The Nexus Series: Books 1-3 (36 page)

24

JILL
stepped slowly through the door at the end of the hall off the old builders’
quarters lobby.

She was
officially in the Dark Beneath.

Corey and Bradley
stepped in beside her.  Their visors’ night-vision showed an empty,
metal-walled passage stretching before them.  Jill placed a crawler on the
wall just like Bradley had done a few days ago.  “Ready, Diz?”

“Ready,” Dizzie’s
voice replied in her ear.

The little
vehicle began its silent journey along the wall as Dizzie operated it from
their new temporary headquarters.  The video feed showed up on small
screens affixed to their wrists and the audio went straight to the speakers in
their helmets.

They followed the
crawler about halfway down the hall and placed another crawler behind
them.  Amber would be driving this one from the builders’ quarters, always
keeping it in whatever passage the three explorers had just left behind and
making sure no one came up on them unawares.

This would be the
protocol for the first stage of their mission—never personally going anywhere
without the crawlers monitoring things before and behind.

Bradley let
everyone know what he thought about the strategy.  “This sucks. 
These things are slow as molasses.  We have to wait three years every time
we want to turn a corner.”

“Relax,” said Corey. 
“It beats getting shot.”

“I don’t
know.  I’ve never gotten shot, but it might be better than this.”

“I have,” said
Jill.  “Trust me, it’s not better.”

In each passage
they placed their own surveillance materials.  Cameras and microphones
were affixed in places they wouldn’t be easily detected by any passers-by.

“You’ll be
turning right at the end of this passage,” Dizzie’s voice told them.  “At
the end of
that
passage is the intersection where Bradley’s crawler
found the patrollers last week, just so you know.”

“Thanks for the
heads up, Diz,” said Corey.

They turned the
corner and headed for the intersection.  “There’re no lights,” Bradley
observed.  “When I came here the first time, the hallways off that
intersection were lit.”

They stepped into
the intersection.

Lights flickered
on, and their night-vision automatically adjusted.  Down each passage off
the intersection—except where they had just come from—fluorescent lanterns now
glowed from the walls, spaced every ten meters or so as far as they could
see.  Their guns were already in their hands.

Corey finally
lowered his weapons.  “Motion-sensor lights.  The crawler didn’t set
them off—too small, probably.”

“Sketch’s people
must have set up the lighting,” said Bradley.

“If we trigger
the lights,” said Jill, “we probably trigger some sort of warning, too.”

“They’ll know
where we’ve been,” muttered Bradley.

“Not much we can
do about that now,” said Corey.  “We move on.”

They followed the
crawler down the hallway to the left.

THE
rest of the day passed without incident.  Lights automatically turned on
wherever they went, but the crawlers never detected any incoming presence.

“Which is pretty
weird,” Dizzie said over dinner back at their temporary headquarters.

“Just a
coincidence,” suggested Bradley.

“Maybe.  But
when you first checked this place out, it took all of ten minutes for you to
encounter a pair of patrollers.”

“Maybe they know
we’re here,” said Amber.  “Maybe they’ve moved their operations somewhere
else in the tunnels.”

“Then we’ll find
them,” Corey said confidently.

BY
the
end of the second day, another large section of the tunnels was under
surveillance.  Most of the passages were narrow and walled with concrete
or metal panels.  There were a few staircases and ramps, and a few bridges
or railed walkways through gaps in the satellite’s inner-workings.  Not
much variety.  Everywhere they went they found motion-triggered lights in
place.

They gathered at
Dizzie’s station that evening.  She pointed to a screen displaying a map
of the tunnels.  “The section highlighted in red is the section we’ve gone
over.”

“Not much,” said
Bradley.

“It’s only been
two days,” said Corey.  “We’re making some progress.”

“And still no
run-ins with the bad guys,” said Amber.

“I’m with
Dizzie,” said Jill.  “That’s more than a coincidence.”

