Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (15 page)

And now, orbiting the planet, Galo felt his
frustration spike again. Though he hadn’t seen them yet, they couldn’t have
gotten far. They had to be here somewhere, and Galo would find them.

The forward team consisted of Ethan, Collins, and
Ndaiye. They began by inspecting the tunnel next to the Shark’s Mouth and then
moving clockwise around the Stadium, checking behind the stalagmites for
yawning black holes that might lead them out. At each, they stopped and walked
a few feet inside, focusing and trying to feel any air circulating.

Ethan felt it now, the stillness of the cave. Its
air was damp and cool. It tasted of dirt and minerals. At every new opening he
willed the air to move, a breeze to move past them, but every one held the same
static gloom.

It was nearly noon when they sat down near one of
the gaps to rest and eat a few bites of nutrition bar. Only Ethan had brought
his pack. He was carrying food and water for Collins and Ndaiye, so he pulled
out their bars, tossing them each one.

They’d worked their way halfway around the huge
room, and when Ethan looked across the center of it, he could see the rest of
the crew eating, too. Ethan sat down and leaned against the outer wall next to
Ndaiye. Collins settled himself at the base of one of the stalagmites across
from them. Ethan saw Collins’s hands silhouetted against the glow of his
shoulder lights. They were trembling violently.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re shaking.”

Collins looked up in surprise, then stuck his
hands in his pockets. “I’m fine.” Then, glancing back toward the group, he
amended, “Actually, I’m freezin’.”

The coveralls had been doing such a good job
keeping him warm that Ethan had forgotten how really chilly it was down here.
The rudimentary thermometer on his pack read twelve and a half degrees
Celsius—much too cold to be comfortable for long.

“Turn up your Everwarms,” Ndaiye said.

“They’re dead.”

“What?”

“They’re dead. I woke up this morning and the batteries
were out.” There was a defensive edge in his voice. “They’re solar powered, you
know. They’re all going to go dead if we don’t get out of here pretty soon.”

Ethan could tell that Collins had let this go too
long. They were going to have to get him warmed up. He pulled a small fuel
brick out of his pack and broke a piece off. He laid the piece on the floor by
Collins.

“We’ll let this burn a few minutes, just to get
you a little warmed up.”

Collins, whose shoulders were now shaking as
well, nodded.

The fuel brick started and let off a warm glow.
Collins looked at Ethan gratefully and scooted close to it, holding out his
hands.

Chewing on the salty nutrition bar, Ethan
wondered how long the heat brick would burn, how many bricks they had
altogether, and how long it would be until the warmth of his own coveralls
faded.

Sharp smoke from the burning brick snapped Ethan
from his thoughts. It burned in his throat and eyes. The smoke simply hung
thick in the still air of the cave. Ndaiye, coughing, stood and moved away.

Ethan realized their mistake. Without breezes to
blow the smoke away, they were condemned to sit enshrouded in it. Collins,
choking, stood too and stomped out the brick, grinding it under his boot until
it was nothing more than glowing red powder. The smoke continued to hang in the
cavern, reaching out toward the little group they’d left and continuing lazily
around the edges of the room.

Suddenly, Ndaiye’s voice rang through the cavern.
“Look! Look!” he called, pointing excitedly. Ethan followed his gesture and
saw, with wonder, the cloud of smoke moving. It drifted toward a wide vertical
crack about fifteen meters ahead of them. Lazily, the smoke nosed into the
crack like a living thing and slipped out of sight. Overcome with excitement, Ethan
ran toward the crack and inside. The passage behind it was wide enough for the
three of them to walk side by side. All three members of the forward team made
their way along it. Collins shone his light up and Ethan could see the smoke
creeping along, rolling down the passage in front of them.

The passage itself rose gradually. It was nothing
like the steep incline they’d navigated before.

“Maybe it’s finding a way out,” Ndaiye said, his
voice higher-pitched than usual. “Maybe we can follow it right out.”

