NINE

315.82 grams cirium

I HAVE NEVER feared nine more. As lead ore scout, the burden of protecting the cavers falls to me, and it feels heavier than the twin Oxinators on my back. The guards were so distracted herding the cavers to the mouth of nine, no one noticed when I swiped a second tank. I will have to push it ahead of me through the neck of the tunnel. At least we’ll have filtered air if someone else’s tank proves faulty.

Dram lifts a brow when he sees the extra Oxinator, and I almost laugh—he stole one too. My eyes slip to Cranny’s, practically daring him to say anything about it. I shift my body so he doesn’t see the two extra bolt guns swaying from my belt. Dram will be leading the second team, so today I will have to anchor my own markers. And fire my own bolts through flash bats if necessary.

Fire, I hope it’s not going to be necessary. This is going to be hard enough without flash bats.

Dram and I wade to the front of the Rig in our tarred suits. Already the weight of it makes every step a chore, and I’m sweating beneath my layers.

“We’ll split up just before the neck,” he says.

I nod. We went over the plan so many times I lost count. We fell asleep leaning against each other on the kitchen floor.

“I’m not sure how long I’ll have you in my earpiece once we separate,” he says quietly.

My hands skim over his shoulders, checking for tears in his suit and tightening his harness. He turns and pulls me close, on the pretense of adjusting my Oxinator. “I’m worried about Ennis,” he says. “The depth is a struggle for us, and he’s fifty years older.”

“If he’s the only one you’re worried about, you’re doing a lot better than me.”

He grins ruefully. “Hey, I’m just happy I don’t have to squeeze myself down the neck of nine for a change.”

I tighten my goggles. “Right, because tunnel gulls are always a treat.”

“Just try not to make so many orbie friends this time, okay?”

I tap my finger on my tarred suit. “Dad says it’s orbie-proof.”

“It’s also breathing-proof,” Dram mutters. “I may not even make it to the orbie pool. This suit might just kill me first.”

I smile and he grins back. My fears linger still, but they’re not in control anymore. I face the entrance to nine. “Just remember our deal.”

He switches on his headlamp. “Of course. You can’t go before I do.” He steps into darkness, but not before I see his smile.

I let the image linger in my mind, a talisman in the face of danger, then I turn on my headlamp and palm lights. My team lines up behind me. Their fear hangs over me, as heavy as my tarred suit.

“Step in my steps,” I say to Lenore. She drapes her arm around Winn, whose eyes are fixed on me.

“Don’t go past any red lights,” Winn murmurs. She grips an axe to her chest. An axe I’m certain Lenore will end up carrying for her before long.

“Step in my steps,” Dram says to the man behind him, and the cavers repeat it back, a quiet ripple of words.

Reeves shuffles into place at the back of Dram’s team. Dangling from his belt is a chain with twisted barbs of metal. A long, jagged piece of metal sticks up from his boot. He wears his hair tied with the leather cord Lenore gave him. I turn back, but not before I catch Lenore watching him.

“You should tell him,” I say.

She pulls her eyes away. “If we make it through this, maybe I will.”

Just before we head inside, Reeves glances over at Lenore. Raw emotion carves his features. The expression I was not meant to see tells me he already knows.

Lenore has only one palm light because she threw her other into tunnel four, tucked inside her extra pair of socks the day after Reeves was sentenced. She told Cranny her flash blanket fell into an orbie pool and filled it with nutrition packets from countless meals she’d skipped. On her birthday each year, when Congress issued her a new pair of clothes, she sneaked out at night and set her old ones inside the bars, wrapped around syringes and vials of serum.

She may not have said the words, but her actions spoke loud and clear. And, judging by the look on his face, Reeves loves her just as fiercely.

Dram guides his team away from our usual path.

“How come you stopped?” Lenore asks behind me.

“Sorry,” I murmur. I force my feet to move, even though I feel like I’m separating from a part of myself. The last caver on his team turns the corner, and I see the flash of Reeves’s chain reflecting from his palm light.

“You haven’t ever done this without him, have you?” she asks.

“No. It feels … wrong.”

She smiles.

“What?”

“I’m glad.” Her smile widens.

“You’re glad I feel all wrong about this?” I mutter.

“Something like that.” She holds Winn’s hand. The girl’s axe hangs tucked in her belt beside her own. Sometimes I forget how strong Lenore is.

