“You’re not glowing anymore,” she said as she turned off the cutter and slipped it back onto her belt.
Adan couldn’t see his garrick all that well under the water, but that was the point. She was right. It was no longer glowing. He was finally clean.
Twenty-Six
Shaft to Nowhere
With no more currents to contend with, Adan and Sierra resumed their swim across the reservoir, but Adan’s nerves were on edge the whole time. He kept wondering if the current would pick up again. Maybe there was a backup drainage pipe somewhere else? He swam as though another current propelled him, one pushing him to the opposite side of the chamber.
Once they finally reached it, Sierra carved out a little place for them in the wall at the edge of the water where they could rest. Adan lay inside the hollow, catching his breath, hoping he would never have to get into water again.
Tired as they both were, they did not rest long. They soon started carving out a tunnel in the black rock of the reservoir wall. This time Adan did the cutting so Sierra could rest. He worked his way into the rock, crouching low and giving himself just enough room on the sides to toss out the rocks behind him. He carved the tunnel at an incline so most of the rocks slid out on their own accord.
“How much time left before the cutter goes dark?” Sierra asked about five microslices in.
Adan slid away a small panel that showed the power level down to a burnt orange color. “Half a slice, if that.” When the panel hit red, the chip would need to be swapped out. “We may have to resort to using the chips from the chronotrace soon.”
“How many are in there?”
“Three, but they are all on low power.”
“Too bad the skimmers don’t use bismine.”
“We’ll have enough to get us to the vault,” he promised, though that was assuming everything went perfectly.
Sierra made a noncommittal sound, indicating she was probably thinking the same thing.
“What about once we get the prisoners, though?” she asked a few moments later. “How are we going to get them all back up to the surface if Bryce and the others aren’t there?”
Adan paused from his cutting and wiped the sweat from his brow. “I’m sure we’ll find a way. Maybe Gavin will be there, too. If so, he’ll know what to do.” Adan had almost forgotten about his friend in all the chaos. Gavin had helped him escape the Institute. Adan was confident he’d be able to get them out of Manx Core. If they found him.
Adan started cutting again, working faster than before. His limbs soon grew exhausted. The cutter was like a pendulum that was losing its momentum, swinging with less and less force after each pass, but he kept going to let Sierra recover as much as possible. When he broke through the wall about ten microslices later he let the cutter fall to the ground and took another quick rest until Sierra emerged through the opening.
“You’re spent. Why didn’t you let me have a turn?” Sierra asked, putting her hands on her hips. Adan felt like her patient all over again.
“You can have it the next round.” Though exhausted, he slurped in a big gulp of air and got out the skimmers. Every moment wasted was one more delay keeping them from reaching the prisoners.
He fired up the skimmers and they sped down the maintenance tunnel on the other side of the reservoir. It was only about three spans across, half the size of the tunnel they’d used to leave the mine. Track lighting ran along the edge of the floor, but the passage was otherwise rather nondescript.
They ate up the distance with smooth, air-cushioned strides. Within two microslices they arrived at the spot which, according to the schematic, was directly beneath the vault.
“All right, my turn to do the cutting,” Sierra said. “Pass me the skimmers and I’ll start into the ceiling. Once I carve out enough space for both of us, I’ll crawl in and you can come up.”
“Okay, be careful,” Adan said, hoping she didn’t get hit by any of the rocks as they fell.
He sat down with his back against the wall, giving himself plenty of distance to avoid the falling chunks himself. Though Sierra was careful to cut at an angle, away from her body, he couldn’t help but cringe when some of the larger rocks slammed into the floor. They made a horrible amount of noise. Without a modulator they would have no idea whether or not someone entered this tunnel. If they did, the noise would be sure to alert them.
Eventually Sierra was able to slip into the hole she made in the ceiling. From that point on, all Adan could see were her feet dangling from the lip. Then even those disappeared as she carved out enough space to be able to stand up inside the shaft.
Adan walked over to inspect the hole a couple of times and to see her progress, but he didn’t get too close. Each time he asked if she would like to take a break, but she always refused.
She had been carving for almost twenty microslices when Adan thought he heard a noise somewhere back down the tunnel.
“Hold on a moment. I thought I heard something,” he told Sierra, who promptly stopped cutting.
They waited for a while, but heard no sounds, so she went back to work.
Not long after that they ran into a problem with the shaft.
“I’ve hit a vein of that black and blue rock,” Sierra informed him.
“Celerium?”
“Yes. And the cutter isn’t doing anything to it. I think I’ll have to carve a way around it.”
Adan remembered how Gavin had used the blue spectrum to sculpt the celerium back in the compound. But even then, it had taken him a long time just to fashion a small coil. It would probably take forever to cut through a large vein.
“Do you think the cutter has enough energy to carve around it?”
“As long as the vein isn’t too large,” she answered, trying to keep her thoughts positive.
“Right. We’re so close.” Adan did his best to echo her mood. They were almost three quarters the distance they needed to go to get to the vault, but there was no telling how far they would have to dig to get around that vein.
