Crossover (11 page)

With
a stab of guilt, she realised that school would be starting right
about now. She hoped the forged doctor's certificate was fooling
her teachers, and that the fake excursion note she'd given her dad
had convinced him she was at the Museum of Art History. She'd
planted a bug in his phone, so any calls he made to the school were
redirected to a mobile with a fake answering machine message
–
you've called Narahm School for Girls,
all our operators are currently busy, please leave your name,
number and reason for phoning after the tone
. Any calls from the school to her father would be redirected
to the same phone, but a different recording –
hi, this is Ash, leave a message for me or Mr Arthur and
we'll get back to you
.

But what if her
father actually went to the school in person for some reason? What
if the school sent a get-well-soon card to her house, and he saw
it? What if –

Focus, Ash, she
told herself. You've taken every possible precaution. You won't get
busted. It's time to think about the job at hand.

The light was
getting brighter and the noise louder. She'd almost reached the dig
site. She could smell the broken rocks, and hear the whirring of
the generator under the shouting of the miners. She kept her back
to the wall, edging sideways down the tunnel.

The tracks had
ended, and the grey dirt was getting finer beneath her feet. Time
for the gross part. She spat into her hand, and wiped the saliva
all over her face. Then she scooped up some of the dirt with the
other hand and dabbed it against her cheeks, forehead and chin. The
silty powder stuck to her skin and hardened, like face paint at a
carnival. She couldn't see herself to check, but hopefully she no
longer looked like a disembodied head floating down the
tunnel.

She'd reached
the opening to the cavern. Slowly, silently, she peeked around the
corner.

Giant sodium
lamps blazed in every corner, and six gas analysis vents hummed on
the walls – the modern day equivalent of a caged canary. The miners
shuffled around everywhere like ants in a nest. The woman with the
jack hammer was near the centre of the cavern, the enormous machine
shuddering in her grip. Ash had expected to see dust and smoke
floating around the bit, but no – it was sinking into the stone as
cleanly as a scalpel into butter, leaving holes the size of
coins.

A metal walkway
traversed the wall on the right-hand side of the cavern, about two
metres above the ground, all the way from the tunnel she was in to
the other side. There was a flight of stairs at each
end.

'I've reached
the dig,' she said. 'How far away is the box?'

'According to
your GPS and Buckland's map, it should be 38 metres South
South-West of you, and about 6 metres down.'

Damn it, she
thought. 'We've got a problem.'

'Tunnel not
where it's supposed to be?'

'Worse,' Ash
said. 'The miners are digging up almost that exact
spot.'

'
What?
'

'Could they know
about the box?'

She could
picture Benjamin biting his lip. 'No,' he said finally. 'They're a
legitimate company. And they've been drilling here since before the
map turned up. It's probably just coincidence. But either way, you
–'

'Can't go
digging for treasure while they're in there,' Ash finished.
'Right.'

'So.
Abort?'

'Hang on,' Ash
said. 'Just a second.'

She didn't want
to give up, not now. She had assured the curator that she would get
his artefact back, and she was so close!

Ash peeked
around the corner again, into the cavern.

'There's another
tunnel on the south side of the cavern,' she said. 'I think I can
get to it. The diggers won't see me if I stay close to the wall
–'

'Ash, that
tunnel just goes deeper into the mine, all the way to the
underground river. It doesn't curve back around or anything. You
won't be able to come up at the box from underneath, if that's what
you're thinking.'

'It's
not.'

'Then what's the
plan?'

Ash said,
'You'll see.'

She edged around
the corner onto the walkway, feeling horribly conspicuous. But
no-one else was walking around the scaffolding – everyone was on
the cave floor. She told herself that anyone looking up would have
the wall-mounted sodium lamps in their eyes. With her camouflage,
she would be little more than a shadow on the wall.

Her footsteps
were soft on the metal grating – the mining boots looked heavy, but
she'd hollowed out the soles and removed the steel caps for ease of
movement. Of course, if a mine cart ran over her foot, she'd be
–

'Hey!'

Ash's heart
stopped. Run, or freeze?

She
froze.

'Hey,' the miner
yelled again. 'Jennings!'

The woman with
the jack hammer released the trigger. Looked up.

'Foreman wants
to see you,' the miner said. His voice echoed around the
cavern.

The woman wiped
some sweat off her forehead with a yellow glove, balancing the tool
on its point with her other hand, and then passed the handle to the
miner. He started drilling as she jogged over to the other side of
the cavern.

Ash let the air
out of her lungs. False alarm. She kept moving, one careful step at
a time.

Two miners were
rolling a cart along the tracks to the rocks broken up by the jack
hammer, while another drove a bobcat towards them. The bobcat's
trowel descended, and the chunks of stone clattered against one
another as they were scooped up. Hydraulics whirred as the bobcat
lifted the load, swung it sideways, and dumped it into the cart. A
cloud of dust accompanied the crash, and the trowel swivelled back
for another load.

The scaffolding
Ash was on ended at a set of stairs, leading down to the second
tunnel. She slinked down, shoulder almost touching the wall. For a
few frightening seconds, she was on the cavern floor with the
workers – and then she was safe in the darkness of the
tunnel.

'I made it,' she
whispered.

'To the other
tunnel?'

'Yep.' Ash
removed her cap and tugged the elastic band off her ponytail with
one hand, while removing a cigarette lighter from of her overalls
with the other.

'Great,'
Benjamin said. 'And being in there will somehow allow you to sneak
past the fifty or sixty miners?'

