Chapter 3--Maricossa

Maricossa stared at the book in his hands: The Return of Sherlock Holmes. He’d been aimlessly turning pages for the better part of an hour, but had yet to read more than disconnected words here and there. Instead, he kept hearing words Sergei had told him long ago. “Even the best plan is worthless if you don’t have a contingency plan to fall back on when it fails.”

A contingency plan… they needed one desperately. If one of the kids got sick, or the supplies ran out, or the White Tiger caught up with them, they had to have a backup plan already lined out.

Maricossa had one option in mind, an option that had been part of his personal ‘doomsday plan’ for years. Most of the pieces were already in place. The trouble was, he’d been planning for himself and Connie, not himself, a dozen other people, and several thousand books. The added load made it less ideal. But it was still a plan—the only one they had, and the best they could hope for under the circumstances.

WOOF!

Maricossa jumped, dropping the book on the floor and knocking a computer keyboard off of the ledge where he’d propped his feet. The dog’s bark echoed amazingly well in the cavernous control room.

“Scarf!” Maricossa said, letting out a breath of relief as the dog trotted up to his chair. “You scared me to death!”

As Maricossa reached for the keyboard now dangling from the ledge by its cord, Scarf whined and swished his tail much like Libby swished her skirt when she was nervous.

“Sorry, boy,” Maricossa said, replacing the keyboard and getting up to retrieve the book, “I guess I startled you too, didn’t I? Come here.” He extended a hand, but Scarf wasn’t looking at him. The dog’s eyes and ears were both pointed towards the passage Libby and Skylar had taken to go exploring.

Maricossa listened, but didn’t hear anything. He glanced at his watch. They’d been gone for a while. They were probably fine, but it couldn’t hurt to check.

He pulled his torch from his belt and clicked it on as he entered the passage they had taken. Scarf started to follow him.

“No, stay,” he ordered. The dog hesitated but finally sat down, and Maricossa continued into the passage.

He passed several doors that looked like they had recently been opened, and in a few places he could see footprints, but he didn’t see Libby, Skylar, or the beam of their light.

“Libby? Skylar? You alright?”

There was no answer.

A few minutes into the passage, a flapping blur swooped around a corner and careened in wild loops, disoriented by the light. Maricossa turned the torch off and waited several seconds until the bat regained its bearings and flitted away.

He found a spot where Libby and Skylar had apparently crawled through a partially blocked doorway, but when he shined the light inside, he saw nothing. "Libby? Skylar?"

He waited a few minutes, but there was no answer, so he moved on.

He was glad Skylar had Libby—in general, as well as here in the tunnels. Maricossa knew well what went on inside a boy Skylar’s age when he lost someone he loved. Until Skylar learned to get what was inside him under control and live with it, he wouldn’t want to have much to do with anyone else. If they tried to violate that distance, his instinct would be to lash out.

Libby was the one exception, the one person who might be able to stay close to him while he healed, who could gradually coax him out of the emotional tunnel he was digging for himself. For Skylar’s sake, Maricossa hoped so. He wished he’d had someone like Libby, someone whose nearness didn’t feel like trespassing, when he had lost his mother. It had happened long before he met Connie…

Connie. Maricossa shook his head. She was the last thing he needed to be thinking about now—from this angle, anyway. She belonged on the other side of the coin, and was a danger he needed to avoid. If only he could come to terms with that and stop thinking of her as the lost love of his life.

The passage turned again, this time to the left. Maricossa wondered if Skylar and Libby had lost their torch somehow. Their footprints were close together and scuffed and frequently bumped into things, as though they were shuffling along blindly.

“Skylar? Libby? Can you hear me?” Still no answer. If they had lost their light, why on earth hadn’t they gone back towards the control room? Unless of course they had gotten turned around in the dark and thought they were heading back towards the control room while they were actually getting more and more lost.

Maricossa was beginning to wonder how far they would actually go before realizing they were heading the wrong way, when he saw light ahead. He followed the tunnel around a bend and found a metal ladder built into the wall, leading up to a door. The door was only open a crack, but daylight blazed through the gap.

