Page 102 of Never Enough

“Copy that,” came from TB.

“Cerberus, be prepared to make things go boom.”

“Waters…”

“I hear you, Nemo.”

“This is not going to go well,” he muttered under his breath.

When he caught up with her, she was already dragging her finger along three lines in the stratum that were running parallel to each other. “These are the veins,” she said, speaking to Waters over the comms. “Diamonds on the bottom. Taaffeite in the middle. Tanzanite on the top.” She followed the veins to a dead end. “They’ve stopped drilling here.” She frowned. “I don’t understand why.”

“Gem, Nemo, I’ve lost video feed,” Midas warned. “Something’s interfering with my systems. You need to fucking hurry and get out of there.”

She glanced around the tunnel floor. Someone had left a pick behind. She grabbed it and began hacking at the wall. Nemo found another and began to hack about six inches to her right. Unspoken, they worked together to remove a piece of the wall as a physical example containing both veins together.

Gem let loose one last mighty hack at the wall, dislodging the rectangle of material they had been working on. She threw the pick to the floor, stuffed the sample into the pouch at her waist, and followed Nemo at a breakneck pace back through the tunnel.

When they reached the main chamber, Nemo unhooked the chain they’d used to swing across the chasm, then grabbed her. “We don’t have time to go single. Hang on, tiny.”

She threw her arms around his neck, then wrapped her legs around his waist. Throwing all of their weight into it, Nemo swung them on the chain back across the canyon. With the weight of their combined momentum, it only took two tries to get them across, and that was only because Nemo didn’t want to take any chances that he’d crush Gem when he let go. Oncethey landed, they didn’t stop to worry about the chain but ran hell-bent for their climbing gear.

“Nemo!” Gem whisper-yelled. “What about the other tunnel? We need to know!”

Nemo looked at his watch. “No! We’ve got fifteen minutes, kitty cat. We need to get back up those ropes.”

She flipped him off and took off down the other tunnel.

“Dammit! Somebody needs to put a leash on her,” he muttered to himself.

He followed Gem to the corridor’s edge. He watched her sneak a quick peek inside. Whatever was going on was so far down the tunnel she couldn’t see from the entrance. When he caught up to her, all they could see was a curve in the tunnel about a hundred yards down and bright light coming from around that curve.

“What the hell are you two doing?” Waters asked. “I told you to get your shit and get out, not play Sherlock Holmes.”

“Remind me of this conversation the next time Kubrick wants to do something you don’t want her to do,” Nemo sniped.

“Her wanting to jump out of a helicopter is not the same thing,” Waters argued back.

“So you’re saying I should have let Gem go on her own?”

“Boys! Not the time for this argument. We’ve got plenty of time, Waters,” Gem insisted. “I just want to see what’s going on in here that has them ignoring the vein they had been working so hard on and is clearly still producing stones.”

“Nemo, finish up, grab her ass, and get out.”

There was a harumph on the line from Demon. “Should be easy for him. That’s his M.O.”

Nemo rolled his eyes. “Really, dude? You’re going to bring that up now?”

“If the condom fits.”

Gem glared at Nemo. “Both of you, shut up.” She waved Nemo to follow her.

Moving quickly and stealthily, Gem and Nemo went down the corridor. As they got closer and closer to the curve, the noise got louder. There were shouts of men—what sounded like orders of an unfriendly sort. They even heard whip cracks, and there were some moans and crying.

“What the hell is going on down here?” Nemo wondered.

“I’m afraid to look, but we’ve got to.”

When they reached the end of the curve, there were two hallways of earth. The one on the left was dark. The one on the right took a sharp turn back up into the direction they’d come from.

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