“If we get out of here—if we get out of here, I… I need your help with something else.Someoneelse. My brother. He?—”
He held up a hand. “Don’t worry. I know where he is.”
I gaped. “You do?How?”
He shrugged. “Same reason I know everything else I know. I find out.”
“Where is he?” I asked in the smallest voice I could muster.
“He—”
“No,” I blurted out. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to know. Not yet. I’m barely keeping my anxiety in check long enough to dothis.”
“Fine,” he said with a half-smile. “One at a time, right?”
I tried to give him a half-smile back. “One at a time.”
He nodded and turned. The implication was,this isn’t goodbye. I didn’t believe him, but even if it was, I’d come to understand that goodbyes weren’t always the end.
Max started down one of the paths leading up to one of the terraces. I watched until his light disappeared, then took a deep breath and started down another narrow path angled downward, trying to catalog every marker I saw. The first marker had about 90 percent pyrite veins. The next one had about 80 percent. If I kept following, maybe I could find my way back, at least… but these things were twenty years old. How much could I really trust them?
Meanwhile, the disconcertingly cool air carried the scent of copper, earth, blood, greed, and of the lives lost to all of them. It was hard not to sense a lingering presence here. Somethingworsethan thugs with high-powered rifles aimed directly at my hippocampus. Something that seemed to stain the very molecules I breathed in and out and make the shadows cling to me so tightly I couldn’t shake them.
I didn’t believe in ghosts, though—well, no, that was a lie. I absolutely did.
I was still shivering, but a drop of sweat trickled from my brow, stinging my eye, blurring my vision. I blinked it away, wishing the temperature would make up its mind. Not to mention, I should have set a timer on my phone. How was I supposed to keep track of when to turn back, and—well, shit. I was failing at this spectacularly already, and I wasn’t even dead yet.
I won’t die and neither will he, nor you.
Really? I was relying on Max, someone I’d only definitively decided wasn’t evil a couple of days ago, to ensure that?
Not like I had a choice.
A glint of metal caught my eye. A rusted cart, its wheels locked eternally. Beside it, a pickaxe, handle splintered, head tarnished. I ran a finger along the edge. Had some slave once picked up this thing and turned it on their overseers? Made arun for it only to die because, as had been repeatedly impressed upon me, none of themevermade it out of the mines alive?
A crossroads veered downward, below a rise. I hesitated, then chose the left route, where the air grew heavier, striving to pay attention to how the wind and the markers changed. Up here, though, half of them appeared to have been kicked or blown aside. Even more troublingly, the light seemed to be dimming. My mind was working overtime now, spinning scenarios straight out of a campy horror flick. Discarded corpses, husks of souls? Faceless, undead monsters, flesh rotting and peeling, out for revenge?It was your fault too,they’d screech, dragging me off to hell, and they’d be right.
In the face ofthat,a bullet to the head sounded downright charitable.
Besides, as grim as all my cartoonish, imaginary horrors were, chances are whatever real threat Resi had dreamed up was even worse. And thatdefinitelymade me feel better.
A sudden clatter and a rush of air, and I whirled around, heart pounding.
Nothing.
Trying to distract myself, I swept my flashlight along the rough-hewn walls, tracing faded markings. Symbols of warning, of depth, of danger. A couple of blue copper agates caught my eye, arranged in a carved-out section of the wall. On the other side, a red deposit. An arrow, maybe, if I squinted. Warning or direction? And to what?
A flicker of movement drew my gaze upward. Something swooped down from a far-up perch, screeching. I flinched back with a gasp, nearly dropping my gun, my weak, sweat-slicked fingers fumbling buffoonishly on the trigger. As my heart raced, another dark shape emerged, then another, tiny little black missiles seemingly aiming at my head.
Bats. Harmless bats.
I stumbled on farther, heart hammering against my ribs. A sharp stone jabbed into my palm as I caught myself on the wall, but I barely noticed the sting. I had to keep moving, to remember the dizzying array of ores and deposits and arrows and indicators, of everything that might mean something. My eyes darted frantically around the bifurcated passage I’d landed in—not so much a tunnel, more of a ledge shooting off in two different directions.Choose,the ghosts whispered.
From the left passage, a sudden rush of cool air clawed at me, and I crept forward onto the narrow ledge, the echoes of the bats’ screeching still ringing in my ears.
And when it finally stopped, I heard footsteps. Not ghosts. Real, human footsteps.Realdanger.
I couldn’t turn back, so I had to choose.