One of Dram’s markers comes to life, glowing yellow beside the neck of nine.

I turn and face my team. “This is where it starts to get hard—”

“Rye…” Dram’s voice cuts in through my earpiece. “Worried … neck … ORUs…” His voice crackles in and out. I’m losing him.

“I’ll take precautions,” I say, hoping he can still hear me.

I look up. The cavers’ eyes are wide behind their goggles. I suppose it’s not reassuring to hear that Dram and I are worried about something.

“It’s the added gear,” I say, pointing to the pack beneath my Oxinator.

Each of us wears a collapsed ore retrieval unit on our back. We haven’t used them in years, not since Roland’s father tried to escape Outpost Five on one, but it’s the only way to move large amounts of crude ore quickly. When activated, the units ascend the tunnels a bit like hovers, following the wire laid out by the ore scout.

Dram and I have never worn them down nine, and I’m scared they will catch us in the tube of rock like corks in a bottle.

“Give me a head start,” I say to my team. “I need to see how we’ll fit with the ORUs. Our mouthpieces tend to cut out in here, so I’ll blow my whistle to signal you. One blast for danger and two for follow.” I stick the whistle between my teeth and crawl in.

It’s tight. The tunnel scrapes against my ORU, but it’s a chance we must take. I blow my whistle—two short bursts.

The tunnel narrows slightly—enough that I have to hold my breath to squeeze through. Dram would never have fit with the added equipment. I’m suddenly grateful he’s guiding his own half of the team the other way down.

Our earpieces pick up every scrape of our axes and the ORUs along the walls, and I begin to wonder how much our noise might be noticed by tunnel nine’s inhabitants. As we clear the neck, I hold my finger to my lips, calling for silence. Half the cavers illuminated their suit lights, and I stomp toward them, gesturing angrily. They mute their lights and step back into place as I grip my bolt gun and take the lead once more.

“Slow down, Scout,” Roland says.

I look back and realize I can’t see half the group. I forget that they aren’t used to my grueling pace—that they usually plod through their tunnels, instead of attacking the caverns like Dram and I.

I wait for them to catch up, scanning the rock for a flash of wing or the telltale glow of yellow eyes.

An hour later, we stop again, long enough for me to demonstrate the use of Oxinators for those who’ve never needed one. We spray skin barrier over any uncovered areas before I guide them onward—more slowly now—giving them time to adjust to the depth and increased particle exposure. I am so focused on getting my team of twenty-five to the cavern safely that I’m caught off guard when the light bolts come to life at our feet and we’re suddenly standing before it.

“The vein is in here,” I say, ducking beneath an archway of rock. “I’ll dust the cirion gas, and you’ll see it clearly.”

“Already did it,” Dram says. He hangs suspended before the water-soaked wall, axe in hand. He holds my gaze, and for a moment, the other cavers fade away.

Lenore gasps, drawing me back. She lifts her hand, shining her palm light over the vein. Her headlamp sweeps the line of ORUs, half filled with chunks of ore.

The murmurs from the cavers grow so loud, I pull my earpiece away. Most of them have less than a hundred grams to their names—a vein of this size is beyond comprehension.

I walk toward Dram. “How long have you been here?” I ask.

“Two hours. Gull route is faster.” His axe sparks against the rock with each swing, and bits of cirium ore break off into his pouch. “And since we weren’t eaten by gulls, we managed to get a lot mined.” He adjusts his grip and smiles at me.

I smile back. “We made it.”

“We still have to mine it out from under these little bastards and then get it all back up.”

My smile widens. “Save some for me, caver. I’m getting to four hundred grams today.” I reach for my climbing line, and exhilaration spins through me so powerfully my hands shake.

Dram watches me, gripping his axe. A wordless communication passes between us, even as the other cavers haul on belay lines and hammer at stone, their excitement tangible as particle dust.

We’re getting to 400 grams today. We’re going to live, Orion.

I pass the rope through my harness, my gaze locked with his. This may be my last climb. Our last descent. The last time we are ever defined by only cavern walls and cirium ore. My eyes prick with unexpected tears. Dram tilts his head, like he’s sensing the shift in my emotions.

“Still with me, ore scout?” he calls.

Always. I want it to be true, I realize suddenly, and it occurs to me that freedom from Outpost Five means the end of our partnership. Without the tunnels binding us together, will we still step in each other’s steps?