'Nope,' Ash
said. 'But now I'll be out of the way when they leave.'

She wrapped the
elastic band around the lighter, tying down the button so a steady
stream of butane flowed from the nozzle. Not enough to risk an
explosion, not even enough to be detectable to the human nose – but
just the same, enough to create a panic down here. She pitched the
lighter back up onto the walkway.

A perfect throw
– the lighter bounced twice on the grille before clattering to a
stop right under one of the gas analysis vents.

'Leave?'
Benjamin was saying. 'We can't wait for them to –'

An
alarm shrieked, so loud that Ash had to press her palms against her
ears. All work on the cave floor stopped instantly, and there was a
moment of absolute stillness before someone yelled, 'Gas!
Evacuate!
Evacuate!
'

Tools thunked to
the ground as the miners fled, back towards the tunnel Ash had come
in through. Their boots left dusty craters in the dirt. Someone hit
a switch on the generator on their way out, and Ash watched it
shudder to a stop.

She should have
expected that. The miners wouldn't want to risk a short while the
generator was unsupervised – it was possible, though unlikely, for
a spark to set the fuel tank alight.

The lights
flickered and started to fade. Darkness grew from the corners of
the cavern like squid ink.

In a matter of
seconds, the dig site was deserted. The miners were well trained –
at the first sign of toxic or explosive gas, stop what you're doing
and get out.

Ash could hear
Benjamin saying something, but she couldn't tell what. The alarm
was deafening, and she had a growing suspicion that it couldn't be
shut off.

'I
don't know if you can hear me,' she said. 'But I'm okay. The alarm
wasn't me. Well, it
was
me, but it's not
about
me. Don't freak
out.'

She ran back up
the stairs onto the walkway in the fading light, and snatched up
the cigarette lighter. No sense leaving unnecessary traces. She
pulled her hair back through the elastic loop and dropped the
lighter into her pocket, then ran back down to the cavern
floor.

The
last of the lights had gone out now – Ash couldn't see a thing.
Living in the city, Ash thought of darkness as her bedroom with the
curtains closed, or a movie theatre between when the house lights
go down and when the trailers start. But this was completely
different. The blackness was so pure, so perfect, that when she
waved a hand in front of her face, she felt the breeze on her
cheek, but otherwise had no way of telling that she'd moved. In
fact, for a surreal moment, Ash wondered if she'd simply
thought
about moving her
hand, but hadn't actually done it, and the breeze had been
something else.

The alarms were
still blaring. They must be on an external power-source. Anyone or
anything could be in here and she wouldn't be able to see it or
hear it –

Get a grip, Ash,
she told herself. She fumbled for her phone, and snapped it
open.

The glow of the
screen was useless against the black ground – she had to crouch to
see it, and even then it only illuminated the small circle in which
she stood – a faint blue island in a sea of darkness.

She
selected
camera mode
, and
pushed the button.

The flash lit up
the cavern up for a fragment of a second, like a mountainscape in a
lightning storm. Ash regained her bearings – the jack hammer lay on
its side at her 2 o'clock, the pile of spare hard-hats and
headlamps were at her 11:30. She jogged through the darkness
towards them. When she guessed she was about three metres away, she
took another picture.

The flash told
her she'd underestimated – the pile of equipment was almost five
metres away. She didn't need another picture – she walked right
over and started sorting through until she found something that
felt like a headlamp.

She clicked the
switch. The bulb worked. She tightened the straps around her head,
tilted the lamp so the light fell upon the ground roughly five
metres in front of her, and ran back towards the jack
hammer.

She had a
collapsible trowel in her pocket, but now that she'd seen the kind
of equipment the miners were using, she thought she could do
better. She didn't know how to use the jack hammer, but there was a
pile of shovels, mattocks, and other digging tools nearby. Ash
selected a pickaxe, swivelled it in her hands, and then swung it
into the ground between her feet.

The rock
crumbled easily – it was clearly a different substance to the stone
the miners had been drilling through a few metres to Ash's right.
Which made sense, she realised, since the box had only been buried
here a couple of years. Not enough time for the mud to solidify
into tough stone.

She swung again.
The light jittered on the floor. She couldn't hear the rocks
shattering over the screaming of the alarm, but she could feel the
impacts through the padded grip of the pickaxe.

Six metres
below, Benjamin had said. But that was when she was up in the
entrance tunnel, which was at least four metres above the cave
floor. She should only need to dig two metres down. But the hole
had to be fairly wide, or else there was a risk that she would
completely miss the –

Clack.
Ash paused. That last strike
had felt different. Either she'd hit a tougher kind of rock, or
she'd found what she was looking for.

She swept the
broken stones aside with the blade of the pickaxe, and shone the
headlight down into the hole she'd made.

Wood. She'd
struck something made of hard wood.

She reached down
and grabbed the box. It was less than 15 centimetres to a side,
scarcely bigger than an engagement ring box, with dirty brass
hinges and a scalloped handle. There was a scar on the top where
the pickaxe had scraped it.

She placed the
box reverently beside the hole. Lifted the lid.

Urgh, she
thought. Success. She could have taken the object out and reburied
the box, but she didn't want to touch it with her bare
hands.

Shuddering, she
closed the box up again. 'I have the prize,' she told Benjamin. She
tried to keep her voice from shaking. 'Time to go.'

Ash could hear
him saying something, but not what. Probably asking her out on a
date, yet again. It was his way of congratulating her.