Page 66 of Spelunking Through Hell

“I know,” I said. “But like I said, I have faith in you.” I closed my eyes, exhaling, allowing myself to relax into the bed. It was a decent enough bed. Not up to the standards I was used to back on Earth, but for something scavenged in a desolate hell world, it was pretty good.

Slowly, as if he was afraid of somehow overstepping, Thomas tightened his arms around me and pulled me closer, until my forehead was pressed lightly to his chest, and I could hear the long-missed familiar rhythm of his heartbeat. Tangled up and keeping close, I sighed, and pulled myself closer still.

It had been a long, hard day for both of us—a long, hard decade, really—and it was no surprise when we fell asleep, not letting go.

“Boss?” The voice was Sally’s, breaking through my fuzzy, somewhat disoriented dreams like an ice pick and shocking me back into wakefulness at the same time as I heard the door slam open. She sounded alarmed.

That wasn’t a good sign. I pushed myself away from Thomas, distantly relieved that this time he’d still been there when it had been time for me to wake up, and shoved myself into a sitting position, already fully awake as I turned to face her.

“Knock,” I recommended in a cold voice. Then: “What is it?”

She wasn’t bleeding and had no new visible injuries. Her eyes werea little wild, and her spear was wet with what looked more like maple syrup than blood, but apart from that, she could have just been waking us up to prove that she could.

“They’re in,” she said, sagging and leaning against the spear for support. She was panting. The sudden urge to get her a cookie and a place to sit was almost overwhelming. “All of them. They’re in.”

Thomas was sitting up, blearier than I was, but still waking quickly enough that we probably wouldn’t be dead if Sally had been something dangerous. “It’s done?”

“All of them who were willing to come,” she said. “The O’Vera and another contingent of Haspers attacked while we were still getting the last of our people inside. We lost over a dozen men. Our attackers lost a hell of a lot more. They’re hungry, and dehydrated, and so tired it’s almost criminal. I’m surprised they were able to march on us in the first place.”

As I had almost expected, a look of brief, biting guilt flashed across Thomas’ face. He wasn’t responsible for the death of this world, but he had still hastened its decay on some level by siphoning away the pneuma attached to the new arrivals, keeping it from dissolving normally and entering the atmosphere. Without him, this place might have had a few more years. Of course, the people here had spent all the years up until now preying on each other, and without him, there would have been no haven for the people who weren’t interested in violence and rapine, but there was no way to know.

There was no way to know any of this. I elbowed him lightly. “Hey. You offered them safety. They chose to stay outside and keep attacking each other. That’s not on you.”

“Listen to the lady who hauled you off for naptime when we needed you,” said Sally. “This isn’t your fault. Hey, lady.”

“Alice,” I said mildly. “The name is Alice.”

“So you keep saying. These friends of yours. When are they supposed to show up?”

I wasn’t really interested in having this conversation again. “Whenever they do,” I said. “I can’t exactly call them and ask where they are. Presumably, they’re somewhere between here and Ithaca. I don’t think we can wait for them.”

“So we’re fucked, is what you’re telling me,” said Sally, straightening. “You came here to get everybody’s hopes up, and now we’re all going to die even faster than we were before. I’m sorry, boss, it doesn’t matter how much she looks or talks or acts—or fucks—like your deadwife, she’s not her, and she never was. She’s a trap laid by the crossroads. And we both fell into it.”

Thisagain? I stared at her before turning, slowly, to look at Thomas. He was watching me, visibly worried.

“You can’t think she’s serious,” I said. “You have to be smarter than that. Come on, honey, you know me. You know there’s no chance the crossroads could mimic me well enough to fool you for more than a minute once we were both awake and actually talking to each other.”

“I know Mary was there almost as soon as Alice Healy was born, arms out, ready to take her charge,” he said slowly. “I know there’s never been a living person the crossroads knew better than they knew my wife. I know that if they wanted to, they could make her in perfect replica, craft or steal a body, change it to suit whatever they needed it to be... maybe even shove poor Mary’s ghost inside. Torture us both at the same time to punish her for keeping me out of their clutches as long as she did.” Then he looked to Sally. “But I also know that if they were laying a trap to convince me, they wouldn’t have had her come here and tell me she’d been gettingflensed aliveby someone she trusted for fifty years in order to stay in one piece long enough to get to me. They would have found something less immediately alarming to explain her presence. Something less likely to cause me to lose my temper.”

I sagged in sudden relief, and only Sally’s presence kept me from grabbing and kissing him like it was going to be the last time. Instead, I turned to her and said, coolly, “Believe me or not, but I am who I say I am, I’m not going anywhere, and we’re all getting out of here.”

“Without your friends.”

Thomas slid off the bed and stood. “There may be a way,” he said. “Alice has been traveling through dimensions via artificial means, causing even more disruption to the dimensional membrane, and hence the pneuma, than the norm. When she told me how she’d been rejuvenating herself for all this time, she caused me to actually assess the levels clinging to her skin. She’s been having it removed regularly, but even with only this trip to fuel her, she had to cross dozens of barriers to get here. She currently has enough pneuma on her for ten people. I’ve long suspected that the crossroads metered out the arrivals of our newcomers to keep them from revitalizing the world sufficiently to make it a pleasant place to live. They’ve never allowed us this much at one time.”

“So, what—you think you can scrape it off her and use it to open a door?”

“I think the word ‘open’ might be overly generous in that sentence, as opening something implies it can be closed again,” he said. He looked at me, lips pressed into a thin line. “This will hurt. Not as much as your customary means of removal, since you’ll keep your skin, but quite a bit all the same. And I’ve never moved this much pneuma at one time. There could be unexpected side effects.”

“You have my full consent to pull my pin and chuck me like a grenade at the wall of the universe so that we can all blast our way the fuck out of here,” I said cheerfully, sliding to my feet. “I can take a little pain, and it’s not like I can use all this pneuma for anything.” And it wasn’t like he was going to let me carry it back to Naga the way I’d been doing.

And it wasn’t like I particularly wanted to, either. I’d always gone running obediently back before this, but Thomas’ horror over the idea of me being skinned was enough to make me wonder if the little telepathic helpers who’d always been there to ease the post-treatment pain might not have been flipping a few switches while they were inside my head, keeping me from getting as alarmed as I really should have been. It would be so easy for a Johrlac to implant a few subconscious impulses and commands. It was already clear that they’d been messing with my memory, enough to remove important pieces of information about the way the whole system worked, all without leaving holes for me to recognize and investigate.

I’d have to ask Sarah to check my head when we got home. She didn’t like reading my thoughts—something about the level of single-minded obsession that had driven me through the last five decades being overwhelming, which Antimony said was a polite way of saying, “Your brain is a sack of broken glass, and she’s afraid she’ll cut herself”—but she’d do it if I asked her to. Better to know.

Thomas sighed. “I know you have a pain tolerance worthy of dedicated scholarship,” he said. “I just wish you hadn’t needed it, and I have no desire to be the one to hurt you.”

Sally rolled her eyes like any teenager confronted with the thought that her father was attracted to someone, and I was reminded that while right now, she might look a few years older than me, she was actually the age she seemed: she was so terribly young, barely out of childhood when the crossroads took her. They always did appreciate an opportunity to prey on the young.

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