The Enclave (31 page)
But his whispered “What is this place?” only provoked a hissed order for quiet from his guide.
Before long they came to a closetlike opening in the rock wall to their left. As Zowan’s guide turned his back to the opening, then reached up and pulled himself out of sight, Zowan realized the “closet” lacked both floor and ceiling and was actually a vertical ventilation shaft cut through the stone.
Cautiously, Zowan backed into the place the other man had just vacated and reached up as he had done. His fingers closed about the metal rung of a ladder ascending the side of the shaft. Bracing his feet on the sides of the opening until he’ d ascended far enough to get them on the ladder’s bottom rung, he remained unnervingly aware of the space at his back and the indeterminate drop below him.
After what seemed like forever, his hands reached the end of the ladder. Groping about, he found a flat landing, and was considering how to execute the transition from ladder to floor without anything to hold on to when a hand seized his arm and pulled him off the ladder onto the flat as if he were a child.
The hand was hot as fire as it drew him away from the shaft and through a doorway—though only the snick of a door shutting behind them told him so. He was released then, and a palm-sized lamp was pressed into his right hand as a rough but familiar voice grated, “Turn it on. Keep your voice down.”
“Neos?!” Zowan flicked on the hand lamp, its weak light illuminating his dark-robed guide once more. It was Neos, all right, but his brother had changed considerably since Zowan had last seen him six months ago. His face had grown more angular, his brow heavier, his cheeks gaunter. It was just now sweat-sheened and streaked with some sort of dark pigment, and the angry red boil in the midst of his forehead looked ready to burst.
Zowan had no more than a glimpse of it, though, for the moment the light hit him, Neos gasped and turned away, shielding his eyes with a huge, knobby, long-nailed hand, also streaked with pigment, dirt . . . and blood.
“What is that on your forehead?” Zowan angled the lamp away from the other man, all his excitement now turned to horror. It couldn’t be an oculus. Why would they do that? Neos was never selected to be an Enforcer. Enforcers were supposed to have affinity for the position, to be reliable and obedient and stable. . . .
“I don’t know,” Neos said, so softly Zowan had to lean toward him, trying not to gag on his pungent body odor. “I don’t want to know.” He said it so vehemently, Zowan veered off from questioning him further. He was obviously unwashed. Perhaps it was just a big pimple.
“Is there really a breach?” Zowan whispered, trolling about for something else to say, and realizing now that it must have been Neos who’d yelled that panic-igniting word in the blacked-out Star Garden.
Neos made a huffing sound that might have been a snort. “There’s
always
a breach. New Eden’s air comes unfiltered from the surface and always has.” He shook his head. “There are no air scrubbers, no seals, no poisons. The surface is fine. Everything they’ve told us is a lie. Everything.”
“Are you all right?” Zowan leaned closer, lifting the lamp a bit, to see that Neos really was shivering under the heavy cloak. “You seem ill.”
“I
am
ill. They’ve infected me with something. I don’t know what. I don’t even know if I’ll survive it. Probably not.”
“We should get you to the infirmary,” said Zowan. But the moment he uttered the words he knew it was a ridiculous suggestion.
Which Neos confirmed with another snort. “Why? So they can finish the job?” He fell into a coughing fit—deep, wracking, mucus-filled coughs that made Zowan draw back in alarm. His thoughts went back to the heat of his grip, the boil on his forehead, and the clumps of fair hair on his red tunic. All symptoms of the development of an oculus . . .
Suddenly his brother’s hand shot up from the dark folds of his cloak to grip Zowan’s forearm again, the burning on his bare skin now carrying profound significance. “The world is not what they said it was. You have to go and see it. They’re holding us here like prisoners. Doing things to us that shouldn’t be done to—”
He broke into another bout of vicious coughing. When he had recovered, they sat silently for a moment, and then he said again, “You have to go and see it.”
“How?” He waited and, when Neos said nothing, added, “
Is
there a way out of the goat ravine?”
Neos grunted. “It would never be that obvious.” He heaved a shuddering sigh and shoved to his feet. “Come. I’ll show you.”
