Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (24 page)

“We should stay a bit longer,” Traore said
guardedly. It was good to hear him speak.

Brynn took his hand, as she had been doing
lately, and Ethan saw her look into his eyes. “We have to go sometime, Traore.
We have to find our way out.”

Traore’s gaze dropped down to their clasped
hands. His shoulders slumped a bit more. “What if there is no way out? What if
we all die down here?”

The room filled with a barren silence. It was the
fear that crept around the edges of their minds all the time, ever since they
had found themselves in the wrecked ship at the bottom of the shaft. Though no
one had said it aloud, they all knew it was a possibility—maybe even a
probability. Now, hearing it spoken and feeling the press of the cave all
around them, the fear pushed its way to the forefront of their consciousness
and hung there in the midst of them, heavy and terrible.

They could not bring themselves to leave the
warmth of the cave, could not bring themselves to force Traore out into the
cold darkness again. And so they stayed. Another night. Two.

***

When Ethan awoke after their third night in the
Sauna, his mouth was dry, his cheeks burning, his lips cracking uncomfortably.
He was out of water, had been for several hours, and so were the rest of them.
They had rationed food, but here in this constantly dripping, weeping, damp
place, none of them had thought to limit their water.

It had been over a week since they had filled
their water bags in Crystal Springs. The baking heat of the Sauna Room, so
welcome when they first came from the chill of the cave, had dehydrated them
quickly, and they had awakened from their last sleep parched.

“We need to go,” Ethan said, gathering their
packs and handing them their discarded coveralls. “We have to find water.”

Ndaiye looked up at him. His lips were cracked
and Ethan longed to give him a drink. He looked through his pack. No water and
precious little food. A single nutrition bar, and maybe two more among the
group. The situation was getting more and more desperate.

When he had them all on their feet, he tried to
tempt them into the passage. “The cool air feels great in here!” he said with
enthusiasm.

Brynn, who had picked up some of Traore’s
discouragement, replied, “It will be great until we’re all freezing again.”

Ethan walked on, the truth in her words gnawing
at him.

***

Ethan had been gone for over two weeks. Kaia
found herself staring out the window aimlessly more often now. She couldn’t
seem to find the energy to work on bots for the kids, visit the junkyard, or
visit her passengers. The last few days all she could manage was losing herself
in the battleship manuals the Admiral had brought home for her. Even though she’d
been reading them for six months and there was nothing new in them, they were a
good distraction and she found that she couldn’t put them down.

Ethan couldn’t be gone. Not so quickly, without a
chance to say goodbye. Not the man she’d mourned for half a century. She looked
up from the manual to see a military hovercar pull up. Why would they be coming
when her father was in Lumina?

“They do know he’s not here, right?” she asked
out loud.

But they weren’t there, as they usually were, to
collect her father. Her missive jingled and the voice on the other end of the
line was Admiral Reagan.

“Kaia. We’ve got an alien situation. I need you
in Lumina.” His voice was tight with worry.

“I’m coming,” she said, and even as her breath
came quick with fear of the aliens, she was relieved to have something to
distract her from Ethan’s disappearance.

Aria had spent so many days in the mountains that
she had lost her fear of them. They were not, as she had first seen them,
waiting to snatch her and her children along with Ethan. They were solid and
strong, safe even, compared to the crush of people in the city, so many of whom
were ill. And the people were so indifferent to Ethan’s loss. At least the
peaks seemed to echo her loneliness. She still went out, poling Luis’s sleek
little boat down the river, and then hiking, sometimes wandering for hours over
the landscape looking for a clue about where he’d gone.

She was especially drawn to a section of the
river that had a broad, stony bank. In many places, the trees and thick grasses
came right to the edge of the river, spilling into the water and blocking hope
of passage. But in this section, far beyond the petrified Taim grove, the
forest was welcoming. The peaks around it yawned with arches, grottos, caves, and
cavities carved by eons of water. Hank had directed her to it as a good place
to look. He had a crop of kwai fruit growing nearby and sometimes she saw him
as she pulled the boat onto the shore and set off into the forest.