Maricossa turned off his torch and climbed up to the door. Just as he reached it and pushed it open, he heard a peal of laughter. Libby’s voice was the one he recognized first, but Skylar was laughing too. That, at least, was a good sign.

The door led out onto a wide stone ledge that jutted out from a bramble-covered hillside so steep it was almost a cliff. Libby and Skylar sat with their backs to the door, looking across a deep gorge towards the waterfall. They both had handfuls of blackberries, and looked so happy that if Maricossa hadn’t known they were lost, he would have turned and left without saying anything.

As he stepped outside the door swung on its hinges, squealing loudly. Libby and Skylar turned to look at him.

“Oh, Maricossa! Thank goodness. We hoped you’d come looking for us eventually,” Libby said through berry-stained lips. “This is just like that scene in The Two Towers, isn’t it?” She waved her arm at the vista beyond the cliff. “Welcome, my lord, to Isengard! My name is Meriadoc, son of Saradoc, and this—”

“No, Libby,” Skylar interrupted, popping another berry into his mouth, “I’m Merry, remember? I’ve got too much good sense to be Pippin.”

“Says the boy who got us lost in the first place.”

“You got us lost running from the bats.”

“I only broke the torch, I didn’t get us lost.”

Maricossa smiled. “Skylar, I didn’t realize your ‘Strider’ reference meant having to look after a couple of adolescent Halflings. But regardless of who got you lost, would you like me to get you found?”

Libby’s smile faded. She glanced at Skylar, the ground, and the sky before answering. “I guess so,” she said softly. “It just… I just feel so much better out here in the open. I know it sounds dumb, but…”

Skylar stood and brushed himself off. "Don't worry. I don't like it much either, but…" he shrugged. "I'll try to be better company. Sorry. We can be miserable together. It won't be so bad."

Libby looked doubtful. “Maybe.”

“Come on, then. And no questions about second breakfast!” Maricossa turned to head back into the tunnel, but stopped first to look around. The view stretched for miles, maybe half way back to Shandor Rei—

A tiny sparkle of light caught his attention. Mariccosa froze, his blood running cold as his eyes focused on the hazy, yet distinct, shape of an airship hovering in the distance. The spark must have come from a spyglass. It was too far away to see markings and know whether it was a White Tiger vessel or not, but it hardly mattered. Any vessel could report back to the White Tiger.

“Back inside,” he said, “Hurry!” He held the door open while Libby and Skylar scrambled inside and down the ladder, then followed them and pulled it shut.

“What is it?” Libby asked as Maricossa turned his torch on once again and made his way down the ladder.

“Airship. We have to get back and make sure no one’s outside.”

They raced back through the passages and rooms, following their own tracks back to the control room. Scarf was ecstatic to see them but Maricossa brushed past him and hurried straight into the hangar.

The Daniel Defoe was still moored to the scaffolding, which meant Hez wouldn’t be far away.

“Professor!” Maricossa shouted when he saw the older man walking across the far end of the hangar, “where are the kids?”

“They’re in the kitchen,” Professor called back. “Mrs. Monday is just serving tea.”

“All of them?”

The Professor chuckled. “You don’t think they’d miss her sugar cookies, do you?” He suddenly frowned. "What's wrong?"

Maricossa let out a quick breath of relief. That, at least, was one less worry. "I saw an airship when I found these two. It's far away, but I caught the glint of a spyglass."

“What now?” Libby asked. “We just wait for the airship to go away?”

Maricossa walked to the edge of the walkway they stood on and braced his arms against the railing. “Libby,” he said, “we need to talk. I didn’t want to this soon, but I don’t think it can wait.”

“What do you mean?” Libby said. “Talk about what?”

“Maricossa, Skylar, there you are!” Hez sauntered out of the ship’s hull and down the ramp to join them on the walkway. “Glad to see things are sorted out so we can get back to unloading these books, eh?”

“We’re not unloading any more,” Maricossa said. “Not now, anyway.”

Hez stopped, smile gone, and stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“Wait,” Libby said, “why aren’t we?”

