Page 113 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“My people and I created the damned thing,” Bodil said, rising back to her full height from the crouch she’d been using to talk to me. Which left her eyeball to eyeball with Alphonse, even when he straightened up. “Now get a grip, vampire, as your people say, or I’ll do it for you.”

“I’d like to see you try!”

“Right now, so would I,” she said grimly and swept down the tunnel.

And that ended that.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I tried to stand, but it didn’t go any better this time. The room did its shaky-shaky thing, and I stumbled into Alphonse. Who I guessed didn’t want to wait for me and my pathetic human recovery time because I was snatched up, flung over a beefy shoulder, and carted down the sloping tunnel like a sack of beans.

I’d have preferred Pritkin’s shoulder, but he was up ahead, taking point, and as laser-focused as usual in a crisis. Everyone else flowed after him and Bodil, leaving me and Alphonse to bring up the rear. And to watch the passage trundle by, as there was nothing else to do.

Enid’s light source was ahead of us, possibly leading the way considering how dim it was here. But it nonetheless lit up the walls with a faint, shifting radiance, like looking at the moon from underwater. And showed me glimpses of rubble extending much farther than I’d expected—piles of it.

In places, it half obscured the tunnel in slanting mountains of rock and dirt, forcing Alphonse to clamber over. He didn’t get winded because vampire, but I heard some huffing and puffing up ahead, probably from Enid. I felt for her, as there was a ton of stuff in the way, making the walk an obstacle course.

Much of it was unexpected, such as the shattered pieces of wood propped against the walls or reinforcing the rubble in spots as if somebody had tried to make barricades. There were also a bunch of crates that had once held magical weapons and were now mostly empty and dust-covered. And the few potion bombs still in place, like eggs in their cartons, were sunken in and looked decayed.

There were also a few discarded hand-held weapons here and there, primarily broken spears and pikes and one sword half covered in dirt. Alphonse bent over and pulled it out of the rubble. Like the pikes, it was almost new-looking.

Of course, this part of the tunnel was bone dry, unlike the area outside, where vines and mildew had taken over, and further down, where the river ran. So that might explain the state of the weapons. But it didn’t explain why they were here at all or why the rest of this place looked so unfamiliar.

I glanced around, wondering just how far back we’d been sent. Because the tunnels that Pritkin and I had made our frantic escape through hadn’t looked like this. Like most of this place, they’d been tall to accommodate fey height and black and glittery.

They had not had huge chunks of rock missing, as if a backhoe had carved them out or the walls had been mined to provide rubble for the nearby barricades. They had not had giant cracks scrawling like black lightning everywhere and a half-collapsed ceiling as if someone had tried to seal themselves in after the barricades fell. I would have thought I was reading the signs wrong, but Alphonse saw them, too.

“You can see where they put charges,” he said, his voice low and his finger pointing up at the fractured ceiling, the ruins of which we were slowly clambering over. “Brought it down in big enough chunks to impede a tank.”

But it hadn’t been enough. Because we were traveling a path carved through the wreckage, and while it wasn’t easy, it was doable. And seemed to go on forever.

“Wasn’t enough,” Alphonse agreed. “Looks like whoever was defending this place brought down half the mountain, and whoever was attacking just kept going.”

“Who was attacking?” I asked. “Those things out there?”

“Dunno.” He kicked something with his foot, which I guessed he’d been able to smell despite it being buried under dirt. A human skull peeked out at us, but there was no body attached. And the skull. . .

My thoughts petered out, but Alphonse wasn’t so squeamish. “Whoever it was, they were hungry,” he said and crushed the gnawed-on bone under his boot.

He walked on.

Alphonse stayed busy ducking under pieces of rock or climbing over debris. It was bad enough that he was continually cursing in places, but nobody shushed him. I even heard a few competing phrases from up ahead after somebody jostled a precarious slab and almost got crushed.

“Everybody okay up there?” Alphonse yelled as the rockfall sent reverberations along the tunnel.

“All right,” Enid called back. “But be careful. This part is not stable!”

“Like everything else in this damned place,” Alphonse muttered over the echoes of the fall, which were loud enough to wake the dead, only nobody seemed to care.

Maybe because, while a battle had happened here, it hadn’t been recent. Drifts of dust in the crevasses glittered in the low light, highlighting those jagged scars instead of being suspended in the air. Like the coating on the weapons, it had been here for a while.

Alphonse edged closer to the right wall to avoid another unstable area, and I reached out and touched the pole of a pike that had been propped against the stones for who knew how long.

“What do you want that for?” Alphonse demanded. “It’s broken. The end was snapped off in someone’s hide.”

Or something’s, I thought.

“I don’t want a weapon,” I said. “I want to touch it, but it’s coated in dust.”

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