She worried because the children were beginning
to show signs of anxiety having both she and Ethan away from them. Even Kaia
was unavailable, staying in the barracks at the base in Lumina, helping her
father figure out the alien situation. So Aria took the children with her into
the mountains sometimes, and sometimes she took them to their school, and as
the days passed and there was no sign of Ethan, sometimes she stayed home
playing with them and comforting them in their grief at his loss. She only
cried once they were asleep.

She met with her friends from Ship 12-22 often,
bringing them fruits and gathering their trade items. Hannah, a skilled doll
maker, was one of her favorite people to visit. Today she stopped and offered
Hannah a basket of berries.

Hannah handed her two standard dolls, which she
tucked into her pack.

“I have something else,” Hannah said, “for your
friends, you know, with the little girls.” Hannah retrieved from a cabinet in
her cottage another doll. “Polara told me she gave one of them her doll, so I
gave her one just like this when she was here with Kaia the other day. But she
said there was another little girl there, in the tenements, so I thought you
could give her this.”

Aria took the doll carefully from its creator. It
was exquisitely made, with delicately stitched hands and a sweetly painted
face. Its long dark hair was soft as down, and Aria knew that Daniel’s little
sister Nallie would love it.

“You are an absolute artisan,” she told Hannah. “This
is beautiful.”

“I wish you could convince the Market District
here in the city.” Hannah scoffed. “Since your woodsie friends are liking them
so much, I took them around to every shop in Coriol and not one will carry
them.”

“Maybe you should open a little toy shop of your
own.”

“Saras would never give me any shop space, and he
owns it all. Anyway, there’s fines for people taking Saras scrip without paying
the fee to Saras, and paying the fee to accept it cuts out any profits. A few
people come here and they do pay me in scrip, but if he finds out I’m selling
them, the fines will be more than I could make on dolls in a lifetime in
Coriol. “

“The company town isn’t as wonderful as it sounds
on paper,” Aria agreed.

Hannah went on. “And it’s not just that. Saras
could make lots of scrip if he’d open up a toy store himself, but he won’t ever
do it.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “There’s a reason there are no
toy stores in Coriol,” Hannah said. “Saras doesn’t want children playing with
toys. Toys won’t help get Yynium out of the ground. Toys won’t prepare children
to be miners and managers of miners. Saras doesn’t want any distractions from
his main objective.”

Aria shook her head. Though Hannah sounded a
little extreme, Aria suspected she was right. The few toys Polara and Rigel had
came from their friends from the Ship 12-22: the dolls from Hannah, the
beautiful wooden animals and finely carved blocks from Winn the carpenter, and
the tiny play dishes from Luis. The only things in the Market District made for
children were clothes and occasionally books.

Every decision Saras made seemed to tie back to
his lust for Yynium. Saras was ruled by Yynium, and Coriol was ruled by Saras.

She hugged Hannah before she left. “I’ll take
this to Nallie right now,” she said. “She’s going to love it.”

As she rode across town, she looked forward to
handing the doll to Nallie. She’d brought berries for them, too.

But when little Merelda opened the door, Aria
forgot about the doll in her hands and the anticipation of giving it to Nallie.
The child’s eyes were red and swollen, as if she’d been crying for days.

Aria leaned down. “What is it?” she asked,
gathering the weeping child into her arms. “Merelda, what’s wrong?”

Merelda buried her head in Aria’s shoulder and
spoke in a voice twisted with grief. The single word was muffled, but Aria
would have recognized it anywhere. “Mama.”

***

Aria had never attended a funeral on Coriol. This
one was short, held in the evening so that people could get back to their
apartments and get some sleep before work tomorrow.

The little all-purpose church was full of Marise’s
neighbors and other workers at the mine. Reverend Hardy said a few words. There
was a song, slow and sad, in Marise’s native language, and a dedication of some
sort before they took the body away.

Aria looked across at the somber, blank face of
the boy she’d helped weeks ago. Daniel was stoic, unnaturally still. He turned
his hollow face toward Aria and the emptiness there pulled the air from her lungs.

