Chapter 148: Without the Map
Chapter 148: Without the Map
Wren put the map away and started counting people.
"Halloway, fine. Tally, fine."
She moved down the line, putting a hand on each of them while her light passed over a shoulder, a strap, or a beast’s flank.
"Colby."
"Here."
"Look at me."
Ren looked at her. Rock dust covered his eyebrows, and his hands were shaking, but he was standing exactly where she had put him. For the moment, that was what mattered.
"Anvil?"
"He’s—his left foreleg took some of it, but he’s putting weight on it." Ren swallowed. "He’s fine. He’s fine."
"Reyes."
"Nothing." Dolan was already staring at the rubble wall, his jaw working. "Ash is clean."
"Astor."
"Fine."
"Glitch?"
Jin ran his hand down the back of Glitch’s neck. The plating there was hot, and a fine tremor ran through it that had nothing to do with the collapse.
"Tired," he said. "Not hurt."
Wren nodded and moved on to their equipment.
She counted everything aloud, which Jin realized after the fourth item was deliberate. Two working lights remained in the fixed array behind them, both at half output. They had four personal lamps, roughly nine hours of water at a working pace, ration packs, intact first-aid supplies, a recovery kit, and emergency beacons on all four students.
"Beacon."
"Already," Ren said.
He had triggered his the moment the ceiling finished coming down and had not thought the action worth mentioning.
Dolan looked at him.
"What?" Ren asked.
"Nothing," Dolan said. "Good."
Wren checked the readout.
[EMERGENCY BEACON — UNIT 12-C]
[Distress packet: TRANSMITTED]
[Last recorded position: LOGGED — Marker 5 vicinity]
[Two-way link: UNSTABLE — no handshake]
"Right." She held it up so all of them could see the screen. "They know. They have our position. They can’t talk to us, and we can’t talk to them, so nobody starts hoping about timing."
"How long does extraction usually take?" Ren asked.
"Depends entirely on what’s between us and them."
"What’s your guess?"
"I’m not going to guess," Wren said. "Whatever number I give you, you’ll start counting against it. When we pass that number, you’ll fall apart. We work as though nobody’s coming and allow ourselves to be pleasantly surprised."
Jin filed that away as one of the better things he had heard from an authority figure in either life.
They spent nine minutes examining the rubble because failing to check it would have been stupid.
The collapse filled fifteen meters of a passage four meters wide. The two working lights on the far side still shone through gaps too narrow to fit an arm through.
Jin had Glitch open Tremor Sense against the blockage and received an answer he did not enjoy.
"It’s still moving."
"Define moving."
"Settling." Jin waited with one hand flat against the stone. "It isn’t one stable pile. The upper layer still hasn’t found its bottom. Every few seconds, something inside drops another centimeter."
Dolan already had both hands on a slab.
"So we pull the loose material off the front and—"
"The top layer comes down on whoever’s pulling," Jin said. "Everything we do here also travels straight into the floor."
Dolan’s hands stopped.
"You mean the thing underneath."
"I mean everything we do travels into the floor, and I have no idea what might be listening." Jin kept his palm against the stone. "That isn’t me being dramatic. It’s the actual limit of what I can tell you."
Wren put a hand on Dolan’s forearm, and he released the slab.
"How long would it take to dig through, best case?"
"I don’t know. Days," Dolan said, honestly enough that Jin considered it the most useful answer he could have given. "With tools we don’t have."
"Then digging isn’t a plan. It’s a way to die tired." Wren stepped back. "Tally."
The fennec had already left.
Tally returned from the marker-five side with her ears raised and her entire body pointing like an arrow.
They followed her to a fracture in the wall about eight meters beyond the crystal seam. It was a vertical split in the rock, barely wide enough for Ren’s shoulders, running back into darkness.
Air flowed out of it. Not much, but enough to move the dust in the lamp beam and feel cold against a damp hand.
"That’s fresh," Wren said. "It isn’t this chamber’s air."
"Meaning it goes somewhere."
"Meaning it comes from somewhere," Wren corrected. She raised the lamp toward the gap. Its beam reached four meters before the darkness swallowed it. "That doesn’t mean it’s passable, safe, or connected to anywhere we want to be."
She remained at the mouth of the fracture for several seconds before speaking again.
"Standard procedure is to stay put. That isn’t caution. It’s the rule. Rescuers search your last recorded position first, and every meter we move makes their job harder. If we enter an unrecorded fracture and something happens, nobody knows where to look."
"Okay," Jin said.
Wren turned toward him.
"So tell me why I shouldn’t follow procedure."
He had expected the question and spent the previous four minutes making sure he could answer it honestly.
"Because this chamber is getting worse."
"How much worse?"
"That’s the problem. I can’t give you a number." Jin crouched and placed his palm on the floor beside Glitch’s foot, more for his own focus than because it helped the skill. "When we entered, the stone beneath this section read like one connected mass. Now it reads like three. Stress is spreading beneath the collapse point and moving toward the seam."
"Confidence."
"Medium-high on the structural stress. Low on the timing." He looked up at her. "It could fail in ten minutes or hold for a week. I don’t know, and anyone who claims they do is lying."
Wren looked from Jin’s hand on the floor to the narrow fracture.
"And the rock around that?"
"Quieter than what’s under our feet. That’s all I have." Jin glanced into the darkness. "I’m not calling it safe. It’s only less loud."
"Less loud," Dolan repeated.
"Yeah."
Wren made the decision in about six seconds.
"We move."
She did it properly.
First, she took a locator marker from her kit, keyed it, and clamped it to the wall beside the fracture where a lamp from the main passage would catch it.
Then she pulled out the field notebook, tore free a page, and wrote in block capitals with the lamp held between her teeth.
UNIT 12-C. ALL 4 STUDENTS + 4 BEASTS ALIVE, NO SERIOUS INJURY.
LEAVING RECORDED POSITION 1447.
REASON: STRUCTURAL STRESS BELOW CHAMBER, DETECTED BY VIBRATION SENSE, PROGRESSIVE. ENTERING UNRECORDED FRACTURE, FOLLOWING AIRFLOW. WE ARE NOT CONTINUING THE MISSION. SEEKING STABLE GROUND AND EXTRACTION. — HALLOWAY, W. (PROV. LEAD)
She wedged the note beneath the marker clamp.
"Say it back," she said. "All of you. What are we doing?"
"Getting out," Ren said.
"Getting out," Dolan repeated.
"Getting out," Jin said. "Marker six doesn’t exist. Nothing exists except a wall we can stand behind."
"Correct."
Tally entered the fracture first.
The unrecorded route was little more than a crack that water had spent a long time widening. For the first sixty meters, they moved sideways with their packs held in front of them.
Then the fracture opened into something with a floor.
Jin noticed the scratches before anyone spoke because he was already watching the ground and the walls. That was his job now.
They were everywhere.
Long parallel gouges ran across the lower walls in sets of three and four, most of them around knee height. In several places, they had carved entire scoops out of the rock. The oldest marks were packed with dust, while the newer ones still had bright edges.
Between them, the stone carried a pale, chalky residue, thickest where the gouges ran deepest.