Sierra labored for a few more microslices before she tossed him down the skimmers and Adan finally joined her up in the shaft. Now that she wasn’t excavating vertically, she needed someone to help clear the rocks. Adan, who was by now completely rested, was more than happy to assist. He offered to take a turn at cutting as well, but she just shook her head and went back to work.
He took a moment to study the immense bluish vein she had uncovered. He was struck not only by the size of it, but also by how incredibly smooth it was. He had never seen rock as naturally smooth as this. It certainly was beautiful with its cobalt blue flecks scattered amongst the blackness.
Sierra carved out a tunnel a dozen paces long with no sign of the end of the celerium. That was when the cutter finally gave out, plunging the shaft into darkness. Adan cringed when it happened, but refused to panic, reminding himself that they still had the chips from the chronotrace.
He whipped out the device in the dark and removed one of its chips. Reaching out, he placed it in Sierra’s hand, sensing her position through her bioseine.
She swapped out the bismine chip and the cutter blazed back to life, lighting up the dark passage once more.
As she turned to face the rocks she’d been carving into, she dropped the old, dead bismine chip and it went ricocheting down the short passage, past Adan and down the shaft that led to the maintenance tunnel, landing with a muffled plink.
The new round of cutting was not long underway before Sierra stopped.
“Are you tired? I can take over for you now,” Adan offered.
“No, it’s not that. It’s just…I’ll try one more direction, but even if I guess right this time and we’re able to get around the vein, I don’t know if we’ll have enough to make it all the way up and into the vault. But it’s pointless to keep going on in this direction.”
“That makes sense. I doubt it’s that deep in all directions.”
Sierra abandoned the new tunnel and started cut
ting back the opposite way. Adan could tell she was exhausted; her cuts were coming slower and slower. She had resorted to using her free hand to help keep the cutter up. Once again he offered to relieve her, but she refused to relinquish the device, snapping at him and telling him to stop asking; she would tell him when she was too tired to keep going.
Adan said nothing, but the silence afterwards was palpable. His hopes drained away with each passing moment, as much from her reproach as from the grim circumstances they faced. The two realities intertwined themselves together in his mind, forming an unbreakable bond which, much like the celerium vein, he could not cut through.
Sierra toiled on, slashing at the rocks as if she were taking out her frustration on the inanimate material, but it did little good. She had gone a dozen paces in the new direction when the cutter died again.
Wordlessly, they repeated the same procedure as before and restored the cutter with the second chip from the chronotrace.
This time Sierra didn’t bother consulting him, but struck out in a new direction. It was just as well. Adan saw little hope they would get around the vein, no matter which direction they chose. They were trapped here, only a few short spans beneath the prison vault. The time to rendezvous with the others would soon pass.
Despite Sierra’s mounting frustration, she did not close off her mind. And there in the stifling rock, as she hacked futilely beneath the vein, he sensed she was close to losing all hope. She slashed her way down the new path like a burning ember melting into the sand. Her will to go on would soon vanish altogether. It was only a matter of when.
Adan was contemplating asking her to give over the cutter one more time, in spite of her warning, when Sierra gave a little cry of surprise, followed by a chuckle.
“I found it,” she announced, her thoughts the complete opposite of what they had been a moment before. Hope glimmered brightly inside her once again. The ember had been rekindled. “I found the end of the vein.”
She flashed Adan a smile that washed away all the tension which had built up between them. He sensed her energy quicken as she set about busily carving through the rock around the end of the vein.
The vein proved to be as tall as it was thick, but it was no longer in their way. It was straight up from there on out and she carved so quickly Adan could barely keep up with clearing out the debris.
She burrowed her way through the black rock as if she were just starting out again. Adan’s spirits rose with each chunk of debris that fell. From the schematic he knew they were only three body-lengths away from reaching the vault.
And that is when the yellow blade died again. Fumbling over himself, Adan produced the third and final chip, handing it to her with a trembling hand. All their hopes rested on this small crystal half the size of Adan’s palm.
They made terrific progress as Sierra seemed to push her way through the rock through sheer force of will. Chunks fell like an avalanche now. Two body-lengths to go. Then one.
They came to within a half a body-length of the vault before the final chip died. Sierra slammed the cutter against the side of the tunnel, whether in frustration or in the vain hope she could jar it back to life, Adan couldn’t tell. Utter blackness filled the tunnel. Her mind went dark as well, even darker than the tunnel around them.
There was only a small stretch of rock between them and the vault, but it might as well have been the entirety of the Vast.
Sierra climbed slowly back down the long shaft she had made without a word. Even in the dark her very movements echoed in defeat. As she set foot back in the lower tunnel, Adan heard her begin to weep softly.
“What are we going to do?” he asked at last, his voice just above a whisper.
Sierra didn’t answer. After a few moments the sounds of her crying died down and then disappeared. The two of them sat in silence for so long the darkness felt like it was a thing in and of itself, as if it were their real obstacle and not the span of rock which separated them from the prisoners.
