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Hanging from the center of the dome was a makeshift chandelier. Three big metal rings sat one inside the other, and dozens of light bulbs hung from them at different heights. At least half of them were burned out. What was left bathed the room in a light somewhere between yellow and orange, like an ongoing sunset.

Six huge cylinders of black metal dominated one side of the room. Each one was fifteen feet high on their round face and maybe twenty long. Heat rippled around them and they flickered like mirages. Roger got a little closer and could see vents. Something reddish-gold was whirling in there, racing around the inside of each cylinder at blurring speeds. They were the source of most of the noise echoing in the chamber.

“Holy shit,” he said over the roar of the machines. “They’re generators.”

Roger saw the bundle of cables they’d followed back and forth for ten miles. The cables split off and ran to—ran
from,
he corrected himself—the different generators. Behind the big machines he could see some huge pipes running down into a ditch. They were as big as air conditioner ducts, and it looked like there were two of them for each of the generators. Nate walked past them and crouched down to look in the ditch. Whatever he saw must’ve been pretty cool because he kept shaking his head and looking at it again.

Xela was standing halfway between Roger and Nate. She was turning around in a slow circle, looking at everything. Her hands were fumbling with her backpack, trying to pull out her camera. It would’ve been quicker to look, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the huge room. Her skin was gold in the yellow-orange light.

Roger tried to picture laying out track for a camera dolly if the big chamber was a film set. The track came in ten-foot sections and he guessed he’d need at least twenty of them to go across the room. Going from the door to the back wall was trickier, across the ditch, but he guessed it would take fifteen pieces of track to run between them.

Not as big as he first thought, but still a big room.

He glanced over at Xela. Her camera was finally out and she pointed it at one thing after another. He waved to get her attention and pointed up at the chandelier.

She looked up and grinned. Her head tipped back. The camera went up. Her stomach went taut and her tits pushed against the green bra.

Roger glanced over at Nate. He was still staring into the ditch. It didn’t look like he’d moved. Roger waved to get Xela’s attention again and pointed at Nate. She glanced between them and called something to Roger. He could hear her voice, but couldn’t understand her over the noise of the generators.

Xela turned and moved next to Nate. She looked down into the ditch. Her camera hung from her hand at her side.

Roger took a few steps toward them. It was enough of a shift to give him a better view of the ditch. It was deeper than he thought, and it looked natural. It was a crack in the ground, and its sides were rough and uneven.

Another few steps and he realized he’d misjudged how wide the crack-ditch was, too. It was at least fifteen or twenty feet across. It was hard to be sure with all the heat ripples in the room. The big chamber was closer to round than he’d calculated. And it looked like the other side was a few feet higher than their side.

Roger noticed one of the tattoos on Xela’s bare shoulder—an elaborate oval filled with hieroglyphs—and glanced down. The far side of the crack was still going down. What he’d thought was a ditch looked to be a canyon in the floor.

Then he was next to her. Xela reached out and grabbed his hand. She had a strong grip for such a slim woman. It made a number of thoughts dance through his head for a moment.

And then he was looking down, down, down, down...

* * *

Nate stared into the abyss. He didn’t know if it stared back, but he was pretty sure it had singed his eyebrows. As it was, he closed his eyes and saw the red after-image of the bright, jagged line he’d seen far below.

“I’m not crazy, right?” he said to them. The words rasped at his overheated throat, but his friends were close enough to hear him. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Holy fuck,” said Roger. “Holy fuck.”

The canyon went down for miles. Nate had climbed to the top of the Hollywood Hills once or twice and looked out ten miles or so to the Pacific. Now he looked straight down at least that far. It was a wound in the Earth, a cut deep enough to draw blood. Not just a swell of red but the bright, pulsing blood that only came with serious injuries. They could all see it shifting and writhing far below, the filament of a hundred-thousand-watt bulb.

The heat rose up at them, an ongoing stream of air that made him squint. It smelled like fire. His eyes watered from it. Out of the corner of his eye he could see it rippling Xela’s hair across her scalp.

“Is this...” She paused to rub her eyes with the heel of her hand. Then she raised her voice to be heard over the rumbling generators. “Is this a volcano or something?”

Nate let his eyes drift up to the edges of the huge crack. “I think it’s a fault line,” he said.

Roger shook his head. “Those are miles underground.”

“We’re
miles underground,” said Nate. “At least a mile, maybe more.”

“Doesn’t make any fucking sense.” Roger shook his head again. “It can’t be a fault line.”

“It’s just a little one, I think,”said Xela. She looked across the canyon. “It’s only twenty feet or so.”

“And a hundred miles down,” Roger said.

Nate gazed past Roger. A dozen metal pipes hung over the edge of the canyon, each one at least four feet across. They reached down for the distant fire and disappeared into the distance. It was far enough that the huge pipes couldn’t be picked out against the canyon walls. He was sure they kept going all the way down.

He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked over his shoulder. A red rope of light burned across his vision. He blinked a few times and wondered if he’d damaged his eyes somehow.

The pipes ran across the ground, held up on squat brackets. They almost formed a platform behind the generators. In fact, Nate could see some low catwalks stretching back and forth across them. There were tanks and valves and huge wheels to spin. It all led into the generators.

“They’re geothermal,” said Nate. “They run off the heat of the earth. The magma and all that.”

Roger dragged his eyes from the chasm to look at Nate. “What’s that mean?”

Xela squeezed his hand. “It means they’ll run forever.”