“That’s exactly what I’d like to know,” Hez said, putting his hands on his hips. “I have a crew and clients waiting for me in Shandor Rei—”

“And I’ll tell you when you’re free to rejoin them,” Maricossa said.

“Free?” Hez repeated. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe I take my orders from you. I’m fairly certain that ‘Captain’ outranks ‘Dishonorably Discharged Deserter.’ ”

“Hezekiah Honor Needle!” Libby snapped.

Maricossa left the railing and walked towards Hez. “You make all the cheap jabs you want,” he said, “but I’m in charge of protecting the kids, the Professor, and the books, and if I have to tie you down and gag you to do that, I will.”

Hez raised his eyebrows and kept coming forward. “That might be a bit tough to do, tiger boy.”

Maricossa saw Hez’s hands flexing, the subtle shifting of his shoulders, the slight forward thrust of his head, heard the challenge in his voice. Hez wanted a fight, a chance at the Alpha position. Why not give it to him, if it shut him up?

Maricossa made a point of looking Hez up and down as they both stopped, less than a step apart. He could see the feral energy in Hez’s eyes, the look of a man who had been in fights and liked them. He smiled condescendingly. “Not too tough, I expect,” he said, “a boy whose voice is barely done changing.”

“You take your best shot, if that’s what you think,” Hez said.

As you wish. Maricossa jerked his elbow up into Hez’s chest, sending him stumbling backwards.

The surprised pain on Hez’s face only lasted for a second, gone by the time he regained his balance. “So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?” he said, coming forward again and throwing a straight punch at Maricossa’s face.

Maricossa deflected the punch and used its momentum to turn Hez aside, leaving the back of his arm exposed for the stun maneuver that followed the block.

Hez shouted and spun around to face Maricossa again, pain beginning to blend with the anger on his face. He went into a roundhouse kick, once again aiming for Maricossa’s face.

Maricossa ducked, and Hez’s boot passed harmlessly over his head. The kick’s momentum carried him around to face away from Maricossa, and Maricossa used the chance to kick his thigh, dropping him to one knee. Before he could get up again Maricossa stepped up behind him and hit the side of his neck with a knife-hand strike.

Hez fell face-first onto the walkway, moaning, and didn’t move.

Maricossa knelt next to him and rolled him over. His eyes were wide, blinking every second or so, but he said nothing. Maricossa almost laughed. He’d been where Hez was a fair share of times and knew exactly how it felt.

“Now,” he said, leaning over where he was sure Hez could see him, “I. Will tell you. When you. Are free. To go. Capisci?”

Hez only moaned again.

Maricossa stood up, raked his hair back from his face, and turned around to see Libby tiptoeing towards him, her eyes on Hez and a worried look on her face.

“Is he--okay?” she whispered.

“Oh yes." Maricossa tried to repress a smile. "He’s probably seeing three or four of everything right now, but his faculties will regroup in a minute or so.”

Libby didn’t look convinced.

“I promise,” Maricossa said, “a brachial stun just hurts, it doesn’t harm.”

Libby covered her face with her hands and let out a breath, but it didn’t sound like one of relief. “I cannot believe you did that,” she said, raising her face again. Her eyes were narrowed. "When we’re all stuck here in this lousy bunker together and it’s bad enough without people fighting and you and Hez of all people, I mean, I know he can be a flaming nuisance and sometimes I’d like to clock him myself, but you can’t just—”

“Libby, Libby!” Maricossa said. "Trust me, he needed to get that out of his system and we’ll all be better off now that he has.”

Libby crossed her arms and walked back to where Skylar stood.

“Come on, you two,” Maricossa said, starting for the kitchen at the far end of the hangar. Skylar fell in beside him, and Libby walked on Skylar’s other side, looking none-too happy. “We still need to talk.”

“About why we’re not unloading the books?” Libby asked.

“About why we can’t stay here,” Maricossa corrected, “and why somebody’s going to have to make a trip back to Shandor Rei.”

Chapter Two--Skylar

Skylar ran up the tunnel, pulling Libby after him, both of them ducking low to avoid the rush of leather wings above their heads. His hand, which had been trailing along the wall to keep his balance in the darkness, suddenly felt metal rather than stone.

