Chapter 2 - under the mountain pt 2

They spent another day going down, although none of them called it morning when they woke. Morning had become a word for something that happened elsewhere, somewhere beyond several thousand feet of rock where the sky changed colour and light came through windows and a man could look east and know roughly what hour it was. Beneath the mountain there was only the lamp Ward had kept burning while the others slept, turned so low that its flame barely managed to give shape to the men gathered around it. Nathan woke to pale faces suspended in darkness, the smell of stale sweat and lamp oil, and the ache that had settled so deeply into his body that for a few moments he could not remember which parts of him were merely sore and which had actually been injured. He thought they might have slept five hours. Harcourt, once his spectacles were back on and he had spent several minutes rubbing stiffness from his fingers, insisted that it had been closer to six. Mallory listened to them for all of half a minute before telling both men that knowing whether they had slept miserably for five hours or miserably for six was unlikely to improve anyone's disposition. A few tired smiles appeared around the lamp, but no one had enough energy left to laugh properly.

Packing had become its own small ordeal. Bread was no longer eaten with any pleasure; it was chewed because chewing was necessary, swallowed because bodies required fuel, and washed down with water that tasted increasingly of the metal bottles in which it had been carried. Every movement seemed to require preparation. A man did not simply rise after resting anymore. He stared at his knees first, drew breath, braced a hand against the floor and slowly persuaded himself upright. There was often a grunt at the end of it, some small involuntary noise that would have embarrassed any of them above ground. Down here nobody commented. The mountain had stripped away too many vanities for that.

It had reduced all of them in different ways. Harcourt no longer resembled the celebrated professor whose name had been enough to draw investors, surveyors and government interest to the expedition. Grey dust had collected through his beard, his spectacles sat crooked because of the crack running through one lens, and Nathan had noticed him repeatedly flexing his right hand whenever he believed no one was watching. Hargreaves had stopped making proper entries in his journal. Once, he would have recorded every change in temperature, every geological oddity and every disagreement about the route. Now he occasionally opened the book, stared at an empty page, and closed it again. Petru no longer prayed constantly. Nathan found that far more disturbing than when the man had muttered prayers under his breath every few minutes. Mallory still talked because silence seemed to offend some stubborn part of him, but even his stories had begun to come apart. He would start telling one, lose the thread halfway through, and simply walk on without finishing.

Ward alone seemed determined to remain recognisably himself. He still complained, still threatened, still ordered men to drink when he thought they were being foolish and then snapped at them for wasting water. He complained about the lamps, their pace, Harcourt's judgement, Anton's knife and Nathan's habit of looking too long at things that no sensible person would want to examine closely. More importantly, he continued treating Nathan with much the same exhausted suspicion he had shown him since the prison doors had opened.

Nathan had, to his surprise, become grateful for it.

The chain between their wrists scraped softly whenever one moved too far ahead of the other. During the first days Nathan had hated that sound. It had been a reminder that he was still a prisoner even while descending into places no law had ever reached. Now the scrape reassured him. So long as the chain moved, Ward was still beside him. If the sound stopped when it should not have, Nathan knew immediately.

They had all begun thinking in such terms.

Nobody asked whether everyone was well anymore. They listened for breathing instead. Nobody casually wondered where another man had gone; the question had become when did I last hear his boots? No one rounded a corner alone. If a man stopped to tighten a lace or rub a cramp from his calf, everyone stopped with him. Their progress had become painfully slow, but speed had ceased to matter as much as the ability to reach backward and touch another human being.

Nathan noticed that they were doing that more often as well. Not affectionately. Under ordinary circumstances some of these men might never have liked one another. Most had known each other less than a fortnight, and several had spent much of that time arguing. Yet Mallory now kept a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of him whenever the tunnel narrowed. Petru and Anton rarely allowed more than a few feet between them. Ward occasionally placed a palm against Nathan's back when they climbed steep sections, not because Nathan required assistance but because knowing exactly where he was seemed to matter.

Fear was turning them into a herd.

Nathan knew it was an unpleasant comparison. He also knew unpleasant comparisons did not become inaccurate merely because men disliked hearing them.

The passages grew stranger the farther they descended. Nathan had noticed the change the previous day, although experience had taught him that voicing every observation he made was not always helpful. In the upper tunnels he could understand what he was seeing. Water had made those places. Its history was written openly in the rock: rounded edges, shallow channels, mineral deposits where old streams had dwindled, patches of stone smoothed by centuries of flow. Even when the cave system had been difficult, it had still behaved like a cave.

That was no longer true.

The lower passages were smooth in a way Nathan could not explain. They were not polished, and there were no obvious signs of tools, but the rough irregularities of naturally broken stone had gradually disappeared. Some ceilings curved over them with such consistency that Nathan found himself measuring the arcs unconsciously, searching for the geological process that might have produced them. He could imagine none. When he had mentioned this to Harcourt the day before, the professor had spent nearly an hour arguing that pressure, erosion or mineral formation could account for it. Nathan had listened without being convinced.

Today Harcourt barely looked at the walls at all.

Their lamps concerned him more.

