The Stars Are Legion(53)

“I agree there are different levels,” Casamir says.

“How diplomatic,” I say.

Casamir covers her mouth with her hand, failing to hide a smirk.

“I’m an experiment, then?” I say. “Let me tell you something, Casamir. I’m tired of being somebody’s experiment.”

“Sorry,” Casamir says. “It isn’t like that, though. I can’t become an engineer without going on this journey. Every engineer has to go up a level, has to explore. I’m tired of the pits. They always get tired of me talking and send me to the pits. Can’t be an engineer unless you fight for it.”

“How do you prove you got to another level?”

“I have to bring something back,” she says. “There’s . . .” She unrolls the map from her pack and spreads it out in the light of the torch. “There’s a gateway, here,” she says, pointing.

“Where are we?”

“Almost there,” she says. “Another hundred thousand steps, maybe. Five sleeping periods, give or take.”

“You say there were mutant hordes.”

“Oh, that. Yes,” she says. She rolls the map up again. “We may encounter them in the next twenty or thirty thousand steps. We’ll need to keep a lookout.”

“Did you bring weapons?”

“I have my knife,” she says. I’ve seen her knife: a sharpened tibia.

“Are they dangerous, the mutants?”

“Sometimes,” she says. “Mostly, they keep back from the light. We just need to stick close when we’re walking the next few periods. It shouldn’t be too bad.”

But she isn’t looking at me when she says it.

I don’t sleep well. I toss and turn at every sound. The spaces here are so vast that we cannot huddle against the walls, so we sleep at the foot of the bone mountains, and the bones creak and clatter as small animals and insects scurry around inside of them. I wake twice with black, palm-sized insects sitting on my chest, and I bat them away and stab them with the tibia that I’m using as a walking stick.

When Casamir shakes me to get me up, I’m already awake, exhausted and irritable.

I follow Casamir’s bobbing light as we come to the end of the bone mountains. She raises it as high as she can, and I see mounds of fleshy protuberances, some two stories high, riddled with a patchwork of holes and burrows big as my head.

I don’t have to ask what lives in there, because I can see the shiny glint of their six eyes reflected back at us from the burrows. Whatever they are, they do not like the light.

Casamir smiles back at me nervously. “Onward, and all that,” she says.

We move cautiously across the pitted ground. It’s as if something has eaten away at the floor. I’m reminded of what Casamir had told us closer to the city, about how the walls and floors were permeable outside of the light.

There’s skittering along the edges of our pool of light, and Casamir freezes.

I come up behind Casamir. Das Muni bumps into me. She grabs at the back of my suit.

“Keep going,” I say.

“I just . . . maybe . . . ,” Casamir says.

I step ahead of her, to the edge of the circle of light. “There’s no option where I go back,” I say. I think of Jayd and all I haven’t yet told Casamir, or Das Muni. “There’s a whole world at stake up there.”

“Not my world,” Casamir says.

“Your world,” I say. “Come on.”

Casamir inches forward. She moves the torch to her other hand and drops it. She says something in her language, probably swearing, and runs after the torch as it rolls away toward a depression in the floor.

I scramble after it as well. I lunge, too late, as it rolls into the hole, plunging us into darkness.

A hooting sound comes from all around us. One voice and then others.

I reach into the hole. My fingers brush the end of the torch, but I’m too big to get any farther.

“Cas,” I say.

She’s next to me, burrowing her head inside. “My arms aren’t long enough!” she says.

“Let me,” Das Muni says softly.

The skittering sounds grow closer. I feel the hush of breath against my ankles and kick out but don’t make contact with anything.

Das Muni presses herself next to me. She crawls down after the torch. I keep hold of her legs, fearful about some creature pulling her down.

“Ouch!” Casamir says. “Something bit me!”

The hooting is a storm now; it reverberates. I want to cover my ears.

“I have it!” Das Muni says. “I have it.” I pull her back up. She raises the globe, and I see that her eyes are broad and bright and there is something like triumph on her face. But as she turns and looks behind me, the expression turns to fear.

Casamir is tangled in crystalline webbing swarming with bulbous, multi-segmented beasts. They each have a dozen legs that look like long, clawed fingers lined in black hair. Their faces are fanged, lined in six eyes and hundreds of little feathery antennae.

I pull up my walking stick and swing at the webbing. “Bring the light!” I tell Das Muni, but she is frozen in shock, mouth agape.

I plunge ahead, striking at the creatures. They burst when my stick makes contact, splattering yellow guts across my face. I try to pull the webbing off Casamir. The insects turn their attention to me. I feel their feathered antennae brush my ankles.