Then she at last she spoke. Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but the sound of it gave Adan something solid to hold onto in the dark.
“You know, back in the esolace you could engage in what they called challenges,” she said. “They could be whatever you wanted. You could push yourself physically or insert yourself into some mystery that seemed impossible to solve. But if it ever got too hard, if it ever seemed too much, you could just walk away and the whole thing would disappear. I sometimes wish life was like that. Then we could just leave this place and go home and our friends wouldn’t be prisoners anymore because they wouldn’t even be real. They’d be just another part of the story that was playing out in our heads.”
Adan tried to imagine what it would be like knowing you could be free of a problem with a simple thought.
“But then you wouldn’t push yourself as far as you could, would you?”
“No, I suppose you’re right,” she admitted. “It just seems like there are some problems that are impossible to solve. We failed, Adan. We failed.”
Adan had no answer this time, for he had the same thoughts himself. Without the cutter, they would never be able to get into the vault the way they planned. They could go back out and take the tunnels into the main chamber. But even if they could somehow reach the front entrance to the vault undetected, he doubted the two of them would be able to overcome the guards there by themselves. The others, if they had even survived, would be long gone by then.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said softly.
Her words released a knot he had been holding inside of him, but he didn’t know how to respond.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘apology accepted’,” she said. “That is, if you want to.”
“Oh—apology accepted, then,” he said. Then his mind froze up again. Another awkward silence enveloped the darkness. “Sierra,” he said at last, an odd mix of emotions rising inside him, “I want you to know something,” he began, but faltered, words failing him once again.
A scraping noise from the shaft interrupted his thoughts. The tunnel was completely dark, but instinctively he looked in the direction of the sound. Then he heard it again, closer this time.
“Someone’s coming up the shaft,” he warned.
“What are we going to do? We’re totally blind in here.”
Adan’s heart ricocheted around inside his chest. They were at a dead end. If someone was coming to attack or capture them, there was no way out. But he couldn’t let his fear take hold. He forced himself to focus in on what he knew, what possible advantages they might have, blind and alone in the dark as they were.
The bioseine. It could dampen his senses. Maybe it could augment them as well. A quick query to his system revealed that to be the case.
“Use your bioseine to focus in on your hearing,” he instructed.
He already knew the layout of the tunnel from memory. Now, with his bioseine taking hold of his senses, dampening his vision and focusing all of his mental energy on his hearing and touch, he began to notice a subtle change. While he still couldn’t see anything, every sound was magnified. His breathing, his heartbeat, small noises he had simply filtered out before rushed to the forefront of his awareness, clamoring for attention.
The padding of Sierra’s feet on the rock sounded like she was stomping down the passage. He felt her body pushing against him in the dark. It was strange being so close to her. The sensation made it difficult to concentrate. Thankfully, she squeezed past him and the feeling passed.
“Wait, where are you going?” he asked, his mind freeing itself from the distraction of her presence.
“The cutter may be dead, but it can still be used as a weapon,” she replied.
“I still have my neutralizer.”
“If it’s a somatarch, that’ll be useless.”
“Wait, my shiv,” he told her, feeling at his belt for the knife Bryce had given him. But it wasn’t there. He must have lost it in the neophosphorous or in the water. �
�Never mind. It’s gone. But give me the cutter instead—”
“There’s no time,” Sierra shot back, “I’m almost to the opening.”
Adan heard her steal towards the lower shaft. He started down the tunnel after her, determined not to let her face the danger alone. The rocks felt more solid than before as he groped his way along the wall. Even his feet were more sure as he edged his way down the roughhewn tunnel.
“I’m at the opening,” she informed him. “The light from the maintenance tunnel is partially blocked. Someone’s definitely in the shaft.”
As Adan crept towards her, he could hear her breathing getting louder, but he couldn’t hear anything from whoever was coming up the shaft.
He had almost reached her when a white light burst through the tunnel, momentarily scrambling his senses.
Sierra’s mind went blank. She’d been hit by a neutralizer.
He went still as the rock around him. For a long terrible moment he couldn’t think. If he went forward, he might be hit by the next blast, but if he stayed where he was, whoever was coming up the shaft would eventually come up and take him out as well. He didn’t want to count on the neutralizer failing to affect him a second time.
Unexpectedly, the celerium vein nearby pulsed ever so briefly and he got a glimpse of the tunnel. For a brief moment he saw Sierra’s crumpled body lying at the edge of the shaft. Beyond her was the opening below, a stretch of blackness from which the enemy approached.
Though he had no idea what had caused it, the light faded as quickly as it came, but Adan could still see the scene in his mind. He could hear the sound of someone coming up the shaft distinctly. The intruder sounded like he was almost to the lip of the lower shaft.
Adan could not let whoever it was reach the upper shaft. He didn’t stand a chance in a fight with a somatarch, and he couldn’t wait to see if it was an assessor. With no time to consider some other possibility he rushed forward, vaulting over Sierra and tucking his legs up under his body, hurling himself like a human ball down into the shaft.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 58