Chapter 113: Turn Back
The tent was too small to hold the nightmare.
"Hey" Obi said softly from the flap. One hand on Raizen’s shoulder, careful - firm enough to be real, not so much that it had to be fought. "You with me?"
Raizen nodded because breathing was hard work and nodding was cheaper.
Obi’s face was half-shadow from the banked fire outside, half the thin glow that spilled through the tent seam. For once he wasn’t wearing a grin like armor. He listened with his whole head turned, as if the night might answer him if he looked respectful enough.
"Come on" he said. "You need to see this."
"What is it?" Raizen’s voice came out scraped.
"Private ping" Obi said, and lifted his slate. The display was dimmed, coordinates shivering on a map like a heartbeat. "Lighthouse. She didn’t want to wake the whole camp. You weren’t answering-" a glance at Raizen’s hands told him why "-so she sent me. And before you ask, yes, everyone else is either bleeding, sleeping, or pretending not to be either."
Raizen rubbed the heel of his hand under his eye and found dried salt. "Kori will skin you."
"Tradition" Obi said. "Also-" the grin tried to visit and then thought better of it "-if I told her first, she’d make me bring paperwork and a chaperone."
He shoved Raizen’s boots toward him with a toe. "Quiet. Let the girls sleep."
Outside, the ring lights hummed, pushing back a circle of gold. Beyond it, the night had its own light - thin, even, the kind that doesn’t come from any single place. Their breath made small ghosts that died an arm’s length out. Snow held the prints of their boots.
They crossed the perimeter in complete silence. The camp fell away behind them like a drawing you fold in half. The hum beneath the ground stayed polite. For now.
Obi talked the way a man sets out stones to cross a river.
"She sent coordinates with an old shaft number" he said, tapping the slate. "Said the tag went dark and never came back. There’s a note I didn’t love: "closed without explanation." Which, you know. Not too delicious."
"Why not the miners?" Raizen asked.
"Because they were the ones that closed it" Obi said. "And when people close something without explanation, they don’t appreciate being asked to open it with witnesses."
"You’re guessing."
"More or less" Obi replied, and kicked a rock that had been trying to look like a boulder. "Also guessing."
They followed an old service path that the wind had bullied into a smoother version of itself. Scrub pines hunched like tired old men. The world had color - just the wrong kind. Everything wore the same iron-gray no matter what it was.
Raizen’s calf ached in the exact place the dream had put its teeth. He didn’t limp. He counted his breath into his ribs, not his throat, the way Kori insisted. His mother’s smile hung just ahead of him in memory - small, stubborn, forgiving - and every step felt like a choice not to walk toward it.
"You saw something" Obi said without looking.
"I dreamed something" Raizen corrected.
"Same neighborhood" Obi said. "Less rent."
"Enough" Raizen cut him off.
"Copy" Obi said, and shut up for two dozen steps.
The shaft mouth found them when they weren’t looking for a mouth. It was a rectangle in the hillside, half drifted over, the rest armored in a way that had nothing to do with passive safety. A welded grid sat over a bent gate. Someone had hung a sheet of punched steel over that and pinned the edges with resin foam that had expanded and hardened into pale rock. Two sets of chains looped through three anchor points. A third chain, newer, ran diagonally. Its padlock had been painted over. Twice.
A wind-torn sign flapped and stuttered against a bolt.
RESTRICTED.
COLLAPSE HAZARD.
Beneath that, in marker that had bled into the plastic laminate:
DO NOT OPEN. WE HEAR IT.
A second hand had tried to scratch the last line away. You could still read it anyway.
Obi let out a low whistle. "When a door tells you no with that many fonts" he said, "it’s either the wrong door or a very interesting door."
He put a palm to the chain, testing slack. His fingers went to his belt by reflex - knife, pry tool, a folded wedge he’d retired from a camera mount, a stubby torque wrench that had definitely been part of a borrowed kit when the day started.
"Alteea wanted us to open this?" Raizen asked.
"Alteea wanted us to look" Obi corrected, wedging the pry under the foam seam and leaning. "She knows I translate "look" as "touch." It’s one of the pillars our friendship rests on."
The foam sheared with a sound like ice complaining. Obi shifted, set his shoulder, and the gate groaned - a deep, expensive pain. Welds popped on the rightmost hinge. Metal surrendered a centimeter. Another. The chain snapped with a noise you could taste.
"Subtle" Raizen said.
"Thank you" Obi said, and drove a boot into the gap. The foam ripped free in a long, disgusting peel like old skin from sunburn. "Give me a hand?"
Raizen wrapped both hands around the grid and pulled. The muscles that ran from his wrists to his elbows lit and held. The grid bent slow, like a door being taught how to argue. One more shove and the lower corner kicked out enough to pass a body, then two.
Obi ducked first. He passed the sign with his head tilted, like it might bite. The air exhaled. It was warmer than it should have been for snow sitting on your boots. Wet. Metallic. Something sweet under it that didn’t belong to any plant.
They flicked their lamps on. The beams cut cones out of the dark and found a corridor that wanted to be a throat - walls rough where the rock had given up unwillingly, cables sleeping along the ceiling in coils, old drill marks like ribs. The floor pitched down in a practiced slope. Boards had been laid for traction and then pulled up again. The nails remained, heads winking like small eyes.
Obi looked back once, toward the snow. His grin stopped trying to arrive. "If I yell" he said quietly, "you pull that gate."
