Chapter 4
Rocks chewed into my knees as I crawled through the opening, every movement I made stiff with reluctance.
Dalton had clipped toe lamps to his boots. He gave me a hand up. The rock roof overhead allowed me to straighten, but he was forced to stoop.
“You’ve got toe lamps in the left side pocket of your pack,” he said, then reached down to help Leo through.
That was handy information. It would have been even handier if I’d had a chance to find them outside where there was still light enough to see by. I dug for them, using the distraction as a chance to get myself under control. I breathed in, counting silently in my head: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . And out: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . .
I kept that up as the rest of our party joined us inside. There wasn’t much room. A pile of rocks and rusted equipment heaped up on one side, cutting what had been a reasonably spacious area into a hallway. I guessed that this had once been an easy in-and-out shaft for workers, and when the mine went defunct, it had turned into a dumping ground.
I was squeezed between Dalton and Leo. The former blocked the passage out so that no one could go past him. Likely that’s where the foreman had checked miners’ pockets in the good old days to keep them from stealing. The outer rims of Dalton’s silver eyes gleamed dark orange, almost red. I wondered again what he could see. Then again, maybe his eyes were just human disco balls. Better yet, maybe they were mood eyes. If so, he was feeling fiery. I snorted to myself. Right. As far as I could tell, he only had the one mood—pissed off. I could sympathize.
I was still shaking with the cold of pure fear. The longer I stood around doing nothing, the worse it got.
“Let’s get going,” I said. I sounded belligerent. Dammit. I swallowed. “One of the kids could be injured,” I added. Maybe everyone would think I was just worried instead of terrified.
“Not yet,” Dalton said. He unhitched a length of rope from his backpack and unwound it. Every four feet was a pair of double knots, two inches apart. A carabiner hung in between. “Latch yourself on to the rope,” he ordered. “Use a belt-loop or one of the metal rings on the side of your pack.”
Clearly we weren’t moving until we were all attached, so I hooked the rope to my backpack. I wanted to be able to drop it and run if needed, and clipping to my pants was counterproductive to that plan. I was beginning to feel a lot like one of the seven dwarves. Maybe next we could all start singing. Hi-
ho, Hi-ho, it’s off to death we go, with magic traps and mine collapses . . .
The rhyme needed a little work.
I was in line behind Dalton and one of the female members of his team. I should learn their names. Her chestnut hair was pulled into two tiny pigtails just behind her ears. Bangs curtained her forehead above a rounded face. She looked over her shoulder past me, then turned to murmur something to Dalton.
I took advantage of the murky gloom and everybody’s distraction over clipping on to the line to grab hold of Trevor’s trace. I bent down, pretending to adjust my toe lamps. I slipped my hand into the trace dimension. Instantly my skin and bones turned icy. The cold slipped into my blood and crept up my arm and into my chest. I grabbed Trevor’s trace. Something against my hand, then thin fingers grasped my wrist. I yanked back. As I did, someone called my name.
“Yeah?” I asked, rubbing the numbness circling my wrist where I’d been grabbed.
“Yeah, what?” Leo said, tugging on the rope and letting go when he was satisfied it wasn’t going to give way.
“Someone said my name.”
He gave me that patient worried look, like I was going out of my head. “Are you sure you can handle being down here?”
I made an exasperated sound and shook my hand. “I’m fine.” Except someone had called my name. I looked around. No one else had heard it. Had it come from the trace dimension? The idea sent spiders crawling down my spine. Who—what—had touched me? And called my name? How did it know me? What the hell was going on?
I looped Trevor’s trace ribbon around my wrist and shook my hand to get the circulation going and warm myself back up. I’d never had the cold of the trace dimension strike me so swiftly or with such a vengeance before. I flexed my fingers and curled them into my palm, my nails cutting into my skin.
