by Jack Heath
He reached out and touched the photo, tracing the curve of her cheekbones.
'Ashley,' he whispered. Then he walked back to the other side of the room, and starting weaving through the imaginary throng once again. Practice makes perfect.
~
The guard stared down at the grubby pass card. 'The thing is,' he said, 'you're not on the personnel list.'
The girl blinked. Wiped the grime off her palms. 'Sorry?'
'Your pass is valid,' the guard said, uncomfortably. 'But I've got a list of people to let through, and you're not on it.' Plus, he thought, I'm not sure I've ever seen you before.
The girl offered him a wry grin. 'Does that mean I can go home?'
The guard sighed. 'Well . . . '
'I know, right?' the girl said. 'You're not supposed to let me in – it's against regulations. But if I leave, they're one worker short for the day and the foreman will say it's your fault. You could call him up here to sort it out, but then he'll blame you for wasting everyone's time.' She scratched her hair under her cap. 'Course, if he'd done a proper headcount in the first place, there'd be no problem.'
The guard wondered how long the girl had been working down in the mines. Couldn't have been more than a couple years – she looked younger than his niece, although the tattoos on her neck made her at least eighteen. He looked at the pass card again. It was definitely legit.
'How about I call him?' the girl said, fumbling through the pockets of her overalls. 'That way –'
'No,' the guard said. He jerked a thumb towards the mouth of the tunnel. 'Go on.'
The girl shrugged. 'Sure. Have a good day.'
The guard watched her walk away into the blackness. Then he stepped back into his station, sat down in the swivel chair and picked up one of the wedding magazines his fiancé had left out for him. The interesting part of his day was over.
~
'Benjamin,' Ash whispered, stripping off the overalls to expose a patchy grey suit, made from the same fabric as her cap. 'I'm in the outer tunnel.'
'What took you so long?' His voice was crisp and loud in Ash's ear, thanks to the new earphones they had bought. No more obvious wires on her neck – the plugs contained batteries with 48 hours between recharges, and were coated with rubber that matched Ash's skin colour exactly. Benjamin was on a boat half a kilometre off the shore, but she could hear him as clearly as a chiming bell.
'There was a list of miners,' she replied. 'But the guard was convinced by the pass card anyway.'
'You're welcome.'
Ash snorted. 'Come on. It's not like it was hard for you to make, with the laminating machine and the new-edition Photoshop.'
'Hey, you need more than just the equipment,' Benjamin said. 'You need the skill to use it. Did I say "skill"? I meant "genius".'
'Are you done?' Ash asked, distractedly. She was walking as fast as she dared down the steep, uneven slope. Iron tracks had been bolted to the ground so mine carts could carry debris out of the shaft, and the wooden slats would have made good steps – but there was a sodium bulb bored into the roof every five metres, and Ash was sticking to the edge of the tunnel to stay out of the light. Her camouflage was only effective in dim conditions, and she never knew when a mine cart might rattle up out of the gloom.
'Yeah, I'm done,' Benjamin said. 'If you need anything, you know where to find me.'
'In my ear?'
'Like always.'
The lights flickered momentarily as someone further down the tunnel switched on a jack hammer, diverting a sizeable chunk of the electricity. Ash was glad of the din – now she would be inaudible as well as invisible. The noise of the bit repeatedly striking the sandstone was like the clanging of a demented school bell.
With a stab of guilt, she realised that school would be starting right about now. She hoped the forged doctor's certificate was fooling her teachers, and that the fake excursion note she'd given her dad had convinced him she was at the Museum of Art History. She'd planted a bug in his phone, so any calls he made to the school were redirected to a mobile with a fake answering machine message – you've called Narahm School for Girls, all our operators are currently busy, please leave your name, number and reason for phoning after the tone. Any calls from the school to her father would be redirected to the same phone, but a different recording – hi, this is Ash, leave a message for me or Mr Arthur and we'll get back to you.