“This way!” he shouted over the surprisingly loud noise of the bats. He shoved open the side door, and they ducked inside, panting.

Skylar slammed the door shut on the bats. “You okay?” he asked Libby.

It was pitch black, but he could hear that she was breathing harder than him—not from exertion, but from fright.

“I hate bats,” she said in a low, low voice, each word as distinct and sharp-edged as a blade. “Hate them. Hate, hate, hate, hate—”

“Right, I get the idea.” He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, resting his chin atop her head. “I’m not too crazy about them myself.” Skylar didn’t have much practice comforting girls, but to his relief, she didn’t try to pull away, allowing him to soothe her for a long moment. Outside the door, the noise of the bats faded, until there was complete silence in the tunnel. “Better?” he asked.

She stepped back. “Better,” she agreed. “Thank you.”

He gave a half-smile in the darkness, and reached for the door, pulling it open just a bit. “They’re gone,” he said, listening to the darkness. “Wonder where they go?” They hadn’t seen any bats—or at least, not many—until just now. There must be an opening of some kind that led to the outside, something he and Libby hadn’t seen on their way down.

Opening the door fully, he squinted the way they had come, hoping to see the reflection of Libby’s torch on the walls.

Nothing. No light of any kind met his eyes. He jumped when Libby took his hand. “I think you broke the torch,” he whispered.

“Prof’s going to kill me,” she whispered back. “Can you get us out of here?”

Skylar thought back, over all the rooms they’d come through, the turns they’d taken, the places where there was more than one door out of a place, more than one hallway…

“Sure,” he lied, suddenly aware of how far they were from anyone who might help—Maricossa, the Professor, even Hez. But Libby must have heard the slight tremor in his voice, because she squeezed his hand.

“Don’t lie, Skylar.”

He grimaced. “We’re pretty deep, Lib,” he admitted. They should at least make their way back to the cave in, and make sure that the torch hadn’t just rolled to where they couldn’t see it. “Let’s double check the torch, ok?”

Still holding each other’s hands, more for balance and a sense of space than anything else, they retraced their footsteps. Skylar used his metallic arm to feel along the rough wall, the raspy clanging of metal against rock a harsh sound in the otherwise silent tunnel. Suddenly, he bumped up against something.

“The cave-in,” he whispered.

“I don’t see a light…”

Skylar lifted Libby’s hand and placed it against the wall. “Stay here,” he said. “I’m going to see if I can find it. Maybe it just…switched off.” As if, he scoffed mentally. But at this point, it was their only hope. It could take days to find their way back in the dark—if they didn’t get hopelessly lost and end up falling down an open shaft or something.

Carefully edging around the pile of fallen rubble, Skylar found the edge of the doorway on his third try. “I’m going in,” he said.

“Careful, Sky.”

If we get back, he thought to himself as he wedged himself through the narrow gap, No—when we get back, I’m going to make the Professor install some sort of light in this eye of mine. What’s the point of having something like this attached to your head if it’s not useful all the time? “Oomph,” he muttered, falling through the other side with a considerable lack of grace. “Alright, I’m through. Where did you drop the light?”

Muffled through the layer of stone and other fallen rubble, Libby called, “I don’t know.” Her voice was high and slightly breathless. “I was swinging at the bats and it sort of rolled away anyhow but I’m not sure where it went because I was kind of distracted by the little monsters swooping at my head like they were going to rip all the hair out of my scalp like those savages you read about in books like The Travails of Edward Beckett where he gets captured by cannibals and—”

“Libby.” She only did the motor mouth thing when she was really nervous. He wanted to go back and hug her again, but the torch was priority right now.

“Sorry.”

Skylar crouched down, sweeping his arms slowly across the floor on either side. He found pebbles and splinters a-plenty—and a disgustingly crumbly substance he knew to be bat guano—but no torch. “Do you think it could have rolled under a shelf?”

“I don’t know.” Libby’s voice became clearer as she moved to the doorway. “I don’t remember if they went all the way to the floor or not.”