I’d often wondered if something inhabited the trace dimension. Spirits, maybe. It was the only explanation I could think of for the feeling of beings rubbing against me when I reached through. I’d always thought the encounters were accidental, like fish nudging against swimmers in a small pond. But now—someone, some
thing
—had tried to grab me. Something more solid than a spirit. If it had got hold of me, would it have tried to pull me fully into the trace dimension? Would it have frozen me solid? Or did it have another plan that I couldn’t begin to imagine? It knew my name. Did it want something from me?
I shuddered. I wasn’t going to cross over that line again any time soon unless absolutely necessary. I take great pride in not being that girl in the horror movies who knows a serial killer is axing people out in the woods and so decides that a nature walk is a brilliant idea. I’m the lock-myself-in-the-basement-with-a-shotgun-and-some-napalm sort of woman. So given that the metaphorical ax-murderer was in the trace dimension, I planned to stay the hell out of the woods.
I know, famous last words, and I’ve been known to blindly run into a burning building to help someone out. this time would be different, I told myself firmly.
I didn’t have time to worry about what might be waiting for me in the trace dimension. I had more pressing problems. Focusing on the reason we were in the mines, I turned my attention Trevor’s trace. Its mustard-orangey hue was still vibrant, though I could feel fear racing through it, along with a healthy dose of curiosity. I wonder if anybody ever told him that curiosity killed fewer cats than it did humans and that it never paid to get nosy with the Tyet.
I gave a quiet sigh. He was a teenage boy, and stupid by virtue of his hormones. Teenage girls were no better. At that age, after my dad disappeared, there wasn’t a single line I didn’t cross, and no rules I didn’t break. I was lucky I didn’t get myself killed. I came close more than once, and goodness knows I wouldn’t have cared much if I did.
Lauren didn’t appear to be having much better luck straightening out Trevor than Mel had with me. You can lead a horse to water, and while you can beat it senseless, you can’t actually make it drink, short of putting a hose down its throat and pumping its stomach full. That probably defeats the purpose.
I was hoping Trevor didn’t learn his lesson by getting his throat slit.
Happily, I realized that thanks to getting grabbed, for a few minutes, I’d forgotten I was standing inside a mountain, the roof and walls of the shaft held stable by fading magic and old timbers. Not so happily, I suddenly remembered, and instantly my body dampened with cold sweat. I snorted at myself. At this point, though I
knew
the Tyet was the most dangerous threat around, they seemed like mere gnats to the circling vultures of my fears.
“Are we ready?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. Movement always helped. I knew I wouldn’t get lost. Or rather, I might get lost, but so long as I could find trace in the maze of shafts knotting through the mountain, I’d find a way out eventually. Of course, that was presupposing the mountain didn’t collapse on me, or I didn’t fall down a deep shaft.
A chorus of readies down the line behind me indicated that, in fact, we could start looking for the teens.
“Where to?” Dalton asked me.
Inconvenient though it was to be the third in line and have to lead from behind, I knew he wasn’t going to let me get around him or the woman in front of me. Maggie. That was her name. I’d heard it before, but now it clinked down into my brain like a pebble down a drainpipe.
“Straight ahead,” I said.
We started off. It was like being in a chain gang. We shuffled along, the rope pulling taut between us, then slackening, then tightening again. I couldn’t see anything ahead. Dalton’s toe lamps only illuminated a few feet in front of him, and he and Maggie blocked most of that view.
The ceiling was low, and here and there Dalton called out a warning to duck. We went on for a hundred feet or more.
“Left. About ten feet up,” I called.
Turning the corner took a while. Behind me, the rope jerked as Lauren, Leo, and the other three members of Dalton’s team snaked around. If the snake was an epileptic in the middle of a seizure.
We had only just straightened out when I called out a right, another left, then down a long, rough-cut stairway that jigged and jagged according to whatever drunken whim had overcome the people cutting it into the earth. The walls on both sides scraped my shoulders, and I had to hunch over to keep from scalping myself on the roof. Chunks of stone littered the steps, and once I slid on one, barely catching myself before I dominoed over Maggie and Dalton.
A wider space at the bottom led away into four branch tunnels. Metal tracks ran through, with a circle roundabout where we stood.
