Yelagin knelt beside her. “We may die yet,” she said, “but it won’t be in this tunnel.”
Demidov frowned, glancing at her, refusing to hope.
“Come on,” Yelagin said, helping her to stand. “There’s a way out.”
“A way up?” Demidov asked.
Yelagin would not meet her gaze. “A way out,” she repeated. “That’s all I can promise for now.”
A fresh spark of hope ignited inside Demidov and once again she allowed herself to think of Vasily. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he was still alive.
All she and Yelagin had were knives, but for the moment they were still alive. They would fight to stay that way.
The tunnel sloped downward. Demidov’s ears were still ringing, all sounds muffled thanks to her proximity to the grenade’s explosion. Her head pounded but she took deep breaths and kept her arms outstretched, tracing her fingers along the tunnels walls as she tried to keep her wits about her. There were ridges and striations along the rock that were quite different from what she’d been able to make out on the side of the massive hole. If that sinkhole had been bored up from below by an enormous methane explosion, as Vasily and his team believed, then this side tunnel had been created by some other means.
Something had carved it out.
Several minutes passed in relative silence, with Demidov following Yelagin, the two women doing their best not to slip. The twists in the tunnel often led to a sudden steep section, and a wrong step might have led to a broken neck.
The luminescent blood they’d been splashed with faded with each passing minute, and soon Yelagin’s flashlight was their primary source of illumination. The air moved gently around them, not so much a breeze as a kind of subterranean respiration, the tunnels breathing, evidence there were openings somewhere ahead and below.
Noises came to them, quiet whispers of motion followed by what sounded like thousands of tons of rock and earth shifting, but they remained very much alone in the tunnel. Demidov exhaled in relief when the tunnel flattened out and she found she could stand fully upright. Yelagin picked up their pace, and soon they were hustling along in a quick jog. The thumping of her heart, the familiar cadence of their steps, lent Demidov calm and confidence that allowed her to gather her thoughts. Find the source of the air flow, she told herself. See if we can climb. Track down the tumblers and try to ascertain the status of the science team – dead or alive?
“There’s a glow—“ Yelagin started to say.
Then she swore, stumbled, and hurled herself forward in the tunnel. Demidov pulled back, reaching for her knife, ready for a fight. Her backpedaling saved her. Just in front of her, Yelagin scrabbled her hands to get a grip to keep from falling into a hole in the tunnel floor, an opening that seemed to drop away into nothing. Air flowed steadily up from the hole.
“Kristina!” Demidov called, glancing around, trying to figure out how she could help.
Yelagin had already managed to drag one leg up, prop her knee on the edge of the abyss, and now she hauled herself to safety on the other side of the five-foot gap. She’d seen the glow, but had been moving too fast to stop, so instead she’d jumped. And almost not made it at all.
They stared at each other across the gap, neither of them wanting to be left alone. Yelagin used her torch to search the edges of the hole, and it looked to Demidov as if she would be able to get around it – if she was extremely careful – without falling to her death. She lay flat on her belly and dragged herself to the edge to stare down into the depths, drawn by the soft glow that emanated from within. On the other side, Yelagin did the same.
Demidov went numb.
It was Yelagin who spoke first. “Is that...? Is it a kind of... city, do you think?”
Far below, perhaps hundreds of feet, were loops and whorls of stone, a kind of labyrinth of strange tracks and bowls and twisting towers. From those strange spires of rock hung innumerable tendriled things, either asleep or simply static, dreaming their subterranean dreams or contemplating the labyrinth of their underground world, and perhaps the new world they had discovered above them.
“Oh, my God,” Demidov whispered.
“Captain,” Yelagin said quietly.
Demidov looked up and saw that Private Yelagin had risen to her knees. Now the woman took to her feet, braced herself against the wall, and reached out across the gap. The message did not require words – get up, don’t look, don’t think, and let’s get the hell out of here. Demidov ought to have been the one in command, but in that moment she was quite happy to let Yelagin guide her.
She glanced one more time at the sprawling, glowing city-nest below and then she stood, never wanting to see it again. Taking a deep breath, she put one foot on the bit of stone jutting out from one side of the hole, and then she shook her head.
“No,” she told Yelagin. “Back up.”
“Captain…”
“Back up, Private.”
Yelagin withdrew her hand, hesitated a moment, and then backed away, giving her plenty of room to make the leap. Demidov got a running start and flung herself across the gap. She landed on the ball of her left foot, arms flailing, and then stumbled straight into Yelagin, who caught her with open arms.
For a moment they stood like that, then Demidov took a single breath and nodded. “Lead the way.”
They followed the beam of Yelagin’s light, passing several places where the tunnel branched off in various directions, until they found one that sloped up. Demidov paused to feel the flow of air and then gestured for Yelagin to continue upward. They’d been moving for only a minute or two, Demidov staring over Yelagin’s shoulder, when she realized she could see more details of the tunnel ahead than ought to have been possible. Her breath caught in her throat and she reached out, grabbing a fistful of Yelagin’s jacket.
“Stop,” she hissed into the other woman’s ear. “Quietly.”
For long seconds they stood in the tunnel, just listening. Demidov felt her heart thumping hard in her chest as she stared ahead. Sensing the trouble, Yelagin clicked off her flashlight, confirming what Demidov had feared. Not only did the tunnel ahead gleam with the weird photoluminescence of the tumblers, but the glow was becoming steadily brighter. They could hear the slither of tendrils against rock.
Part of Demidov wanted to just forge ahead. But she remembered all too well the glimpse she’d had of the tumblers killing Zhukov, and she thought perhaps they ought to retreat, find a side tunnel, and wait for this wave of creatures to pass them by.
Demidov took Yelagin’s arm and turned to retrace their steps.
The same glow lit the tunnel behind them.
“No,” Yelagin said quietly.
Demidov slipped out her knife. They had no other weapons and nowhere to run. A numb resignation spread through her, but her fingers opened and closed on the hilt of the knife, ready to fight no matter the odds.
The tumblers sprawled and rolled and slunk along the tunnel, arriving first from one direction and then the other. Some slipped along the ceiling or walls, filling the tube of the tunnel with their undulating tendrils and their unearthly glow until it looked like some kind of undersea nightmare.
“Captain,” Yelagin whispered. “Look at the little ones.”
Demidov had seen them, miniature tumblers about the size of her thumb, maybe even smaller. They clung to the others and moved swiftly amongst them. The little ones seemed to cleave more to the ceiling, creating a kind of mossy mat of shifting, impossible life. The tumblers flowed in until the only bare rock was the small circle where Demidov and Yelagin stood.