But what if her father actually went to the school in person for some reason? What if the school sent a get-well-soon card to her house, and he saw it? What if –
Focus, Ash, she told herself. You've taken every possible precaution. You won't get busted. It's time to think about the job at hand.
The light was getting brighter and the noise louder. She'd almost reached the dig site. She could smell the broken rocks, and hear the whirring of the generator under the shouting of the miners. She kept her back to the wall, edging sideways down the tunnel.
The tracks had ended, and the grey dirt was getting finer beneath her feet. Time for the gross part. She spat into her hand, and wiped the saliva all over her face. Then she scooped up some of the dirt with the other hand and dabbed it against her cheeks, forehead and chin. The silty powder stuck to her skin and hardened, like face paint at a carnival. She couldn't see herself to check, but hopefully she no longer looked like a disembodied head floating down the tunnel.
She'd reached the opening to the cavern. Slowly, silently, she peeked around the corner.
Giant sodium lamps blazed in every corner, and six gas analysis vents hummed on the walls – the modern day equivalent of a caged canary. The miners shuffled around everywhere like ants in a nest. The woman with the jack hammer was near the centre of the cavern, the enormous machine shuddering in her grip. Ash had expected to see dust and smoke floating around the bit, but no – it was sinking into the stone as cleanly as a scalpel into butter, leaving holes the size of coins.
A metal walkway traversed the wall on the right-hand side of the cavern, about two metres above the ground, all the way from the tunnel she was in to the other side. There was a flight of stairs at each end.
'I've reached the dig,' she said. 'How far away is the box?'
'According to your GPS and Buckland's map, it should be 38 metres South South-West of you, and about 6 metres down.'
Damn it, she thought. 'We've got a problem.'
'Tunnel not where it's supposed to be?'
'Worse,' Ash said. 'The miners are digging up almost that exact spot.'
'What?'
'Could they know about the box?'
She could picture Benjamin biting his lip. 'No,' he said finally. 'They're a legitimate company. And they've been drilling here since before the map turned up. It's probably just coincidence. But either way, you –'
'Can't go digging for treasure while they're in there,' Ash finished. 'Right.'
'So. Abort?'
'Hang on,' Ash said. 'Just a second.'
She didn't want to give up, not now. She had assured the curator that she would get his artefact back, and she was so close!
Ash peeked around the corner again, into the cavern.
'There's another tunnel on the south side of the cavern,' she said. 'I think I can get to it. The diggers won't see me if I stay close to the wall –'
'Ash, that tunnel just goes deeper into the mine, all the way to the underground river. It doesn't curve back around or anything. You won't be able to come up at the box from underneath, if that's what you're thinking.'
'It's not.'
'Then what's the plan?'
Ash said, 'You'll see.'
She edged around the corner onto the walkway, feeling horribly conspicuous. But no-one else was walking around the scaffolding – everyone was on the cave floor. She told herself that anyone looking up would have the wall-mounted sodium lamps in their eyes. With her camouflage, she would be little more than a shadow on the wall.
Her footsteps were soft on the metal grating – the mining boo
ts looked heavy, but she'd hollowed out the soles and removed the steel caps for ease of movement. Of course, if a mine cart ran over her foot, she'd be –
'Hey!'
Ash's heart stopped. Run, or freeze?
She froze.
'Hey,' the miner yelled again. 'Jennings!'
The woman with the jack hammer released the trigger. Looked up.
'Foreman wants to see you,' the miner said. His voice echoed around the cavern.
The woman wiped some sweat off her forehead with a yellow glove, balancing the tool on its point with her other hand, and then passed the handle to the miner. He started drilling as she jogged over to the other side of the cavern.
Ash let the air out of her lungs. False alarm. She kept moving, one careful step at a time.
