The Two Fangs

Chapter 12

The tentative plan to drive the cart another two hundred miles to the England-France dome proved ridiculous. Even discounting the limited range of its battery and the spares rattling in its small bed, it was decades old, it didn't move any faster than a brisk jog, and its motor badly needed greasing. Some joints in its exposed chassis only held together because they had rusted that way.

Moreover, the maps Grid had copied weren't current. They marked rough ground, sunken and flooded passages, and cave-ins, but not all of those. They discovered that when they had to return up a half mile of tunnel upon finding that it unexpectedly dove into a salty pool of unknown depth and breadth. At another point, they had to lift the cart over a cave-in that left just enough room to get it past the damaged ceiling.

"I think this isn't working," Valle said, when the low-battery light began to blink on the console.

"This is the only way," Grid muttered. "Keep an eye on the charging light. We could pass through the edge of a charge field from the subway or something."

She'd said that before, and so far Valle hadn't noticed that light coming on, in all the sixty-some miles they'd gone. The bat reached over from where he lay in the back seat and pressed his palm against the power switch. Grid tried to swat his hand away, but he was braced against the seat firmly enough to resist her. The cart skidded and stopped.

"Come on," Grid complained.

"I'm gonna test the batteries."

Swapping the batteries meant disassembling part of the undercarriage (while seated on the damp floor), which was why they'd been reluctant to try it earlier. Grid stood by glumly, holding onto bolts and caps for Valle as he worked. The effort showed that both spare batteries had about a third of a charge. They connected the cart's computer to her tablet to map out how far that could get them.

Assuming no more obstacles that didn't show on the maps, their three batteries could just barely take them to a tunnel beneath the next dome nearest Osah's. They might be able to walk the rest, if they were up to attempting their rescue then after a long walk and more than a day without food.

"We have to at least find another deeptown," Valle said.

Grid groaned, and then cursed. She stood and shouted wordlessly into the pitch-dark distance. When she was done she sat down and threw her head back, with an unsettling crack from her mechanical neck.

"Then what?" she sighed after a few moments. "Maybe someone can charge us, we get the cart running, it takes us three times as long as we think it will because the map's shit and the deepways are more shit, we get there and find there's no way up, like the way we got down here in the first place, and we have to turn back."

"We could go in aboveground and be spotted immediately."

Grid turned her yellow eyes at him sharply, but huffed and looked down at the cart's floor.

"At the start, I thought it was about fifty-fifty that when I grabbed you, you'd tear me in half then and there. Then it turned out that you're probably the single best person to have with me on this. And everything could've gone to shit a hundred times, but it didn't. Then in half a second, I threw away the only ally we had. And Ding was just a kid."

"He had a gun on me. I don't have any problem with him being dead."

"Well, they did nab the two of you for a reason, even if you didn't turn out as bad as Crucis."

Valle blinked at the sting of that. He got back into the back of the cart and sat opposite her.

"That's fair," he allowed.