Even here, twenty feet down, I could see telltale scars of the power that had raged above us; it seemed lifeless, without any trace of living insect activity, although there were plenty of dead, burned carapaces. Had there been any still alive, I’d have used them to help us tunnel, but the lack meant the soil was closer packed, less easy to manipulate. Below that, another ten feet, lay granite, but it had been pulverized into grains almost as fine as sand.
Luis and I continued to dig, moving the dirt up and off to the sides at the top of the shaft. We broke through dense glacial till material, and into an area of the mine that had somehow survived almost intact as it angled down. The beams and bracing had bent, but not broken, and as we stepped out on the silty clay floor, Luis let the tunnel begin to fill in behind us.
Almost immediately, the air began to feel thick; part of it, I realized, was my own natural claustrophobia playing with my senses. I forced myself to breathe slowly and deeply as we kept moving. The children seemed immune to the feeling of burial; Luis produced a reassuringly bright ball of fire to light our way, but it had the disturbing side effect of reducing the quality of the air still more, until Edie began to reduce and recombine molecules to release oxygen from the dirt around us. The fresh air was almost overwhelming at first, but when Luis murmured my name, I forced myself to refocus on the task at hand. The intact mine tunnel ended in a jagged, sharp fall of stones—more dense till, a mix of finer and bulky gravel that had been ground down from mountains aeons ago by the immense power of glaciers. Below the clay lay more till, and then solid stone.
Luis and I pushed the rocks past us, tunneling in and down. It was hot work, and even with the constantly refreshed air I felt the pressure of the deep on me, the tight-pressing walls. The damp, cold feel of clay around me, the stink of it mixed with our sweat… It was just as well that the work before us took such power and concentration, because otherwise the fear that gnawed at my heels would have overtaken me completely. As it was, I did not dare to let go of Luis’s hand. It was not entirely to strengthen the flow of power between us, and I thought he knew that; I could feel his concern through the link.
We had tunneled three quarters of the way down when, without warning, I began to feel oddly faint. My lungs were working harder to process the apparently sweet, cool air, and I found myself breathing faster. Thinking why this might be seemed more difficult as well, a slippery concept that flitted like fish through shimmering water. I had a headache, growing worse with every pulsebeat, and I felt sick to my stomach as well.
I was fumbling for water in my pack when Luis stumbled and fell to his knees. It surprised me so much that I dropped the bottle. When I reached for him, I found my hands too clumsy to help.
Everything seemed so hard.
“Stop it,” I heard the Void child say. His voice sounded calm, but cold. “Edie, you’ve had your fun. We need them.”
Edie, sitting cross-legged on the damp floor of the tunnel, gave him a disgusted look and shook her head. “You know what, chipmunk? You’re really no fun at all. Look at them. Aren’t they funny like this?”
I couldn’t think what was amusing about seeing us fall, scramble, grab on to each other, and try to rise back to our feet. My head pounded so, and no matter how many breaths I sucked in, it felt as if the walls were crushing me, suffocating me. No air… There was no air.…
“Stop it,” Alvin said again. “It isn’t funny.”
She held up her thumb and forefinger, about an inch apart. “Oh, come on, it’s a little bit. No? Fine.” She waved her hand, and suddenly the air that I was dragging in was full of sweet, cool, intensely real oxygen. I collapsed to my side, hyperventilating to enrich starving tissues, and heard Luis’s lungs working at the same desperate speed. Now that my brain was clearing of its fog, I realized that we’d been suffocating.
“You,” I gasped, and lifted my head to stare at Edie—who held up her hands in surrender, and shrugged.
“Nope,” she said. “I didn’t do it. You hit a pocket of methane. It’s heavy; it displaces air from the ground up. You couldn’t have known. It’s odorless and colorless. Kills lots of people.”
“She protected the two of us from it,” Alvin said. “But she didn’t protect you.”
“Well, we were closer to the ground,” Edie said. “I was getting around to you guys.” Her smile was charming, and it had an edge of cruelty to it. “It’s just a headache. You’ll be fine. I wasn’t going to let you die or anything.”
No, she wouldn’t have; she had a very definite understanding of her risks down here in the tunnels, and despite her mastery over air and water, she had no real chance of reaching the surface again without our help.
I slowed my breathing with deliberate control. My skin was slick with panic sweat, and although the temperature was cave-cool, I felt hot and trapped, and I was still suffering from the headache and a worrying tremble in my muscles. In a few seconds, I felt good enough to rise to my knees and pull Luis with me; he was still breathing too fast, and his dark eyes looked dazed—at least until they focused on Edie and her smile.
I held on to his shoulder as I felt his muscles go tense. “No,” I said softly. “Don’t waste your strength. We have to keep going.” We were committed now, and there was no time for petty anger and vengeance. No room for a fight, either. I was waging enough of a battle to keep my instinctive, atavistic terror of this deep, closed space at bay.
He deliberately relaxed and nodded. His long, dark hair was sopping wet now, and stuck to his face and neck in sweaty points. “You okay?” he asked me, and put his hand on my chin, lifting it so I met his eyes. “No damage?”
“No,” I said. There was the lingering headache, but it was subsiding. I wondered how far Edie would really have allowed it to go, without Alvin to control her. Too far, I suspected. It didn’t take long for unconsciousness to set in, and brain damage, and death. She’d have been… interested, I thought. Like a scientist with lab animals, or—perhaps more accurately—a serial murderer with a new victim. “No, I’m fine. Let’s continue.”
Luis rounded on Edie and said, in a deadly quiet voice, “You do that again, and I’ll choke the living crap out of you with your own lungs. I mean it.”
Her eyes widened, and suddenly she looked like the child she was. “I’m sorry!” she said. “Really, I’m sorry, I won’t—I won’t do it again. Please, don’t hurt me.” She shrank back, and Luis loomed over her like a dark, cruel shadow.
He snorted, shook his head, and relaxed. “Don’t try to play me, kid. You ain’t got the skills. I’m not the Big Bad Wolf, here, and you’re not Little Red. Save it for someone who doesn’t know you’re psycho.”
He turned back to face the wall of debris in front of us, and began ripping it aside with vicious scoops of power—too much of it, expended too violently, but I understood the impulse. Because he’d looked away from her, he didn’t see the change that came over Edie’s face in that moment, the black glimmer in her eyes, the flat rage.
I watched her in case she acted on her temptations to hurt him. But in that instant, Alvin reached out and put his hand on Edie’s shoulder.
She gasped and sat down, hard.