“Hey—stay out there.”

“I’m not coming in.” She was silent for a second, and Skylar moved over a few feet, still sweeping the floor with his hands. “What do we do if you can’t—”

“Ah-ha!” Skylar’s fingers lit on something cool, round, and metal. “Got it.” Please work, please work, please work…He jabbed the switch with his thumb.

Nothing.

“Turn it on,” Libby pleaded.

Skylar felt as though every inch of the earth over his head was suddenly weighing down on him, intent on crushing out his breath. “It’s broke, Lib,” he said. “I can’t turn it on.”

She said nothing, and Skylar stood. It took every ounce of self-control in him to not burst out in anger, cursing everyone and everything and every blasted reason he was lost in a labyrinth of long-forgotten passages in a long-abandoned bunker miles under the earth. All the angry thoughts that he had been shoving back into the corners of his mind sprung forth, and he gritted his teeth in the darkness.

A week ago, he had been enjoying life. He lived with the Professor, Mrs. Monday, and her son Coll in a warehouse by the banks of the Shandor River, and was learning to read in a hidden library deep in the Forgotten Sector, where he had met Libby. Coll was his best friend, Galvin Maricossa was a mysterious but fascinating presence in his life, and his relationship with Libby was moving someplace he didn’t really understand, but was pretty sure he liked.

Now, Maricossa was a double-agent that Skylar still couldn’t wholly trust, the Professor had no time for him, and Coll was dead. Libby was the only thing that hadn’t changed.

“Skylar?” Libby’s voice came through the darkness of the room and the thicker darkness of Skylar’s frustration and brought him back to reality. “What do we do now?”

Skylar shook his head, sweeping away his anger to deal with later. He fingered the useless torch in his hand and thought. Why hadn’t he carried a package of matches with them? If only there was something that could lead them out—a rope, or a groove in the floor or…It hit him with sudden clarity. “We need to follow the bats.”

“What?”

“We need to follow the bats.” Certainty and relief combined in a heady rush, and Skylar felt along the wall until he found the door again. Squeezing back out into the main hall, he explained, “We haven’t seen them going out the main hanger, so they must have some other exit. We’ve just got to find it. That many bats—it ought to be big enough for us to get out.” The last bit was pure bluff—he had no idea how big a bat’s egress had to be. But he couldn’t bear to think that they might find it and be unable to escape, or worse, not be able to find it at all.

“Come on, Lib,” he said, managing to fake a cheerful, brave tone. “Keep your nose peeled—we should be able to smell fresh air. Or…or feel a breeze or something. And they can only go through open doors, so we don’t have to worry about any of the closed ones.”

“Except that we opened most of them on the way here,” Libby pointed out, her tone getting high and breathy again. Skylar groped in the darkness until he found her arm, and took hold of her hand.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey. We’ll get out of here.”

“Promise?”

Skylar swallowed. Then he squeezed Libby’s hand, and tugged her away from the caved-in doorway and back toward home—he hoped.

“Yeah. Promise.”

Chapter One - Libby

Libby slapped the journal shut and stared at the wall. She felt like taking a pickaxe to it. Not that the poor wall had done anything to her. An outlet for the frustration building up inside her would have been nice, though.

They'd arrived at the bunker two days ago, and other than her brief foray into the forest, she'd been inside, helping Mrs. Monday set up a kitchen, unload the kids' schoolbooks, and generally try to settle into a semblance of normal life. She'd barely seen Skylar or Maricossa, and Hez had been nagging her every other minute about unloading the rest of the books so he could take off.

As if she was in charge of that anymore.

She twisted around in the chair she'd set to face the wall and frowned at the Professor, who was lingering over a late lunch with Mrs. Monday and Toddy. The Professor looked up from his sandwich. Libby ducked down behind the high stuffed back of the chair.

"Libretto?"

Darn it. She slid out of the chair, pushing her feet into the sandals she'd worn since Skylar's rescue. "Yeah, Professor?"

"Have you seen Skylar today?"

Libby twisted her hips and remembered she was wearing her linen pants. No skirt swished to fill the silence as she thought. "No, sir, I haven't."

