Qualify (87 page)

“You’re right,” Emilio says up ahead, as we break formation and sort of sit there, levitating, staring around us. “I have no idea which cavern or tunnel is the right one. Where do we go?”

“Usually, the direction from where the water is flowing should tell us,” I say. “But it kind of does not seem to be flowing from anywhere at this point, it’s standing like a lake. Or at least, hard to tell.”

“Whoa, look up, guys!” a girl says, lifting her face toward the ceiling, and directing her board to rise a few feet. “Check out the amazing stalactites! Those are the biggest I’ve ever seen!”

“You just keep checking out junk on the ceiling, and you’ll end up floating face down in the water too,” Claudia says from a few feet away.

I glance at her with a frown. For a moment our gazes lock, and ugh, Claudia has a fierce expression on her face. . . .

“I think we need to break up into small groups or pairs and go check out each of these sub-caverns,” Jack says.

Meanwhile I am staring at the very still water below us, and the three or four additional bodies floating in it. There’s no current, no movement.

Think, Gwen, think! What is going on here?

And then it hits me.

“Wait!” I exclaim. “Don’t go off anywhere! I think that’s what killed these people! They wasted time looking around, wandered too far into the sub-tunnels and by the time they got back to the actual gate it was too late!”

“Ooh, Gwen-baby! So why the hell are
you
in charge,
puta?
” Claudia snarls at me, turning her hoverboard around aggressively.

I flinch at the ugly word, but before I can open my mouth, Laronda exclaims, “Because she’s the smarty-pants! Don’t you know, she’s Shoelace Girl? In case anyone missed it, if it hadn’t been for girlfriend here, most of you in L.A. wouldn’t have passed the Semi-Finals! So if you know what’s good for you, you listen to her!”

“Oh, yeah? You’re Shoelace Girl?” Emilio says with a small grin. “Okay, you got my attention.”

“Here’s the thing,” I say tiredly, ignoring the annoying fact that I’ve just been outed as that minor NQC “celebrity” I am trying very hard to live down and forget. “The water is not moving because I think this is a permanent lake here—it’s not going to drain,
ever
. So if we judge by the water level here it might seem like we have plenty of time to explore, but in fact, this is as drained as this chamber is going to get. Which means, the new gate is about to open any moment.”

“Okay, so what do we do?”

I bite my lip. “We listen. We need to be very quiet, stay exactly where we are, and just shut the hell up completely, and
listen
for a sound of rushing water. That would be the new gate opening.”

“Okay, I think that works for me,” Jack mutters.

Laronda meanwhile glances around at the cavern with all the Candidates in our team flying around everywhere, tired voices raised in echo-raising chatter, and then she yells, “Everyone, over here! Right now! And be quiet! As in, effing
shut up!
”

Some people turn briefly in our direction. And then, most of them decide it’s worth checking out whatever’s happening here in our group.

“Listen to Shoelace Girl!” Laronda keeps repeating, as more and more Candidates converge.

And then I have to repeat what I just said. I do, and everyone, surprisingly enough,
listens to me
.

The cavern chamber is suddenly very quiet, except for the soft drip of water coming from the ceiling.

“So how long do we listen?” a girl whispers.

“S-s-s-sh,” I say.

Because, in that moment, I can hear it. A sudden remote sound of a waterfall, barely audible in the distance, and coming from one of the larger sub caverns off to the right.

“Over there!” I exclaim. “Quickly! That’s the new gate!”

“Go! Go! Go!”

And we fly in the direction of the sound.

W
e reach the six beacons about five minutes later, when the top half of the floodgate has lifted up all the way, which means it’s far ahead in its cycle.

“Faster, go faster!” everyone cries, as we fly past the gate, and see our tokens being auto-scanned, and then we continue through the normal-sized tunnel from that point on.

“Phew, that was a close call,” Laronda yells out to me as we’re flying in our usual formation. “Okay, my turn to use the flashlight.”

“How much time do we have?” someone asks.

“Just keep moving!”

And so we keep going for about fifteen minutes at high speed, until we see the next floodgate. And yeah, it’s already open too, so we missed the most optimal entry time, which means that we have to make up time again, and go really fast to reach the next gate before it opens. . . .

Things kind of blur at that point. I grit my teeth and hold on to the hoverboard with numb hands, and I know I am going way too fast, just like everyone else around me is.

Unsafe
fast.

Because, yeah, a few minutes later someone runs into a tunnel wall.

There’s a yell, and the boy falls off, hitting his leg against a rock, so it’s bleeding. His hoverboard spins out and slams into two more people, who also collide with another three right behind them. Because, again, we’re all going
very fast
.

Seconds later, it’s a team disaster.

“Stop! Stop! Everyone halt! Stop!”

Those of us who can, sing the stop commands to bring our hoverboards to a levitating pause. We breathe fast, waiting for people who have fallen on the floor to get back up on their boards.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. . . .”

“What about you?”

Candidates are checking each other, and two guys help a girl get back on her hoverboard because she sprained her ankle badly. A couple of minutes later everyone—including the original teen who capsized and caused our train wreck—is back on the boards, and we are off again.

But we’ve just lost about ten minutes.

Crap . . . crap . . . crap.

W
e approach the next gate with a significant delay again. Which means we have to fly just as fast through the next chamber. We’ve entered a horrible cycle that we must break out of, or we will not be able to maintain this high level of pace for much longer.

“Go, go, go!” Voices sound from all directions.

“But
carefully!
Watch the walls! Watch the tunnel curve, watch for any obstacles!”

