The Quiet at the End of the World

by Lauren James

  “Maybe it leads into a chamber above this one,” I say, climbing back down to Shen. “Like a natural cave or something. The builders who excavated the tunnels must not have known about it. They probably made the ceiling too thin and the roof collapsed inwards from the pressure.”

  “Do you think it’s a way out?” Shen asks.

  I shrug. “It could be. We should give it a go, anyway. You said yourself that you’re worried about my scuba gear. This might be our only option.”

  “Maybe we should see if there’s another route.”

  “I don’t think we have time, Shen,” I say. “Let’s at least try this. It might save us a few hours, and we want to get back as soon as we can.” It’s eleven p.m. Finding the processors didn’t take as long as I thought, but we have a lot of people to fix, and I have no idea how long it will take to replace each part. For every hour we spend here, that’s another person in the community whose memories might be lost.

  He agrees, but I can tell he’s reluctant. I scale the rocks again and look into the tunnel. The crawl space looks even narrower now, but I’m sure there’s just enough room to work my torso inside. “I’ll go first,” I say.

  “Careful,” Shen says. He climbs up the rubble to give me a leg up, and I pull myself into the opening.

  As I wriggle in on my belly, the loose rocks shift under me. It’s even tighter than I thought it would be. My chest and back scrape against the rock whenever I breathe out.

  “OK?” Shen asks, his voice muffled. His headlight beam passes in front of me, casting my shadow into the tunnel ahead.

  “Tight,” I call back, “but OK.”

  He squeezes my ankle, and releases me. I rise up on to my elbows again and slide further into the space. My neck hurts from holding my head low enough to avoid hitting the roof. Slowly I drag myself on, centimetre by centimetre, fingers creeping forward against the surface.

  A metre or so in, a rock juts down from the ceiling. To get past it, I have to bring my arms back to my sides and twist my head and shoulders, pressing my cheek against the stone and easing through. There’s no way to push myself forward except with the tips of my toes. I slither on, staring at the stone wall just in front of my face. I close my eyes, making my way through by touch. The rush of air into my lungs is roaringly loud in the silent space.

  I’m nearly past the obstruction when my shoulder brushes against the rock, dislodging it slightly. I rear up in fright, convinced that the whole mountain is about to come down on top of me. My helmet smashes into the roof, filling my ears with a loud bang. It feels like the walls are squeezing in on me, making the small space smaller and smaller until suddenly I can’t breathe.

  “I can’t – Shen, get me out! Get me out, now!” I scream, trying to turn around, but there isn’t enough space. My breath is coming out in juddering gasps.

  Two hands close around my ankles, sending warmth spiralling through my frozen body. A voice says calmly and quietly, “You can do this, Lowrie. I believe in you.”

  I sob. I’m breathing so fast that my back is scraping against the ceiling constantly, rubbing my skin raw through my clothes. I can hear a low grinding noise, and I can’t tell if it’s my bones working in my jaw as I tighten it in fear – or if the whole mountain is shifting above me, threatening to collapse and press me into nothing but rock.

  “I can’t! Get me out get me out get me out! I’m trapped!”

  “You’re not trapped,” he says. His voice is steady, like this is totally normal. Why is he not terrified too? “I’m right here – ready to pull you out at any moment.”

  “The rock, it’s – it’s shifting! I’m going to—” I’m desperate to turn around, to look behind me and see what’s happening. I imagine rock falling, cutting me off from Shen, leaving me alone in the darkness, without light, unable to move a muscle. “Shen, please!”

  “It’s in your head,” he soothes, rubbing at my ankles. “The rock is stable. It’s OK, it’s OK. You’ve got this, Lowrie. You’re OK.”

  I breathe through my nose, trying to calm down. He’s right. I can do this. I’m so close. Now that I’ve relaxed a bit, I can even make out the chamber ahead with the light of my headlamp.

  I’m so close to getting out of here. All I have to do is carry on a little further, and we’ll be free and safe.