"I have a job for the two of you. I'd like you to explore some of the back tunnels behind the control room," the Professor said, taking a bite. He spoke around the mouthful of food. "It's been a long time since I've been here, and I don't remember the layout as well as I'd like to. See if you can find anything useful, maybe a back way out of the bunker. There was one at one time, but I don't remember the location."

Libby nodded, the meaning of his words taking away a bit of the excitement at getting to spend time with Skylar. Even here, the Professor didn't think they were safe. He wanted a way out, an escape.

She couldn't wait until the day when they didn't have to find escape tunnels.

She followed the short tunnel to the control room, where stacks of computers banked the walls for several stories, metal-grate walkways providing access to the higher ones. Maricossa sat in one of the dusty chairs in front of a bank of screens, one hand playing with the stuffing that leaked from the chair cushion, the other turning pages in a book propped against his legs, which were kicked up on the keyboard of one of the computers.

"Seen Skylar?" she asked.

Maricossa looked up. "I think he might be on the ledge outside the bunker." He frowned. "He's not in a good mood. We were unloading books earlier and I thought he was about to take my head off."

"I'll be careful," Libby said quietly, remembering when she and Skylar had realized he'd saved her life when they were kids. If he hadn't hurt her then, he wouldn't hurt her now.

Maricossa nodded. "You're probably the only one who can even get close to him in this mood."

She gave him a suspicious glance as he went back to reading his book. Maricossa had seemed so cautious around Skylar since they left Shandor Rei. Did everyone really think Skylar was that scary? Libby crossed the control room and pushed open door. It protested loudly, the rusty hinges squealing. Maybe she was the only one who could see past Skylar’s metal shield to the tenderness underneath.

The air bladders of the Daniel Defoe nearly touched the ceiling and the metal walkways of the hangar, making the room seem small. A few crates and miscellaneous furniture stood near the gangway, looking like Maricossa had abandoned them as soon as Skylar had stopped helping. Hez lounged on a chair, staring at his ship, his arms crossed and his chin resting on his chest. He turned around at the sound of her footsteps on the grating.

"Hey, Lib." He jumped up. "Lookin' for Skylar?"

Libby put her hands on her hips. "You picked up on that quickly."

He grinned and shrugged. "Hey, listen, when you get the chance, we need to finish unloading all these books. Skylar and Maricossa were helping me earlier, but they got in a tiff about something or other. Not sure that I really get those two. Anyway, I've got places to be, so when you have a few minutes…"

"Yeah, I'll get to it, Hez, promise." Libby scooted along the metal walkway to the door set into the bunker's metal door. This close, she could faintly hear the pounding of the waterfall on the other side—as insulated as the door was, it kept most of the noise and water out.

She pushed the door open and stepped out onto the slippery ledge. The waterfall rushed down just a few paces to her right. On her left, the path curved back toward the waterfall and ended in an abrupt ledge that jutted over the whirlpool fifty feet below. Skylar perched on the edge of the ledge, rolling a rock between his palms and staring down the river in the direction of Shandor Rei.

Libby trailed one hand along the cliff wall as she picked her way to Skylar. It was surprising that he'd even come out here, given his usual caution when it came to mixing heights with his artificial limbs.

When she was a few feet away, the shadow of the falls cliff dropped away and the sunrays massaged into her shoulders. Libby stopped for a moment and closed her eyes, reveling in the way that the sun soothed away in the tension in her muscles. Even just a couple of days underground was too much.

"Hey, Lib."

She opened her eyes. Skylar brushed pebbles from his hands and scooted back from the edge.

"Hey, Sky. The Professor was wondering if we'd explore some of the tunnels behind the control room. He says he doesn't remember them very well. Plus I think he wants to know if there's another way out."

Skylar snorted. "I'd have thought the Professor would come up with some not-so-blatantly-obvious idea to keep me occupied."

Libby smiled weakly. "Well…whatever works."

"I suppose so."

When they got back into the hangar, Libby noticed that Hez had disappeared. Then she heard banging and muffled curses coming from the hull of the ship.