A man yells. It’s so loud in my earpiece, his voice distorts.

“What’s wrong?” I search the faces of the cavers. Another voice cries out. I run to the edge of the orbie pool as the climbers reel back from the wall, twisting on their ropes.

“Flash me,” Graham grumbles. “Ore mites. Haven’t seen them in years.” He points to the wriggling white masses erupting from cracks in the cirium vein.

“They bite!” Roland swings away from the wall, shaking his arm.

“Probably their claws you’re feeling,” Reeves calls, sliding down his rope. “Let me help you. You don’t want to pierce their skin.”

The mites pour from the newly exposed rock.

“Pull your flash blankets up!” I shout. The writhing creatures bounce off the cirium fabric and fall twelve meters to the water.

Roland ignites a flare and holds it toward a wave of mites erupting from the stone.

“NO!” Reeves shouts. “Douse that flare! They explode in flame!” He maneuvers across the wall, from caver to caver, detaching the creatures with a skilled flick of his blade.

“You’re saying they’re combustible?” Gabe asks.

“I’m saying we used them to blow an entire gulls’ nest down four.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t bring the cavern down on your heads,” Owen says.

“We did,” Reeves says. “It was the lesser of two evils.”

Dram hoists himself to the indentations where mites burrow in smooth lines. “They can’t attach to my suit,” he says, drawing back his axe. “I’ll take this seam.” The ore mites drop as Dram chisels at the cirium. Their legs writhe, tiny claws scraping along his tar-coated suit as they slide off him, rippling over his body like a waterfall.

A sense of unease tingles along my spine. “Dram, I’m coming.” I stride toward the wall.

Winn screams, and I whirl toward her. She just summoned every carnivore around.

“Hush,” Lenore says, reaching for her.

The white, wriggling mites cling to Winn’s sleeves. More cavers gasp as the insects dig into their suits.

“Turn up the heat in your suits,” Reeves calls. “They don’t like heat.” He unclips from his rope and leaps down, then swings his chain across his back, catching the end and dragging it down. The sharp points of the mites’ legs catch on the chain, and they release their hold.

“Don’t kill them!” Reeves calls. “They’re filled with parasites you can’t see. If you destroy the host mite, they’ll attach to you, only you won’t know until it’s too late.”

“Stop!” Lenore cries suddenly.

Winn shoots past, her eyes wide. A red light bolt illuminates at her feet.

“Winn, come back,” I call.

But she’s not listening to anything except the voice in her head telling her that mites are climbing her body. She cries, stumbling past another red marker. I untie from the climbing line and run after her. A third red bolt glows at her feet, but she runs away from me into a cavern. I lift my Oxinator and breathe. Bat cave.

The darkness swallows her, and I force myself to slow, to catch my breath so I don’t give us away. I switch off my headlamp and mute my palm lights. I step past the bolt light and duck into the cavern.

“Winn!” I hiss her name.

“They won’t come off!” Mites climb her arms as she shakes and spins.

“Hush!” I get to her in five strides and point upward. Dozens of flash bats hang suspended from the dripstones. Her eyes widen. I switch off her headlamp.

I turn the heater in her suit to full and slip one of my knives free. With shaking hands, I pierce a squirming mite. As soon as the blade penetrates the dense skin, tiny black dots spill out of the slit. I bite back a scream and fling it away. The knife scrapes stone with a clatter that is too loud.

Wings flutter at the corner of my eye, but the bats remain dormant. By some miracle we haven’t roused them.

Mites drop from Winn, deterred by the heat of her suit. I pry the others off with my knife, careful not to prick them.

“Follow me. Slowly,” I whisper, easing backward from the cavern. I have one hand clenched on her harness; the other grips my knife. I steal a glance over my shoulder. Dram stands in the shadows, his bolt gun aimed upward.

We’re ten steps from the others. Nine. Seven.

Winn’s transmitter beeps. We freeze. Yellow light illuminates the cavern. I clamp my hand over her transmitter and glance up. Hundreds of glowing eyes stare down at us.

My hand tightens on my knife. The bats drop.

“Run!” I grasp Winn’s arm and sprint for the opening.

Dram fires. A bat screeches. Red light glows above our heads, but the swarm descends in front of us, blocking our exit.

