Lapis followed the jiggly light down the musty-smelling corridor, unable to distinguish much other than the thick soil smeared on grungy metal walls, the transparent, lined containers embedded just above head height that probably once contained lights, and the smoothed dirt floor. Unlike the Jiy underground, the curved ceiling remained intact, no wires or debris hanging in the way, providing a clear avenue of escape.
The dogs did not like the new atmosphere, and whined, upset. Lapis held her two close, murmuring in a low voice she hoped soothed them. One licked her chin and snuggled into her chest as if to hide. She heard Rin reassuring his two, talking to them as if they understood his confidence.
The corridor ended in a humongous central hub. Broken rail tracks filled the ground for as far as Lapis could see, and she assumed disparate tunnels intersected it. Rusted boxcars in various states of decay sat on them, a few so damaged the contents peeked out; cyan-colored rock winked at them.
“Is that . . . aquatheerdaal?” Caitria asked, flabbergasted. Mama Poison rumbled, as if saying yes. Tovi halted next to one and turned about, taking care not to strike Rin with his tail. They formed a loose group, antsy and uneasy. Lapis handed her two dogs to Patch, then leaned against him for balance while she emptied her boots. Her pant legs were long enough; how had she gotten so much dirt inside them?
“How much of this stuff is still here?” Tearlach asked, eyeing the mineral.
“It isn’t in the ground,” Patch said. “And I doubt anyone knows these cars exist, or they would be empty.” He looked directly at Mama Poison as the large lizard situated herself. “Have you been through this place?”
She deliberately nodded.
“How’d you get past the door?” Caitria asked.
She adjusted her weight, held up a claw, and pointed back the way they had come. She wagged it back and forth to say no, then pointed into the darkness and nodded.
“So you come in another way. Maybe you know the way to our camp.”
“Cassa’s there. You know her?” Lapis asked. No reason not to confirm the woman’s identity.
Mama Poison nodded with exaggerated acknowledgment, her shoulders moving with the motion. Tovi’s head bumped up and down, multiple times. If a lizard could look worried but hopeful at the same time, he did.
“Is she working with the mercs?”
They shook their heads together, adamant.
“I have the camp coordinates, Patch.” Caitria held her bundle of dog in the crook of her arm as she tapped at the screen. “But something’s interfering with my tech. I can’t get a reading. Can you get a sense of the area? We need to go southwest.”
Mama Poison nodded, rapped the ground before her for attention, then raised her claw and pointed at herself before carting her bulk past the boxcars. She moved so fast Lapis thought they would lose her in the dark, but her long, long tail gave them something to follow. Tovi scampered after her, Rin and Caitria following. Patch shoved the pups at her, who whined in displeasure as she adjusted them, then trotted to catch the group. Her partner and Tearlach took the rear.
“Well, if they do break through the door, the aquatheerdaal will keep their attention,” Tearlach said as they entered the new way.
“Millions of metgals of rock is just sitting there,” Caitria agreed. “Grabbing all of that would provide a fortune to whoever retrieved it. I don’t think that’ll happen, though. Taangis tech doors aren’t easy to infiltrate, even after so many years—and that one was meant to stay closed. You don’t hook up a door to a terminal if it’s a casual entrance.”
“How is it still working?” Patch asked. “If Taangis built it, it’s far older than the stuff in Jiy, and the underground areas are falling apart there. Nothing’s intact.”
“Someone’s maintaining it,” she replied, her voice matter-of-fact but hesitant. “There’s no rust on the door, no major debris in the corridor. We can ask Tovi’s guardian when we get back. It’s odd, though. If people are preserving it, you’d expect them to have cleared out those cars by now. Whoever still resides in Ambercaast has to know how much aquatheerdaal is worth, and that mineral is already mined, ready to ship.” She laughed. “We should have grabbed some.”
“We’ll come back for it,” Patch growled.
“What are your scans showing?” Tearlach asked.
“Nothing. Whatever’s interfering with Caitria’s tech doesn’t like my set-up, either. I can use my second eye for depth perception, but that’s about it.”
Great. “Well, if they can’t get through the door, they might decide to search the area,” Lapis said. “They’ll assume there’s an exit someplace nearby and hunt for it.”
“That depends on how active Adrastos’s people are in patrolling,” Tearlach said. “And they now have a reason to secure the border with a heavy force. The mercs will have to sneak about or engage them, and all that takes time and effort away from finding us.”
“Do you think the people chasing us are from Meergevenis?” Lapis asked. “They had the same color of cyan beam the Blossom enemy did.”
