He wanted to call out, call for his mommy to tell him what he should do, but felt somehow that he shouldn’t, that now that he was inside, he needed to be quiet. And pimming her was a no-no: Asher would be looking for that, and that’d be even worse than not masking, since it’d make them both easy to find. Should he crawl back? Tell them he was lost?
No, he didn’t want to make Mister Three mad. There was no telling what he might do if he got mad. Or disappointed. He’d said he was a soldier. Soldiers probably didn’t call for their mommies, and they probably weren’t afraid of the dark. Tears came to his eyes.
Wren gripped his knife tighter, held the blade up, looked at it. He was a soldier. He was a soldier.
“I’m a soldier,” he whispered, as the first hot tear streaked his face. “I’m a soldier.”
For some reason, he just decided to go right. It felt better somehow. He took one last look at the entrance, and then moved on. And once the decision was made, he found it suddenly easier to move, to crawl faster. To quit crying. It’d been a fleeting glimpse of the entryway, but Wren knew now that time was short. The Weir would be out soon. And Mama was counting on him. Mister Three was counting on him. He wouldn’t let them down.
He crawled on, elbow after elbow, and in another minute or so, he nearly passed over top of the very thing he’d been looking for. Another vent. A way out. Below him, and smaller than the one he’d come in through, it nevertheless looked like his best and only option.
Wren scooted back, tried to get some leverage on the fitting, but it was no good. A couple of minutes of trying to wedge the blade into the seams didn’t work. In the end he took to stabbing the vent over and over, each strike echoing sharply throughout the Vault beyond, and sending a chill up his spine. Finally, the metal bent outward, making a hole big enough for him to slip through.
For a time, he sat listening, straining for any sound of human life below. Then, he scooted forward, and peered downward into more of the same deep blackness that he’d just crawled through. He remembered back when Mister Three had hidden them before, back in that big wet place, when he’d dropped their chemlight down the stairwell. It’d been an accident then. Now, it seemed like a good idea.
Wren reached through with the chemlight, then let it fall from his hand, watched as it floated into nothingness, and then clattered suddenly, and rolled to a halt. Its meager light pooled on what looked like a smooth concrete surface. It didn’t seem that far down. Too far to go head first, though. Wren dragged himself forward over the vent, then, once his feet were clear, dropped them through the hole and scooted backwards.
He had intended to lower himself slowly down until he was just hanging from the edge, and then drop. Something didn’t go right. It happened too fast, about when his waist went through the hole, and all of a sudden he was slipping and falling, and something punched him in the arm and chin, and then his feet hit before he was ready, and he fell to his hands and knees on cool, hard concrete.
It took a second for Wren to figure out he’d hit the ground, and that he was where he meant to be. His arm felt funny. And his chin was burning. Really burning, like he’d put it on the stove. He tried really, really hard not to cry. But he couldn’t help it.
Through the tears he picked up his chemlight, held it high, tried to figure out where he was. Then, there was a sound. A sort of scuffle. A mouse running through paper, or a raven’s sudden flight. Wren froze. Strained. Gripped his knife so hard it hurt. Again, the sound. Coming from slightly behind him, over his right shoulder. Then a scraping, metal on metal.
An arctic wave of panic rushed over Wren then, as every nightmare creature he’d ever imagined exploded in his mind, there, trapped in the room with him, and he holding the only light. He wanted so desperately to scream, but his only thought, his one lone rational thought was to be still, and he clung to that thought. Be still. Be still. Be still.
Again, a rustling. No closer. And this time, followed by a voice.
“Wren?” it called. It sounded small, tinny, strange. “Wren, baby, are you in there?”
Mama.
“Mama! It’s me, I’m here!”
“Where are you, sweetheart?”
“I don’t know,” he called. He wasn’t even trying anymore. The tears fell freely. “Mama it’s all dark!”
“Come to me, Wren. Just come to my voice.”
He moved towards the voice he knew and loved the most, each step making it sound fuller, warmer, more and more like Mama.
“Keep coming, baby. You’re real close.”
Finally, in the last few steps, Wren could barely make out a stripe of pale purple light slipping in. The gap in the gate. He dropped to his knees, set the chemlight on the floor, and stuck his hand through.
“Here Mama, I’m here.”
He felt her strong hands close around his, warm, certain.
“Are you alright? Are you hurt?”
“I fell.”
Another voice now.
“The engines. Can you see ’em?”
Mister Three.
“No, sir. It’s all dark.”
“Wren, are you OK?”
He laid the knife down by his side, wiped the tears away with his free hand. He still had a job to do.
“Yes, Mama, I’m OK. I’m OK now.”
“Wren, you’re on the left side of the gate,” Three said, louder. He must’ve been kneeling near the gap now. “If you follow the gate over to the other side, the engines should be right there.”
“OK. I’ll find them. Hang on.”
Wren stood up, picked up his chemlight, followed the gate across the room, running his other, empty hand along it more for comfort than direction. Mama and Mister Three were on the other side of that gate. Eight inches away. Everything was fine.
He reached the end of the gate, where steel met concrete, and held the light above his head again. A few paces away he saw the beginnings of some kind of machinery: old, brown, massive. Had to be the engines.
“OK, Mama, I found them!” he yelled.
And in the next instant, froze again, as the echo from his voice trailed off. He felt it.
Something was there, moving in the darkness. Closing.
No faint rustle now. Just a steady, slow pat… pat… pat, like bare feet carefully placed. There was no hope for control now. Wren screamed.
“Mama! Mama!”
“Wren?”
Absolute terror seized him, a waking nightmare.
“Mama! Something’s in here! Mama!”
“Wren! Wren!” she called, hysterical. “Wren!”
Back, back, he slid back to the wall, down to the corner, hugged his knees. The knife, his knife, he’d left it on the floor across the room, just now when he needed it most. And the patter never stopped, never sped up. It just came closer, closer, closer.
In his panicked fright, Wren threw the chemlight at the sound, watched it sail and clatter away, bouncing off some block of rounded, rusted metal. Clamped his hands over his ears, screaming for his mama to come get him, knowing there was no way she could.
Eleven
The woman was hysterical, and Three couldn’t really blame her given the situation. Wren had gone suddenly silent, and wasn’t answering her calls now. But they were on a knife’s edge, minutes from the waking of the Weir. Without the safety of the Vault, he was out of options. And without options, Cass wouldn’t survive the night.