Between the continued darkness, and the exit from the Star Garden through various ducts and shafts, Zowan had lost all sense of direction. He followed Neos through a maze of passages—some wide and high and recognizable as corridors in the Enclave proper, others dusty, cramped, and unfinished. Once they walked around the edge of a huge shaft, toes balanced on a narrow walkway as they held on to the pipes and cables that snaked down the stone wall.
Zowan had no idea how long they walked, or where they were, and sometimes he wondered again if he was just hallucinating all of it.
Finally they entered a low-ceilinged chamber full of the whir of machinery and the odor of damp earth, metal, and concrete. Zowan’s hand lamp reflected off huge pipes sprouting out of the floor, running parallel to it and then turning away, or dipping down again. Some were marked with red painted lines, others with blue. They followed one such pipe, marked with red, all the way to the back of the chamber, where it dove into the floor so close to the back wall they practically touched. About five feet away from it, Neos rolled aside the large metal drum that was holding a four-foot square of steel plating in place against the wall. Pulling the plating aside, he revealed a small tube that had been drilled through the stone, slightly over two feet in diameter.
“It’s through there,” he said, gesturing for Zowan to enter. “Crawl on to the other side and wait for me there.”
“Wait for you?” Zowan looked at him aghast.
“There are some things I need to do.”
“Like what?”
“Set up some diversions. I can feel Gaias getting closer. And they’ll probably have some of the power lines up soon.”
“What difference does that make? Can’t we just leave?”
“If they know where we’ve left the Enclave, they’ll know where to look for us on the surface. Besides, I want to keep things confused enough they won’t know for sure you’re even gone yet. It’ll give you a bit of a head start. And believe me, you’ll need it. If they think you’ve gotten out, they’ll hunt you down. And when they catch you, they’ll add you to their collection of experimental subjects.”
“But how will I know which way to go?”
“You won’t have any options. Just crawl to the end of the tube and wait for me there. Now hurry up. I want to close this back up before I leave.”
And so Zowan shoved hard into the narrow tube, which was barely wide enough for his shoulders. Wriggling forward on his elbows and hips, the beam of the hand lamp spearing about erratically, he tried not to think of where he was or where he might be going. But when he heard the sound of the metal drum being rolled back into place against the steel plate, intense anxiety accelerated his pace until he was crawling as fast as he could, desperate to get to the end of the tube and wondering how he was going to be able to stand waiting in a space not much bigger than his sleepcell bunk for who knew how long.
Especially since he was growing more and more convinced this was all a trick and Neos had only brought him here to bury him alive in this bizarre way. His breathing rasped loudly around him as blisters formed at the pressure points where he sought to push himself forward.
Then abruptly his outstretched elbows came down on nothing and he pitched headfirst out of the tube.
New Eden
Zowan fell only about two feet to a dirt floor below the crawl tube’s ending. At first he lay panting, disoriented in the total darkness that had descended on him when he’ d dropped his hand lamp. Profoundly relieved that things hadn’t turned out as badly as he’d feared, he still regretted ever having gone to the Star Garden. Neos had sounded like a madman, not just during their recent flight through the Enclave, but earlier when he’ d visited Zowan in the infirmary. Zowan had not wanted to admit it then, invested as he was in the hope of getting away. Now he could not escape the horrifying realization that he’d been tricked.
After a time he sat up and groped around until he found his hand lamp, then switched it on to look around, the beam noticeably weaker than it had been. He sat in yet another narrow, rock-walled tunnel, though this one was at least high enough he could stand up in it. Mindful of the hand lamp’s failing battery, he switched it off and settled down against the wall to wait. Silence pressed about him so profound the rasp of his own breathing sounded loud. The rankness of Neos’s unwashed flesh lingered in his nose, and he could almost feel the trembling, too-hot hand upon his arm. He was getting thirsty, too, and had no idea where he might find water. . . .
Led here by a madman. What an idiot you are,
he told himself. But then, maybe he was also mad. . . .
Eventually he drifted into sleep, where Andros called to him again.
“They’ve got me locked up in a dark cell down here. Please,
Zowan, come and get me out. I don’t know what they’re going to do
to me!”
