Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (17 page)

Maggie grasped Ethan’s shoulder painfully and
pulled him down to her eye level. “If you let another of my people die in a
stupid accident like that last one, you’ll be the next to drop off a cliff,”
she said, her eyes burning with rage. “I should never have left Collins in the
hands of a Colony Office fool.”

Ethan wanted to protest, but guilt stopped his
words. He simply nodded. She shoved him back and turned away on the stretcher.

It had been so long since he’d seen grief turn to
anger. So long since he’d stood face-to-face with that kind of pain. But it
wasn’t something you forgot. He ached for her and for Collins. The cousins lifted
the stretcher. Ndaiye shot Ethan an apologetic look over Maggie’s head. Ndaiye,
of all of them, understood Collins’s death best. He was there. Ethan gave him a
wry smile.

Ethan hated to leave the Teardrop Chamber. Above
him, the long transparent filaments hung down in perfect parallel. He hoped the
worms lived throughout the cave and that he’d see the chandeliers again.

They followed the passage they’d found the day
before. A subdued quiet still rested over the group, and no one joked or
teased. Three of the crew had their Maxlights on, and the passage was almost
unbearably bright. It made Ethan feel better, though, and probably all of them.

Ethan lagged behind, letting Jade lead the way
today. Brynn came up beside him.

“She can be pretty harsh,” she said quietly.

Ethan, not sure that Maggie couldn’t hear them,
simply nodded. “It’s rough, losing someone,” he said.

Brynn walked in silence for a while. “Ethan,” she
said, “I don’t want to complain, but I’ve got a problem.”

He looked at her closely, questioning.

“I’m out of water. Have been for hours. All this
walking and the dirt—it’s so dry.”

This part of the cave was dry and dusty. It was a
change from the dampness. Ethan was glad for a problem he could fix. Without
stopping, he swung his pack around to the front and rummaged up a bag of water.
His last. He handed it to her and got a smile in return.

“Sip it,” he said, “don’t guzzle or it’ll make
you sick.” She nodded.

They walked on in silence. The tunnel passed on
either side in an endless monotony of gray. Ethan held the sparkling
chandeliers in his mind, their light and beauty out of place in this dismal
passage.

When he traded off with Traore for a turn
carrying the stretcher, he half expected Maggie to kick him in the kidneys
while they walked, but she didn’t, just rode in sullen silence.

“That song you sang last night,” he said to
Ndaiye, “it was in an Earth language, wasn’t it?”

Ndaiye spoke from the other end of the stretcher.
“Yes, a very old one.”

“Do you speak it?” Ethan had met so few native
speakers of other languages. As language standardization became more and more
necessary for global commerce, the languages had died.

“I do. A little. My parents and grandparents were
tenacious people. They hung on to the scraps and pieces of it that their
grandparents had left them.”

Ethan nodded. Linguistic enclaves still thrived
through such tenacity.

“I’d love to hear more of it someday.”

“When we’re not trying to die,” Maggie
interjected.

Her acidity suddenly struck Ethan as funny, and
though he knew she was saying it to quiet them, he started to laugh. Ndaiye’s
laughter exploded behind him. It felt wonderful to laugh at the absurdity of
this whole situation. Their laughter ricocheted around the passage, and Ethan
heard an annoyed grunt from behind him on the stretcher. He laughed harder.

Jade stopped ahead and held up a hand. They
quieted. A distinct ping echoed through the cave ahead. Walking carefully, they
continued down the passage. Seconds later, they heard another, followed
immediately by another with a slightly different pitch. A long pause, then
another ping. As his ears adjusted to the rhythm of the pings, Ethan began to
anticipate the next one. He watched Jade walking ahead of him. Her steps fell
in syncopation with some of the pings, and he noticed his own were doing the
same. Ahead of her, the stone of the tunnel, light grey for the last few hours
they’d traveled down it, suddenly darkened. It swallowed the beam of Jade’s
Maxlight, and she slowed. The passage narrowed here, too, suddenly tapering to
a funnel just big enough for a single person to walk through.

