After every haircut, the barber would show Luke the back of his neck in a mirror that telescoped from the wall on metal armatures. When he angled the mirror, sometimes Luke would see Clayton sitting silently, or catch his father with his nose stuck in a magazine. That mirror offered a hidden view, Luke used to think. The face of the world when it wasn’t aware you were looking at it.
His mind fled back to that childlike sensibility—a mirror that showed the world’s hidden face—when his gaze focused on the insides of the Trieste. It was as if his view had shifted, tilted, the way that barber’s mirror had, like a solid pane of glass. His body was suddenly awash in warmth. He stared closer, transfixed by that pitchlike black…
His breath gritted in his chest like steel wool. Were things moving in there?
Sly liquid shiftings, mincing suggestions of activity, all attended by a silky sound that made him think of sightless crabs shucking over one another in a shallow tide pool…
“What’s wrong, Doc?”
Luke tore his eyes from the hatch.
“Some trick of the light,” he croaked.
“That happens down here,” Al said. “The light reflects differently, gets absorbed in weird ways.”
Don’t go in there, shrilled the voice in Luke’s head.
What choice did he have? What could he say: Sorry, I couldn’t do my part to save humanity because I’m a teensy bit scared of the dark?
Anchoring his hands on the hatch, Luke bit back his fears and propelled himself into that funneling blackness.
3.
HE TOPPLED THROUGH AWKWARDLY, having shoved himself hard enough to silence that inner voice that kept shrieking:
Don’t-don’t-don’tdon’tDON’T!
He’d expected some kind of crash pad, but there was nothing but steel gone frosty as the insides of a meat locker. He hit the floor; pain lanced down his collarbone and needled up his throat.
The Challenger’s hatch swung shut.
Luke rolled up, knees tucked to his chest. A goose egg was already swelling on his forehead. Lights winked on the floor, much like those of an airport runway. They didn’t help much—he could barely see six feet in either direction.
Cold. God, it was bracingly cold. This couldn’t possibly be the temperature throughout the station—everyone would freeze to death.
Who’s to say they’re still alive? a new, maddening voice asked, joining the chorus in his head—this one sounded a lot like his mother’s voice. Who’s to say they didn’t die days ago, Lucas my dear?
Noise from directly overhead: dap-dap-dap-dap, a sound that could be mistaken for the footsteps of eager children. This image now entombed itself in Luke’s head: a pack of waterlogged youths with their eyes vacuumed from their skulls scampering clumsily above him.
Where the hell was Al?
Luke stood, his adrenaline spiking. His head slammed into the tunnel. He couldn’t stand at his full height; the ceiling was too low. Claustrophobia assaulted him; for a moment he was suffocating inside his own skin.
This is a tomb, he thought. Nothing but a vast undersea crypt, and I’m alone inside of it.
Laughter.
Luke’s blood seized. Dry, nerveless dust caked his veins, as if he’d been pumped full of fast-dry cement.
There it was again, unmistakable. This wasn’t that dap-dap-dap noise from above. Unmistakably, it had been laughter. And it was coming from deeper down the tunnel.
A boy’s laughter.
No way could it—
“…Zach?”
Luke clapped a hand over his mouth. He couldn’t believe he’d spoken the name, even now, disoriented at the bottom of the world. His lips burned with the shame of it.
Of course his lost son wasn’t down here. He wasn’t anywhere on earth—he was in heaven. He was safe from harm now.
You don’t know that.
His mother invading his head again, her voice honeyed and lacerating at once.
They never found him, did they? He could be anywhere, Lucas. Anywhere at all.
Sound from behind him. Luke spun on his heel. It came again. A tentative, staccato skittering. The urge struck to scurry back through the hatchway—a hatchway he feared was locked in any case—but instead Luke leaned into that sound, his eyes hunting desperately.
A rhythmic panting traveled through the dark. A shape carved itself out of the gloom twenty yards away, squatting motionlessly. Luke could just make out the wet jewels of its eyes and the whitened plume of its breath.
Come on, he thought, his hands balling into fists. Come on if you’re coming.
Which it did. Eagerly in fact, attended by a rapid clickety-click-click.
Luke swung at its mad approach, wondering in some fear-shrunk chamber of his mind if this was something you could fight in the conventional ways—with fists and feet and teeth. How did you fight a monster?
His fist passed harmlessly over the creature’s head, then it was on him—
Panting and whimpering and wagging its tail.
4.
A CHOCOLATE LABRADOR RETRIEVER. It twined around Luke’s legs, nuzzled its snout into his crotch, and whined companionably.
“Oh, Jesus. Hey. It’s okay, boy,” Luke said, running his hands over the dog’s head. “Oh, wait—girl.”
The dog looked healthy, though a little too thin and clearly quite cold. Her hind legs were shaking. She rucked her snout under Luke’s armpit and rooted until her head popped out under his arm, giving his chin a slobbery lick.
One of Clayton’s lab animals? Did that mean the other specimens (Luke hated to think of them in his brother’s clinical terms) were out of their cages, too?
The porthole opened. Al’s boots appeared, her body gracefully following. She scanned the tunnel in both directions. Only then did her eyes settle on Luke.
“Your hands,” she said. “You’re cut.”
Luke nodded. “I didn’t exactly nail the dismount. I’ll live. What took you so long?”
“The porthole shut after you went out. It shouldn’t have. I had to disengage the pressure locks all over again.”
Al had a flashlight. When she flicked it on, Luke noted that they were situated in a gooseneck: the tunnel curved ninety degrees to the left and right, roughly thirty yards ahead on either side.
The tunnel was ovoid: narrower at the top, wider at the bottom. Pipes and tubes ran along the walls, each labeled with their use. Many appeared to be wrapped with… Christ, was that friction tape? It was—the stuff the army called “hundred-mile-an-hour tape,” as its manufacturers claimed it could hold a Jeep together at that speed.
My God, Luke thought with a dizzy species of dread. Is this fucking place held together with tape?
Black foam had been applied around the entire tunnel in twenty-yard increments, in buckled seams running from floor to ceiling—Otto Railsback’s handiwork, had to be. Elsewhere Luke spotted signs of lowtech, on-the-fly fixes: baling wire and putty and soldering lead—the station had that shopworn, fix-me-up quality he remembered from the spaceships in the Alien movies.
Al gestured to the dog. “I see you’ve met Little Bee.”