  I have to do this. For Mum. For Dad. For Jia and Feng, and everyone else we know.

  “Do you want me to pull you out?” Shen asks, as my breath slows down, grows calmer.

  “No. I can do this.”

  I close my eyes and push myself forward, navigating by touch alone. Shen’s fingers slip away from my ankles, and I hear him cheer me on. His voice buzzes in my ears, loud and encouraging.

  The crawling goes on for ever in a slow, careful easing forward. Stopping for breath. Moving a bit more, stopping for breath. I start to panic again when I realise I’ve moved far enough inside the tunnel that Shen can’t reach me any more to rub my feet. But I take deep breaths and keep going.

  The surface is covered in a thick mulch of bird feathers. Pigeons must roost here. It’s another sign that we’re close to the surface. When my fingers reach the rock edge of the crawl space I’m unable to bear it for even a second more. I yank myself forward, scraping my torso along the rocks as I tumble out into the chamber.

  I slump to my knees, gasping. I feel absolutely battered. I seem to be bleeding from every centimetre of skin. Pain shoots down my neck from when I hit my head, and my knees are numb.

  “Lowrie?” Shen shouts, sounding high-pitched and worried.

  “I’m OK!” I call back, looking around the chamber. It’s even larger than the man-made tunnels. The walls are rough compared to the smooth machine-carved vaults. It’s definitely natural. “Throw me the end of the rope?” I shout. “Tie the rucksacks to your end. I’ll drag them through.”

  Once I’ve done this, I shout to Shen again. “Can you get through?” I ask.

  “I think so. Are there any big obstructions?”

  “Not any more. I knocked most of them aside.” Next time, I think I’ll push something in front of me to clear away the rocks. Then nothing can fall on me. Even better, I could send Mitch in first. He would have been able to scout ahead. I wish I’d thought of that before.

  Shen moves more quickly through the crawl space than I did. He’s not as scared, and he can pull himself forward using the rope tied tightly to this side. When he clears the crawl space, he’s pale and dusty, with thin scratches covering the skin of his jaw and neck.

  I immediately collapse against him, burying my head in his shoulder and letting out a muffled scream. His hands come up and wrap around my back. “I’ve got you,” he says. He presses a breathless kiss to the side of my brow.

  I lift my head to look at him.

  “Breathe in,” he says, pursing his lips as he takes in a long, slow breath. I follow it, latching on to his rhythm like a lifeline. “Breathe out.” Shen holds me in place until I finally feel fit to move. “We’re nearly free,” he says then, pressing his thumb to the corner of my eye and rubbing away the damp tears clinging to my eyelashes. “It’s over, Shadow.”

  I carefully brush a line of dirt from his cheek, bracketing his face between my palms. “I thought I’d never get to touch you again. I was so scared.”

  He smiles. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Suddenly I know it’s true. I don’t need to worry about what might happen when Shen and I are left alone. It’s already happened, and we’re fine. We’re still together, and I know now that there’s nothing I could do that would make him leave me. Even if we got together and broke up, we’d still be in this together for the long haul.

  So instead of letting go, I keep hold of his hand, interlinking our fingers and squeezing tightly.

  There’s a noise behind us, and I look through the tunnel to see Mitch fold himself up into a smaller sphere and then roll through the tunnel.

  “You are so creepy,” I say, as he unfolds into his n
ormal form. “Who designed you?”

  Shen grins at us, looping the rope around the length of his forearm to pack it away.

  Mitch reaches out to stroke the side of my face with a cold thin metal finger, slowly and intentionally weirdly.

  I shiver, pushing him away with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure you have a sense of humour. A bad one but still.”

  Shen isn’t listening. “Lowrie,” he says, sounding amazed. “Come and look at this!” He’s moved further down the chamber and is staring at the rough stone wall. There’s something drawn on the rock: slashes of red against brown.

  I gasp. “Is that…?”

  “Yes.” His voice is trembling.

  The walls are covered in red ochre line drawings of dancing figures and four-legged animals, painted in rough strokes and curved smears, surrounded by ancient handprints.