Ethan loved his optimism. Here, in the dark, when
anyone could feel hopeless, Ndaiye always had a bright word. The promise of it
shone in front of them. They walked faster.

Later, Ethan would look back on that moment and
wonder how he could have missed it. He would wonder why he was in the middle
instead of on the left, why Collins had been the one to swing his light up at
just the moment that the cave opened underneath him.

Ethan saw the light swing crazily to the side,
was blinded by it for a moment, and heard a heart-stopping cry of surprise. He
turned fast, just in time to catch one last glimpse of Collins as he plummeted
down a narrow vertical shaft.

Two breaths later, Ethan heard a sound that would
haunt him. He lay on his stomach and shone the light down the shaft. Pressing
the button that kicked extra light out, he could see that Collins would not be
coming back out.

Ethan pulled back from the edge and sat up,
gasping. It had been so fast. How could he not have seen it? How could he not
have warned Collins?

The bleakness of this place again washed over
him. Ndaiye stood against the far wall of the passage, his optimism silent.
Ethan didn’t look at him, didn’t say anything for a long time.

Ethan had never seen so much human death in such
a short time. And this cave gave no second chances. People were here one moment
and gone the next. There was no going back, no doing it over, no doing it
better.

***

The
tunnel led to a drab gray chamber, where the smoke leaked out of a cleft in the
rock directly above them and no wider than one of Luis’s soup bowls. There was,
however, a level, smooth passage that exited on the opposite side of the
chamber, and Ethan and Ndaiye thought it may connect back somehow to the
passage the smoke escaped from. They retrieved the others and brought them to
the chamber.

They filed in quiet respect past the shaft that
would be Collins’s final resting place. Jade had tears glistening on her lashes
as she stepped carefully to the other side of the tunnel. She was wearing Collins’s
pack, and Ethan sensed there was more to her grief than losing a coworker. When
they were all safely past the pit, Ethan switched off the light and made his
way up the slope behind them, leaving Collins to his rest.

***

Ethan felt empty as they settled in for sleep.
When he came to Coriol he had been cheered as a savior of thousands. They had
chanted his name and elected him as a Governor of the Colony Offices. He was
lauded as brave and gifted.

But one moment, one thoughtless, distracted
moment, had cost a man his life, and Ethan had neither predicted it nor
prevented it. How could he be a hero with such blindness?

He was blind here, in every way. As the team
switched their shoulder lights off one by one, he felt the darkness closing in
around him. He lay back, his own lights still on, seeking comfort in their
glow. The usual chatter was absent and the team stilled quickly.

Finally, knowing that every second of light he
indulged in now was a second of darkness later, maybe in some far more
dangerous circumstance than this, Ethan tapped the shoulder lights of his vest
to quell them.

His eyes burned with their afterglow for a
heartbeat, two. He shifted his head on his pack, waiting for the pressing,
complete darkness that he knew would come.

Instead, emerging from his light-blindness, Ethan
saw tiny, bright jewels of light, seemingly suspended in chains from the cave
ceiling, like the most delicate of chandeliers. Ethan looked closely and saw
tiny worms suspended from the ceiling, weaving straight strings of
phosphorescent silk, with hanging jewels of sticky fluid that they used to
catch their food.

Their beauty caught Ethan off guard, and the soft
sounds of awe from the rest of the team told him they saw them, too. Somehow the
gracefulness of the tiny droplets of light soothed. He let the tears come
silently, feeling them slip out of the corners of his eyes and race down his
temples.

He heard, softly filling the chamber, Ndaiye’s
deep baritone voice, beginning as a hum, then a gentle ripple of syllables,
like falling water: “yangu mtoto, mtoto, ndoto. Itakuwa utulivu mtoto wangu,
yangu mtoto, mtoto, ndoto.”

A lullaby, in a language Ethan had never heard
before. Though the words were unfamiliar, the feeling behind them was not. It
was gentle, calming. It was love and comfort.