And so we stare with dilated eyes at the way before us, watching for any changes in the tunnel.

The terrifying thing is, the floor of the tunnel now barely has a trickle of water left. Which means that this chamber segment is almost empty and the next gate will open and begin pumping water here and transferring air out, long before we can reach it.

“Go! Just go
really
fast! No time!” Everyone’s screaming, and we lean into our boards, flying so fast that the walls of the tunnel become a twilight blur.

Our ugly suspicions are justified. Water begins rising again as the next chamber is emptying here into ours.

“Go!
Go!
”

But—there it is. The six rainbow beacons glow in the distance of about a hundred feet, water lapping over them. And the water level on our side of the chamber is very high up now, so we have to fly closer to the tunnel ceiling, flattened as much as possible.

“Oh God, it’s
closing up!
The gate is closing up!” someone screams up ahead.

We hurtle forward, reaching the beacons just when there’s a clearance of only three feet remaining between the top and bottom of the lift-gate—and it’s narrowing with every second. Candidates start throwing themselves through the slit opening. By the time Laronda and I are at the gate, we have to glide through carefully, keeping our hoverboards perfectly horizontal, and I even feel the top of the gate scrape against my backpack.

The people right behind us barely make it. And the last person literally
crawls
through the closing slit, while his backpack gets snagged. So he pauses, pulling hard until the bag is un-jammed, and then barely misses his hoverboard getting crushed in between the closing “jaws” of the gate.

“Damn! That was the closest damn thing ever—” the boy cries, breathing fast, and then we continue onward, picking up speed again.

Because there is simply no time. We have to compensate with high speed to break out of this doomed cycle.

W
e are approximately on our twenty-sixth hour.
Where
we are exactly, no one knows. The last remaining speedometer and mileage tracker on someone’s otherwise non-functional GPS has stopped working due to water damage pretty much after the first ten hours—which is ages ago—so we can only guess that we are now well in the middle of the Atlantic, deeper than anyone really wants to imagine, and more than two thirds to our destination.

I honestly don’t know how we’ve even made it this far. I think it’s the grueling physical endurance training over these past two months that is saving us. Without it, I’ve no doubt most of us would be long dead, due to a gazillion factors—shock, extreme tension, impossible exertion, oxygen hunger, too much carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, calcium carbonate or limestone and other freaky chemicals in the limited “air pocket” we’re traveling in, extreme cold, and ultimately, hypothermia.

Hypothermia is a constant danger. Everywhere, I can hear teeth chattering. . . . Even now, I suspect our bodies may be too far “gone”—messed up, damaged by the environmental stresses and the cramped position we maintain—so that we can not recover enough for the final sprint to the end, once we arrive at the central hub mega-cavern underneath Ancient Atlantis . . . blah, blah, blah. . . .

The flashlights are mostly off now. We fly by the light of a single one that the person in front holds like a headlight to illuminate our way. Surprisingly, it is enough for our dark-acclimated eyes.

One thing is different though. The tunnels here appear to be of a more roughly hewn nature, less streamlined. Many of them contain weird “cutouts” or pockets in the walls, on all sides, like ancient lava bubbles or cavities, pockmarking the tunnel interior with holes like Swiss cheese, ranging from small to huge. The presence of these bubble pockets creates an additional difficulty for us as we try to navigate as cleanly as possible in a straight line and avoid the tunnel walls.

I shudder to imagine the antiquity and the amazing natural consequences that
might
have caused the formation of these tunnels—because yeah, I have an odd gut feeling these are no longer artificial but natural veins and arteries running deep through the crust of the Earth. And the ancient Atlanteans—and now
we
, crazy kids—are just using them after the fact, fully formed and minimally retrofitted for our wacky human purposes.

Incidentally, does the air we’re breathing even have enough oxygen anymore? What is this musty, stinky miasma?

Okay, can you tell I am delirious and rambling?

Yeah, Gwen, the uber-nerd, only
you
would be thinking about ancient rock formations and atmospheric chemical compounds at a time like this. Focus, Gwen, focus!

“Does anyone know how many hours we have left?” a Candidate yells at some point as we arrive at the next floodgate, having somehow managed to regain our good timing.

“Hey, man I lost track. Maybe seven or eight hours left?” Emilio says in a voice that cracks with exhaustion.

“If this were a bus ride,” Laronda mutters, “we’d be singing songs to pass the time. Too bad if we try that kind of thing here, we’d screw up our hoverboards programming. No singing!”

“Yeah, yeah, no singing!” a girl Candidate says and starts to giggle drunkenly.

It occurs to me, we really are experiencing oxygen deprivation, and who knows what other poisoning by breathing this crap air for so long. Now, I am assuming the Atlanteans have a minimally functioning air filtration system of some sort here, or we’d be long dead by now. . . .

“Hey, guys,” Jack says behind me. “Wanna hear something scary?”

“Hell, no.” The moan comes from Laronda. “This is all scary enough, no, thank you.”

“No, I mean, just think—what if the whole tunnel gate system collapses? Like, it breaks down and stops working all of a sudden? I mean, how ancient is this place? Must be thousands of years old! All that time, and the effing gates still work? Wow! Just, wow!”

“Okay, you’re right,” I say. “That
is
the scariest thing you can say right about now. So just shut up, okay? Seriously!”

The guy goes silent, thank goodness.

And minutes later we reach the next gate.

As we pause and hover, waiting for it to open, a few of us take out our drinking water bottles to take small precious sips, and eat a bite or two of something. In the shadows a couple of people use the deep bubble pockets in the tunnel walls to answer the call of nature.