Day 29, continued. 12:31 p.m.
The junction is a low wide chamber, maybe sixty feet across, with a ceiling that comes down to about seven feet in the middle so that you're always slightly stooping without deciding to. Four tunnels come in around the edge. Tom and I were standing at the mouth of the ramp with Ren thirty feet up behind us at the last turn and Colby behind her.
The floor was dry and the walls were warm and my count was twenty-four.
Then I started counting again and my hands went cold.
They were everywhere.
Not coming at us. Every instinct I had said they were, and every instinct was wrong. They were going somewhere, in a slow steady rolling stream out of the second and third tunnels and across the floor of that chamber, dozens of them, at the pace of a man walking a dog.
I did what I'd been told to do, which is keep the count. I counted in fives with my lips moving, and lost my place twice on the far side where they bunched up, and went back and started that part over, and I got to forty-one before they started overlapping and I could not separate one from another anymore.
"Forty-one," I said. "That's not all of them. That's what I can resolve."
Tom said something short that Colby would have enjoyed. I didn't laugh. I wanted to, a little, which I think is what your body does when it runs out of better ideas. My hands were still cold and the air on my face was warm and those two things would not line up.
* * *
They were all going the same way.
Every one. Out of two and three, across the chamber, and into the fourth tunnel, the one that isn't on the map, and none of them came back out.
And the fourth tunnel was warm. You could feel it from thirty feet, a difference in the air on your face like standing near an open oven door in a cold kitchen, and the closer they got to it the faster they went. They sped up at the end.
We'd moved without meaning to. Somewhere in the counting Tom had edged off the foot of the ramp and along the wall to get a straight look into the fourth tunnel, and I'd gone with him, shoulder to the stone, so that the ramp was behind us and off to one side now instead of at our backs.
I put my hand flat on the wall again, down low, like I had at the bottom of the ramp.
At the ramp it had been warm. Here it was warm enough that I took my hand off.
"Tom."
"I see it."
"No, look at the light."
* * *
Every kid in Arizona learns this in the third grade off a laminated poster, right next to the one about what to do if there's a fire.
Blue. Green. Yellow. Orange. Red.
You learn it as a countdown, which is how it's taught, and you learn it alongside the water cycle, as a fact about the world that has nothing to do with you personally. There's a blue one behind the video store on Cave Creek. There's a blue one behind a storage place on Bell Road. They're blue. They've always been blue. A man drives past them in a truck.
Nobody ever tells you what the color actually is.
It's the light off the walls. That's all it is. That flat sourceless grey-blue that I'd been walking around in for four and a half hours, the one that eats your shadows and makes you bad at distance. It comes off the stone, and the stone is one color on the whole inside of a portal, and the color of that light is the reading. The blue door in the parking lot is just the part of it that pokes out into the world where a man in a truck can see it.
Levels one and two had been grey-blue. Grey with a blue in it. Blue, the way a blue portal is blue, which is barely.
The fourth tunnel was green.
Not a shade off. Not a trick of my eyes after five hours. It came out of that tunnel mouth and lay across the floor of the chamber like water, and the slimes going into it went from grey to green as they crossed the line, and I stood there and watched about eleven of them change color.
"Ren," I said. My voice did something strange. "Ren, come look at this."
She came down four steps and stopped.
"That's green," Ren said.
Behind her Colby said, "What? What is it," and she didn't answer him. She had one hand on the wall of the ramp and she kept it there.
* * *
It took me until Monday to get this into one sentence.
A portal doesn't ripen from the outside in. It ripens from the bottom up.
The Bell Road portal has been blue for nine years the way a house with a fire in the basement has a cool front door. The county checks the door. The app reports the door. Tom Guzmán cleared this place twice and both times he cleared two levels and a third that had three tunnels on it, and went home, and got paid three hundred dollars, and never once had a reason to walk down a hallway that wasn't on his map.
And somewhere under Bell Road, under a self-storage place and four miles from Colby Estrada's mother's apartment on Thunderbird, a fourth tunnel opened at some point since Tom was last down there in March, and everything in that portal has been walking into it ever since.
That's what a hidden portal is. It isn't a portal nobody found. It's this. It's the part of a portal nobody goes to, inside a portal everybody's already checked.
There is a fence around that door. There's a sign. There's a phone number in smaller letters under the sign and some county inspector who drives past four times a year.
All of it is bolted to the wrong end.
* * *
"Up," Tom said. "Now. Nobody runs."
He said it perfectly. Flat, normal volume, the same voice as the counts. And I turned around to go up the ramp behind him and that's when I found out how long we'd been standing there.
The stream out of tunnel two had widened.
While the four of us stood there and looked at a color, the rolling steady line of them coming across the chamber had spread out like water does when the ground flattens, and it had come around the base of the ramp, and it was between us and the way up.
It wasn't deep. Maybe twenty feet of floor with slimes moving across it at the speed of a man walking a dog, twelve or fifteen of them in the gap, and more coming out of two behind that.
And you cannot walk through that. One slime is a beanbag chair full of water that takes three hits with a hammer and doesn't care about you. Twelve of them across twenty feet of dry stone, moving, in a room where you're stooping, at hour five, with a forearm you have already spent, is how somebody goes down in a slime hole and doesn't get up.
"REN." Tom, and this time he was loud. "Go up. Take him and go up and hit the reader and do not come back down."
"Tom—"
"You're an E-three with a lighter and he's got a sword he's never swung. Go up."
I heard boots on stone going away from us and somebody saying something and then not saying it.
After that there was only Tom breathing next to me, and the slimes going past us with no sound at all, and the warm air coming out of the fourth tunnel onto the side of my face.
* * *
So that was the situation at 12:38 in the afternoon on a Saturday, a hundred feet under a self-storage place on Bell Road.
Two of us on the wrong side of the room. Twenty feet of moving floor between us and three hundred feet of ramp. Forty-one that I could count and more that I couldn't, all of them coming out of two tunnels and going into a third one that was the wrong color, and not one of them interested in us in the slightest, which somehow made it worse.
A man with two kids and a night job, holding a maul.
And me.
Tom shifted his grip on the maul, both hands, and then shifted it back to where it had been. He looked at the gap and then at me, and I watched a very tired thirty-four-year-old do arithmetic he did not want the answer to, which is a thing I know the face of.
"Kid," he said. "How long can you hold that."
Nineteen minutes and forty seconds, on a Tuesday, in an air-conditioned gym, fresh, with a woman timing me on her phone.
That was not the number he was asking for and we both knew it.
I got my elbow in and my feet live and brought it up.
"Long enough," I said. "Get behind me."