The Winter Over(40)

But a long minute passed without a sound except her dying laughter. The collapse wasn’t coming. Cass opened her eyes.

Or thought she did. Her eyes were wide open but the darkness in front of her was as total as if she’d kept her lids squeezed shut.

She wriggled her hand free of her mitten and reached to her forehead where her lamp was. Correction , she thought as she felt jagged shards of plastic where the bulb’s housing should be. Had been .

The hard knot of anxiety in her gut yawned wider. Like an idiot, she hadn’t brought a backup flashlight, instead relying only on her headlamp. No flare, no acetylene torch—she would’ve had those if she’d dragged the tool sled along. She had a miniature magnesium flint and striker fire-starter attached to a keychain almost as a joke, but was she willing to risk a fire, even a small one, in a tunnel filled with desiccated wooden timbers that had been sitting in an ultra-arid environment for more than half a century?

Hell, no . The only thing worse than being squashed by a collapsing roof would be finding herself trapped in a raging tunnel fire she herself had started, drowning in the resulting ice melt, then having the ceiling collapse in on her.

A shudder went through her. The safest thing—the only thing—she could do was to walk the tunnel in the dark.

While her hand was still out of her mitten, Cass passed her hand around her mask and hood to check the damage. She’d been lucky. None of the tiny fléchettes had done much except prick the skin. She pulled the largest splinters out, then put her mitten back on and got to her feet painfully, ready to set off into the complete darkness.

It was disorienting. Thinking carefully, she replayed her fall, the bursting timber, hitting the ground. Obviously, she’d been walking toward the base. If she’d hit the ground in one motion, her head should still be pointing the right way. It seemed unlikely she’d spun in a circle before falling. Unless she’d sprawled sideways across the tunnel?

Then she cursed, wondering if she’d hit her head on top of it all. Come on, Cass . What was the one ever-present structure in the tunnel, the reason she was down here in the first place? The sewage pipe. And it consistently ran along just one side of the tunnel. Which meant all she had to do to get back was reach out, find the pipe, and keep it on her left. Assuming she didn’t smash her arm into another timber support and kill herself this time.

Cautious in the extreme, she sent her left hand out on a scouting expedition at about thirty degrees up and out from her shoulder, sliding her mitten up the ice at a slow, measured pace until her hand bumped into the cushy insulation that wrapped every inch of the sewage pipe. She cupped her hand around the underside of the conduit; then, moving forward with short, wary strides, she let the pipe guide her forward.

As step followed step, however, she struggled to keep herself grounded and calm. In the complete absence of light, she had nothing to indicate her progress, which fostered the disturbing sensation that she was endlessly repeating herself. Cass found herself taking longer and longer steps, wanting nothing more than to get back to the cheap plywood door that meant she’d made it at least halfway home. But she forced herself to slow down and stick to the shallow stride that would keep her safe.

Counting helped. Picturing the schematic in her head and factoring in what she knew about her own stride, she did some rough calculations. Safety was still many paces away, but any problem could be quantified and, if it could be measured, overcome.

A memory hit her then, hard and visceral, so real that she gasped, fighting to keep her balance. This wasn’t the first time she’d counted off steps or followed a schematic. Measuring, assessing, noting. It had been a tunnel then, too. It was amazing she hadn’t seen the similarity sooner.

Maybe it was understandable. She’d had a hard hat on then, and jeans, not a parka and mittens. And she hadn’t been in a squat, claustrophobic wormhole, but in an arched, rounded cavern so colossal that it resembled a cathedral more than the transit tunnel it actually was. She hadn’t been frightened and alone; she’d been surrounded by welders and drillers and engineers working round-the-clock shifts. The city had been pushing for completion—constant pressure rained down from the mayor’s office, it was an election year, transportation was that season’s cause célèbre. Sparks flew at one end of a run while her team took measurements at the other.

Tight lips and flattened mouths spoke of mute disapproval, but no one had the brass to stop the process. They were a tight, professional group—a rarity in city government—and they prided themselves on never being the bottleneck in a project, doing their work on time and under budget. The unrelenting pressure had given all of them a fever, though, and they’d scrambled over pipes and scribbled in their notebooks at a pace they’d never allowed before. They made the numbers work, and when they didn’t work, they made them right. Boxes were checked, lines were signed, and assurances given. There’d been much patting on backs and handshakes all around, until five months later when those same hands were being wrung in agony or covering their faces in horror.

A noise somewhere ahead brought both her feet and her memory to a halt. A clacking noise, followed by a thump, but having heard it through three layers of clothing, she couldn’t be sure. The only sound she’d been hearing for long minutes had been her own breathing and the silvery whisper of her mitten’s synthetic fabric against the slick insulation.