It took another ten minutes before they could drag themselves away from the fault. Nate had heard of people hypnotized by the sheer scale of the Grand Canyon when they saw it in person. All the movies and television specials in the world couldn’t prepare someone for the sight of a solid object that went from horizon to horizon. Seeing an exposed fault line had the same effect.

They wandered to the generators. There was a battered desk set up a few yards past them. The discolored wood blended into the stone wall. A few yards beyond that was a wooden shed, its boards just as bleached as the desk.

Nate could feel the heat coming off the generators. They weren’t red-hot, but he thought they’d still burn his fingers. Each of the big turbines was coated with years of dust and dirt that had cooked into soot. He wrapped his hand in his shirt and took a few swipes at the hot metal. The steel gleamed beneath the grime.

“Check this out,” said Xela. She’d used her own shirt to clear a big patch on the next generator in line. A strip of silver and black was riveted on the dull metal. She gave it another wipe with the shirt. Nate and Roger looked over her shoulders at the curling letters.

Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co.

Roger glanced at them. “That’s a real company, isn’t it? They make kitchen appliances and stuff?”

“I think they used to do everything electric,” said Nate. “How much power do you think these put out?”

Roger shrugged. “Generators on set are half this size. Think they put out something like fifteen or sixteen hundred amps.”

Xela gazed up at the steel cylinder. “Does twice as big mean twice as much power?”

He shrugged again. “Not my thing. Might mean more power. Might just mean they’re older.”

Nate walked along the row of generators. Each one had the Westinghouse label, hidden by the layer of dust and silt. He recognized it by shape. There was a heavy plaque marked with a Roman numeral at the base of each generator. He was standing in front of
IV
, and Xela had just cleaned
V
. The one closest to the fault line was
VI
. He took a few more steps, passed
III
, and approached
II
.

Xela had her camera up again and was getting photos of each plaque. “Did you notice the base?” She pointed at the floor. The generators sat on a raised platform carved out of the rock. It was fitted with steel straps that wrapped back and forth across it. “These things are solid.”

The desk was warped and cracked. It reminded Nate of pictures of house fires, where some of the furniture had been in the home and exposed to the heat but hadn’t caught fire. In front of the desk stood a charred-white framework of wood that might have been a chair a hundred years earlier. A windswept pile of rags between the legs was all that was left of a seat cushion.

The desk itself was barren, and warm to the touch. There was a black fountain pen and a cracked ink bottle. A newspaper stuck out of one of the desk’s pigeonholes. Nate touched it and the edge crumbled away. He yanked his fingers back and tried to read what he could of the fragile headline.

“Anything?” asked Roger.

Nate shook his head. “I wrecked some of the date. I think it’s the twentieth of some month in 1894, but that’s all I’ve got.” He angled his head. “It looks like there’s a dozen little articles all on the front page.”

Xela pushed him gently aside and lined up her camera. It clicked once. “You know what bugs me?” She dipped her head at the rolled-up paper in the pigeonhole and the camera clicked again. “In the movies, when people find some dusty old chamber or something, there’s always a newspaper with some big banner headline that nails the date. ‘Titanic Sinks’ or ‘Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor’ or something like that. It always knocks me out of the movie.” The camera clicked again.

Nate smirked. “You think it’s more believable that this is a crap daily paper?”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m not having a lot of trouble believing all this.”

“I am,” muttered Roger. “Still doesn’t make sense.”

They left Nate to study the desk and moved to the shed. Xela pried open the door and barked out a laugh. “Oh, of course there’s a bathroom here,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Roger, “if only you could’ve held it for another three hours.”

She peered down the hole of the outhouse. “Not too sure I’d feel safe sitting there anyway.”

“Worried something’d grab you?”

“Worried I’d fall through,” she said.

Nate crouched between the desk and the outhouse. The ground was covered with papers. They fluttered in the constant breeze coming out of the chasm. Most of them danced near the desk and pressed themselves in the rough corner where the floor and ceiling ran together. Some of them were trapped further out on the floor, pinned by random eddies and air currents. They were singed on the edges or burned black.

Nate reached to touch one and it collapsed into ash that was swept away on the constant breezes. He squinted his eyes at the next one and tried to make out the faded ink lines. “Can you get photos of these?” he called over his shoulder.

Xela looked back. “Which ones?”

“All of them. As many as you can.”

She nodded and bent to the closest page.

Roger crouched next to her. “Drink some water.”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“Ain’t about being thirsty,” he said, “it’s about staying hydrated on the job, y’know? You’re not sweating that much.”

Her lips formed a quick grin. “You’re watching me sweat. That’s not too creepy.”

“Damn hot in here. Suck to get heatstroke at the bottom of those tunnels.”

She pulled a bottle from her pack and he did the same. “We could ride the elevator back.” She washed the words down with a double mouthful of water.

He took three deep swallows from his own bottle and wet his head again. “Don’t know about you,” Roger said, “but I’m not too keen on getting in a hundred-year-old wooden elevator with a cable a mile long.”

She smiled again and went back to taking photos.

Nate took a few steps and his eyes slid around the room. Generators. Cables. Pipes. Supports. Chandelier. Roger joined him and held out a water bottle. “Whatcha thinking?”

He took the bottle, tipped his head back, and poured it into his mouth. “I’m thinking we’re missing something,” he said, wiping his mouth on his arm.

Roger looked at him. “Whaddya mean?”

Nate waved his arm at the row of generators. “Okay, you said movie generators are half this size and put out fifteen hundred amps, right?”