"And lock you in with a note that says "we hear it"?" Raizen asked.
"Pretty much" Obi said cheerfully.
They went single file. Their footsteps went from crisp to quiet to damp. Every sound got smaller and then started coming back late, like it had had to check with someone first.
The first turn came with a brace of timbers that had been chalked with little symbols - not the ordinary. Circles, slashes, triangles, repeated in rows that didn’t make sense. A small scrap of ribbon - blue once - had been tied to a nail, frayed down to fiber. A charm had been nailed where a cross might go. It wasn’t a cross. It was a hexagon with a notch bitten out of it.
Raizen touched it with the back of his glove. The wood felt too warm for old wood.
"They didn’t want to be found" he said.
"They didn’t want whatever was inside to be found again" Obi corrected.
He raised the slate and thumbed up the message so Raizen could see it. It wasn’t an audio. It was a text spike.
"Obi. Coordinates attached. Gate 09-A. No alarms - discreet. Sealed by nonstandard. Don’t broadcast. Look, don’t touch. If you hear... anything, mark and retreat. ~ A."
Obi looked at the gate, at the broken foam, at the bent grid, at his own pry bar. He lifted his chin at Raizen like a dog getting caught with a stolen glove. "Whoops."
Raizen made the sound he made when he didn’t want to endorse and didn’t want to argue. "We’ll mark it on the way out."
They went deeper. The hum found them around the next bend. Not loud, present. The sort of sound you don’t hear with ears until the moment you realize you can’t stop hearing it at all. It asked the bones to listen. It kept time. It was steady enough to make your own heartbeat feel careless.
Raizen slowed. "Hear that?"
Obi cocked his head. "Either a live wire or we’re in a giant throat."
"Don’t say that" Raizen said.
"Pipe? Tunnel? Throat" Obi decided.
The "Pipe? Tunnel? Throat" widened enough to feel like it had exhaled. Their lamps reached further and came back rarely. Carts had sat here once. The rails were gone. Shine marks remained where metal had kissed metal a long time.
There were prints. Not boots. Not paws. Straight lines down the dust where something long had been dragged or had chosen to be straight by nature. A row of chalk marks at ankle height ran along the left-hand wall. Five, then a space, then five. A tally. When Obi’s lamp passed over one set, the chalk threw back a faint sheen. Not chalk then. Something that hated light.
"This feel like collapse to you?" Obi murmured.
"No..." Raizen exhaled. "Feels like a story people didn’t want to keep telling."
Comms hissed and spit. A piece of Alteea’s voice fell down the wire like a leaf through air. "-careful - grid" Then gone. The slate showed live connection, zero throughput. The numbers lied, polite.
They hit the sealed turn.
A slab of sheet steel had been bolted across the opening at shin height and up, with braces thrown behind it the way you barricade a door against a thing that knows doors. More foam oozed along the edges. Someone had burned old straps into a melted loop to glue the bottom.
Across the plate, in chalk that had been pushed until it broke, a message as neat as a scream:
TURN BACK
Obi let the lamp hang off his wrist by the strap and ran both hands down his face. "So" he said lightly. "We turn back?"
Raizen watched the foam, the half-glued straps, the bolt heads flattened to make them hate wrenches. "So..." he responded in the same tone. "We go through."
"Obviously" Obi said, relieved to be predictable again. He set the pry at the left edge and hauled. The foam tore in stringy ropes, clinging to itself with gross affection. He drove the torque bar between the slab and the rock and leaned the weight of a man who’d grown up breaking locks no one else would admit existed.
"On three," he grunted. "One-two-"
The lower right corner popped and kicked back like it had been punched from the other side. The plate trembled. Dust walked down the seam in a slow, gloomy snow. Obi swore quietly, braced, and shoved again. This time the plate surrendered a palm’s width. Enough to fit fingers. Enough to lie.
Raizen put his shoulder into the pry. The infinity of time between a thing resisting and a thing giving up finally ended. The plate peeled.
Warmth hit them. Not a rush. A presence. The air ahead had weight. It carried that same sweetness - not rot, not sap - an almost floral note that didn’t have the decency to be pleasant. The hum grew clearer. It shifted a hair. It felt like it had noticed.
"Last chance to be smart" Obi said, breathless.
"I don’t like being too smart" Raizen said. "It feels like running. And that Prototype of mine is a Marathon..."
They slipped through sideways, shoulders scraping paint, foam smearing like cheap glue across their sleeves. On the other side, the tunnel floor fell away into a gentle bowl and widened in the way rooms widen when a builder stops arguing with the space and lets it be what it wants.
Raizen lifted his lamp.
The hum lived here. It didn’t get louder. It simply became honest.
Obi took two steps in and then one more without meaning to.
His foot hit a patch of floor that had a different idea of friction. He caught himself with a hand against a raised rib of metal, flinched like it had bitten him, and yanked back. He stared at his palm, then at the rib, then at the space beyond where their light failed.
"Holy metallurgy" he whispered.
Raizen turned his beam toward where Obi was staring and for half a second the reflection that came back looked like a room full of knives learning how to breathe. Then the beam shifted and it was only metal again, only shapes, only a dark that had learned to count.
Far down in the new dark, something answered the hum with a note a hair higher, like a harmony learning how.
They stood there, lamps shaking just enough to make the light look alive.
"Obi" Raizen said, and it was only his name.
"Yeah" Obi said. "I see it."