It was Yana’s advantage, and a delightful little scrap of irony.
She bounced on her toes like a runner warming up before a race. When the light swept past again, she scrambled up the steep, overhung-in-places bluff. Her fingers scraped at crumbling stone; roots gave when she grabbed at them. Though she was strong and fit and practiced and not too hungry, her forearms ached with a deep muscular soreness by the time she dragged herself over the edge.
There was no time to lie there panting and collecting herself. She wriggled to her feet and crouched, balanced on her toes and fingertips, waiting to discover if she’d been seen.
The blind eye of the robot lighthouse swept past once, twice, while Yana held as still as a toad that hopes not to be noticed. She thought, over and over like a short penitent prayer: I am stone. The illumination within the bunker never flickered. No hue, no cry. No sign of life.
They were probably in there enjoying a pleasant supper of hot soup and bread, she thought bitterly — a mistake. Her stomach growled, and she felt faint. She waited for one more pass of the light, gathered herself, and when the welcome darkness embraced her again, sprinted toward the back of the bunker, running not by sight but by the remembered outlines of the land.
She made it. Pressed against the base of the bunker, she paused and listened intently for alarms and excursions. Nothing. Had the infrared sensors given out long ago, along with everything else? Had she been skulking for no reason?
Or was it simply that no one was watching them, and all the artificial systems had long since degraded, ground down, and failed?
She knew the bunker wasn’t deserted. She’d seen shapes moving around it as recently as her last scouting visit, a mere few days ago. But they went inside at night, sealed themselves up. And that was why night was the safest time for her to strike.
She didn’t expect to break in. The bunker was pre-Eschaton tech, and she might have about as much luck prying a clam open with her torn and ragged fingernails. It’d be safer to try to swim out to those aquaculture rigs, and that was nearly certain death. But her careful spying had revealed that while the bunker was probably impregnable by any means within Yana’s reach, the people who lived there didn’t store everything within its walls.
There were outbuildings. Low, dug-in, camouflaged with rocks so they looked like part of the outcropping the bunker was built into; they huddled behind it like so many slanting boulders. There, by those storage sheds — there, Yana thought she could probably break in. And there was food there. She’d seen men rolling the barrels of mussels from the aquaculture rigs along the beach, hoisting them up the bluff with pulleys and cables. She’d seen them hauling up baskets of seaweed, too. And more mysterious large, soft-looking sacks of things, all carried from small boats moored far out to sea — too far to swim.
She imagined flour, bacon. Oatmeal. Sugar.
Her stomach growled again. She swallowed the bitter bilious flavor of her hunger and propped her hands on her knees.
There was a little more light here. It filtered down from the floodlights above, and the dark sky was brightening. Not with dawn, not yet. With rich drapes and swirls of electric green and arctic blue aurora.
Sprinting — and potentially falling — wasn’t worth it, here. By the glow of the Northern Lights, Yana picked her way along the edge of the path that led from the bunker’s great steel door around to its rear. She didn’t walk on the path because it was scattered thickly with bivalve shells — clam, oyster, mussel — and she knew they would crackle and crunch under her feet.
She moved crouched over, as much to get her eyes closer to the ground as to disguise her silhouette. It was a good thing, too, because it kept her from tripping into the trench beside the entrance to the sheds. There were three of them, side by side, two-thirds buried underground and then more earth and stones heaped on the roofs.
She drew up sharply, found the stone steps leading down, and paused. If she, herself, were going to set a booby trap, this is where she would do it.
Someone moaned in the darkness below.
Yana froze. She felt like a damned startled rabbit. For an instant, she thought bitterly of what it had been like to walk tall, mostly fearless. To have a full belly and time to think, read, plan. Then she acknowledged the thought, let it pass through, and refocused her attention on the actual, critical, possibly life-threatening matter at hand.
There was a person in the darkness below.
And that person was hurt.
Well, most likely. She could construct all sorts of conspiracy theories and worries about decoys and traps, but Occam’s razor suggested that somebody else had been attracted by the presence of food, and had either triggered a trap or just — in the dark — stumbled into the gaping hole in the ground.
Yana risked bending down, dropping her hand below the line of the ground, and squeezing her fingers tightly, briefly, on the activator of her minilume. It glowed with a pleasant cool light, illuminating a bare pit or trench paved in flagstones and featuring a fieldstone retaining wall to keep it from collapsing in on itself. On the far side were the doorways to the three sheds or root cellars. They were all closed.
Yana heard the moan again.
This time, she had been listening. Waiting. She thought the sound emanated from the leftmost of the sheds, which was the one closest to the sea. Another quick squeeze on her lume, and she saw that each shed had a small casement window about four feet off the ground. The three windows were not identical. They had obviously been constructed from whatever materials were available, then hinged to a custom-built window frame when the time came to install them in the sheds.
The one on that leftmost shed was propped open at the bottom.
As if in response to her light, Yana heard a brief intake of breath. The moaning stopped.
Silence.
She hadn’t seen anything that looked like a trap in her brief glimpses. Now, though, she palmed the lume and waited for her eyes to adapt. She moved her head from side to side, scanning — looking with her peripheral vision, which was sometimes better in the dark.
There. A faint silvery runnel reflected the glow of the night sky. Elongated, razor-thin, like when sunlight splayed along a length of spider-line: a tripwire strung across the bottom riser of the stairs.
All right, Yana thought. So if you saw that and wanted to avoid it, what would you do next? You’d drop down, right, over the edge on the opposite side?
Yana waited for the lighthouse beam and matched it with a quick flicker of her lume, peering down into that pit. The big flagstone at the far end of the pit had a funny, plasticky shine to it. And it was suspiciously clean, without the scraps of dead grass and litter of sand that marked the other flagstones. Plenty of birdshit, but some of the shit had a sort of funny, elongated splatter pattern.
The flagstone was on hinges. It was designed to drop whoever jumped down onto it into an oubliette. Or possibly into a pit of hungry tiger sharks and rotating knives, which would probably be more efficient in the long run, and probably just about as much fun. No need to haul any prisoners — or bodies — out of a hole in the ground that way. You’d save on rigging pulleys.