“Why would you think they’re going to do something to you?”
Zowan asked him.
“Because I can hear them talking about it. It’s your fault I’m here,
you know. You have to come and get me out!”
Guilt seared Zowan’s heart.
“I don’t know where you are, Andros!
I don’t even know where I am right now.”
Andros did not reply.
“Besides, I have to wait for Neos to come back. . . .”
Again, only silence. Andros spoke to him no more, and somehow Zowan knew his friend was annoyed with him.
He awoke to the same dark, dusty corridor he’ d fallen asleep in with no idea how long he’d slept. Neos had not returned and Zowan’s thirst was stronger than ever. He was getting hungry, too.
How long should he wait? What if, in creating his diversions, Neos had been caught? What if they’d made him tell where Zowan was and were coming for him now? Or worse, what if Neos had been caught and taken to that place where the experimental subjects were kept? What if he wasn’t coming back?
He wrapped his arms around bent knees as horror consumed him. For a time he sat nursing bitter self-recrimination. Then a sound made him look up, and he glimpsed a gleam of light on the rock walls of the corridor ahead of him, just where it took a turn. He sat forward in sudden hope. “Neos?” he called.
There!
Another gleam. He leapt to his feet, switched on his hand lamp, and soon reached the place where the corridor turned and angled upward, arriving just as the person ahead of him disappeared around the next corner. “Neos!” he called, louder this time. “I’m down here!” Neos must have come back, after all, and not seen Zowan sleeping in the darkness beside the hole.
Now Zowan hurried up the sloping corridor, expecting his brother to reappear around the corner at any moment. But he did not. When Zowan reached the corner himself, he saw the light shining down a rugged rocky wall from above. Hurriedly he climbed after it, speculating that Neos wasn’t speaking for fear of drawing the attention of Enforcers. But as the mysterious man with the lantern continued to lead upward, never letting him draw close enough to see more than a robed figure with a light, he began to think it wasn’t Neos at all.
Instead his thoughts returned to the voice of I Am, who had told him during his time in the infirmary to leave the Enclave, to come out of the darkness. . . . Was that who was leading him now? A new eagerness seized him, a sense of something greater than he could imagine. He hurried along narrow passages that had turned from solid rock to earth and rock together, his shoulders brushing the walls, the top of his head sometimes brushing the wooden supports that held up the tunnel. Intersecting passages offered alternative paths, but he ignored them, his eyes fixed on the light ahead. The passages gradually grew wider. At one point he passed a small room and found a dusty striped mattress on a metal frame, a blanket folded at its foot, a not-so-dusty bucket sitting beside it—as if someone might have lived here for a time.
Soon after that, he felt the faint draft of drier, warmer air, and his pace quickened yet again. Then his guiding light winked out, and he stopped in astonished dismay. Darkness pressed around him like black wool. He thought of all the side spurs he had passed, how hard it would be to return. Yes, he still had his hand lamp but . . . how would he know the way?
The draft caressed his face, carrying an odor reminiscent of the goats’ grotto. Maybe he could follow the direction of that air current. . . .
Heart pounding with new hope, he started onward, and slowly, perhaps as his eyes adjusted, he became aware of a faint glow ahead. It wasn’t enough to make out forms, but it was light. At the next corner, it grew subtly brighter as the passage leveled off and took a series of short turns, each new vantage showing more and more illumination. The temperature was rising, as well.
For the first time it occurred to him that he had no protective suit, no brown-lensed goggles for his eyes. . . . All the terrifying warnings he’ d ever heard about walking unprotected on the surface flooded his mind, and he came to a stop. Neos said it was all a lie, that the world had not been poisoned, that people
could
walk its surface and live. But Neos had left him alone in the darkness for who knew how long, failing to keep his promise to return. How could he trust Neos?
His thirst had grown into a monstrous craving, and going back would be a long and difficult journey. Maybe there would be a quiet pool ahead, like in the goats’ grotto.
Besides, it was not Neos who had led him this far. It was the light of I Am.
He continued on and soon turned into a short passage, which clearly led to the surface. A grating stood in the opening, but even so the light was so bright he flung up an arm to shield his eyes.