"Hey, look at that," Skylar muttered. "One person in a worse mood than me."

She patted his arm and pulled open the door to the control room. Maricossa looked up from his book, but Skylar passed through with barely a nod to acknowledge the older man's presence. Libby gave Maricossa a shrug, grabbed a battery-powered torch from a shelf, and followed Skylar as he turned right—not heading for the kitchen, but further into the dusty corridors that curved around and behind the control room.

Libby hurried to Skylar's side and switched on the torch. The yellowy beam flickered a bit as it illuminated the path. She smacked it with her hand and the flickering stopped.

"What, afraid of the dark too?" Skylar said.

She grunted and elbowed him. "That makes it sound like I have a million different fears, and I really don’t."

He smirked. "Sorry."

She flicked the beam around in front of them. On the wall to their left, there was nothing. The wall to their right had door spaced about, from what she could see in the weak beam, every ten to twenty feet apart.

Skylar pushed the first one open, and Libby shone the light inside. Empty, cobwebby shelves filled the small room. "Just a storeroom," Skylar muttered.

"Will it work for the books?" Libby stepped further into the room and examined a shelf. The metal was spotted with rust and condensation. She sighed. "Too damp, just like the kitchen and the bunkrooms we already found. Hez isn't going to be too happy about that."

They left the doors open as they proceeded down the tunnel. The next few rooms were storerooms like the first, and after that they found more bunkrooms, though smaller than the two that they'd found next to the kitchen.

After the first few rooms, Skylar stopped commenting about each one and walked in silence, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat when he wasn't opening doors. Libby could tell he wanted to say something—just the way he sometimes half-turned to her, but then would look away with a little shrug of his shoulders, as if it wasn't important.

After the third time, she said, "How long did you know Coll?"

Skylar stiffened a little. "Met him about the same time I got these." He waved his metal hand.

"Best friends right away, or did you guys fight at all?"

He actually chuckled at that. "We didn't fight much until I met you, Lib."

"Oh…I'm sorry."

"Naw, don't be. Coll can be—" he coughed. "Uh, could be…"

Libby reached over and slipped her hand into his. She squeezed it, even though it was the metal one—could he sense pressure with his prosthetics? His hand tightened a little around hers. "Are you irritated that the Professor asked you to do this with me?"

"A bit," he admitted. "I think I process things a lot different than the Professor. He doesn't quite understand other peoples' ways of dealing with stuff, and he really doesn't understand that when something happens to me, I have to go off and let it sit on my mind for a while. He thinks that brooding isn't a good thing."

"I don't know that too much of it is."

"Not saying that. But I do need a little of it." He squeezed her hand again. "But this is good too."

The torch flickered out. Libby stopped and slapped it again. The beam came back on, but it was even more yellow and watery than it had been a moment before. "Darn it! We're going to get stuck in the dark, I know it!"

"Naw, we won't. I saw that there was a bend ahead. We'll see what's there then head back, all right?"

She made a face and nodded. As they stepped around the bend in the stone walls, Libby scuffed her foot through a puddle of water. She glanced down. A tiny steam ran through the center of the corridor floor, not even deep enough to make any noise.

"I wonder where that's coming from," she said.

Skylar moved the torch up and squinted past the light. "I think the tunnel might be blocked."

A few more steps forward, and the debris of a cave-in came into their view, wooden supports sticking from the boulders like a set of bad teeth. Libby made out the remains of a doorway half-covered by the rubble, the first door they'd seen on their left. Water glistened and trickled on the boulders, forming a larger puddle on the floor that gradually found its way into the little stream Libby had seen a few steps back.

"The Shandor River must have an underground bit or something that made this cave in," Skylar said. He stepped up to the cave in and prodded a few boulders. "Everything seems pretty settled, but I hope it didn't damage the integrity of the rest of the bunker. That could be a problem."

Libby swung the light away from him and shone it on the half-covered doorway.

"Hey, Libby!"

"Rubble piles are boring. I saw more than my fair share at the Library. This, however—" she crouched and shone the light into the room. "Hey, this one's clear." She set the torch down on a rock, facing the doorway, and sat down.