She glanced away, looking at the mourners as they
filed past her on their way home. It was then that she realized how many of
them had the flowering purple bruises. Aria involuntarily covered her mouth. As
soon as Daniel and his sisters left the church to follow the body, Aria fled,
running until she could hold her breath no longer. Standing on the sidewalk,
she sucked in great gasping breaths of the fresh air.

Brynn had been right. The cold was beginning to
seep back into them, maybe even worse for the time they’d spent warm. They’d
left the Sauna hours ago, traveling a branching, winding tunnel that required
the use of the marking rock. The passage was not wide, but after the Python Pass,
Ethan felt he could stand anything as long as he could stretch out his arms.
There was little conversation as they tried passage after passage, their thirst
growing more and more desperate with each passing hour.

Ethan heard a thud and a scrape. When he turned,
Maggie was on the floor. Brynn stepped close to her, but Maggie pushed her
away. Ethan went and lifted the captain, his lips splitting as he tried to
smile encouragement to her.

“I’m thirsty,” she said blearily.

“I know. We’ll find something soon.” They walked
on.

Finally, as they rounded a corner, they saw a sheen
on the dead end in front of them. The wall was weeping.

“Water!” Ethan croaked. He set Maggie against the
wall and fell against it himself, pressing his mouth to the rough stone. But it
was a trickle, and as he scraped his tongue painfully against the wall, he came
away with only the barest drops. Frustrated, he stepped back. Pity swelled in
him as he saw them all, the rest of his crew, trying to pull life-sustaining
water from the stone.

It was then that Ethan saw one more end for them
in this labyrinth. If they didn’t fall down a shaft or get crushed by a
rockslide, if the krech didn’t get them and they didn’t get trapped, they would
survive just to die anyway. They would survive all those horrors just to die of
thirst or starvation.

He walked away, unable to watch them. There wasn’t
enough water there for a Xyxos, much less a person.

As if on cue, a pink flash caught Ethan’s
attention. It was a Xyxos, darting out nearly to his feet and then back to the
edge of the wall. It happened too fast for Ethan to see it clearly, but his
attention was diverted by something far more exciting. The Xyxos left little
wet footprints, surrounded by puddles, as if it were dripping wet. For it to
get that wet there must be a pool around here somewhere.

Ethan called to the others and kept his eyes on
the little creature as it scurried along the passageway behind them. Another,
dripping Xyxos joined it, and then another. As the crew came up beside him, Ethan
helped Ndaiye with Maggie.

They followed the herd of little pink Xyxos. When
a split came, the Xyxos seemed to know just which direction to take. Ethan
peered ahead of them. What if they were simply getting more and more lost? What
if the Xyxos led them to a dead end?

But wasn’t that what he had just figured out?
That everything down here was a dead end, in one way or another? He let the
darkness of the thought play in his mind a moment until a flash of white caught
his attention.

Ethan peered ahead of them. At the edge of the
light he thought he saw someone. A tall figure slipping around the edge of the
next column. But when they arrived at the column, an empty space greeted them.
He glanced around. Had anyone else seen it?

He felt something crunch under his boot. At the
risk of losing the Xyxos, he paused to pick it up and look at it. It was,
impossibly, a chei seed, like the ones Aria had been drying at home. How could
it be down here? Excitement choked him as he thought that perhaps they were
nearing an exit. More seeds crunched under his boots. Perhaps the Xyxos were
dropping them as they ran.

Shining the light ahead of the little herd of
Xyxos, Ethan felt a stabbing apprehension as he saw a row of shining seeds
stretching before them. The Xyxos weren’t dropping the seeds. They were
following a trail of them. They weren’t leading the survey crew, they were
being led themselves.

Ethan stopped abruptly. “Wait,” he called to the
others. They stopped, nervously glancing ahead as the Xyxos moved into the dark
without them. “This may not be safe.” Ethan said. “Maybe we shouldn’t follow
them. I think someone is baiting them, and we could be walking right into a—”

“Hush!” Maggie interrupted him. “Look!”

“But—” Ethan began, but then he saw what she was
pointing at. They all saw it.

