are cities today that rely almost completely on imports for survival. When the lake expanded, maybe after a volcanic eruption, and their trade route was flooded, what reason would they have had to stay? They probably were assimilated into other cultures. It’s happened before.”
“So the Ancients might not have been such a big deal after all?”
Queen gazed at him sidelong. In the darkness, he made no effort to hide his naked emotions. He might not even have realized how much his face revealed, but she could read him like a book. Mulamba’s death was weighing heavily on him. He had been desperate to find some evidence that would support Mulamba’s theory and justify the excursion to the Belgian museum, which had ended so tragically.
She thought about telling him to shake it off and soldier on, but decided that maybe it was better for him to wallow in guilt than face the much more immediate and desperate reality. They were trapped underground, hundreds of miles from the only known entrance, with no food and no way of knowing whether the path they were traveling would lead to escape or take them deeper into the unknown.
Twenty minutes later, they found further evidence of human activity: two broken pieces of carved stone that fit together to form a thick disk, with a square hole through the middle like a Chinese coin.
“It’s a wheel,” Rook said, inspecting it with his light. “Someone’s Flintstone-mobile had a blowout.”
Deep Blue was perplexed by the discovery. “Stone wheels would indicate a very primitive level of technology.”