Two miners were rolling a cart along the tracks to the rocks broken up by the jack hammer, while another drove a bobcat towards them. The bobcat's trowel descended, and the chunks of stone clattered against one another as they were scooped up. Hydraulics whirred as the bobcat lifted the load, swung it sideways, and dumped it into the cart. A cloud of dust accompanied the crash, and the trowel swivelled back for another load.
The scaffolding Ash was on ended at a set of stairs, leading down to the second tunnel. She slinked down, shoulder almost touching the wall. For a few frightening seconds, she was on the cavern floor with the workers – and then she was safe in the darkness of the tunnel.
'I made it,' she whispered.
'To the other tunnel?'
'Yep.' Ash removed her cap and tugged the elastic band off her ponytail with one hand, while removing a cigarette lighter from of her overalls with the other.
'Great,' Benjamin said. 'And being in there will somehow allow you to sneak past the fifty or sixty miners?'
'Nope,' Ash said. 'But now I'll be out of the way when they leave.'
She wrapped the elastic band around the lighter, tying down the button so a steady stream of butane flowed from the nozzle. Not enough to risk an explosion, not even enough to be detectable to the human nose – but just the same, enough to create a panic down here. She pitched the lighter back up onto the walkway.
A perfect throw – the lighter bounced twice on the grille before clattering to a stop right under one of the gas analysis vents.
'Leave?' Benjamin was saying. 'We can't wait for them to –'
An alarm shrieked, so loud that Ash had to press her palms against her ears. All work on the cave floor stopped instantly, and there was a moment of absolute stillness before someone yelled, 'Gas! Evacuate! Evacuate!'
Tools thunked to the ground as the miners fled, back towards the tunnel Ash had come in through. Their boots left dusty craters in the dirt. Someone hit a switch on the generator on their way out, and Ash watched it shudder to a stop.
She should have expected that. The miners wouldn't want to risk a short while the generator was unsupervised – it was possible, though unlikely, for a spark to set the fuel tank alight.
The lights flickered and started to fade. Darkness grew from the corners of the cavern like squid ink.
In a matter of seconds, the dig site was deserted. The miners were well trained – at the first sign of toxic or explosive gas, stop what you're doing and get out.
Ash could hear Benjamin saying something, but she couldn't tell what. The alarm was deafening, and she had a growing suspicion that it couldn't be shut off.
'I don't know if you can hear me,' she said. 'But I'm okay. The alarm wasn't me. Well, it was me, but it's not about me. Don't freak out.'
She ran back up the stairs onto the walkway in the fading light, and snatched up the cigarette lighter. No sense leaving unnecessary traces. She pulled her hair back through the elastic loop and dropped the lighter into her pocket, then ran back down to the cavern floor.
The last of the lights had gone out now – Ash couldn't see a thing. Living in the city, Ash thought of darkness as her bedroom with the curtains closed, or a movie theatre between when the house lights go down and when the trailers start. But this was completely different. The blackness was so pure, so perfect, that when she waved a hand in front of her face, she felt the breeze on her cheek, but otherwise had no way of telling that she'd moved. In fact, for a surreal moment, Ash wondered if she'd simply thought about moving her hand, but hadn't actually done it, and the breeze had been something else.
The alarms were still blaring. They must be on an external power-source. Anyone or anything could be in here and she wouldn't be able to see it or hear it –
Get a grip, Ash, she told herself. She fumbled for her phone, and snapped it open.
The glow of the screen was useless against the black ground – she had to crouch to see it, and even then it only illuminated the small circle in which she stood – a faint blue island in a sea of darkness.
She selected camera mode, and pushed the button.
The flash lit up the cavern up for a fragment of a second, like a mountainscape in a lightning storm. Ash regained her bearings – the jack hammer lay on its side at her 2 o'clock, the pile of spare hard-hats and headlamps were at her 11:30. She jogged through the darkness towards them. When she guessed she was about three metres away, she took another picture.
The flash told her she'd underestimated – the pile of equipment was almost five metres away. She didn't need another picture – she walked right over and started sorting through until she found something that felt like a headlamp.
