Willful Machines (13 page)

“This evening just gets more and more interesting,” Nico said.

“You told me you wanted to live.” I hunted around the base of the fence until I found the place where someone had dug a hole under it. I shimmied through. “Your turn.”

Nico took off his yellow windbreaker, balled it up, and tossed it over. “Catch!” He slithered after me. I tried not to imagine all those muscles I'd seen last night swelling and shifting under his T-shirt as he moved.

The trail continued on this side of the fence, broken in by decades of trespassers. It skirted the base of the mountain for a while and ended at the mouth of a tunnel. A ramshackle barrier of wood planks blocked the opening, with another yellow
NO TRESPASSING
sign nailed to it. A few of the planks had fallen away, though, leaving gaps like knocked-out teeth.

“What is this place?” Nico said.

“It used to be a mine. Copper, I think.” I peeked through one of the gaps in the barrier, but I could see only darkness beyond.

“And we're going inside?”

I looked back at him. For the first time all evening—for the first time since I'd met him, in fact—he appeared hesitant. “That's the plan,” I said.

“Through here?”

“I believe so.”

“You believe so? You mean you haven't come here before?”

Oops. I'd hoped I wouldn't have to admit that so soon. “I've never had the chance. My Secret Service detail is always hovering around me.”

“So you don't do this all the time? Sneak out of your room in the dead of night?”

I shook my head. “The truth is, I haven't been this far away from my detail in years.” Only now, as I said it out loud, did I realize the enormity of it: I hadn't had even a moment on my own like this since before Dad had started his run for the presidency. Except for that one other time, two years ago. But of course I didn't mention that now.

Nico laughed and knocked me on the arm. “And here I thought you were this outdoorsy adventurer type.”

“Nope. I'm about as indoorsy as they come. The pasty skin should've been a tip-off.”

He crossed his arms and looked back down the trail. “So you've never ditched your security before. Never come up here before. But you did it for me?”

For the umpteenth time that night, I blushed. “I guess you could say that. I mean, I've wanted to check this place out for a long time. Bex has been inside, and she told me all about it. It sounds amazing.”

Nico's eyes returned to the barrier. His face clouded over again.

“If you'd rather not, though, I totally understand. I get freaked out and decide not to do things at least seven times an hour.”

It felt strange being the brave one. I wondered what had him spooked, this guy who did handstands on cliffs and talked about making every second count. Was he claustrophobic? But I didn't want to be a jerk and ask him.

“I think this might be fun, though,” I added.

He rocked back and forth in his flip-flops, his arms still crossed, his mouth twisted to one side. “At least I know you're not a serial killer. So I don't have that to worry about.”

“It's true. I'm not.”

“Okay, then. That being the case, let's do it.”

I
motioned my puck through a space between two of the planks. It illuminated a low, narrow tunnel with rutted walls held up by thick wooden supports.

“I'll go first,” I said.

I squeezed through the opening. The air smelled like mushrooms, and it felt ten degrees cooler in here than outside. Nico followed. Our heads bent low, we made our way single file through the tunnel. It stretched off into the distance, as straight and precise as a perspective drawing. We didn't speak much now. The only sound was the flapping of Nico's flip-flops, which echoed off the walls and produced a complex, appropriately ominous rhythm. Our pucks floated just ahead of us, their light carving out sharp-edged shadows in the rugged rock. “Network signal lost,” they murmured at one point, almost in unison.

After we'd walked for what felt like a mile, the echo of Nico's flip-flops shifted downward in pitch, and a soft exhalation of cold air blew into my face. A few steps later the tunnel
walls vanished, and we found ourselves in a space so huge the light from our pucks couldn't reach the far side. The two little devices surged upward, as if they felt as happy as we did to be out of the cramped passage.

My foot clanged against something: an empty beer bottle. “Be careful. There's garbage on the floor. And then somewhere up ahead . . .”

“. . . there's no more floor.”

Nico had pulled ahead of me. He strode right up to the spot where the ground dropped away and left an enormous black void. I stayed where I was and hid my hands in my hoodie pockets and squeezed them into tight, tight fists.
You chose to bring him here
, I reminded myself.
You knew this was coming.

“How far down does it go?” When he glanced back at me, his face seemed to glow in the low light. Whatever had scared him before we'd entered the tunnel didn't trouble him now. Meanwhile, I was barely holding myself together. In other words, things had gone back to normal.

“Something like three hundred feet,” I said, with only a slight tremor in my voice. “The cavern formed naturally. The miners didn't make it. I've heard you could fit the Statue of Liberty in here. Although as of a month ago I guess that's not saying as much.”

Nico had already gone back to directing his puck one way and then the other to light up more of the cavern. “Is there a way to get to the bottom?”

“Jumping, I guess. Apart from that, I don't think so. There's a story kids tell at Inverness, though. One time, years ago, I'm not sure how many, a group of students came here to hang out. They were drinking. One of them fell over the edge.”

“Uh-oh.”

“But he survived. Apparently there's a ledge about thirty feet down. He landed on that.”

Nico leaned way out to peer into the chasm. “I can see it.”

My heart thumped harder. I forced myself to focus on our pucks as they explored the dark space. The cavern walls, smoother than the ones in the tunnel, draped downward in graceful folds, like curtains.

“What did the kid do?” Nico asked.

“He shouted up to his friends. He didn't think he'd broken anything. They told him to stay there while they got help. But he'd been using his flashlight to look around, and he said he could see a tunnel leading away from the ledge. He wanted to try following that first to see if it would take him back to his friends. The kid disappeared into the tunnel. And his friends waited. And waited. And waited.”

