The Anomaly(78)

“What about them?”

“Little extra nick at the end? Maybe it wasn’t the start of another letter. Maybe it was an apostrophe.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe instead of a name, whoever put them there was trying to write ‘DON’T’—as in ‘Don’t screw around with the pool down this corridor, because it will fuck you up.’”

“Don’t care about any of this,” Molly said. “I need to drink.”

“Do we have anything made of glass?”

“Why?”

“It’s the least reactive thing in water.”

Molly dug in her backpack. “No,” she said, though she kept digging. “Oh.” She held up a small glass pot. “There’s this.”

It was her empty lip balm container. “Got a tissue?”

She found one and handed it to me. I used this to wipe the residual balm out of the jar. She rooted around in the bag again, and came up with some tweezers.

“Would this help keep your fingers out of the water?”

“Not only that.” I got out my cigarette lighter. When the jar was as clean as I could get it, I held it with the tweezers and sparked up a flame. I played it methodically over the inside and outside of the little pot, producing a not-unpleasant smell from a burned smear of balm. It made me realize how long it had been since I’d smelled anything but cold rock and endless dust. Something sweet, and warm.

“It’s not perfect,” I said.

“Close enough,” Ken muttered. “Get on with it. I don’t want anything coming up behind while we’re trapped here.”

“Wait,” Pierre said.

He was standing at the end of the ledge overhanging the pool. He had the camera on his shoulder and the strong, hard, white light above its lens was directed straight across the space in front of us, revealing for the first time that this pool room was significantly larger than the other one. Much wider, and higher, and far, far longer.

“Fuck’s sake,” Ken said.

He sounded more exhausted and defeated than I’d ever heard him sound before. Than I’d heard anyone sound, ever. Because not only down the end but along both sides were vast tiered platforms, holding hundreds of metal spheres, thousands of them—all of them far larger than the ones we’d seen before—stretching back, rank after rank, into the darkness.

While I was staring at these I heard a little splash, and looked down to see that the lip balm pot had slipped out of the tweezers, and was now sinking to the bottom of the pool.





Chapter

46



We stood looking out over the water until Pierre turned off the light, and then sat and stared into blackness. Nobody gave me a hard time about dropping the pot.

Ken and I shared a cigarette. There were only two left now. Just after I stubbed it out, a long, howling growl echoed down the corridor. It didn’t sound like a wolf. I don’t know what it sounded like. The kind of thing people heard a very, very long time ago, prowling outside their cave in the night. The kind of thing that made people afraid of the dark. It didn’t seem like whatever made the sound was close. That yielded little reassurance. We had nowhere to go. It would find us sooner or later.

Pierre turned the camera light back on and directed it up the corridor. For the first time I noticed that there was a flat and polished section on the wall there. In the middle was a single large pictogram. It looked familiar—the one with the short horns—and I knew where I’d seen it: on the console rock in the other pool room. The light went past it and found Ken, and I saw he was looking thoughtful.

“What’s on your mind?”

“What did Feather say? Before she left.”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again, Nolan. As precisely as you can remember.”

“She said Dylan was dead, or told me again. She said the thing about an arc, which I’m now thinking she meant another way. As discussed. That’s it.”

He shook his head, frustrated. “Something else.”

“There really wasn’t.”

“There was, Nolan. It nipped at me even at the time, but there was other crap going on and I blew past it. Fuck. Think. What was it?”

I closed my eyes. This made me feel lost and nauseous. I half opened them again. I couldn’t recall anything else. I could barely remember the things I’d already mentioned. “There’s nothing else, Ken.”

“Paintings,” Pierre said. “Didn’t she say something about the paintings?”

And then there it was. “Actually, yes. She said they were fifty thousand years old. That’s all.”

“That’s it,” Ken said quietly.

“What?”

“You mean,” Molly said, “how would she know they were that old?”

“No,” Ken said. “Well, yeah. There’s that. But roll back further, Moll. You, me, and Nolan were there in that cavern. We saw the paintings, and then the light died on us before we could get to the end. But what happened when we got back to the main room? Why did we hurry back?”

“Because…shouting,” she said. She was frowning with concentration, like someone in eighth-grade algebra keen to show she was following along. “We were in the fissure on the way back and we heard Gemma shouting.”