She clicked the switch. The bulb worked. She tightened the straps around her head, tilted the lamp so the light fell upon the ground roughly five metres in front of her, and ran back towards the jack hammer.
She had a collapsible trowel in her pocket, but now that she'd seen the kind of equipment the miners were using, she thought she could do better. She didn't know how to use the jack hammer, but there was a pile of shovels, mattocks, and other digging tools nearby. Ash selected a pickaxe, swivelled it in her hands, and then swung it into the ground between her feet.
The rock crumbled easily – it was clearly a different substance to the stone the miners had been drilling through a few metres to Ash's right. Which made sense, she realised, since the box had only been buried here a couple of years. Not enough time for the mud to solidify into tough stone.
She swung again. The light jittered on the floor. She couldn't hear the rocks shattering over the screaming of the alarm, but she could feel the impacts through the padded grip of the pickaxe.
Six metres below, Benjamin had said. But that was when she was up in the entrance tunnel, which was at least four metres above the cave floor. She should only need to dig two metres down. But the hole had to be fairly wide, or else there was a risk that she would completely miss the –
Clack. Ash paused. That last strike had felt different. Either she'd hit a tougher kind of rock, or she'd found what she was looking for.
She swept the broken stones aside with the blade of the pickaxe, and shone the headlight down into the hole she'd made.
Wood. She'd struck something made of hard wood.
She reached down and grabbed the box. It was less than 15 centimetres to a side, scarcely bigger than an engagement ring box, with dirty brass hinges and a scalloped handle. There was a scar on the top where the pickaxe had scraped it.
She placed the box reverently beside the hole. Lifted the lid.
Urgh, she thought. Success. She could have taken the object out and reburied the box, but she didn't want to touch it with her bare hands.
Shuddering, she closed the box up again. 'I have the prize,' she told Benjamin. She tried to keep her voice from shaking. 'Time to go.'
Ash could hear him saying something, but not what. Probably asking her out on a date, yet again. It was his way of congratulating her.
~
Ash started jogging back up towards the north tunnel. Now came the tough part: sneaking back out. The miners had all evacuated, so they would be watching from a distance as she emerged from the tunnel. Even if
she put her overalls back on and wiped the grime off her face, they'd be curious, wondering why she'd taken so much longer than they had. So she'd have to find a way to get past them without being spotted.
Or a place to hide, she thought, while I wait for them to come back in and resume work. But who knows how long that'll take? I have to be home by the time school finishes, or Dad will freak.
She kept moving. She couldn't strategise without seeing how far back the miners had evacuated. Maybe they'd be so far away that she could just walk out the mouth of the tunnel and head straight to the rendezvous.
A vague glow stained the tunnel wall up ahead – she was getting closer to daylight. She reached up and switched the headlamp off. There was no way of telling how long it would be before a hazard team got suited up and came down to search for the gas leak. If they rounded the corner further up the tunnel, Ash didn't want them glimpsing her torch.
She didn't think it was likely to happen soon, though. It seemed quiet and still up ahead.
Now that she was further away from the cavern, she could hear a little better over the alarms. 'Benjamin,' she said. 'I'm coming out with the box.'
There was no response.
'Benjamin?'
Nothing. Ash strained her ears to listen – and heard the rustling of static.
Her heart kicked against her ribs. Had something happened to Benjamin? Had the local cops found him? If that had happened, she told herself, then there'd be no static, just silence. Right? It must be an equipment malfunction. Nothing to worry about.
Right?
The light was brighter now. She was almost at the guard station. Hopefully the guard would have evacuated too. He was suspicious of her before, he'd be even more suspicious now –
Ash rounded the last bend, and saw that the guard hadn't evacuated. He was slumped halfway through the frame of the guard station window, broken glass stuck into his belly, a chunk of his throat torn out. There was a bullet hole in the wall behind him.