“Where did Chris go?” Carly asked. The Weaver cavern seemed bigger and stranger all of a sudden.

Gabriel shrugged. “We’d better find him.”

They wandered up the hallway, back in the direction they had come. The empty labs seemed even eerier now, if possible. Other hallways spun off in many directions. Chris could have gone anywhere.

“He can’t have just vanished,” Gabriel said.

“Or so you think,” Carly said, trying to make her voice sound mysterious. It wasn’t hard in these surroundings. “Maybe he’s been concealing alien teleporting technology from us all this time.”

“Ha,” Gabriel said. “You think he’s going to reappear, in a tuxedo or something?” He laughed and made jazz hands, shaking his palms out to the sides. “Surprise!”

Carly laughed too. It felt like they needed to fill the silence. The quiet in the labs was too eerie otherwise.

It was extra odd being just the two of them. Gabriel Parker and Carly Diamond, alone in the vastness of Infinity…The words echoed in her head like a movie-trailer voice-over.

Carly took the opportunity to contact the Cloud Leopard. She raised her MTB and tried to radio Dash and Piper.

No luck. The connection failed to produce even static.

Chris had been right—the rock blocked all radio signals to the surface. Plus, the part of the Jackal outpost that was on the surface must have been relatively small. They were definitely deep underground now. The walls here appeared to have been carved straight out of the stone.

“Hey, look at this,” Carly exclaimed. She entered one of the labs they hadn’t explored yet. It was mostly empty, except for a battered-looking metal safe the size of a mini refrigerator.

The small safe looked like it had been dropped from a great height. It was all crinkled and crushed, like an empty juice box. The smashed metal door had rings for a padlock, but there wasn’t one. It didn’t appear to be locked—just so damaged that it had become impossible to open.

Gabriel tugged on the door. It didn’t budge.

Carly examined the safe from all sides. “There’s writing over here.” She tapped the MTB on her wrist and brought up their translation program. The crew had a special translator device, but as a safety precaution, Chris had downloaded the program to their MTBs too.

“It translates to ‘tunnel navigation system,’ ” she reported. “Approximately.”

Gabriel grinned, excited. “Wait…it says ‘approximately’?” he asked. “Why would you want to navigate approximately?”

“I think it means it’s an approximate translation.”

“Oh. That’s even weirder.” Gabriel took off his backpack and rummaged inside it for a minute. He pulled out a small black pouch.

Carly knocked on the safe’s metal walls, as if hoping someone might open it from the inside. “We have to open it,” she insisted. “Maybe we can pry the door loose with a screwdriver?”

“Yeah, I have one right in here—” Gabriel unzipped the black pouch. “Yahh!” he cried, jumping back in surprise. His padded Simu Suit loomed over him like a ghost.

Carly laughed at his stunned expression. “Why’d you even bring that?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Gabriel said. “I thought it was my tool pouch. Shoot. I must have picked up the wrong one when I was packing.” They were both small black zippered pouches. He could easily see how he’d made the mistake.

“Oh,” Carly said. “So we don’t actually have your tool pouch with us?”

Gabriel rummaged in his bag. “I guess not. Sorry.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Carly said. “This place is pretty well stocked. We can probably find any tools we need around here.” She scanned the shelves while Gabriel set about refolding the Simu Suit. He squished the foam flatter and flatter and zipped it back into place. He returned the pouch to his backpack, still feeling kind of embarrassed over the confusion.

Carly pulled a scraper from the bottom of a shelf. It had a flat metal head about two inches wide and a thicker blue plastic handle. “Here—why don’t we try this?”

“That works.” Gabriel helped Carly position the lip of the scraper in the space along the edge of the safe door. He pushed all of his weight against it.

The door inched open.

The contents of the safe were…utterly disappointing.

“It’s paint.” Carly said. Several stacks of fist-sized canisters. Except they were all the same pale yellow color. Barely yellow, more like a saltine cracker. Each can had a pair of hooks looping off the rim, like quotation marks. Or fangs. A stack of clean brushes accompanied them.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Gabriel added dryly.