“Probably.” Patch shook his head. “If they are from Meergevenis, they must be pretty desperate, to send mercs across an ocean to nose about depleted aquatheerdaal mines.”
“Tovi’s noddin’,” Rin called. “About them bein’ Meergevens.”
Aquatheerdaal seemed an unlikely explanation for their presence. The trip to Theyndora was a long, expensive, difficult venture. Or that was Lapis’s impression, taken from the books she read. It may be, because of their advanced tech, the journey proved far less a problem than Jilvaynan writers imagined, as accustomed as they were to a society forbidden the use of computerized mechanisms.
The way became stuffier, mustier. Lapis wondered how much dust Mama Poison kicked up, and how much was stale air sitting in a tunnel, waiting for someone to pass by and disturb it. Other than the lizard, had anyone used the tunnels since Ambercaast fell to ruin? The city died after Dentheria invaded, leaving over two hundred years of rot between then and now.
They reached another still, silent space with a ceiling high enough Caitria’s light did not illuminate it. The soft white glinted off train engines, their exteriors caked in grunge, roots, rust, their windows black. She shuddered at the thought of someone hiding inside a compartment, waiting for a random group to pass by, but acknowledged that remembered horror tales and the press of darkness instigated her unwarranted fear. No one traversed the tunnels, so no guttershank would have cause to sit in wait for them.
She clutched the dogs closer. Her bundle quieted, burying their heads into her shoulders and shivering, and she felt terrible for making them traverse such a terrifying place. At least they did not squirm; she really did not want to chase after one of them if they got loose and raced away.
One engine had shattered front windows, and clumps of crumbly something piled on the sill. She glimpsed a dark shape collapsed over the dashboard; a body? It would be nothing but bones. She felt sorry for whoever it had been, that they died and no one bothered to retrieve their corpse. She glanced behind at Patch and Tearlach; both appeared grim, and she wondered what they noticed that she did not.
A wide walkway, large enough for Mama Poison’s bulk, ran between the engines, and the lizard hastened down it, her tail swishing about but not touching the machines. Lapis noted evidence of interrupted work; a shovel stuffed into the ground between degraded plastic barriers marking a construction area, the handle rotted but the metal scoop still standing, a fallen table with brittle pages curled up at the bottom and writing utensils spanning away from it, a small, square utility room with a rusty, dented chair that had the remains of a coat draped over the back, the lower half piled in an unglamorous heap on the floor. A crane stood to the right, ropes dangling lifelessly over a pile of cracked metal boxes whose contents had oozed out and solidified on the ground.
Near the exit, bones peeked out of two haphazard piles. Glints of metal winked through the decaying fabric, and Lapis thought one small heap that sat next to the main one resembled the shape of a tech weapon.
“Get the impression of history weighing down?” Tearlach asked in a quiet voice.
“Left to rot. Forgotten, and in that sense, dead.” Patch half-laughed. “A fitting representation of the final results of empire glamor.”
“It’s strange.” Caitria’s voice drifted back to them. “I read that Ambercaast dwindled and died, like most of the other cities that became ruins after Taangis withdrew. But that’s not the impression I’m getting from this room.”
“A Dentherion slaughter and they left the bodies to rot? Sounds right,” Patch said.
“But if they had access to this area, they also had access to the boxcars carrying aquatheerdaal. The primary reason Dentheria invaded Ramira in the first place was that they needed cash to pay back Taangis for the tech they bought. It wouldn’t have mattered how much money the mineral made, but that it made something to add to the coffers.”
“It may be, that Taangis killed them and left them,” Tearlach said. “A parting gift from the parting empire.”
“They would have taken the aquatheerdaal with them,” Caitria insisted. “There’s too much money sitting there to leave it behind.”
The discussion sent a shiver up Lapis’s spine. She had the same reaction to certain places in Jiy, where the explanations for ancient death and destruction did not fit the evidence before her eyes. Too many atrocities existed there, covered by the desperate ignorance of the people who only wished to forget.
Dentheria had a lot to pay for, and it would never come due.
The fresher scent of cold evergreens and dank soil slowly overwhelmed the musty decay filling the tunnel. Moonlight touch the ground where Mama Poison halted. Patch patted Lapis on the shoulder before he moved to the entrance and peered into the night. Tearlach stopped next to her, his attention on the pitch-blackness behind them. She studied it as well; the faint clink of metal against metal floated to them, a constant repetition of sound.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Tearlach whispered. “We didn’t pass anything that made noise, and I don’t think it’s the mercs. It’s too . . . consistent.”
