Chapter 116: The Dark
Fifteen feet tall. Eight tons of muscle, shell, and bone.
The Tide Turtarex runs.
Not fast, not by my standards—but each of its strides eats thirteen feet of ground while ours eats six.
"CLIFF. GO, GO!"
I slap Oliver on the back as I pass him and push everything I have left into a sprint. The shoulder sends a bolt of pain down into the elbow and I convert the pain into speed.
Behind us the earth shakes. Each step of the Turtarex lands like a mortar hit. Frost jumps off the sand with every impact.
Something on its shoulders starts to hiss.
I risk one glance back.
Lumps of wet biomass are swelling along the ridge of the shell—boils the size of watermelons, each one glowing a sick yellow from inside. The biggest one pulses, contracts, and fires.
A wad of something splits the air over Oliver’s head.
"DOWN!"
Oliver ducks on instinct. The wad sails past his scalp by maybe six inches and hits the stone outcrop to our left.
The rock dissolves.
Three feet of granite go slush in under two seconds. Steam boils off the wound in the rock. The smell hits us a half second later—sulfur and something organic and burning hair all at once.
Acid.
Another hiss. I don’t look back this time. I just yank Rhayne hard by the elbow to the right and the next wad passes through the space where her head was and punches a fist-wide hole in a boulder twenty feet ahead of us.
"ZIGZAG! DON’T RUN STRAIGHT!"
We break formation. Oliver left, girls right, me threading the gap. I keep my eyes on the cliff face ahead. Two hundred feet. One-fifty.
Another wad comes. This one hits the frost ten feet to my right and the white crust goes black, then liquid, then gone. A crater the size of a bathtub opens in the sand.
Behind me the Turtarex’s breathing is audible now—a wet, bellows-like rasp that pulls air through more throats than any animal should have.
One-twenty feet. The cliff face is no longer a silhouette—it’s a wall, textured, pocked with shadows. And in one of the shadows I see a seam. A vertical crack in the rock. Maybe three feet wide at the widest point.
Maybe enough.
"THERE. THE CRACK. GO THROUGH IT!"
Lola hits the gap first. She’s small, she’s fast, she’s through.
Rhayne next, turning sideways to fit her shoulders.
Oliver third—he scrapes his pack hard enough that I hear a strap tear.
I’m last. I dive through the crack sideways.
Behind me the Turtarex arrives. It doesn’t slow. It lowers its head and slams the cliff face at full sprint.
The impact is more like a force than a sound. The stone around us jumps. Dust comes down from the ceiling in a sheet. Lola screams, short and high. I feel cracks open somewhere above us and the world’s volume doubles as a sheet of rock the size of a cart shears off the outside and seals the gap behind us.
Then it all collapses.
Darkness.
Total darkness.
I can hear Oliver’s breathing on my left. Rhayne’s on my right. Lola is somewhere in front of me, hiccupping small fast breaths into the dark.
"Torch. Oliver. Now."
"On it."
I hear him fumbling at his belt. A flint strikes twice. On the third strike the oil-soaked cloth catches and orange light spills into the space around us.
The space is bigger than I expected.
We’re in a vein that runs deep into the rock mountain. Walls dark and slick with something that could be mineral or could be algae. The ceiling is low, maybe seven feet at the peak, sloping down as it goes deeper.
Behind us, the entrance is now a pile of shattered rock and a choking drift of dust that won’t settle. The Turtarex is still on the other side. I can hear its screams through the wall.
Then the impacts start.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Each one shakes dust loose from the ceiling. The bigger chunks are going to come down next. We can’t stay near the seal.
"Move. Deeper. Now."
Oliver takes point with the torch. I put the girls between him and me. Lola has the crystal-frozen bear in one hand and is gripping the back of Oliver’s pack with the other.
"I hate dark places," she says. Her voice is flat. Factual. A statement of policy, not a complaint.
"Noted. We’ll keep the torch close."
"I really hate dark places."
"I heard you the first time, little bear."
She goes quiet.
We move.
Twenty feet in, I stop.
The torch flame in Oliver’s hand is doing something. Not flickering randomly—leaning. Bending slow and steady away from the depth of the tunnel and back toward the collapsed entrance.
Air.
There’s airflow coming from deeper in. A slow steady breath pulling from somewhere behind us to somewhere ahead of us. Caves don’t do that on their own. It’s a cave tunnel.
"There’s another way out."
"You sure?" Oliver’s voice is small in the stone.
"The flame says so. Keep moving."
We go deeper.
The tunnel narrows, then widens again, then narrows. The slick walls get slicker. My boots start to lose traction. I can smell something ahead—not bad, exactly, but thick, like the air gets denser the further we go in, like something is breathing it already and letting us have the leftovers.
Then the sound.
It comes from ahead of us and below. A long, wet, throat-deep chuff. Almost a sigh, rougher in the middle. Gorilla-shaped, but wrong. Stretched out. Fed on something it shouldn’t have been fed on.
Oliver stops walking. The torch stops bending.
"What was that?"
I don’t answer.
Because I’m not sure. And because the ’maybe’ in my head is worse than not knowing.
The chuff comes again. Closer this time. Or the same distance and just louder—hard to tell in stone.
Lola is pressed against Rhayne’s leg. Rhayne’s hand is on her shoulder. Both of them are looking at me.
I make my voice flat. "Weapons out. Quiet steps. No light beyond what the torch needs."
I draw Eventide. We start moving again. Slower now. Every footstep feels like a decision.
I look at the seal behind us one last time. The Turtarex is still hammering it far behind.
Boom. Boom.
The sound is almost comforting compared to what’s waiting in the other direction.
If that sound is what I think it is... We should have tried the turtle.