skin is already turning bright red in the heat.
I make sure I’m in one cart and Roderick is in the other one. We both sit in the first row behind the pilot’s area so that we can jump into the pilot seat if necessary.
The morning has grown even hotter. Sweat runs down the side of my face and gathers in drops on my chin. The guides have brought bottles of water and salt tablets; apparently the heat is a problem for many of the groups they ferry below.
My cart has the local pilot, me, Mikk, the guide leader, a medic, and Bridge. The rest of the team has found its seats in the other cart.
“Before we go below,” the guide leader says from behind me, his voice amplified by some kind of system I can’t see, “let me tell you how this place was discovered. A cave-in ...”
I tune him out. I know this part of the history. The others watch him as he waves his arms toward the remains of destroyed buildings below us.
The entrance to the caves is black. The opening is wide and arched. The structure itself is curious. What little I’ve seen of Vaycehn architecture shows an affinity for layered construction, bricks placed on top of bricks, sections placed on top of sections.
But the arch seems to be one smooth piece of blackness, shiny in the headlamps of the carts waiting to go in.
“We’ve known for centuries that some of the earliest settlers lived in this part of the Basin,” the guide was saying, “but we never knew exactly where. Not until this latest cave-in showed us an astonishing set of ruins.”
The word “latest” catches my attention. Both Ivy and Bridge glance at me. They caught it too. But we seem to decide as a group not to interrupt the guide—or perhaps they are waiting for me to interrupt him.
The guide has a spiel. I’m going to let him run through it. If I have other questions, I will have Bridge ask them later.
When the guide finishes, the carts rise simultaneously. Our pilot nods at the other pilot, who then goes into the archway first. We follow at a reasonably safe distance, although I do notice that the air—which had smelled faintly of some kind of flower—now smells harsh with a chemical afterburn.
I ask our pilot about raising the cart’s top, but he doesn’t even turn around.
“We’re not going far enough,” he says.
The lights from the other cart reflect against the black wall ahead. That darkness I saw was part of the construction, not a darkness of an unlit area. The cart hovers for a moment, then eases downward as if it’s going into a shaft.
It disappears. The light on the far wall is diminished by half, and I can almost see the materials.
Our pilot eases our cart into the archway, and immediately the air cools. The afterburn smell is gone; here the air is tangy, almost salty, as if there is an ocean nearby.
I don’t have time to reflect on that. I barely have a chance to look at the walls around me before we descend.
The descent is slow. We are going down a shaft. The pilot holds the cart at a steady speed. If it weren’t for the reflections of light on the smooth walls, undulating in a strange wave, I would think we aren’t moving at all.
There’s almost a feeling of weightlessness to this slow descent. I feel a pang. I understand weightlessness. Even though I’m landborn, I’ve spent most of my life in space. The idea of going down a shaft into the dark ground, the weight of an entire city above me, makes my stomach clench.
Finally, we reach the bottom of the shaft. The shaft opens onto a large chamber with the same smooth black walls. Only here there is lighting, and it looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s bluish, recessed into the smooth black wall, and seems to coat everything.
My skin seems paler than it ever has. Paler, with a touch of blue. The light seems almost cool—the opposite of that harsh sun above. I blink and realize that my eyes don’t hurt for the first time since we landed on Wyr.
The carts hover next to each other.
“Normally,” the lead guide says, “we continue forward down various passages, giving the history of this place, but you are in charge here.”
Then he looks at me with such contempt that I start. He waits for a moment, studying me.
Finally he says