Everyone in front surged out of the cave; she and the rebel turned to hasten after. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a gleam of cyan cutting through the air, like a glancing glare of light off a glass.
The camp was downhill from them, the bright, clear space easily seen through the trees.
Patch set the tone; he ran.
Startled shouts erupted behind them, but the expected tech beams did not follow. Instead strangled screams filled the air.
“Run faster!” Tearlach yelled.
So said the gangly man with a stride twice her length.
The blare of cyan lit the trees, and the sounds of fighting echoed to her. The dogs whined at the jostling and she held them closer as she scraped past bushes and dodged fallen logs. Terror infused her step, and she mindlessly careened down the slope. She lost track of everyone but Tearlach, and he kept at her side. They hit a pitted, rocky dirt road at the same time as an armed contingent made up of Minq and Lord Adrastos’s people. They carried larger tech weapons and fear skirted up Lapis’s stomach and into her neck. Those did terrible damage to unprotected flesh.
“Get to camp!” one called at them.
Like they planned to race somewhere else.
The bright lights welcomed them, and Lapis gratefully wallowed in it. She slowed with Tearlach, and they came to a gasping halt next to Mama Poison in the meadow, the place large enough to fit her bulk. Cassa, surrounded by wary rebels, Kayleb, and a scattering of others, hugged Tovi around the neck while the three dogs Rin and Caitria had carried yapped, bouncing up and down as if they had already forgotten the terror of the underground.
Her two squirmed, so Lapis let them go to join their family.
“What did I tell you?” Cassa said, tears and exasperated anger coloring her tone. “Always take a dog with you. Why didn’t you?”
The small lizard hunched and looked to the side, just like a teen caught doing something naughty and hating the chastisement. He flicked his tongue, and Cassa sat back, slamming her hands into her hips.
“Don’t flick your tongue at me!”
Mama Poison rumbled, and raised a paw. Her claws flowed into various positions, resembling rat hand signals. While Lapis spelled with her fingers, her knowledge of whole words remained limited. Impressive, that a lizard knew the language. How had she learned it?
“I know,” Cassa replied, aggrieved. “But being a stubborn teen is only a good excuse when you don’t put your life in danger. And you had to save him, placing you in danger as well.”
Rin did not enjoy the attention Lapis gave him at that sentiment.
She smiled at the petulance, then sucked in a deep breath and rubbed her temple, at a loss. Her night had turned into a fantasy nightmare with large talking lizards being the good guys.
At least, she believed them the good guys.
The thought pricked a memory. A series of stories Faelan read to her as a child starred wagon-sized lizards having outrageous adventures and talking to humans through similar hand language. He told her the tales were older than the grandparents in their community, who heard them from their grandparents. As unlikely as it seemed, they had seeds of truth in them.
“What happened?” Patch asked, wandering up.
“Something was following us,” Tearlach said. “And I don’t think it was the mercs.”
“I saw a cyan glint,” Lapis said. “And there was this clicking metallic sound.”
Patch rubbed at the back of his neck. “My scans are shit. I can activate my second eye, but that’s about it. Whatever interfered with our tech seems to have damaged something in my patch or the eye mechanism. Or both.”
Oh no. He touched her cheek, to soothe the gut-punch of worry. “I’m going to have to get that extra-special protection crap Sils brags about.”
“But, he’s in Dentheria.”
“I’ll be back before you know it.” He smacked a kiss to her sweaty forehead. That did not make her feel better. Neither did the concerned look her brother cast her way.
“I’m fine,” she told him. He remained unconvinced because she did not believe it, either.
“Now that we’ve had a happy reunion, I’d love to know what’s going on.” Patch regarded Cassa and the lizards with a lazily lidded eye, his calm hiding a caustic curiosity screaming to get out. Faelan reflected his look; the woman would not have the chance to squirm out of an explanation.
“Oh. Yes.” She rose, wiping at her cheeks before swatting at her pants. “Everyone, I’d like you to meet Vali and Tovi.” She motioned to each in turn. “They’re . . . well, terron lizards. Me, I’m a biological anthropologist from the Bawik Institute in Mozen, Meergevenis. My department sent me here to assist the population of terron lizards left in the Depths. It’s been a rewarding and interesting experience for both me and Tovi. Until now.” She wormed the edge of her jacket between her fingers. “Those mercs showed up and . . . and I’m not certain how to fix what they broke.”
Lapis met the gazes of the others, noting Rin’s excitement, Caitria’s interest, Tearlach’s suspicion, Kayleb’s hostility. They all had accepted the strange so far, but how many more wonders could they handle that night?