“I guess they’ve repurposed this safe.” Carly poked at the lid of the paint can. “And it’s not even a good color.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes jokingly. “Haven’t you heard? Neon pale is the new black.”

“Like I’m ever going to trust your fashion sense,” Carly quipped.

He grabbed three cans and started juggling them, only to watch them crash onto the floor and flop in all directions. “Whoa, that is some heavy paint,” he said.

“Extra gravity, remember?” Carly reminded him.

“Right.” Gabriel bent down and picked a can up by the fangs. He twirled it around his finger. It was heavier than swinging a ceramic mug.

“Let’s go,” Carly said. “We have to find Chris.” She went into the hall. A minute later, Gabriel joined her. He was still messing around in his bag.

“Careful,” Carly warned. “You got any other surprises in there?”

Gabriel grinned. “I just might.”

They walked past additional labs. Gabriel looked in the door of each, in case anything caught his eye. He felt torn between the creepy fun of exploring the labs, and the need to find Chris and get on with the mission. There might be other useful things to find, but they had a job to do here too.

The corridor dead-ended in a T. The new hallway was wider than the others had been. There was a row of red bulbs mounted high on the far wall, but that was it. Several appeared shattered.

“Which way now?” Carly asked.

“I guess they stopped putting in lighting at some point,” Gabriel said. He flicked on his flashlight and pointed it both ways down the dark hall. Then he shrugged. “This way.”

They turned left and made their way down the corridor. The sound of their footsteps became echoey. Beside them, the row of red lights blinked three times, then went out.

“Huh,” Gabriel said. “Does this feel right to you?”

“Maybe they’re on a timer.” Carly pulled out her flashlight too. The dual beams made it somewhat easier to see the path in front of them.

“Oh, look!” Carly said. She hurried through the swath of light toward the thing that had caught her eye. “A flower. Isn’t it pretty?”

She bent to examine it. It was hard to tell in the darkness what color it was. Lavender, she thought, or something close. It had a broad flat face, sort of like a daisy, but with thick, round petals that felt full, like aloe leaves. It grew from a flexible, four-stranded stem that curved out of a moss-lined crack in the wall.

When Carly reached down and touched the stem, she wasn’t intending to pluck the flower. The stem strands severed seemingly of their own accord. They coiled around her index finger and thumb, gripping like a baby’s fist.

“Cool,” Gabriel said.

“Why is it growing indoors?” Carly wondered.

“Um, it’s not…,” Gabriel said, coming up closer behind her. He swept the flashlight over the wall she was crouched near. It wasn’t smooth, as if cut by man-made tools. It was made of jagged stone.

The realization dawned slowly. “We’re not in the Jackal building anymore,” Carly said. This tunnel was more than three times as tall as they were—at least fifteen feet high—and just about that wide. Like a circle. A circle chewed out by giant stone-cutting teeth.

“These are the Sawtooth caves,” Gabriel said. He shone the flashlight back the way they had come. All jagged stone, as far as they could see.

“When did it change?” Carly said. “Why didn’t we notice?” As she spoke, the flower tendrils coiled snugly, tucking deeper into the spaces between her fingers.

“I don’t know. The difference must be subtle at first,” Gabriel said. “We were focused on finding Chris.”

“Let’s get back. We should find him before we go farther,” Carly said.

Gabriel agreed. “We need the maps.”

“And the Weavers.”

They started walking back the way they had come. The hallway seemed much longer and darker now.

Carly was the first to hear the scraping sound. “Did you hear that?”

“It’s nothing,” Gabriel said. “Let’s just get back to the Jackal compound.”

The scraping sound grew louder. Or…closer.

It was the shushing of leathery skin on stone. “Something’s coming,” Carly said.

Whatever Gabriel was going to say in response was drowned out by the grind of stone-cutting jaws. A massive Sawtooth Land Eel slid around the corner in front of them, gnashing and slathering.