“Orion!” Dram shouts. Even with my earpiece, I can barely hear him, the screeching is so loud. His knife flashes on the other side of the mob. The other cavers follow his lead. Knives and axes fly beyond the cloud of flapping wings.

It won’t be enough.

“Get down.” I drag Winn to the floor and kneel in front of her. She is crying hysterically, but it hardly matters now. I take aim with my bolt gun and shoot everything that moves. The cavern fills with the flickering light of impaled flash bats. “Stay behind me. Don’t let them bite you,” I say. I fire the last bolt and draw my knife, but there are too many.

“Hang on!” Dram calls.

I’ve bought us as much time as I could, and we both know it.

A flash bat clamps down on my knife arm, and Winn screams. Through the shock and pain, I grasp a knife in my left hand and drive it through the creature’s head, wrenching it upward until the skull cracks.

“Rye!” Dram shouts.

“No venom,” I gasp.

Another bat lands on my shoulder. I pull a blade and drive it into the space between the rows of eyes.

Winn shrieks. It’s like a siren call to the bats, and they pour over us like a waterfall. I tuck Winn beneath me, covering her until only my body is exposed to the swarm. A third bat clamps its jaw onto my back, and another lands on my skullcap. My Oxinator cracks. Air hisses from the tank, and the bat screeches. More seize onto my back, their teeth scraping my Oxinator and ORU. They dig through the barriers, rooting for flesh.

I scream.

“I’m here.” Dram’s voice in my ear.

Reeves scoops Winn into his arms, and Dram drags me over his shoulder. He has a bat clamped around his wrist. A knife protrudes from its skull.

“Did it break the bone?” I ask.

“I’m fine.” Dram carries me from the cave. “Male bat. No venom.”

He lowers me onto my stomach on a ledge of rock and presses an Oxinator over my nose and mouth. I choke down the air. A few breaths in, I recall the bats dropping onto my back, biting into my tank. There are still some on me. I suddenly realize why my mind is spinning out across the cavern like a handful of particle dust.

“Subpars!” Dram shouts. “Watch me. This is how you kill them.” He thrusts his knife into one bat’s brain and extends the second blade. I hear a crack, and the pressure on my back lessens.

He pushes a piece of rope into my hand, and I thrust it between my teeth.

“This is how you remove them,” he calls. I squeeze my eyes shut and bite the rope as he levers his blade against my skin, cracking the jaw and easing the teeth from my flesh. “Only the females are venomous. They have a black underbelly.” He sighs. “This one’s male.” He tosses it to the ground. “Females will kill you inside of ten minutes if you don’t get all the venom out.”

The cavers curse and shout commands. Dimly, I’m aware they’re still fighting the swarm Winn and I stirred from the cave. Another caver—Reeves maybe—works the dead bat from my arm.

“Brown belly,” he says.

“Let me see,” Dram says. Then: “Fire, you’re lucky, Rye.”

I was bitten by males. Only males.

“She could still bleed to death,” Ennis whispers.

Dram hisses a breath. “Quiet, old man. She’s still with us.” He knots a tourniquet so tightly around my arm, I cry out. Lenore grasps my hand.

“You’re wasting your time with me,” I murmur. “I can’t climb—”

Dram curses and presses cloth to my back. I want to tell him to leave me and help the others. There is so much they don’t know; nine holds so many dangers. But I can’t get the words out.

“She’s still got one on her,” Winn whispers.

Yes. The other flash bat. The one they didn’t see.

Dram rolls me over. A twitching bat gnaws the inside of my thigh.

“Flash me,” he breathes. He stakes it with his blade, and I cry out. The pain is piercing through my shock.

“I need help over here!” Dram calls. I’ve never heard that desperation in his voice before. “Reeves, put pressure on the wound, I’m going to pry it off of her!” He’s breathing so rapidly, I start to think he’ll pass out.

I hear the crack and pop of the jaw and then my head floats away. Something warm seeps down my thigh. It’s warm, and everything else is so cold.

I shiver so hard the rope falls from my lips. Was I still biting that? I taste blood in my mouth. I want to laugh. The rope didn’t work.

“Dram?” Graham’s voice. He has that same fearful tone. The one that tells me I’m in trouble.

Dram doesn’t answer. He sucks in a shaky breath. Fire, is he crying?

“Female,” he whispers.

Now I understand. Tears seep from my eyes, warm like blood. Like the venom coating my wound, pumping through my veins.