As the pucks moved around, the walls seemed to shift in front of us like the surface of a vast, vertical sea.

“They shouted down to him,” I said, “but he didn't answer. They couldn't call him on his phone, either—this was before pucks—because the mountain blocks the network signal. The kids finally contacted the police and told them everything. A
search party went down to the ledge and found the tunnel. But that tunnel split into more tunnels, and those tunnels split off too. Supposedly, there are hundreds of miles of passages down there, some natural, some man-made, and all the maps from the copper mine days are lost. The search party looked and looked, but they never did find him. His body must still be down there somewhere.”

“That's some story,” Nico said.

I sensed I was being a downer again, but at least my fists had loosened a little. “Hey, you want to see something cool?”

“Sure.”

I took a few steps closer to the edge. “Turn out your light,” I told my puck. It blinked off. “Now you,” I said to Nico.

He wagged his finger at me. “Remember, I'm trusting you.”

I put up my hand, as if to swear to my good behavior. He gave his puck the command. The cavern collapsed into blackness.

“Whoa,” Nico said. “It's
dark
.”

That was an understatement. This was the kind of dark that made you sure you'd gone blind. The kind of dark that made you doubt your own existence. The silence in the cavern seemed more complete too, aside from the steady cycling of Nico's breathing and my own. As I stood there, I noticed—or maybe imagined—that strange heat radiating from his body again.

“What happens now?” he said.

“Just wait a second.” I pulled off my backpack and groped
around inside before finding the lighter and the box of sparklers I'd packed. I pulled out a sparkler and flicked the lighter. Nico reappeared in front of me, squinting against the sudden light, his face orange in the lighter's glow. I touched the flame to the end of the sparkler. It flared and hissed as it caught. Sparks gushed from the tip. They poured over our feet and bounced on the ground. A few landed on my skin but didn't hurt. When I threw the sparkler into the cavern, it fell and fell, shedding particles of light, illuminating the undulating rock walls. Nico took a few steps forward to watch it drop, but I stayed glued in place. Then the chasm swallowed it up, and darkness wrapped itself around us again.

“Can I try?” Nico asked.

Our hands fumbled against each other as I passed him the lighter and a sparkler. Then the lighter flame sprang up again, and his sparkler started to crackle and fizz. He flashed me a sly grin in the unsteady light. I tried to smile back but couldn't tell if I succeeded. He lobbed the sparkler over the side and rushed forward to watch it spiral down.

“Come here! You have to see this!”

He grabbed my hand and pulled me forward. Terror sizzled through me. For a second my whole body felt like one of those fireworks. The light from the sparkler had already started to fade, but I could still see the tips of my sneakers inches away from the edge, the narrow ledge thirty feet down where that kid had landed, and beyond that, a yawning, black nothingness.
Then I couldn't see anything at all. My heart sprinted. Inside my hoodie pocket, Gremlin resumed his purring. But I forced myself to stay there, inches away from that void I couldn't see but knew was right in front of me. Feeling Nico's hot, strong hand clutch mine made the agony worthwhile.

“So this is really the first time you haven't had your Secret Service detail following you in
years
?” he asked.

“Yeah. Crazy, huh?” I lit another sparkler but didn't throw it in. We turned to face each other, the firework crackling between us. Its flickering light brought out the threads of gold in his brown eyes.

“What does it feel like to be watched all the time like that?”

“Pretty much as sucky as you'd expect. Being the son of the president is like all the worst parts of being the president with none of the perks. You have to give up your whole life, but you don't get paid and you have no power whatsoever and you'll never have an airport named after you. There are lights and cameras in your face all the time, people talking about you on the Supernet.”

He shook his head. “No wonder you're in the closet.”

My stomach clenched. “What makes you think I'm in the closet?”

“You mean you're out?”

“No, I mean, what makes you think I'm gay?”

He laughed. The loudest laugh I'd heard from him yet. It filled the cavern and echoed against the walls. I almost thought
he'd start a cave-in. Wiping his eyes, he noticed I hadn't joined him. “You
are
kidding, aren't you?”

“Well,” I mumbled.

“You asked me out on a date, Lee. We were just holding hands a second ago. Of
course
you're gay.” He smacked my chest with the back of his hand.

I coughed up a weak laugh of my own. “Yeah. I was kidding. Of course I'm gay.”

And just like that, there went my plausible deniability. I didn't even freak out, either. I thought of Jeremy, that kid I'd kissed freshman year. Neither one of us had ever once spoken the word “gay,” not even after we'd kissed. That charged silence had felt safe, and also weirdly exciting. But this habit Nico had of laying everything out on the table—this was exciting too, in a different way.

“Listen, Nico,” I said. “I think I should tell you something.” The firework had almost burned all the way down. The fountain of sparks had slowed to a trickle. “Toward the end of freshman year, I started hanging out with this guy named Jeremy. We never talked about it, but I could tell he had, you know, feelings for me. I guess I had feelings too. One night we were studying together in the library. We'd taken over an alcove up on the mezzanine, and I'd noticed my Nighttime Armed Babysitter had fallen asleep. He does that sometimes. I realized it was the first time Jeremy and I had ever been alone together, and I knew it might be the last too, so I kissed him.”

The sparkler hissed out in my hand. Nico's face disappeared before I could catch his reaction. Even with my severely limited understanding of romance, I knew talking about kissing some other guy probably wasn't recommended on a first date.