  I realise I’m crying. This cave hasn’t been disturbed in thousands of years. These drawings have been waiting in the dark, long forgotten, for thousands of years. I try to imagine the cavemen who drew them. I wonder if they had a language yet. I wonder if one of these mammoths was their god.

  “Oh,” I sigh. “Oh, Shen.”

  He turns and wraps a palm around the back of my head, pulling me into a kiss. It feels natural, unquestionable. It’s not dramatic or romantic. When or how we started this has never mattered, not when it’s so inevitable. This is where we’ve been leading, all this time.

  His mouth tastes dusty, with the distinct tang of minerals.

  The kiss doesn’t last long, and when he pulls away, we’re silent, looking at the art and taking it in for long seconds that we can’t really waste. But it seems wrong to leave straightaway, after we’ve found something so rare.

  “Do you remember – before any of this, when we were talking about what humanity’s last message to the future might one day be?” I ask.

  He laughs. “Yes! And I thought that it would be cave paintings, because they’ll survive longer than any of our buildings.”

  “Here it is. Humanity’s last message.”

  Shen shakes his head, shadow trembling in the light from our head-torches across the years-old art. “This is getting a bit deep for me. We’ve not even got out of here yet.”

  “Well, at the very least I’m going to have to change my homework,” I say, looking around at how dry the cave is. “I’m going to hide my time capsule in a cave, instead of burying it.”

  Shen kisses my neck. “It could still get flooded, though. Look at the vaults.”

  “OK, well – not a cave on Earth, then. One on the moon! That wouldn’t get the slightest bit damp.”

  Shen looks up. “Wait, that’s it! Space! What if we put a time capsule on a satellite? It could be designed to orbit the earth for years and then crash-land back on the planet at a certain point. That would draw people’s attention to it.”

  “Ooh. OK, you win. That’s genius.” I wonder absently where we might be able to get a satellite. I’m sure we could find one in an old warehouse somewhere. And if it really is just us left, for ever, then we have to leave a message somehow. One that will last into the future. For the octopuses.

  Shen sighs. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “We’ll come back.”

  I’m crouching to pick up our rucksacks when I see something sticking out of the dusty silt on the cave floor. I tug it free, brushing away the dirt. It’s a roughly carved stone figurine of a woman. She fits perfectly in the small of my palm. The face is coarse, but I can see the slash of two eyes and a mouth. I can even see the shape of her braids, running down her back. She’s wearing her hair just like I wear mine.

  “Shen, look.” I hold out the small statue to him, and he cradles it between his hands. “It’s…” I’m so overcome that my voice is shaking, emotion rising up through my chest and bubbling out with my words. “If it was made by the same people who painted these walls then this might be over thirty thousand years old.”

  I picture a girl sitting in this very cave, carving the statue one careful tap of stone at a time. It must have taken years; an entire life. It must have been her most treasured possession, and her children’s, and her children’s children’s, passed down through the generations, used to tell fireside stories, maybe even worshipped.

  Shen has gone pink. “This is older than civilization itself. Older than language. Older than agriculture. Older than domesticated animals. Older than writing. Older than anything.”

  I shiver, unable to stand the pure impossible time of it all.

  I want to ask him to kiss me again, but that’s not a step I’m confident enough taking yet, so it’s easier to just lean in and press my lips to his, the ancient figurine pressed between us. The kiss is sloppy this time, more joy than focus. Shen lets out a little laugh into my mouth, fingers squeezing mine around the stone figure.

  “I think we just found the ultimate treasure,” I say. “That’s it. There’s no beating this. We can resign as treasure-hunters.”

  “Absolutely not.” He nips at my lip, kissing me again and sighing. “I can’t wait until this is over, so we can do that properly.”

  “We’re so close!” I say. “Step one complete!”

  Shen groans, tipping his head back and rolling it to the side to stare at me. “Don’t put it like that. I’m exhausted – literally drained of life: pushed to the very limits of my endurance. And you make it sound like we’ve only just started.”