“And the
surveillance we’ve already put in place hasn’t picked up any activity either,”
Dizzie said with a frown.  “It’s like we’re alone down here.”

“How do we
explain that?” Bradley asked Corey.

He
shrugged.  “No idea.  It doesn’t really matter.  We still have a
job to do, so let’s just keep doing it and see what happens.”

DIZZIE
set her mobile to alarm her any time their tunnel surveillance picked up
anything.

It did in the
middle of that night.  She jumped out of bed and ran down the hall to her
station at the near end of the lobby.  Her hands flew over the keyboard as
she pulled up the camera image that had detected the activity.

Movement had
triggered the lights in the passage.  A lone figure made its way along
slowly, heading towards the place where the camera was mounted.  A quick
look at the map showed Dizzie it was a stretch of tunnel far away from
here.  That was comforting, but her heart was still racing.

The figure was
carrying a small device, sweeping it around the passage.

Dizzie’s eyes
widened.  “Uh-oh.”

The figure got
closer to the camera, and Dizzie could see that it was a young girl.  Her
face was painted silver with dark gaps around eyes, nose, and mouth.  The
device she carried started beeping.

She got closer to
the camera.  Soon she was standing directly beneath it, holding the device
up in front of the lens.  It beeped more rapidly.  She lowered the
device and looked into the camera.  “I know you’re there, Thirty-seven.”

TWO
minutes later the entire team was awake and assembled at Dizzie’s station in
the lobby.  The camera now showed an empty hallway, but Dizzie pulled up
the recorded footage.

“Forty-four,”
Corey breathed when he saw the video.

“I know you’re
there, Thirty-seven,” the figure on the video said.  “You’re watching me
right now, or you’ll be watching a recording of this soon.  We need to
talk face to face.  There’s an old computer terminal in the tunnels behind
me.  You’ll find it—I know you have a map.  Meet me there tomorrow
morning.  I would tell you to come alone and unarmed, but I know you
won’t.  But when I tell you
I’ll
come alone and unarmed, you know
I’m telling the truth.  You have nothing to worry about.  Just be
there.”

With that the
girl turned and left the tunnel.

“What’s her game?”
Bradley wondered aloud.

“Guess we’ll find
out in the morning,” said Corey.

“Wait—you’re not
seriously going to meet her, are you?” asked Amber.

“Of course I’m
going.”

“It’s a setup!”
spat Bradley.

“She just wants
to talk,” countered Corey.  “She said she’ll be alone and unarmed, so she
will be.  To tell a falsehood goes against what the society stands for.”

“
You’ve
gone against what the society stands for,” said Bradley.  “They’re after
you.”

“Not
Forty-four.  Whatever she has to say, I need to hear it.”

“Then we’ll be
watching you closely,” said Amber.

Corey
nodded.  “We’ll set up surveillance in that computer terminal tonight.”

“That’s not good
enough,” said Jill.  “We’re coming with you when you meet her.”

“That won’t be
necessary—”

“I wasn’t asking. 
I’m coming with you.  Bradley, you’re coming too.”

“Already planning
on it,” said Bradley, crossing his arms and giving Corey an icy stare.

“Just don’t argue
about it, Cor, okay?” Dizzie pleaded.

“Oh, I wasn’t,”
Corey said with a chuckle.  “I know better than to argue with you
people.  Let’s get that surveillance set up so we can sleep a little
more.”

THE
three of them departed early next morning, armed and uniformed.  They
reached the terminal room at just after six o’clock.  Forty-four hadn’t specified
what time she’d meet them, but Amber and Dizzie would monitor the surveillance
and let them know when her arrival was imminent.

The room was
actually a
railed
platform suspended in a cavity
within the satellite’s innards.  Along the rail were three old computer
stations, unpowered and obsolete.  It was anyone’s guess what they’d been
used for during Anterra’s formative years a century ago.

Jill sat on a
bench next to Corey.  Bradley positioned himself out of sight around a
bend in the passage just off the terminal.