It couldn’t be what they thought it was, what
they hoped it was. Ndaiye pulled away and broke into a run. Ethan called after
him to be careful, his mouth dry and his voice cracking.

They all ran, more quickly than was prudent,
toward the place where their feeble light bounced back to them from the shining
reflection of water. A vast underground lake stretched in an enormous cavern.
They stumbled to their knees and bellies beside the flat, wide mirror of water
that caught the shadowy image of the stalactites on the ceiling and held it in
perfect stillness before them.

Ndaiye drank first, his noisy slurping bouncing
off the rocks and his hands, plunging in and lifting the water to his mouth,
causing furious ripples across the surface of the lake.

For several minutes, they said nothing, simply
drank and dipped their hands and faces in the water, until their cheeks were
red with the cold and their fingers came away numb. Ethan didn’t think there
was anything better than the taste of that cold mineral water. He looked around
at the slopes around the lake, covered with slowly flowing, seeping water, drips
and streams flowing from small crevasses in the rock, constantly filling the
lake. The shimmering water shone back at him and he silently thanked the Xyxos
and whoever or whatever had led them here.

Looking down through the clear water, he saw
opalescent cave fish pushing lazily along the rock bottom. He glanced over to
see Maggie watching them, too. She pulled the cover off her pack. Seconds later
she scooped it through the water and pulled it up. In it was a wriggling cave
fish, which she grabbed by the tail.

Ethan heard a smack as she knocked it against the
rock. It lay limp in her hand and he watched as she put it to her mouth and
gingerly pulled the white flesh off the bones with her teeth.

After weeks of limited fare, Ethan shouldn’t have
been surprised at how delicious the fish looked, but he was. Maggie slurped and
peeled and he found himself nearly crazy to get one for himself.

Ethan wasn’t the only one. “How did you do that?”
Brynn asked, scooting close to where Maggie was feasting.

Maggie scooted away. “Easy,” she said between
bites. “Just scoop ‘em. They’re blind. They can’t see you coming.” Ethan
thought her purposeful gaze lingered on Brynn a little longer than necessary,
but he forgot about it as he plunged his own makeshift net into the icy water,
coming up with a wriggling fish.

The others netted fish, too. Traore accumulated a
great pile of them before he started eating. It was a real feast.

Ethan took a bite, trying to pull the skin and
flesh off the bone like Maggie had. Even when a sharp, flexible bone poked the
inside of his cheek, Ethan hardly slowed. The fish was rich and tender, with
the sweetness of meat he barely remembered.

When their hunger was curbed, their thirst was
slaked, and their water bags were full again, the crew began to skirt the lake,
looking for another passage. It was enormous, and the cavern sometimes closed
on it, looking like a dead end. But Brynn slipped through and found, every
time, another cavern on the other side of the wall, where the lake continued.

After several of these rooms, Ethan heard an
unusual sound. The laughter of running water filled the cave ahead. It took him
back to the day this nightmare started, when he’d pushed through the vines
seeking solitude. Now, he stayed close to his crew as they moved together
towards it.

Traore passed Brynn and slipped around a wall of
stone in the direction of the sound. The rest of the crew followed, finding
themselves in a small chamber where the water churned through the opening in
the wall. Shining their weak lights across the tumbling water, they saw a chute
where the cave floor dropped away and the water fell, bright and powerful, out
of their view. Ethan, at the rear of the group, was suddenly aware of the damp,
slick rock beneath his boots. The seeping water made it slippery and he backed
away, images of Python Pass in his mind. What if this led to a funnel, or a flooded
chamber where there was no air? He placed a hand on Ndaiye’s arm and opened his
mouth to offer a warning.

But before he could speak, Traore’s arms arched
up in a terrible windmill and Ethan saw him slip, falling into the rushing
water.

Ndaiye cried out and Maggie clung to him as he
tried to get nearer the water. His cousin was gone, down the nearly vertical
chute.

“No!” Ethan leaned forward, peering into the
gorge. He saw nothing but water and darkness.

And then he heard Traore’s voice, small amid the
thundering falls.

“Come on!” Traore shouted. “It’s safe!”

