Now that we knew what was making the sucking sounds, it was even creepier walking through the tunnel, and I kept looking over my shoulder as we went, catching sight of the pale greenness of the slugs in the light from M.K.’s vest.
“Sukey, did you ever take any classes on isolated species?” Zander asked her.
“No,” Sukey said, “but maybe someday I’ll be studying the Zander West slug.”
I stopped walking so I could check the map again. “The tunnel takes a turn up there,” I told them. “Maybe there’s something up there.”
But it was just darkness ahead.
Maybe that was what gave me the nerve to say it. “Do you think he was telling the truth? All that stuff about Dad taking money?”
“No way,” Zander said. “Dad never would have done that.”
I wasn’t so sure. “He did seem to be worried all the time back then. Don’t you remember?”
“Zander’s right,” M.K. said. “Dad never would have done anything like that. They’re making it up.”
Sukey was silent. Finally she said, “Sometimes people do things that seem, well… wrong. On the surface. But there’s a reason for it. There’s a… well, a tradeoff. Maybe he thought there was a good reason for it.”
“But he was an Explorer,” Zander said, as though that was the end of it. “I think they were lying about him to get us to tell them something.”
I wasn’t so sure. I just kept thinking about the way Dad had looked before he’d left for Fazia. Something had been bothering him and for the first time I let myself consider the possibility that he’d been doing something illegal.
We walked along for another thirty minutes or so. The tunnel changed as we went, expanding up and billowing out so that we were now in a large system of caverns. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness a bit so that I could see better with the help of the lights. There were only a few of the giant slugs here and there on the walls and the air had a new dampness.
“What’s that noise?” M.K. asked.
We all stopped walking and listened and, sure enough, we heard the sound of rushing water. Pucci cocked his head, listening.
“What is it?” Zander asked Pucci, who hunched his shoulders in a little shrug. “Hmm. There must be a waterfall or something up ahead.”
“Underground?” Sukey asked. “How can there be a waterfall underground?”
“There are underground rivers,” I said. “In fact, when spelunkers die, it’s sometimes because underground rivers flood. In an instant they can… But I’m sure that’s not what this is.”
But as we came around the turn in the tunnel, I could see that I’d been wrong.
The rushing sound became louder and louder and suddenly we had the feeling that we were right on top of it. We stopped, and when we pointed our lights down at the ground, we saw a wide expanse of swirling, moving blackness.
It was a river, an underground river, and when we looked across the breadth of it, we could see that the caverns we’d been following continued on the other side, winding along beside it into the underground darkness. I checked Dad’s map, hoping it might show us a different route, but it confirmed what I saw in front of me.
“That’s where we need to go,” I told the others, pointing across the water.
There were only two choices: we could somehow get across the raging underground river, or we could turn around and go back the way we’d come.