Book 2 The Gods of Light and Liars

Chapter Five: The Beast

It took Hawk a minute to spot what Em had seen. A rippling movement in the warm off-white crystals behind them, small, slight, sneaky. Its refractions were visible a bare second when Hawk turned, and then vanished. Which told her something (or someone) was not only watching her and Em, it was listening.

"Don't move," Hawk whispered.

"You're assuming it can't hear us." Em also whispered.

"I know. It's a big assumption. But I'm pretty sure the military can't hear us either." She gave her friend a definite look.

"Oh. Oh!" They said. "Are you going to sneak off?"

"May...y...yes I am." Hawk said, all her hesitation evaporating as she spotted Kaiser gingerly making his way down the rope ladder. "I am not going to spend however long it takes to drill through this thing smiling up in that man's face."

"So you'll leave me to do it?" Em said, harshly...and then grinned. "Sorry, babe. You're just so fun to fuck with. I'm happy to stand here and smile in the fucker's face. Go see what kind of alien nasty we're dealing with and I'll keep them from realizing you're gone until it's too late."

"Well, when you put it like that." Hawk muttered, and did indeed begin making her way to the hole. It actually took a bit of a jump to reach the opening from where she'd put her plastic sheet. She had to brace one hand on an outcropping that seemed coated with sugar...tiny crystals that each dug into her palm like a needle. She left a palmprint of blood on that ledge, with a second one on the crystals she gripped to swing into the opening.

It was very well hidden for a natural outcropping. The soft, cream-colored spires of crystal continued for perhaps ten feet, before giving way to a more pedestrian gray stone. Hawk stepped (and bled) onto this with some appreciation. Something she could step on that wouldn't cut her. What an excellent thing.

She knelt, searching through her pockets for something she could wind over the bleeding palm...but she'd left all her first aid supplies in the kit. Damn it. Well, she could go ahead without. Most of the shallow cuts were sealing off, anyway. She was alright to go forward.

Slow steps, gritty on the unfinished, seemingly natural stone. How long had this structure been here? In its own time, not the fast flare they saw on the other side of the Rift. There, geological time moved fast as water. Here...who knew? Step by step into this tunnel. It felt damp, she realized. As if it were taking her somewhere humid.

It was, she realized. Well, maybe not the humid part, but it was taking her somewhere, and it wasn't going to be anything she'd recognized. If there was life, it had adapted to the sort of universe that could produce Glass ashes and energies that sapped organic compounds of life. And she was walking out to face it, not only without any kind of armament whatsoever, but without even a first aid kit.

So maybe she'd go a little bit farther, and then go back.

The hum of the drill was distant, so now she could hear something else: The howling of wind past an unseen opening. And she could smell something heady and sweet with floral botanicals. The prospect of an outside world was getting closer, and now closer...and now her fingers closed, not on rocks, but on the smooth leaves of a great plant. She crept closer, testing each step just in case the ground should prove unstable. She couldn't see the leaves yet, but she could see the opening. Pushing off with her legs, she got a solid grip on the way out of this place. She swung forward, pulling with her upper arms, getting her blood all over the stone, because of course she was. In fact, half the wounds on her palm reopened from this effort. But she'd pulled herself out of a hole, out of a rock seated on another, larger spire of crystal.