  “Well, we’re nearly there.”

  “Soon we’ll be able to tick ‘save the world’ off our to-do list, then.”

  I grimace. “You know I don’t keep a to-do list. Live fast, die young.”

  He winces. “Please don’t. I need you to survive this, so I can teach you the joy of good list-keeping.” He lets me go.

  I want to push him against the rock and relearn the taste of his lips, but we have to keep moving. We don’t have time to stay here all night, and I’m sure that’s what would happen if I gave in to the urge to kiss him again. I keep catching him looking at my lips. I trail my hand down his forearm, interlinking our fingers. “Let’s go home.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The cave entrance is at least twenty metres above us, so we’re going to have to climb up the rock face to get out. The rocks are loose and flake away under my feet as I grip on to the stone and pull myself up.

  “Just pretend it’s the wall of the east wing,” Shen says, looking pale. “We climb stuff like this all the time.”

  “It’s totally the same,” I agree, not believing it at all.

  “We’ve got this.” Shen starts climbing.

  I’m about to follow him when a slice of stone collapses below him. He quickly jumps away, swinging on to more solid rock.

  “The east wing never did that!” I say.

  He grimaces.

  I blow out a long breath. “OK, then.”

  “We’ve got this,” Shen repeats, but he sounds less certain this time.

  We climb with Shen in front and Mitch bringing up the rear. We’re at about the height of the roof at home when there’s a deafening creaking sound, and the rock around us starts shaking. Something above me snaps and a sharp stone breaks free from the cave ceiling. It falls past my hand, tearing open my glove and scraping the skin off my knuckles. Groaning, I tug off the scraps of ruined glove. My hand is slick with blood.

  The whole cavern is shaking now, making it hard to hold on. I can hear the sound of rocks falling, hitting the cave floor far below. I try desperately to ignore it and keep going. We’re so close to the exit, just one more foothold and we’ll be free.

  Another stone is dislodged from the roof of the cavern and nearly hits Shen. My muscles are screaming in pain, but I focus on pulling myself up as fast as possible. Mitch extends his legs and arms, bracing them on the rock above and blocking us from the torrent so we can climb. I can hear the crack and snap as the stones hit the robot’s back. Whole slabs of rock are breaking off now, tumbling past us in shards the size of doors.


  I grab on to the edge of the rock above me, feeling the brush of fresh air against my fingers. I tumble out and twist, grabbing Shen’s forearm and pulling him through the hole after me.

  We’re just in time. There’s another groaning creak and the roof of the cavern collapses completely in an avalanche. Mitch disappears beneath the rock. There’s a screech of metal, a glint in the darkness, and then silence.

  “No!” Shen shouts, horrified. “Mitch!” he sobs. “Is he…?”

  I can’t speak. There’s no way Mitch could have survived that.

  Mitch sacrificed his life to save ours. He died so we wouldn’t.

  I close my eyes, tears leaking out to run down my cheeks.

  We’re both shaking. We hold each other, waiting for the shudders to end, for our bodies to calm.

  “We have to get back to the helicopter,” Shen says finally. “Come on. Save this for later. We have to get home to our parents. Mitch wouldn’t want this to all have been for nothing.”

  I turn and look at our surroundings through eyes filled with tears. We’re on top of the mountain, breathing in clean air, wet with rain. The moon is bright tonight, and the stars shine in a sparkling expanse of glitter stretched out across the sky, framed by the range of hills. I can’t help thinking of how pleased Mitch would have been to get out of the caves, how he would have gambolled around us, golden lights flashing on his head. He had only just found a friend, and now both of them are gone for ever.

  We stumble on trembling legs back to the helicopter, leaving half our kit behind. I want to be somewhere with soft seats and warm air.

  As soon as we climb into the cabin, I drink a bottle of water from the fridge in one long gulp. Then I take a deep breath. I can feel a great wave of grief and fear threatening to roll over me. I push back against it, refusing to let it overwhelm me, and turn to kiss Shen again.