Corey waited in
tense silence, fidgeting with his helmet in his lap.

“Nervous about
the meeting?” asked Jill.  She knew she had to talk to him, and this was
the perfect opportunity.

“A little.
 Okay, more than a little.  We have quite a history.”

“You mean you and
the society, or you and Forty-four?”

“Both, actually.”

“She liked you,
didn’t she?”

Corey
fidgeted.  “I guess you could say that.”

“Is that why you
trust her?”

“I trust her
because a member of the society wouldn’t lie to me.  It violates the
code.”

“You said that
before.  You talk about them almost reverently—like you admire them.”

“I
thought
I admired them.  In the end, I had to leave.”

“But you didn’t
want to.  You still admire them in a way.  You were really drawn to
them at first, I can tell.  That ideal of pursuing justice had a powerful
attraction for you.”

“They claimed
that was their ideal.  I found out their motives were more skewed than I
could’ve guessed.”

“And that was a
big disappointment.”

He
shrugged.  “It’s in the past.  The society means nothing to me now.”

“Doesn’t it?” she
asked.  She touched the silver skull enameled on his visor.

Corey looked like
a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  He sighed as he looked down
at the visor.  “We masked our faces,” he whispered, “to show we were dead
to our old selves and identities, and alive to a new purpose.  I wanted to
believe that could be true for me.  If I hold onto anything from the
Society of Troubled Souls, I hold onto that ambition.”

“It’s quite an
ambition,” said Jill.  “But I think you’re holding onto more than that.”

He looked at her
quizzically.

This was the part
she wasn’t looking forward to saying—the part she had to say the most.  “I
know what it’s like to hold onto things, Cor—things that weigh on you like a
ton of bricks, things that you wish you could just forget about but you can’t,
and they sit inside you and eat away at you.”

Recognition
filled Corey’s eyes.  “You lost your parents too.”

“I watched my mom
die,” Jill confirmed.  “And my dad—well, he was essentially dead to me all
along; I never met him.”

“Jill, I’m so
sorry.  If I’d known—”

“It’s not your
fault; I should have told you.”

“And I should
have told you my own story.”

“But I’m the one
who got our friendship started on the wrong foot.  I’m sorry, Cor.”

He tried to stop
her.  “Jill, it’s okay—”

“Just let me
finish.  I should have apologized to you a long time ago.  You came
to me as a friend when you visited me in jail and tried to point me in the
right direction.  All I did in return was use you for my own plans. 
I ruined the chance to get close to someone who was trying to help me—someone I
could have helped in return.  I’m sorry for that.  I’m glad Amber has
been there for you in ways I haven’t.”

Amber’s name
suddenly made things more awkward, and Corey couldn’t hide it.  “Look,
Jill, you don’t have to compare yourself—”

“I’m not
comparing myself to her.  I’m just saying I’m glad she opened up to
you.  And I hope you two keep things up.  You’re good for each
other.”

“Thanks,” he
said, a little relieved.

“But I want to be
there for you too.  It’s not that I want to get in the way of you and
Amber.   It’s just that...well, sure, she knows what it’s like to
lose a parent too.  But I can relate to you in ways she can’t.”

“You’re talking
about being an errander.”

She shook her
head.  “When you joined the Society of Troubled Souls, they found the
driver who’d caused the accident that killed your parents.  They executed
her.”

“Murdered,” Corey
corrected her.  Anger infused his voice.

“You’ve never
forgiven yourself for that, have you?  You feel like it’s your fault she’s
dead.”

“It
is
my
fault she’s dead,” he hissed.  Then he looked at Jill.  “You...?”

She nodded. 
“I know what it’s like,” she whispered, “to look in the mirror and see someone
responsible for the death of an innocent person.”

He just looked at
her.  He didn’t know what to say.

They sat in
silence for a while.  It was a good kind of silence.

“She’s coming,”
Dizzie’s voice reported in their earpieces.

They stood and
put on their helmets.

