Providence - Max Barry Page 0,103

of him if they’d stayed back and done that earlier.

He unstrapped the converter. This wasn’t the cul-de-sac he’d been hoping for, but it was a lull, and he needed juice. Before he could set it to work, though, he caught a hint of movement in the tunnel behind him. Not a salamander: There was something funny about the wall. He’d passed it by without noticing, but now that the place was helpfully illuminated by flame, he could make out a dripping, like the rock was some kind of slow, gelatinous waterfall. He re-slung the converter and approached. It didn’t look like much besides a wall of goo, but he was interested in anything that might get him out of this tunnel, so he poked it. His hand went through.

He moved forward. The goo admitted him. Resin covered his suit and helmet. He felt his arm emerge into air on the other side, so he forged ahead and wiped the faceplate and saw his little white spirit guide flitting around a cavernous space.

From the floor rose a gigantic slab of smooth resin. Beside it stood another, and more, side by side in neat rows. They rose fifty feet high and were longer still, running off into the dark, farther than his spirit guide would travel. To put some distance between him and anything that might follow through the waterfall of goo, he moved into the aisle between two slabs. The sides that faced each other were divided into hundreds of compartments only a few feet across, like honeycomb. Inside each compartment was a sac made of something soft and white.

He peered at the nearest. Its surface was translucent. Beneath that, something dark and indistinct. He had a feeling he knew what it was, and it was the reason the soldiers had been reluctant to huk him until he’d passed this area by. He poked the sac with the end of the lightning gun. The dark form twitched. He pushed the barrel in farther, until the sac popped and gushed fluid. A dark, twisting shape flopped from the compartment onto the ground. He watched it in the white light. It was long, glistening orange and black, with curving pincers at each end and a segmented body. Six stubby legs. A tiny head, a mouth surrounded by pincers and wet waving hairs. Even in this form, he could recognize the salamander it would one day become. It swung toward him and made a high, thin sound: hik.

He glanced around, in case there was a mama bear. But his spirit guide found no movement in the dark.

He left it. If he could, he would deal with it later. The slab continued another two hundred feet, but it wasn’t taking him toward Gilly; he was going sideways. He saw a honeycomb compartment with no bulging sac and stopped to examine it. It was rough-hewn and empty except for a few dry white fragments. As he continued, he encountered more of these empty chambers. From ahead, wet noises.

At the end of the slabs lay a dark pool of thin brownish fluid. Around it crawled dozens of salamander larvae. There were two adults, workers, he assumed, although they were large, and their backs were grotesquely distorted, bulging with weeping blisters or cysts. He watched the larvae’s pincers grip and pull the blisters’ flesh, their round mouths press to the hole and suck.

In the pool, a faint shape bobbed to the surface. Brown fluid drained from it. A sac. A worker emerged from the gloom and stepped almost daintily into the pool to retrieve it. Using its middle legs, it pressed the sac to its belly, retreated clumsily from the pool, and made for the slabs.

All right, he thought. All right.

He dropped the converter to the floor. He turned in a circle, sweeping the rock with the little light. If there were any secret tunnels, he couldn’t see them. The chamber seemed fully enclosed. He turned back to the nearest nurse. The correct move here was probably to leave as many of them alive as he could, as a waystation for the return journey. But he couldn’t allow this place to survive. He slotted the corroded butt of the lightning gun into his shoulder and began to wash the place clean.

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