“They split up,” I said. “Three of them went to the far right, two others went to the second left.”
“Which way did Trevor go?” Lauren asked. She sounded faintly winded and the last word trembled off her tongue.
“With the three,” I said. “We should split up.”
“And how do you expect to follow both trails? We only have one tracer,” Dalton said.
I could hear him sneering.
“Leo can ask the metal,” I said, before looking at my brother. “Can’t you?”
The light from the toe lamps hollowed at his face, making him look harsh and dangerous. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said.
“What if the others are hurt? Maybe dying?” I dug my heels in. “We have the means to go after both. We should.”
“No,” Dalton said.
I ground my teeth together. I couldn’t make Dalton do anything he didn’t want to do. Unless, of course, I decided to run off on my own into the mines. That was a spectacularly bad idea, so much so that even I understood it. I looked over my shoulder.
“Leo?”
He sighed heavily and shook his head. “I agree with Dalton. Better we stick together. We’ll come back and get the other two after we find the three.”
I flexed my fingers. I could grab the trace of the two, and then I’d know if they were in danger. But I’d have to put my hand back into the spirit dimension, and that was enough to make me think twice. Plus I didn’t want Dalton or his crew to know I could do it. Basically, there was no way I was going to argue myself into a win. I decided to give in gracefully.
“Fine,” I said. “I hope to hell they don’t die.” Or maybe not so gracefully.
Dalton strode out down the far right branch. Maggie followed quick on his heels. The two yanked me after them before I had a chance to think about moving. I stumbled forward, stepping on Maggie’s heels. She swore and twisted sideways.
“Walk on your own damned feet, would you?”
“But yours are so much more comfortable,” I said. “Hey, that reminds me. Where were you when I went down to the Bottoms earlier today?”
She scowled at me. “Fuck off.”
“Trying to, but damn if you and your buddies can’t take a hint.”
“Maggie,” Dalton said before she could retort, his voice cracking like a whip.
She flinched and spun away from me.
After that, I lost all track of time. It was clear the teens had quickly become lost. They coiled and turned, twisting back on their own path. I was able to follow the most recent trail, which saved time, but it didn’t seem to bring us any closer to our quarry. I couldn’t tell how far we’d gone. We climbed up and burrowed down, marching down oddly straight shafts for what seemed like miles. We saw no one else. Occasionally, distorted noises filtered through to us. Every time we heard something, we stopped and waited to see if someone was coming. Leo’s talent came in handy for that. If enough metal veined in the walls or floors, he could reach out along it like an antenna. The more metal, the better his information.
Eventually we found functioning mining claims. Most were booby-trapped, miners being paranoid about people jumping claims. Dalton seemed to have a sixth sense, or maybe he saw things nobody else could. I could only pick up on active magic, and could only tell vague things about a spell, like whether it was binder magic or maker magic or what-have-you.
A lot of the traps didn’t require magic. They were good old-fashioned blow-you-up sorts of things. Trip wires spanned the passages everywhere—from ankle high to head high. Each time we had to unclip from the guide rope, and each one of us had to go over or under with two of Dalton’s team members holding lights on the wires so that we didn’t accidentally blunder into them anyway.
After a dozen of those, I was getting ready to scream with frustration. We were going too damned slow.
“Don’t get ideas,” Leo said as I waited for the last member of Dalton’s crew to pass over the most recent trip wire.
“Ideas?” I repeated innocently.
“Of heading off on your own.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” I lied.
“You’d be dead by now,” he said. “All these traps—you wouldn’t have seen any of them.”
I shrugged. It was true, but that didn’t mean I had to admit it. I frowned. That begged the question—how were the teens still alive? How had they managed to avoid triggering the traps? I asked Leo.
Now it was his turn to scowl and shrug. “It’s been bothering me, too.”
“What’s bothering you?” Dalton asked. Apparently he had bat ears.
I bit back my unhelpful and sarcastic knee-jerk reply—the man brought out the worst in me, I swear—and focused on being a team player. “How come the kids didn’t trip these traps?”