They all heard him.

“We have to go,” Ndaiye said, immediately
stripping off his coveralls and outer clothes and stuffing them into his pack,
then pulling the waterproof cover over it and securing it. “There’s no way to
get him back up here, and I’m not leaving him alone down here.” The others
watched, undecided, while Ndaiye yelled, “Here’s my pack!” and tossed it into
the torrent.

A second later, Traore called, “Got it!”

Ndaiye sat carefully on the slippery side of the
river and launched himself into the swirling water. He slid upright for a
moment before disappearing down the hole, calling, “Whoooo!” as if he were at
an amusement park.

Ethan saw that there wasn’t another choice,
unless they wanted to split up. Maggie went next, then Brynn. Ethan’s own trip
down the chute was surprisingly pleasant, except for the freezing water. Soon
they were all on the bank several meters downstream from the chute, trying to
dry as quickly as possible and pulling on their clothes with badly shivering
hands.

Traore had a new look about him. “That was some
ride!” he said, catching Ethan’s eye. “I’m glad to be alive!”

“S-some ride.” Ethan stuttered, his jaw
convulsing as he tried to speak.

“Huddle up!” Maggie commanded. Brynn stepped
close to the older woman, but Maggie hobbled away from her, gathering the rest
of them closer and ending up on the other side of the circle from Brynn. Ethan
thought Maggie could at least show the girl a little affection. They’d been
down here together long enough, been through enough together, that they owed
each other something. He threw an arm around Brynn and, on his other side,
Ndaiye. The group stood, trying to minimize contact with the cold ground, and
talked about the ride down the chute.

Ten minutes later they were no warmer. Ethan knew
the dangers of hypothermia. He’d read a lot about it on Ship 12-22, when he was
surrounded by the vast, cold vacuum of space. “We have to light a heat brick,”
he said.

“Not here,” Maggie challenged, her teeth
chattering so much that Ethan had a hard time understanding her. “We need to
see if there’s somewhere with a higher ceiling. We’ll suffocate if we light it
here.”

“I can’t go much farther,” Brynn said pleadingly.

“You’ll go as far as you have to,” Maggie
snapped.

Ethan pulled away from the group, striding down
the nearest passageway. It was wide and dark and he sensed it might open up.

When it did, it took his breath away. A cavern
covered in sparkling white flowstone arched before him. It was beautiful, a
stone cathedral. There was a calm feeling there, a safe and holy feeling.

 He shone the light up, but couldn’t see the
ceiling. He shouted, and though his voice was weak and thready from the cold,
he could tell by the reverberation that the room was enormous. Working quickly,
he pulled two heat bricks out of his pack with stiff fingers and lit them
before going to retrieve the others.

When they all returned, the bricks were glowing
cheerfully. Ethan felt the heat reach him as he left the passage. Brynn rushed
to the glowing bricks, leaning over them, seemingly oblivious to the smoke
billowing up. He was afraid she might climb on top of them. Traore took her
shoulders gently and pulled her back, guiding her to sit on the ground near the
bricks and stretch her hands toward the heat.

The others came close and huddled around the heat
bricks. The ceiling was high and Ethan fanned the smoke up and away from them
into the unseen heights of the cavern. Ethan gradually felt the worst of the
chill leave him and looked to see the others trembling less as well. He had not
reckoned on how the icy water would draw the heat from their bodies, and how
difficult it would be to replace. Sitting around the bricks, willing warmth
back into his body, the dehydration of the last few days seemed a small price
to pay for the radiant heat of the Sauna Room.

“We should also keep moving,” Ethan said,
standing and swinging his arms back and forth. “That will help keep the blood
circulating.” He walked in a wide circle, trying not to think about the fact
that these heat bricks were their last. Ndaiye stood and walked, too.

“Hey Ethan, look over here! Isn’t this an alien
language?”

Ethan gazed at the undulating white wall where
his friend was pointing. There, dancing across the curves, were more Ikastn
symbols. Not just a few more, either. As they walked around the white chamber,
they found the symbols etched into nearly every surface. Soon, the whole team
was inspecting the cavern.