“Roger that,”
said Corey.  He looked at Jill from behind the visor decorated with a
silver skull.  “Game time.”

25

SHE’D
come alone and unarmed, as promised.  They faced each other from opposite
sides of the railed platform.

“Thirty-seven,”
she greeted him.  Her painted face smiled slightly.

“What do you
want?” his distorted voice responded.

“To grant your
request.  The society won’t interfere with you.  We’ve withdrawn from
the tunnels.”

Corey crossed his
arms.  “I didn’t exactly leave the inquiry on good terms.  Why so
cooperative?”

“Fifty-two is
still unconscious from the fall.  As her right hand, I’m overseer in her
place until she recovers.”

“She won’t be
happy with your decision.”

“I’ll deal with
that when the time comes.”

“What about my
sentence?”

“It’s not the
acting overseer’s responsibility to carry out the sentence.  The inquirers
can come after you and try, if they feel like it.”

Corey removed his
helmet.  “Why are you helping us, Forty-four?”

She looked
away.  “You were always a friend to me.  As soon as you were gone,
things at the society...well, they changed a lot.  I believed in you, and
I still do.  If you think this revolution needs to be stopped, I trust
you.”  She drew a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to
Corey.  “So go stop it.”

Corey took the
paper.  “What is it?”

She didn’t
answer.  She just said, “Be careful, Thirty-seven.  The society may
be out of the tunnels, but there’re plenty of others down here.”

She was about to
disappear back down the passage she’d come from when Corey called after
her,  “Forty-four?”

She paused and
glanced back over her shoulder.

“Come with us,”
he said.

Forty-four didn’t
answer.

“You don’t belong
in the society anymore,” Corey continued.  “I can see that.  You
don’t believe in them.  You said you still believed in me.  Join us.”

She turned back
to the passage.  “The society is all I have.”

“You have me,”
Corey countered.

Forty-four shook
her head.  “You left.”

Then she was
gone.

Jill took off her
helmet.  “What’d she give you?”

Corey unfolded
the paper.  It was a hand-drawn map of a section of the tunnels.  The
end of one of the passages was marked with a red X.

“HERE
we go,” Dizzie said from the chair at her station.  Her central screen showed
the section of the map corresponding to the hand-drawn chart.  “The X
marks this spot right here.”

“The map doesn’t
show anything down that passage,” Amber said skeptically.

“Forty-four
didn’t mark it for no reason,” said Corey.  “There’s something there. 
We’ll check it out.”

“It’s quite a
walk from here,” said Dizzie.

“Especially
considering how slow the crawlers move,” Bradley added dourly.

“We’ll pack a
lunch,” said Jill.

IT
was well into the evening by the time they got there.

It turned out the
X on Forty-four’s map signified a massive door at the end of a long, narrow
hallway.  There were no lights; there hadn’t been for the last ten minutes
of their walk here.  The door had no knob or handle.  It appeared to
open via a heavy-duty metal wheel.  DANGER! and DO NOT OPEN! had been
stenciled across the bulky door’s surface.  Until recently, two members of
the Society of Troubled Souls had stood guard here constantly.

“Padlocked,”
Corey observed.

“We can pick it
or cut through it no problem,” said Bradley.

“That’s not my
point.”

“They can’t open
this door from the inside,” Jill realized.

“Exactly.”

“Maybe no one’s
home,” said Bradley.  “Maybe they left and locked things up.”

Corey shook his
head.  “The padlock’s rusted over.  It hasn’t been unlocked for a
long time.  It’s been a while since anyone used this door.”

“Whatever’s in
there, there must be another entrance,” concluded Jill.  “We’re coming in
the back door, apparently.  Better that way.”  She pulled out her
lock pick and went to work.

“We could be
walking right into the lion’s mouth,” Bradley said worriedly.

“The crawler,”
Jill suggested, finishing the job and unfastening the rusty padlock.  “We
open the door just enough to let it go in ahead of us.”