“Hold up!” Maggie called, leaning out of the
stretcher to peer around Ethan. “Come here,” she called, and the team gathered
around her. Ethan and Ndaiye set her down and stretched their aching muscles as
they turned to listen to her.

“We’re gonna have to be more careful,” she said
pointedly. “This isn’t some carved-out, polished-up, metal-backed Yynium mine.
No Colony Officers,” here she glared at Ethan, “are going through here every
day making sure there’s nothin’ to stub your toe on. This is a wild cave. We’ve
seen enough already to know that there’s enough in here to kill us without us
throwing stupid into the mix as well. No more charging into caverns blind. No
more pretending we’re fine if we’re not.” Her eyes shifted to Brynn, who
visibly shrunk from the captain’s gaze. “We’re gonna have to be smarter.”

Ndaiye spoke up. “Then you’re gonna let me change
that Sprayshield again, right, Captain?” he asked, taking the Emedic out before
she could give permission.

Ethan watched over Ndaiye’s shoulder. The Emedic
was blinking several warnings.

“What’s up?”

“Batteries are low,” Ndaiye said, “and we’re out
of Reagan cells and bandages.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.” Ethan said.

“We still have some basics: pain medicine,
antiseptic sprays. But,” Ndaiye looked up and caught Ethan’s eye, “with the
batteries going, it’s probably better if nobody gets hurt from here on out.”

Maggie spoke up. “It’s like I said, we’re gonna
have to be smarter.” They nodded their approval. “Now,” she said, “I don’t like
the looks of this next section. It’s narrow and it’s gonna be slick. I can feel
the wet in the air.”

Ethan focused. She was right. The humidity had
risen again.

“We need to send somebody through there to be
sure we don’t find another drop off or a krech nest.” She gestured at Ethan. “You
go first,” she barked. “See if it’s safe.”

He knew what she was doing. He would have to
prove himself to her now and maybe every day after. He nodded slowly.

“If you don’t die, come back and we’ll go in.”

Ndaiye started to speak, but Ethan caught his
eye. “It’s okay,” he said, “I want to make sure.” And he did. Perhaps redeeming
himself to Maggie would help redeem him to himself.

He pulled out his own Maxlight and headed down
the passage. Long and smoothly curving, it reminded him of a waterslide. The
dark walls cut off the light behind him quickly and he was alone with the
ever-nearing pings resounding around him in the narrow tunnel.

When his light fell on a slab of solid rock
ahead, Ethan swore. Another dead end. Except . . . a sliver of
shadow played at the right edge of the rock face. As he investigated further he
found that the passage didn’t end, it just made an incredibly sharp turn.
Stepping through it reminded him of stepping into the experimentation chamber
back on Beta Alora and a shiver ran through him as he stepped quickly around the
corner and out of the passage.

Ethan stood in wonder. All around him, jutting
ten, twenty, thirty feet into the air, was a chaos of shining white crystals,
some of them bigger around than the survey crew’s ship had been. They cut
across the cavern from floor to ceiling, crisscrossing and tumbling like a
broken mirror caught in midair. They were glorious, ghostly and translucent,
suspended all around him down through a long arching cavern. The floor was
covered with smaller crystals, from two to four feet, covering the ground with
jagged edges. Here and there, a pool lay perfectly still, reflecting the
jubilation of luminous columns. A ping echoed through the chamber and he saw
the ripples of a single drop of water on the surface of one of the pools. Seconds
later, another drop fell, again ringing through the crystal cavern like a bell.

“Ethan!” he heard Traore’s voice in the tunnel
outside. “Ethan! Are you okay?”

It took Ethan a moment to find his voice, and
even then it only came in a hoarse whisper.

“I’m all right. It’s—it’s safe. And it’s
beautiful!”

Traore responded, “Okay, we’re coming.”

Ethan didn’t return to them. He stood, soaking in
the grandeur of the cavern by himself as long as he could. When they shuffled
through the narrow entry, Traore first, helping Maggie walk through because the
stretcher would never make that turn with her on it, Ethan turned to see the
awe on their faces. One by one they entered, standing on the low rock ledge at
the edge of the cavern.