"Don't go in there. Any disturbance could make everything more unstable."

Libby ignored him and wiggled into the doorway. She made it through, barely brushing the sides of the doorway, and stood up. Something crunched under her feet, and a sour, musty smell hit her nose. She made a face. What was that smell?

"Libby?" Skylar bent down, blocking the light. "Come on, get out of there. I don't want you getting hurt."

"Can you hand me the torch?"

He growled in frustration and passed the torch through.

"Relax, Sky. That cave-in isn't going anywhere. Besides, don't you think this room would have already collapsed if it was going to?"

"Maybe…"

She flicked the torchlight around. The room was bigger than the other storerooms they'd found so far, and she could see shelves around the edges that looked stacked with old computers and gadgets. "Sky, look at this stuff! The Professor will like this, yeah?"

"Hey, is that a box of C-Ds? Over there, look." Skylar pointed to one of the shelves closest to her. "The Professor's been trying for ages to get one of those to work again, but he has never found that many."

Libby took a step forward and was reaching for the box when she heard a faint rustle above her. She looked up. The torchlight bounced off several beady little eyes, and leathery wings stretched wide.

"Yeeeep!" she squealed, backpedaling.

The bats dropped from the ceiling and fluttered, brushing against her with moist wings. Libby screamed and flailed with the torch, felt it impact one or two of them. "Sky! Skylar!"

"Here, Libby, here." He grabbed her hand, pulled her to the doorway. Something tangled in her hair. Libby dropped the torch and screamed again, slapping around her head. Skylar shoved her through the door and clambered through himself. The bats followed them out, wings flapping loudly in her ears.

"Come on, Libby, run!"

Burns the Fire - Prologue

I made the mistake of telling Mrs. Monday that I felt a little like some of the explorers I read about in the old History books. She told me I should consider writing down all of our adventures so everyone could read about them, and maybe we would become famous. She even scrounged up enough paper and sewed together a little notebook for me to write in, so I kind of feel like I have to do it now.

But I don't really feel like an adventurer. I feel scared.

That night we left Shandor Rei was awful. We barely cleared the airdocks when other airships popped up in pursuit. They didn't fire on us or anything, just put-putted after. Hez tried every trick he could think of and finally lost them in the evening fog over the Shandor river.

Skylar disappeared as soon as it was safe, and I found him curled up in one of the cabins crying. It was a horrible thing. I could almost hear his heart breaking.

It made me think of Brick and Hamlet. I vaguely remember when Hamlet showed up at the library—he was this scrawny kid who Needle caught breaking into the kitchen. Of course it's ironic that he grew up to become our cook. I thought Needle would have scrubbed the love of the kitchen out of him, since for the first six months he stayed with us, his chore was doing the dishes. Brick was one of the many kids Needle brought home from Digory Street, but he was just as special as anyone.

I really miss them both.

No, that's a ridiculous understatement. The truth is that if Skylar wasn’t here with me, I don't think I'd be able to hold myself together.

And then there's the forest.

All my life I've dreamed of running away and finding the forest. I wanted to sit in a mossy tree and play my flute. Skylar lost his limbs because he saved me from wild dogs when I tried to run away to the forest.

We landed in the bunker that morning. We hovered and let Skylar down on a rope ladder, then he went behind the waterfall and opened it so Hez could fly right into the bunker. That was so awesome! I managed to sneak away as Mrs. Monday organized the rest of the kids to gather their things—I suppose having adults around comes in handy sometimes—and went back outside.

The trees stretched on forever, all dark and shadowy. I could barely hear the wind because everything rustled—even the grass under my feet didn't feel soft and velvety like all the books said it was, but coarse and prickly. I didn't like it. It felt too closed in, too stuffy. At least in Shandor Rei I could see the sky.

The only familiar thing was the smell—kind of musty and damp, almost like a few of the Library rooms. When I started to go back to the bunker, I heard a distant howl, and the hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I ran back as fast as I could.

I miss the city. I don't think I'm going to like it here. I feel like my life is going up in flames all around me, and I can't do anything to stop it.