Page 148 of Black to Light

It had gotten worse.

My anxiety grew more intense the longer we walked, the closer I got to the top of that sloping walkway. Rather than slowing me down, it pushed my legs faster. My fingers clenched around the handle of my gun on one side, curling tightly into a fist on the other. My mouth felt dry and locked shut around my teeth and tongue.

I was sweating, but it wasn’t hot.

I glanced around at the others and saw expressions on their faces and in their eyes that seemed to mirror what I felt. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I didn’t want to know why we all seemed to sense the same thing ahead.

Whatever it was, none of us seemed happy to meet it.

We reached the top before I’d found my way around those thoughts and feelings.

My lungs heaved, but I wasn’t tired. I definitely wasn’t out of breath in the usual way.

I glanced at Black, and found him watching me, a taut look on his face as he looked me over. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought he wanted to send me back to the car. He didn’t say anything, though, and a few seconds later, he looked away.

The next time I looked at him, he was checking his gun’s magazine, then the gun itself.

We paused when we got to the top.

Alisha scanned quickly for alarms at the front of the building.

“Nothing,” she pronounced.

She pointed to a door to our right, painted blue and surrounded by flower beds on either side, filled with blooming tulips and rose bushes.

“With no one here, the most direct way to the tunnels is through the gift shop,” she said, manipulating a virtual key where it hovered over her tablet. “The archeologists had a different way in, of course… from a parking lot on the other side. But that’s the side that caved in. There’s no way to get through there now.”

Jax and Kiko cupped their hands on the glass, looking inside the building.

“It’s empty,” Kiko commented.

“It’s clean,” Alisha told us a few seconds later. “No signals are leaving here at all. It looks like they had a basic alarm set-up at one point, meaning just a loud bell, not connected to anything else… but even that must’ve been disconnected, or it would be going off.”

She motioned towards the door.

I noticed then that it stood partly open.

None of us were surprised.

The handle on the door had been broken, as had part of the wooden frame, which was splinted along the white-painted edge.It looked like it had been kicked in. Again, I doubted it had been Nick who’d done that.

This place had been left open, waiting for us.

Waiting for Nick.

Possibly even waiting for Jem and the girl.

Jax walked up to the door first. He pushed in the wooden panel, and held it open while the rest of us filed in ahead of him.

We walked through the small gift store decorated with various rocks and tiny pick axes and stuffed animals and postcards and books and keychains, and into a small museum filled with interactive exhibits. A plastic neanderthal-looking man crouched in one corner, frozen in place where he appeared to be sharpening a wooden spear.

The door behind the museum counter also had a broken handle, although a spring lock kept it closed.

Mika opened that one, and we all filed through ahead of her and Ace. We found ourselves in a long, tunnel-like hallway with a white-painted arch at the end. Beyond that, all I could see were rough walls made of dripping rock.

We all got inside, and the door swung closed.

Everything was dark.

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