No one spoke. Finally, Ndaiye could contain
himself no longer. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said softly. “Can
this be real?”

Ethan leaned down and ran a hand across the
nearest crystal, as big around as his own body and three times as long. The
mineral was cold and smooth under his hand. “They’re real.”

Ethan dropped down and sat on the ledge, then
lowered himself the three feet to the jagged floor of the cavern. Traore and
Brynn followed. Maggie sat on the ledge, but came no further. Ethan saw her
watching them intently.

The crystals were solid. The team could climb on
them and crawl under them. Traore even grasped the end of a jutting crystal and
hung from it. Ethan saw Brynn at the pool, filling her water bags and the one
he’d given her earlier. She stumbled as she brought it to him across the uneven
floor. Small crystals chimed as they snapped or were kicked across the floor.
Ethan couldn’t help himself. He gathered some and slipped them in his pack. Everyone
took the time to fill their water bags from the cold, clear pools.

He stood in front of the wide face of a vertical
crystal. In it he saw his own image reflected in the shiny surface. His
shoulder lights illuminated his unshaven face, and his coveralls reminded him
of the Caretaker’s uniform he’d worn for five long years. He looked different
to himself, older, more weary. He was, he supposed, all those things. If he
made it back to Aria, he would tell her about this place. He would tell her how
the crystals seemed to glow from within when the light touched them, how the
light brought out color from the pure white of them. He would tell her how her
face came to him at every tough moment, and how he held the children’s laughter
in his mind like a talisman against the dark of the cave.

Ndaiye and Jade hopped down and did some
exploring, too. Ethan watched the whole team, climbing and sliding down the
shining spears like children at a playground. That was when he started to get
nervous. The loss of Collins was still a shadow in his mind, and as beautiful
as this place was, it was no place to stay. The jagged floor would be
impossible to sleep on and though most of the big crystals were suspended now,
there was no guarantee they would always be. Several of the giants lay on the
floor, where they had obviously fallen from their own weight. And the shattered
remains of the crystals unfortunate enough to have formed under them were proof
enough that a human wouldn’t survive being under one if it fell.

Maggie, of course, was thinking that, too. “We’ve
got to keep moving,” she called, watching her team. “Let’s see if we can find
the way out.” She stood and Ethan watched as Jade offered to rebuild the
stretcher for her. Maggie waved her aside, and began hobbling across the cavern
floor. Jade returned the folded stretcher to her pack. He’d have to remember to
trade it off with her so she didn’t end up carrying the extra weight of it all
the time.

The team searched the cavern walls for exit
points. Ethan suspected that any way out would be near the back, so he looked
around for the largest gaps he could find between the shining fingers of rock
and began climbing over and under them, following a dark passageway that ran
erratically toward the back of the cave.

It was slow going, and exhausting. Duck down,
crawl under, throw an arm over, pull up, climb through. The space between the
crystals shifted, and after climbing until he was out of breath he found
himself twenty feet above the floor, standing on a gargantuan crystal and
looking down at a spectacular spherical crystal structure, which shone
dazzlingly bright in the dark of the cave. A shaft of light pierced it from
above, illuminating it with vibrant white light.
Sunlight
. Ethan
scrambled down to it. Climbing on top of the translucent sphere, he looked up.

The hole was minuscule, no bigger around than
Ethan’s wrist, and the sun shone directly down it.

He heard a surprised cry behind him and looked to
see Brynn scurrying down the huge crystal, calling to the others as she came. “Light!
Light! There’s light!”

He heard them coming, and stood for a moment with
the sun on his face. He stepped back, letting it fall onto his dirty gloves,
and held it for a moment, taking in its radiance. He wanted to keep it, put it
in his pocket and take it out later, when the cave closed around them again, as
he sensed it would. Ethan wanted to taste the sunlight, revel in it, but when
Brynn climbed up, he moved to let her feel it on her face.