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It knows we’re here, Sam thought. No sneaking. No tricking. It knew. Sam could feel it. Like cold fingers prodding his mind, poking, looking for an opening.
This is hell, Sam thought. This is hell.
Keep the light on, Sam told himself, whatever else, keep the light on.
There was a skittering sound as Caine’s feet kicked some loose pebbles that on closer examination were identical, short, cylinders of dark metal.
“The fuel pellets,” Caine said dully. “Well. I hope Lana does radiation poisoning. Otherwise we are all dead.”
“What?” Duck asked.
“That’s uranium scattered all around. The way it was explained to me, it’s blowing billions of tiny holes in our bodies.”
“What?”
“Come on, Goose,” Caine said. “You’re doing great.”
“Duck,” Duck corrected.
“Can you feel the Darkness, Goose?” Caine asked in an awed whisper.
“Yeah,” Duck said. His voice wavered. Like a little kid about to cry. “It feels bad.”
“Very bad,” Caine agreed. “It’s been in my head for a long time, Goose. Once it’s there, it never goes away.”
“What do you mean?” Duck asked.
“It’s touching your mind right now, isn’t it? Leaving its mark. Finding a way in. Once it gets in, you can never shut it out.”
“We have to get out of here,” Duck said.
“You can go, Goose,” Caine said. “I can drag Sam along.”
Sam heard it all from far away. A conversation between distant ghosts. Shadows in his mind. But he knew Duck could not leave.
“No,” Sam rasped. “We need Duck.”
“Do we?” Caine asked.
“The one weapon it doesn’t know we have,” Sam said.
“Weapon?” Duck echoed.
“It opens up just ahead,” Caine said. “The cavern.”
“What is it? What’s it look like?” Duck asked.
Caine didn’t answer.
Sam rode through a spasm of pain. It seemed to come in waves, each worse than the one before. Surfing the pain, he thought. But in the trough between waves, he sometimes had a few seconds of clarity.
He opened his eyes. He turned up the light.
As Caine had said, they were emerging into a space that was no longer a mine shaft but a vast cavern.
But no natural geological event had created this vast, silent hole beneath the ground. No stalactites hung from the arched roof. No stalagmites grew from the floor.
Instead, the stone walls seemed to have been melted and then solidified. There was still a faint smell of burning, though no smoke and no heat except what radiated from the fuel rod behind them in the shaft.
