Page 39 of Katya and the Young God

Katya wishes she had her phone, because no matter the lack of signal they had down there, taking a picture would assure her that they could do this again if they don’t have everyone on the return trip.

So she steps closer to Nathan, who’s watching everything with the careful eye of a supervisor. “Are we going to have to climb back up afterwards?” She asks, keeping her voice as low as she can conceivably get away with.

He nods, giving her a brief but brilliant smile. “We have a knotted rope that’ll make it easier, that I’ll toss down before I go over myself,” he says, and she can see him as a teacher, as someone whose entire purpose is to pass on knowledge. “It’s like a ladder, requires upper body strength—" he glances pointedly at her shoulder — “but it’ll make it easier for the first to get up here to start the belay safer.”

She gives him what she hopes is her most welcoming smile, the smile that makes people think that they can trust her with their secrets, the smile that has uncovered so many things it’s not even funny. “Once I’m rested it shouldn’t be that big of a deal for me.”

He smiles back, and she knows that he thinks she’s flirting, but she’s gotten information that way before. “You wanna go next?”

To keep up the ruse, she nods, and he grabs the harness from his friend, fitting it on her, tightening around the shoulder just tight enough that it starts to pinch, but not so it cuts off circulation like last time.

He loops the rope through the carabineer that rests on her waist, and it’s a bit too close for comfort, but she’s a professional and would never do something as amateur as show her discomfort with that motion. “All you have to do is step off, and we will control your descent. You can brace your legs against the rock, it’ll help feel more stable, but you don’t need to if you don’t want to.”

She’s going to goddamn do that, but she just smiles at him in return. “Sounds excellent.”

He tugs at the harness, checking it for something, before giving her another smile and holding out his arm to the expansive edge. “This is my favorite part of climbing,” he says, his voice dipped down low and faux intimate. “We sometimes do this off of cliffs, just for the thrill.”

That sounds more insane than not, but she takes her place at the lip of the pit.

This time, there are no crystals at the bottom, just a smooth white stone, lit only by Pieter’s lamp, as he sweeps his head around the area, and the single headlamp of the caver bracing the other side of the rope.

So she breathes out, deep, and lets herself drop off the edge.

Instead of a fall, instead of a sheer drop, it’s slow, and she gets her legs up to the wall, bracing herself.

And...somewhere in the climb down, so subtle she doesn’t notice at first, but the buzzing stops, and it’s deafening in its absence the moment her feet hit the ground below. As she sheds the harness, she glances over at Pieter, whose sweep of the small antechamber is precise, obviously studying something not visible to human eyes.

In terms of sleeping area, Nathan is right. The stone is smooth, worn down by hundreds of footsteps, and the edges of the room are curved into the walls, like a carefully crafted bowl.

Along one side of the room is a stark black featureless stone, unnaturally smooth, not matching of any of the stone they’ve seen so far, and it doesn’t take much guessing to figure out that it’s the seal they’ve been talking about.

To her eye, it looks otherwise unremarkable, and her instincts don’t pick up anything else, but the way that Pieter’s gaze skitters off of it gives her more information than he probably thinks it does.

“What does it look like?” She asks, drawing close to him, trying to see what he sees.

He gives her a startled look, like he hadn’t quite expected her to be down there so quickly, before he smooths his expression down. “Like someone spent a lot of energy making this room,” he says, voice rough. “Like someone spent years crafting all this for a seal.”

“They didn’t want it to get out?” She asks, looking through the room, the otherwise ordinary room.

“Or didn’t want us getting in,” he points out, which feels somehow more pessimistic. “Didn’t want the wrong people to get access, didn’t want the power inside to be abused.”

She studies him, and he gives her a significant glance, one that seems to communicate way more than she would ever want to.

But he breaks the eye contact before she does, with a sigh that deepens the lines on his face. “Or wanted to make it fucking inconvenient,” he says, running his hand through his black curls. “Wanted to make it so inconvenient that only the insane would try.” Hand still in his hair, he looks around again, his eyes drawing lines that Katya can’t see.

“Will you be able to rest down here?” She asks, surprising herself with the question.

Without even looking at her, he shrugs, the deep despairing shrug of someone long used to a lack of sleep. “Who even knows.”

6

It’s another meal of MRE-like protein bars, and Katya barely has time to unroll her meager little backpacking pad before she feels crushed into sleep, her exhaustion steamrolling over her with a power that takes her breath away.

* * *

The next timeshe wakes up, there are low voices talking, and the telltale light of headlamps bobbing around. Her eyes don’t burn with her tentative blinks, and when she sits up, her arm gives her a much more meager stab of pain than the night before.

In the corner of the room, off to one side, Feketer sits with two of the human tour guides, Nathan, and the small woman who seems to scout ahead of everyone – Charlotte, if Katya is remembering her name correctly- talking in low, quiet tones, and despite the small nature of the room, she can’t hear them easily.

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