Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,92

wasn’t a natural cave. This was carved into the earth. A massive undertaking and marvel of engineering.

She took the tunnel for a modern mine shaft at first, believing the Vietnamese must have worked these mountains before the war and abandoned them when the region went to hell. Then she saw the symbols on the wall. They meant nothing to her, but they spoke of something ancient, something older than a mine shaft.

As the tunnel captured her attention she forgot about Weston and his intentions. She focused on the walls. The smooth surface sparkled with blue and green light. Quartz, she thought, reflecting the light ahead.

Weston stopped, and she ran into him. The tickle of his hairy back on her face snapped her to reality and sent a twist of nausea through her core.

He turned to her. “Sit.”

She complied. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she ran, but with King’s fate uncertain and the rest of the Chess Team missing, she didn’t want to press her luck.

Not yet.

Weston moved to the tunnel wall and pushed. A slab of stone slid in and then to the side. A five-foot-tall, three-foot-wide hole opened up. Weston stepped inside and disappeared into the dark.

When he didn’t immediately return, Sara considered escape. But where could she go? Back the way they came wasn’t an option. She would run into a village of Neanderthals. Or break her leg in the darkness. And forward . . . who knew what awaited her there? Maybe something worse? She bit her lip in frustration. King would go, she thought. Think like Delta. It would be better to go out trying—fighting—than to not try at all.

It wasn’t exactly an official motto, but she could picture any member of the Chess Team saying the words. It was enough to spur her into action. Sara pushed to her feet and ran toward the light. She willed her feet to take shorter, faster strides. A sense of freedom filled her muscles and she covered the distance in twenty seconds. Just feet from the tunnel exit, she found herself squinting from the brightness of the shimmering aqua light.

Then she was free of the tunnel, facing the horrific reality of her situation.

Weston calmly walked up next to her and stopped. He had a knife in his hand and a gun holstered on his hip. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Without another word he grabbed her wrist firmly and yanked her toward him so their faces were only inches apart. Only Sara’s bound hands on his chest kept them that way.

Weston grinned and glanced down. The tip of the knife poked her belly, threatening to slice through shirt and flesh all at once. Then, with a quick jerk, Weston lashed out with the knife.

A sickening tear sounded out as Sara screamed.

FORTY-THREE

KNIGHT CONTINUED THROUGH the tunnel, his path dimly lit by the glowing bandanna laden with the phosphorescent algae. Despite his instincts telling him to turn back, that traveling deeper into the mountain was a bad idea, he pushed forward, driven by a desire to see where the tunnel led. That, and the tunnel had been blessedly free of savage ape-women. The smooth layer of dust on the floor gave him comfort as well. The tunnel hadn’t been used for some time. Whatever was down here was no use to beasts, and that made it a welcome place for what they no doubt saw as a small Korean snack.

He did his best to tread lightly, hiding his footprints in the dust, but his injured and splinted leg, which clicked and echoed in the tunnel with every footfall, made stealth rather tricky. But he held on to hope. He’d escaped the necropolis without confrontation and, unless this tunnel was a dead end, felt confident he would make it back to the jungle.

When the tunnel leveled out, his hope grew. When a breeze tickled his nose, his hope soared. The clack, clack, clack of his bone splint sped up as he limped forward like a sprinting gimp.

Then the tunnel opened up and he froze.

Another chamber lay before him, but it was nothing like the necropolis. The floor dropped away, six feet down. The ceiling was eight feet above him and the space appeared to be a baseball-diamond-sized square. A staircase carved into the stone floor descended into a maze straight out of Greek mythology. But this wasn’t Greece and there was no Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth. Instead there was a large crystal, taller than Knight, rising out of