"Maybe. See, the problem is, there's only one way to find out if we'll survive. By dropping."
Ax didn't say anything.
"0h, man." I groaned.
I cut the strand of web.
And I fell. Down through the darkness, toward a landing I could only hope wouldn't kill me.
It was a long drop.
"Aaaaahhhhhhh!"
"Aaaaahhhhhhh!"
WHAP! WHAP! We hit something hard. We bounced. We hit again.
WHAP! WHAP! "You okay?" Jake called down.
"0h, yeah, I'm great."
I said. "I fell about a billion feet and landed on a steel trampoline. Couldn't be better."
"Sarcasm." Rachel commented coolly. "He must be okay."
"Laugh now, Rachel. We'll see how much you laugh when it's your turn."
The plan was for Ax and me to create a silk cable the others in cockroach morph would be able to climb down. That way, they wouldn't all have to go spider. Not that it would have helped, anyway.
"We're coming down." Jake said. "When we reach the end of the silk we'll jump. If you two survived, we will.
Nothing kills a cockroach."
"Why don't you stand right beneath me, Marco?" Rachel suggested. "You can break my Ax and I scurried out of the way. A few seconds later, after they had clambered down to the end of our silk . . .
WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! Three cockroaches landed nearby.
"Where are we?" Jake asked.
"lt's pretty dark. Who knows?" I answered. "lt's a heatingstair-conditioning vent, I guess. Erek said it would be part of the furnace system. Supposedly we go west a hundred feet or so, then drop down, then go across the furnace, then down again, then right.
Then we're at the edge of the High Security Room, where the real trouble starts."
"Excuse me? Did someone say furnace?" Cassie asked.
"Yeah. I said furnace."
"Does it occur to any of you that the furnace might actually come on?"
Cassie said.
"Not till right this minute."
I said.
"lt's not very cold ou."
Rachel pointed out.
"0kay, I've seriously changed my mind." I said. "Let's go home."
Of course, no one listened to me. We scrabbled along the steel floor, two spiders and three cockroaches. Our rough claws seemed to make a horrible din on the metal, scuffing and scratching.
But it probably wouldn't have sounded like anything to a human.
As we ran, there was more and more dust on the floor of the vent. It was weird, like walking through dried leaves. My eight legs kicked through it, and it swirled behind me as I passed. Eventually the dust became as thick as a carpet, although in reality it was probably no more than a few millimeters thick.
Every ten feet or so there would be a grilled opening.
Through the massive upright bars I could see offices.
The light in the offices was very dim, just the glow of computer screen savers and red or green function lights. But it helped us to find our way through the darkness of the vent.
Then . . .
"What's t?" Rachel yelled. She was the farthest back. "Uh-oh. Something coming! I feel the vibrations! Something big!"
She took off. I took off. We all took off.
Now I could feel the vibrations, too. Quick, confused-sounding footsteps. And a dragging sound, like something was being hauled.
I ran. To my left, another spider. Ax.
Ahead of me, two roaches, almost as big as I was.
Rachel was just back to my right.
I couldn't exactly turn and glance over my shoulder. I had no shoulder. And I had no actual head to turn. So I paused, spun around, and in the dim light from a vent, I saw it.
Huge. Twenty times my size! A vast, horrible menace.
"Arat!"
I yelled. "lt's a RAT!"
The thing I'd heard dragging was its naked tail and furred abdomen. It was hungry, and it was after us.
And, unfortunately, it was faster than me.
"Go! Go! Go! lt's gaining!" I yelled.
We blew at top spider and cockroach speed.
Which seems really fast when you're an inch long, but isn't really that many miles per hour. A rat can do maybe five or six miles per hour.
A spider is lucky to break one mph.
"We'll have to morph back!"
Jake said.
"Not in here!" Cassie cried. "Not enough room."
"Next vent." Jake said.
"We go out through the next vent."
The next vent was about ten feet away. I couldn't turn around to look at the rat, but every hair on my spider body told me it was just inches behind me.
Yet there was something else making my hair tingle, too. Something about the breeze . . .
"YAAHHH!" I heard Jake yell.
A split second later, my spider legs were clawing air. It was like a Roadrunner cartoon.
I zoomed out into space, seemed to hang there with my little feet motoring away, and then I fell.
"0h, yes." Ax said calmly. "Erek mentioned we had to go down again."
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! We hit steel again, and each impact sent dust clouds swirling.
"Keep running!" Cassie cried, and fortunately, for once, I didn't argue.
Buh-Booooom! The rat dropped behind us! It was still after us! Fortunately, it was a little stunned by the impact, whereas we were outta there! Suddenly, ahead of us, the steel floor opened up again. But instead of a drop into darkness, there was a weird, vast plain of jagged spires. Each of the spires was steel, three times as tall as my little spider body. Each metal spire opened at the top. There were hundreds of them, all arranged in perfect rows. A foul smell, something my spider mind knew nothing about, came from this field of spires.
A weird, flickering glow lit the landscape.
In the eerie light, it looked like some awful graveyard, with the spires like industrial-strength gravestones or something. I mean, it was creepy.
"What is th?" I asked.
"Let's just get going, all right?" Rachel suggested. "We can sightsee some other time."
I would never have walked into that "field" if the rat hadn't been just two feet back and gaining again. I didn't need spider senses to know there was danger here. It screamed danger.
I stuck out one spider leg and touched the top of the nearest spire. Then another and another. I walked from spire to spire, carefully, cautiously. The cockroaches crawled and squirmed through the valleys between spires. Unable to stand normally, they had to drag themselves inch by inch.
"What is th?" I asked again.
"You don't want to know."
Jake said grimly. "lancet's just get out of here, okay?"
Right then it hit me. From the tone of Jake's thought-speak voice.
"0h, man. This is the furnace, isn't it? These spires . . . the holes in the tops of them . . . it's where the gas comes ou!"
"Not if no one turns on the heat." Rachel said grimly.
Over my head now, I saw the source of the eerie glow. It was the pilot light. It was a jet of blue flame as long as my body. I could feel the heat from it, even though it seemed to be as far above my head as the ceiling of a cathedral.
The rat, smarter than we were, decided to stop at the edge of the furnace. But there was no going back.
We had to cross the furnace. We had to hope the Matcom Corporation was into energy conservation and didn't waste heat. We had to pray that no one had messed with the thermo stat.
Because if the heat came on ...
HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! "Gas!"
The gas blew with hurricane force up through the tops of the spires. In seconds the gas would rise to the pilot light. In seconds the entire land scape would erupt in flame! I thought I'd been moving as fast as I could move.