The Sciences building is almost pitch-dark inside once we’ve figured out how to get in (through the ceiling, big surprise). We’ve dropped into a mostly empty foyer with a wide central desk, much like in every other structure, and a few dilapidated benches along the walls near the crumbled front door. Their cushions have deteriorated entirely, leaving strings of polyfiber and the ash of what might have become mold if this planet allowed for any sort of life at all.
It’s quiet in addition to the dark. Pumpkin’s delicate little steps go unheard as he scampers over benches, rubble, and desks, his headlight whipping around the place like a light show.
“Come on, buddy.” I try to snatch him up, but he skids over a patch of dusty tile and darts toward a square passage into a narrow hallway.
Kieran and I go after him. The hall has a low ceiling, and the stairs Pumpkin has found are decayed and scuffed, with rubble partly blocking their sharp angle downward. Downward. Underground. I let out a breath like a nervous lightjetter before a race, and Pumpkin meows.
“You were right,” Kieran says.
“Maybe.” My chest is tight, but I start on the stairs, maneuvering around the portion of wall that’s collapsed onto them. Pumpkin, out of exploratory greed or fear of me picking him up, skitters down into the dark ahead of me, his lamp revealing the barren floor below. “We shouldn’t get our hopes up.”
But my hopes are up. They’re way up. My heart is pounding in an anxious, excited rhythm, and my face hurts from alternating between a giddy smile and a deep, doubtful frown. As hopeful as I am, I’m also terrified.
If I am right, and Verity Co. is wrong, they’ll come for us. Now I realize I’ve done nothing to hide our tracks. Do I say something? Do I let Kieran go alone, or—
“Look.” Kieran’s arrived on the basement floor beside me, pointing to a reinforced steel door without a handle. Even the wall is reinforced with armored steel. A dull painted banner across the metal spells out in an alien language that only elite personnel are allowed inside. “Think this is it?”
“It’s not exactly kilometers underground.” But maybe. Maybe it is. Pumpkin sniffs at the base of the door, prowling its length.
“But it could lead there.” An edge of boyish excitement slips into Kieran’s voice. He approaches the door, considering it, touching it, tracing the grooves and testing for cracks. He stops at some kind of card reader on the frame, but it doesn’t activate at his touch. “Gonna need a few minutes.”
“Okay.” I look back to the stairs. “I’m going to see if I can cover our tracks.” That, and I can’t bear to stand and watch, holding my breath for whatever’s on the other side of that steel.
Kieran doesn’t answer. He’s already lost in the puzzle of how to open a thousand-year-old, electronically locked door without power.
Pumpkin follows me back upstairs, probably because the door problem isn’t very fun for him either. Cats, like most people, have no idea how to use alien electronics.
We get back to the foyer. The single thin sliver of light that makes it through the ceiling is fainter now. Nebul is spinning slowly away from its system’s sun, turning toward night. There’s no wind, but the cord we anchored and came down on is wavering with the weight of the descender on its end—sure proof we’ve been here.
“Looks like de-anchoring is the best option,” I say, mostly to myself, but Pumpkin too, I guess.
He sits in the halo of light near the cord and licks his lips at me. He does not intend to help, but lucky for me I don’t need it. The descender can go back along the line and disconnect the anchor at the top. It’ll make a clatter on the way down, but so long as no one is too close, only me and Pumpkin will hear it.
So long as no one is too close.
I grimace and attach the descender to my belt. “Be right back, buddy.”
The gear pulls me swiftly up the line with a pleasant zzzzzziiipppp. The darkening air is still stagnant at the top, though growing cooler. It’s quiet, too, like the silence inside the Sciences building evaporated out into the larger world while we were inside it. It’s unnerving, given the ambient noise of robots and drones that has permeated the empty streets since our arrival.
I look out over the destroyed civilization and find the Organizer’s office. Its dome has dimmed with the fading light. I can see the full scope of it against the open sky, and the whole second story too, but the angle of the street and all the other buildings block off any view of the office’s front doors. I risk a desperate lean off the roof but spot nothing.
“Shit,” I say.
“Scout.”
I almost die of a heart attack. I stick my head back into the ceiling opening to see Kieran and Pumpkin staring up at me. “What are you doing?” Kieran whispers. “Door’s open.”
I nod to him and turn to give the domed building a last hopeful look. Still, nothing moves. No noise echoes out. None that I can hear, anyway. I descend back inside and, as planned, let the descender pluck the anchor at the top. It’s an easy grappling-hook shot to escape when we’re done, and worth the extra time to keep our being here a secret.
“You see them?” Kieran asks on the way down, and I shake my head. “Well, whatever, you’re going to like this at least.”
This is a floor hatch beyond the now-open armored door. Kieran’s already opened it too, or perhaps it was open before. I’m too excited to ask because there’s a ladder leading down into a narrow, tunneled passageway. Motes of dust catch on the beams of our three headlights as we stare down. Above the hatch, engraved into the wall, is a map of the building’s underground facility. It’s a practical hive, all long tunnels and carved-out spaces in the earth.
“You’re a genius,” Kieran says.
“What? You’re the genius.”
“Well.” He shrugs. “Let’s both be geniuses.”
Pumpkin meows because I’m pretty sure he believes he’s the real genius out of the three of us.