“Algae, maybe,” DJ says.
“What if I’m allergic?” Ackerly says.
“Not even a control booth,” DJ says, standing beside an old, rusted frame that might have once supported such a structure. “I’ll bet when they sealed it off, they covered the outside with rocks, too. So’s nobody would even know it was here. Paranoid bastards, but smart, right?”
“No Voors came in through here,” Brom observes, turning, his light sweeping around the walls of the garage. “How’d they overpower Skyrines without help?”
Then my own beam returns as a glint—back in the tunnel that led us here. A little speck of reflection that almost instantly seems to be obscured, as if by a shutter, a blink, then jerks aside—and vanishes.
“Did you see that?” I ask, retreating to the center of the hangar.
“See what?” DJ says.
“An eye,” Brom says, throat tight. “I saw it, too—a blinking eye. Just one.”
Ackerly bumps up against us and we’re a tight square, facing outward, sidearms at the ready. “I didn’t see anything,” he insists. “Are we going back that way?”
“Only way out,” DJ says.
It takes a few minutes to get these exhausted and thoroughly unhappy men to see clear reason. We cannot finish our mission without retracing our steps—following our boot marks. I look down at the green dust and our own tracks with obsessive interest, trying to make any sense of where we are, what’s happening. What we’re seeing or not seeing.
DJ takes the lead again. I take the rear. We’re all in stealth mode, moving with as little sound as possible, trying not even to breathe loud.
Then Brom gives a little grunt. “Look at this,” he says, bending, moving his light along our tracks. There’s a very clear boot print, fresh, in the dust. One of ours, doesn’t matter whose. Pointing to the garage.
Someone or something has planted an even fresher pockmark, and pushed aside a little line of green dust, right across that print. A few minutes before.
Without leaving any other sign.
“Ants!” Brom says, his voice rising. “They’re already inside. We are truly fucked!”
“I don’t think so,” I say, mind working so fast my thoughts feel like sparks. No panic. Draw them back from panic. “We’ve all seen Antag tracks on the Red. Individuals leave bigger marks—double circles, side bars. Bigger boots than ours.”
“Not Ants, then,” DJ agrees.
“Calm down,” I say. “Mission first. We have to get back and report.”
We return to the radiance of tunnels at the bottom of the first spiral staircase. Alone, unmolested.
“Something with one shiny eye,” Brom says thoughtfully. “If not Ants, then what?”
“Let’s finish this level and see if there’s something we need to know,” I say.
We’ve gone on for a few hundred meters and it’s becoming obvious that DJ no longer knows where we are.
“We’ve walked too fucking far,” he says. “I’m turned around.”
“Lost?” Ackerly asks.
“No, man, just turned around. Put me right and I’ll find the way. We can follow our tracks.”
We’ve made a wrong turn, it’s dark—no star lights hang on these walls, and the grooves seem fresh. DJ is silent for a while until we stop again and he turns and looks back at us. “These digs weren’t on the map,” he says. “I think we’re nowhere near where we’re supposed to be.”
“Then we just go back, right?” Ackerly asks.
“Green dust will show us the way,” Brom says.
“If you’ll notice,” I say, pointing to our feet, “no green dust.”
“Shit,” Brom says. “It’s supposed to be everywhere, it clogs my nose like snuff—why not here? Why not when we need it?”
“Because it’s not funny,” DJ says. “There’s only green dust when it’s funny.”
But we’re not going to let him off easy. We group around him, tight, as if we can squeeze out a better answer. Not threatening, mind you—we’d never threaten a fellow Skyrine. More like we’re really strung-out chain-smokers and we know he has a pack of cigarettes on him somewhere.
“Give me room to think, goddamn it,” he says, head low, eyes shifting in our beams. Which are, of course, slowly dimming. At least the air is fresh—fresher than ever, I think, like a slow, continuous mountain breeze way down here. “There was a side tunnel back about a hundred meters,” he finally says, and pushes through our pack. “We’ll try that one.”
“I did not see it,” Ackerly says. “Did you?” he asks Brom.
None of us saw it except DJ, and he’s murmuring, “I didn’t think it was the one, not right. Didn’t feel right.”
I have nothing against Corporal Dan Johnson—really. Decent tech, dedicated Skyrine, sometimes tries to be funny. But the thought that our lives depend on DJ’s self-described perfect memory brings no joy. Ackerly and Brom are stoic. I think they made their peace out on the Red, running before the Antag wall of dust, and the rest has just been prelude to a foregone conclusion.
I’m trying to figure the lack of dust and the walls’ fresh grooves. Recent digs?
Even after the water receded?
Slowly it’s beginning to dawn on me that we might be dealing with another kind of participant in our weird game—a third party or group of parties, origin unknown, nature unknown.
But carrying a camera.
“What the fuck are you laughing at?” DJ asks me. “It’s not funny, man.”
“Find that side tunnel,” I tell him.
“Yes, sir. What if it’s not there anymore?”
“Find it.”
Ten more steps and DJ spins around, shining his beam right at us. He points to his right, our left, face bright but damp. “There, just like I saw.”
It’s a smaller, narrower tunnel, barely high enough to stoop into. DJ bends over and heads in anyway, and then pops out like a cork, arms flailing. He’s caught in a weird kind of web, pieces of thin translucent stuff, like flexible glass or cellophane noodles, that have stuck to his helm and shoulders. Grunting like a desperate pig, he plucks off the glassy fibers and flings them to the floor while Brom and Ackerly and I stand back, afraid to touch him, not at all sure what he’s blundered into. But finally he’s mostly cleaned himself off, all but for little fragments, and I tell him to stop, stop wasting energy, let me look you over.
He freezes like a statue, chin high, arms out. “Are they needles?” he asks, high and squeaky.
“Don’t think so. Hold still.”
I carefully pluck away one fiber, hold it out and up in our beams. It’s about five centimeters long, twenty millimeters across, very much like a cellophane noodle in a bowl of Asian soup, but stiffly bendy. I pinch it lengthwise, not too hard, between my fingers. It flexes, then seems to grow rigid—to actually straighten and harden. Weird material.
Pieces of the shattered web lie on the tunnel floor all around DJ. But nothing seems to have pierced his skintight.
“Fucking spiderweb,” Brom says.
“No!” DJ husks. “Fucking heavy-duty no to that shit!”
“Fine,” Brom says. “No spiders.”
“I’m cool with no spiders, too,” Ackerly says.
My turn. I bend over and shine my light directly into the cavity that was supposed to be our turning point, our salvation, if ever I trusted DJ. “Something’s jammed in here,” I say.
“Trapdoor!” Brom says.
Now Ackerly takes umbrage and cuffs him on the side of the head.
My curiosity is piqued. Really. I am not in the least afraid—not now, just feeling a weird kind of wonder. Sad wonder. I feel as if I know what I’m going to find. Or at least part of me knows. Part of me feels a separate truth, not…