“Even opening the
door that much could draw attention.”

“Well, if they
don’t use this entrance, there’s no point in setting up surveillance and
waiting around.”

“I’m just
saying.”

“What do you want
to do, turn around and walk home?  We came to check the place out, so we
check the place out.”  Corey started turning the massive wheel to unseal
the door.

Bradley frowned
invisibly behind his visor.  “Fine.”  He drew his weapon.

Jill did the
same.

“THEIR
voices are cutting in and out,” Amber said anxiously.

Dizzie
scowled.  “
So’s
the video.  There’s some
kind of interference.”  The images from the three helmet cams were
flickering in and out along with their voices.  Dizzie leaned close to the
desk microphone.  “Corey, can you hear me?”

His answer was
too fuzzy to make out.

“It sounded like
they were saying there must be another entrance to whatever’s behind that
door,” said Amber.

“The map doesn’t
show anything like that.  There’s no other tunnel near the place.”

“Maybe from
street level?”

“Ah, good
thinking!  Let’s check it out.”  Dizzie rolled her chair to the
monitor that showed the map of the tunnels.  Three blinking lights marked
the places Jill, Corey, and Bradley were standing.  Dizzie overlaid the
map with a schematic of the city.

Her heart missed
a beat.

Amber
gasped.  “How did we not realize it before?”

“
Corey, get
out of there!
” Dizzie shrieked.

AT
first the wheel had barely budged.  Now it was turning more easily.

Corey heard
Dizzie’s voice crackling faintly in his ear.  “What was that, Diz?” he
asked, pausing.

“The signal’s bad
here,” said Bradley.

Corey retraced
his steps up the hallway.  They’d been in clear communication with Dizzie
and Amber until they came near the door.  “Dizzie, I didn’t get that.”

“Careful,” said
Jill.  “She may be trying to warn us that someone’s on our tail.”

Corey checked the
feed from the crawler watching the passage behind them.  The night-vision
cam showed nothing.

He kept
walking.  “Dizzie, can you repeat?”  He still couldn’t hear her
words.  But the split-second fragments of her message made it clear she
was panicking.

Now he was
running back up the passage.  “Dizzie, are you in trouble?”

The signal
finally cleared as he stepped out of the hallway and into the previous
passage.  He was just in time to catch the last word of Dizzie’s
message: 
“...trap!
”

“WHAT?”
Corey’s voice demanded.  Dizzie and Amber could hear him clearly now.

“I said,
it’s
a trap,
” Dizzie said slowly and emphatically.  “Do
not
open
that door!”

“What do you
mean?”

“You’ll flood the
tunnel!  That door leads into the lake.”

There was no
response.

“Corey, did you
hear me?”

“I heard
you.  But I don’t understand.  Why would they make a door that leads
into the lake?”

“Why’re you
asking me?  Maybe the builders needed access to the lake bed before it had
water in it, I don’t know!”

“But the red X—”

Amber leaned
forward and grabbed the microphone off Dizzie’s desk.  “Corey Stone, don’t
you dare open that door!”

“Forty-four sent
us here.  She wouldn’t try to drown us,” Corey insisted.

“Will you stop
analyzing Forty-four’s motives?  We’re looking at the schematics right
now, and we’re telling you:  There’s nothing on the other side of that
door but a lake, and you’re five stories beneath the surface.”

“OKAY,”
Corey said reluctantly.  “Okay, I believe you.”   He turned back
to the long hallway.

He thought they’d
been waiting for him, but he saw Bradley was now turning the wheel.

“Wait,
no!
”
Corey yelled, dashing toward them.

It was too late.

The door
shuddered and swung open.

COREY’S
cry
was the last thing Dizzie and Amber heard before communications cut out
again.  The last thing they saw was his shaking helmet cam’s view of the
door beginning to open.

Then silence and
darkness.

“Corey?” Amber
pleaded desperately into the microphone.  “
Corey?
”

Now the three
blinking dots on the map disappeared.