Somehow, Ethan let Collins go. He let the pilot
and Carlisle and Espinoza and Baker go. And he hoped, when it was time, that
Aria and the children could let him go.

***

Aria slid down an
embankment, following the sound of the river. She had brought the children with
her today, and they had loved the ride in the little ship. They’d set down in
the clearing and left the ship and its pilot to wait for them while they
searched. She’d just completed her second concentric circle around the survey
site and was beginning on the third. Because her search had taken her far
beyond the usual areas of the Karst Mountains, beyond the edges of the neatly
trimmed Tiger Mountain Park, to the valleys and peaks of the inner karst range,
she wondered if anyone on Minea knew the mountains better than she did.

Still, Aria had to be continually watchful of the
children. Polara was a strong hiker and often in front of Aria, challenging her
mother to keep up with her—until the child got distracted by one of the million
things that the karst forest had to offer: a butterfly, a flower, a steep peak rising
fast from the valley floor.

She took Polara’s hand now as the little girl
struggled to push through the tall grass. It was becoming thicker, taller, here
at the bottom of the embankment. Aria guided Polara behind her, working to
stomp the grasses down as best she could to smooth the way for her.

“Come on, Lara, we’re going to go this way.”

“And find Daddy?” Polara asked directly.

“I hope so.” Aria pushed back the sharp sensation
of knowing how big this wilderness was and how small, in it, were the three of
them.

Rigel rode silently on his mother’s back,
observing. If she turned her head sharply, she could see his bright blue eyes
peering down at her with the aching wisdom he’d seemed to have since he was
born. Aria quieted her mind, listening for anything that could be Rigel’s
thoughts. She’d been listening ever since Kaia had told her of his gift. But
she heard nothing that wasn’t her own.

“Mama! Mama! Look!” Aria followed Polara’s
pointing finger and saw, fleeing off to the left in front of them, a white
deer-like creature. Its curly fur and sweeping horns made it look strangely
cuddly and regal at the same time, like polar bears back home on Earth.

It bounded forward through the long grass,
stopping several dozen meters away and turning its head to watch them.

Aria had no name for it, but its majesty took her
breath away. There were so many species on this planet, and most of them
remained a mystery to humans. On a world where people had come to gather all
the Yynium they could as quickly as possible, there was little time for
interesting animals. If it wouldn’t help make RST more accessible, nobody was
interested. Add to their apathy the fact that the karst range remained largely
unexplored, and it was likely that she and the children were the first humans
ever to see this species.

“What should we call it?” she asked Polara,
running through some possibilities in her own head:
Snow Deer, Bryant’s
Deer, Imperial
.

“Is it a boy one or a girl one?” Polara asked
thoughtfully.

“Well, it’s hard to tell with some animals here.
I’m not sure.”

“I think it’s a boy and we should call it Chester,”
Polara responded immediately, then, reconsidering, “or Curly.”

Aria laughed for the first time in days. She
loved that her children, who lived every moment separately from the next or the
last, had the ability to traverse life unburdened by what was to come. Polara
was particularly good at that, and Aria found it freeing to be with her, even
in the midst of this nightmare. Maybe especially in the midst of it.

She would have liked to observe the new species a
while, sit down on a rock and see if it was aggressive or shy, if it had a mate
in the area or even a herd. But their course would not lead them near it, and
she had too little time and too important a task to bother with wildlife now.

They fought through an especially thick stand of
fibrous grass. In fact, Aria noticed, here the usual flexible grass seemed to
be interspersed with a dark green, curved-leaf grass as rigid as bamboo. Within
a few meters she was unable to push through at all.

She glanced up. The white deer still stood, his
large black eyes on them. Poised there, in a beam of sunlight between two karst
peaks, he seemed to be waiting for them. Aria altered their course slightly,
angling towards the animal. She still held Polara’s hand, though her arm was
getting weary from being held behind her. She guided Polara in her own
footsteps, around stones shrouded in the grass and carefully over the lumps
made by bulging roots.