Reamde

By the time she finished piecing this all together, Chet had caught up with her and was following the wire with his own eyes as he leaned against the gridiron, breathing raggedly and gurgling as he did so. “Holy crap,” he said, “I didn’t actually expect to see it.”

“You think there’s something hidden in that trash pile?”

“Must be.”

In a pocket of his leathers, Chet was carrying a Leatherman that included pliers and a wire cutter. After insisting that Zula go back outside and stand with her back to the mountain, he reached up, snipped the wire, and pushed the gate open—she could hear the massive hinges groaning. “All clear,” he announced, after counting to ten. “But before we go through, I’m going to take a little rest here while you go back to my bike and get something.”

The something turned out to be a massive cable lock. Zula fetched it back into the tunnel and helped Chet thread it through the bars of the gridiron and the gate, locking it securely behind them.

After that, they proceeded with extreme caution, which was not that difficult anyway since Chet couldn’t move very fast. Once they got past the drifts of party trash that cluttered the floor near the grid, there weren’t that many places to hide booby traps. And if the first one was anything to go by, Jones would have marked them all with spray-painted warnings so that the follow-up group—presumably Ershut, Jahandar, and anyone else deemed worthy to follow—wouldn’t run afoul of them. So her nose became extremely sensitive to the sharp perfume of spray paint, and her eyes keen for the fluorescent green color that Jones had been using.

After a few minutes, they came to a place where the tunnel terminated in a rock wall pierced by a mouse hole just big enough for Chet to walk upright. “See, this thing was an adit,” Chet was explaining, “which is what the miners call a tunnel that runs horizontal, flat enough that you can run rail cars on it. Straight into the ore body in the heart of the mountain. Only this first part of it, here, got expanded for the railway. But now we’re going into the adit proper.” There was another pileup of trash and another steel door, barring the entrance to the adit, that had been jimmied open and left hanging askew. It would have been a natural place to put another booby trap. But Zula did not see or smell spray paint, and Chet’s minute inspection of the trash and the door revealed nothing suspicious. They stepped into the much more confined space of the adit and discovered that, as always, revelers and graffitists had been there first.

“Third one on the right,” Chet intoned, then coughed and hacked up something dark which he spat against the wall. The physical effort of the coughing left him woozy, and he leaned against the stone for a few moments, then stumbled forward, insisting on leading the way.

Zula wanted to ask Third what on the right? but reckoned she would see soon enough and didn’t want to put Chet to the trouble of talking. She got a clue when they passed a hole in the wall, and she shone her light into it to see another adit leading away into what she gathered was the ore body. They had clearly entered into a sort of rock that was different from what they’d seen at the surface: darker but laced through with veins of color and a-sparkle with crystalline growths, especially in those places where water seeped out of cracks and trickled along the gutter carved into the adit’s floor. Only a few moments later they went by another, similar landmark, and perhaps twenty meters farther along, after passing momentarily through rock of a different sort, they reentered the ore body and came to adit number three. Which Zula could have guessed just by nosing it out, since the odor of spray paint had become strong again. This time several lines of script had been scrawled across the wall next to the side passage.

They stopped here so that Chet could gather his strength. He had been consuming water at an alarming rate and still complained of thirst. “You go down this adit for, I don’t know, a hundred feet, and you’ll come to a shaft in the floor of a chamber. Should be a steel ladder. Used to be a hoist, but it’s busted now. Down the ladder all the way to the bottom. About fifty rungs. That gets you into an adit that takes you out to another intersection like this one.”

“Does this mean you’re not coming with me?”

“Just a figure of speech,” he said, after a pause to consider it. “Just gathering my energy for that damned ladder.”