“Yes,” Luke whispered. “It’s conceivable.”
Conceivable, if insane. If Clayton or Toy didn’t want to be in contact with topside operations, okay, don’t answer their calls—there was no need to destroy their only link to the surface. What if an emergency arose?
Lucas, nobody is coming to get you.
Shut up, Mom, Luke thought, bristling at the sound of her voice in his head. Shut the hell up. Who asked you, anyway? If I wanted your opinion, I’d visit your grave site.
Al winced, cradling her mangled hand to her chest.
“Hey, let’s get your hand looked at,” Luke said, figuring it was best to keep busy.
Good idea, Lucas, said Bethany Ronnicks. As they say, idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
The first-aid kit was clipped to the wall. Luke opened it and snapped on a pair of surgical gloves.
“Lay your hand on the console,” he said. “I’m going to splint your fingers, then tape them together. Fair warning, though: this’ll hurt like hell.”
Al nodded wryly. “Vicodin, Vicodin, my kingdom for a Vicodin.”
Al yelped when Luke set her pinkie bones. He did it as quickly as he could, but still, he could feel the broken edges of bone grinding.
“Sorry. I’ve done this before, but to cats or dogs.”
“You’re… eeeyyyash!” Al hissed through gritted teeth. “Yup, yup, you’re doing a bang-up job. Keep going.”
Luke cut a length of splint tape and wrapped it around her pinkie. The ring finger was only badly swollen; Luke taped those two fingers together.
“Your middle finger got it the worst. It’s broken down near the knuckle.”
“Does that mean I won’t be able to flip the bird anymore?”
“Depending on how it heals, you may not be able to bend it at all. So you might always be flipping the bird. Hold on—this is gonna hurt like a fuckofabitch.”
Al picked up the broken receiver and jammed it between her teeth.
Luke had to pop the finger up to set the bone. It took three hard tugs. On the third, Al’s jaw clenched so hard that the black plastic cracked between her canines.
Luke tore open a roll of gauze to wrap Al’s hand, in hopes of keeping all the little nicks free from infection.
“You’re good to go.”
The lone monitor fired to life. Their heads jerked in unison.
The monitor was labeled Pure. The O2 purification chamber.
“Do you see that?” Al whispered.
The camera angle offered a long view of the chamber: light pulsed at the entrance, but trailed to shadows at the far end. Luke squinted.
Nothing definite. Slow, insistent, rhythmical—movement that reminded Luke of kelp strands drifting in a night tide.
A red warning light began to flash on the console.
Two words were stamped below the warning light.
The first was Oxy.
The second, Low.
“Oh, good Christ,” Al said as she sprinted out of the room.
11.
LUKE CAUGHT UP WITH HER in the passageway. She stood before one of the four hatches leading to unknown areas of the Trieste.
“This is the one. Can you open it?” she said.
“What’s happening?”
“You saw the light, right? We’re losing oxygen. The system monitors the amount of CO2; when the concentrations get too high, it gives a warning.”
“That’s it? A little light flashing in some room?”
“Usually there’d be an alarm. But the system could be screwy. The door, Doc. Hurry.”
Luke threw his weight against the wheel. The hatch cracked open with a tortured squeal. The tunnel beyond was narrower than anything Luke had seen so far. A weak welter of light spread across the ceiling, as if sickly fireflies were trapped inside it.
“Leave the dog, Doc. It’s safer right here.”
Luke agreed. “Stay, girl.”
LB regarded Luke worriedly—afraid he’d leave, the way everyone else had.
“I’ll be back. I promise.”
The dog didn’t seem very reassured, but obediently stood her ground.
THEY STEPPED into the tight passageway.
Luke shut the hatch behind him, and his ears popped. He immediately became aware of the oxygen quality: stale and cool, not unlike the ancient air in a subterranean cave.
They inched through the diseased trickle of light. The walls hugged their bodies lovingly; the metal seemed to breathe as they moved forward.
“How far do we go?” he asked.
Al grunted. “I dunno. I’ve never been in here.”
Luke could barely see his fingers in front of his face. The walls brushed his hips; the passage was tapering ahead of them but also, as he sensed it, behind them. He could almost hear the tunnel issuing sly snaps and crunches as it crimped, the steel folding like onionskin.
The air tasted horrible. Not just stale—infused with the taste of dead things. They could’ve been in the mouth of some enormous monster, picking their way along teeth hung with rotted meat. Adrenaline twined up from Luke’s feet; it crawled into his chest and forced his breath out in harsh, plosive pops.
“Fuckin’—what the…?” Al said.
“What is it?” said Luke.
“Dead end.”
Spiders crawled over the dome of his skull as a skittish panic rushed over him—an unaccountable fear that reminded him of being a child in Iowa, walking down a lonely country road at night as headlights bloomed over the curve of the earth behind him, conjuring an uneasiness that would linger until the car had passed, the red embers of its taillights dimming around a curve.
“It’s not a cave-in,” Al said. “The wall is sheer.” Her feet shuffled. “There’s space at the bottom. Back up, will you?”
The walls pushed at Luke’s spine—an adoring suction like the mouth of a hungry lover. He managed to clear enough space for Al to get down on all fours.
“There’s something down here,” Al said, knocking her fist around. “Same as a crawl-through, really, but it feels even smaller… an access chute, I’d say. Could be that the air passes through a series of filters or what-the-fuck above the chute. I don’t remember the schematics.”
“Can we get through it?”
“We’ll have to wriggle—and pray there’s no grate at the other end—but yeah… it’s doable. It’s the only way into the purification room.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. That I do remember from the schematics.”
“And there’s absolutely no other…?”
“Doc, hey. Not trying to be an asshole here, but this is it. No alternative.”
“Okay.” Luke vented a shaky breath. “Fine. Fine.”
“I’d let you stay here, but I may need help,” she said. “My hand’s fucked.”
Luke exhaled heavily. “Go on. I’ll follow.”
Al’s body bumped into the tube. Her elbows and knees made no noise at all—it was as if she were crawling through a hole carved into a mountainside.
“You coming, Luke?”
He knelt. His knees and feet were pressed tightly together, the knobs of his anklebones touching. It felt as though the tunnel behind him was no longer an O, but had been crimped into a V: a pair of jaws closing by degrees, forcing him forward if he didn’t want to be crushed.
The air changed once again as he entered the chute: heavier, sickeningly moist. He worked his way forward on his belly, bucking his hips in a clumsy humping motion.