Dram tears my suit open and cavern particles prick my exposed skin. “This is how you save someone from the venom,” he says, and sets his mouth to the wound.

My mind goes as black as the tunnel.

*   *   *

I’m conscious again. Cracking one eye open gives me a view of the tunnel floor and Dram’s feet. He’s carrying me over his shoulder, placing each foot carefully as he tries not to jar my body. Foreign sounds leak past my lips. I try to make them stop, but Dram moves, and pain lances through me.

“Roland,” he says, “another dose of Serum 129.” He shifts my weight in his arms.

Roland spears me with a syringe. “She’s fading fast,” he murmurs.

“We need to get her up,” Graham says.

“Impossible,” Roland whispers.

“Boyo, stop for a moment and let me help you,” Graham says. “You’ve still got that carcass sunk in your arm.”

Dram huffs out a breath and extends his arm. There’s a shuffling of feet as a handful of cavers move in to pry the flash bat loose. I smell Dram’s blood before I see it drip into the dirt. He stifles a moan, and a moment later, a furry body flops to the ground. Blood patters, then flows in a steady stream.

“Did you see the teeth on that thing?”

“It might’ve broke bone—look at his arm.”

“Bandage it, fast!” Graham says.

“Prep her ORU,” Dram murmurs as Reeves helps him ease me to the ground.

I can’t stop my tears. The movement feels like knives pressing into me.

“Winn?” I ask.

“Safe,” Lenore says. “You saved her in that cave.”

I let Serum 129 pull me a little closer to oblivion. Cool air brushes my bare shoulder where my suit’s cut away. The sulfuric smell of Serum 38 coats my skin. The bite was deep, but they’ve saved me from mineral burn.

I don’t even want to think about my leg. I can’t feel anything below my waist on my right side.

Something Graham said sticks in my mind. Serum clouds my thoughts, but there’s an idea I’m trying to puzzle out. He said Dram still had the flash bat in his arm. They just removed it to tend his injury.

Dram would have been the one to show them the proper way to disengage a flash bat’s jaw from my shoulder. I try to imagine him stabbing the bat in the head, cutting away my suit, prying the teeth out, and treating my injury, all with a bat stuck in his own injured arm.

My eyes slide over him. He watches me intently.

“Hang on tight,” he says. His lips are cracked and bleeding, the skin around them peeling. Through his goggles, his reddish eyes reveal that he’s fighting flash bat venom. “I’m sending you up.” He tightens the belt holding me to the ORU and engages the unit’s transmitter. I flinch. It reminds me of Winn’s transmitter the moment before the bats descended.

“I can’t believe I’m putting her in an ore cart,” Dram murmurs.

“It’s the best chance she has, boyo,” Graham replies.

Reeves clamps his hand on Dram’s shoulder. “Send her up.”

Dram’s bloodshot eyes bore into mine. “If there was any other way, I’d do it.”

He tips his forehead down against mine and whispers something. They replaced my earpiece, but I can’t hear what he says.

“What?” I murmur.

He looks at me, and suddenly I know exactly what he said.

He engages the unit, and it jolts forward. I am towed behind it, my feet dragging the tunnel floor as it gains momentum. Then it rockets upward, and I’m grateful for Dram’s tight belt, holding me secure. For the first time, I understand what Roland’s father must have felt when he rode his ORU away from Outpost Five—in the moments before guards seized him. Possibility. Exhilaration. Hope.

The ORU scrapes along the tunnel neck, hitting the sides in a shower of sparks. The unit hovers above the wire, rocking me side to side, and I think of Wes, when he was a baby and I rocked him as he cried for our mother. Our mother who couldn’t hear him because she was down seven. And later, when she couldn’t hear him because she was dead.

The tunnel dips, and the cart veers right, my limbs swinging out behind it like a pendulum, cracking against the cavern wall.

Ding-dong. Like the gears in a clock. Counting down minutes. And seconds. And lifetimes. I can’t hold on any longer. My arms flop loose, bouncing and dragging like dead weight.

But I can’t die now. I made Dram a promise. Something about him before me, or me before him, or neither of us, ever. Not like this. Not on this side of the flash curtain.

The rocking cart lulls me to a place outside myself, and my thoughts scatter like cavern particles. All but one.

I’m returning without a single gram of cirium. And I’m going to be sent to Cordon Four.