At the beginning of the expedition, nobody had thought seriously about wick or oil. A lamp was lit when required and refilled when necessary. There had been abundance enough to make calculation feel petty. That version of the expedition seemed almost ridiculous now. Harcourt carried the remaining spare wicks inside a little wooden case beneath his coat, protecting them from damp as though they were fragments of scripture. Several were already too short to burn properly. One had frayed badly, and another spare length had been ruined when a bottle leaked during the collapse.

Ward allowed only two lamps while they travelled. Whenever the tunnel became simple enough, he muttered about reducing them to one.

Mallory had objected the first time. "And if something comes from behind?"

Ward had not even looked back at him. "Then perhaps you'll be grateful tomorrow when we still have enough oil to see it."

Mallory had begun to answer, then apparently decided there was no point.

Nathan had calculated their remaining light earlier that day. It was the sort of calculation his mind performed whether he wanted it to or not: quantity of oil, rate of burn, condition of the wicks, expected pauses, probable travel time. Usually numbers comforted him. Numbers defined problems, and defined problems could often be solved.

These numbers did not solve anything.

They merely told him how long the darkness was willing to wait.

He kept the result to himself.

Somewhere around what they guessed was midday, Richard Bell's cough worsened enough that Ward called a halt. Bell had been pretending there was nothing wrong since the previous evening, which had become increasingly difficult to believe. By the time he sat down with his back against the wall, his breathing had taken on a faint rasp Nathan could hear from several feet away. Petru offered him water while Mallory searched the remnants of the medical pack for anything useful.

Nathan crouched nearby and watched him.

Bell noticed almost immediately. "Oh, don't start."

Nathan blinked. "Start what?"

"That."

"What?"

"That look you get when you're deciding which piece of a man has gone wrong."

Mallory gave a tired snort without looking up.

Nathan considered Bell's posture, the uneven rise of his chest and the slight pause after each deeper breath. "Your left lung."

Bell stared at him.

Mallory's hands stopped moving in the medical pack.

Nathan realised, a fraction too late, that he had answered the wrong question.

Bell's expression became profoundly unhappy. "Wonderful."

"It probably isn't serious."

"You've just told me my lung is failing."

"I did not say it was failing."

"You said my left lung."

"I said the problem is in your left lung. You have an old respiratory weakness. The damp is aggravating it, and I can hear the difference when you breathe."

Bell looked at Mallory with the air of a man appealing to a higher authority. "Is he ever normal?"

"No," Mallory said. "We've made peace with it."

Nathan frowned. "I am sitting here."

"We know."

Bell smiled.

It was not much of a smile and it lasted only a few seconds, but Nathan felt something loosen inside his chest when he saw it.

That reaction troubled him.

He had spent most of his adult life treating other people's emotions as variables. Fear altered judgement. Grief encouraged irrational decisions. Love was particularly troublesome because it could persuade otherwise intelligent people to behave in ways that made no sense whatsoever when viewed from the outside. Nathan understood those things very well. Physicians had once written entire pages about the detached way he spoke about other human beings and the ease with which he reduced behaviour to cause and effect.

Yet now he was relieved because Richard Bell, a man he had barely known before entering the mountain, had managed to smile.

He briefly wondered whether prolonged exhaustion was damaging his judgement.

Then Mallory found a strip of salt beef and handed it to Bell.

"Eat."

Bell looked at the meat as though it had personally offended him. "I'd rather die."

"Not permitted."

"By whose authority?"

"Mine."

Bell gave him a weak look. "Your authority appears mostly to consist of talking."

"And yet here you are, still alive."

Bell took the meat.

They moved on once he had eaten.

The tunnel widened gradually. At first the extra space felt almost pleasant. They could walk without scraping shoulders against stone, and there seemed to be more movement in the air. Then one of the lamps ceased to illuminate the opposite wall.

Ward stopped.

The others gathered behind him.

Nathan raised his own lamp higher, but the light reached only perhaps twenty feet before becoming useless.

Mallory stared into the darkness. "I don't like this."

Harcourt almost laughed. "I don't believe any of us have liked anything for several days."

"No. This is different."

Nathan agreed with him.

Wide spaces had become dangerous because they made counting difficult.

Ward seemed to reach the same thought. "Close up."

The men moved together until they were almost shoulder to shoulder. Their two lamps seemed absurdly small in that chamber, tiny yellow flames trying to wound a darkness far too large to care about them. Nathan listened as they walked. He had learned the sound of every man by then. Hargreaves breathed in short, careful pulls whenever the pain in his back worsened. Harcourt carried a faint wheeze. Petru sometimes whispered the final words of prayers under his breath. Mallory tended to sigh before speaking.

Bell coughed behind them.

Nathan glanced back.

Bell gave him a mildly irritated wave. "Still here."

Nathan turned forward again.

Several minutes later he looked back once more.

Bell remained at the rear beside another man.

After that Nathan stopped deciding to check.

It had become instinct.

A few steps. Listen.

A few more. Look.

Count.

Walk.

Count again.

The silence eventually became too much for Mallory, who began telling them about his daughter.

"She hates peas."

Petru glanced toward him. "All children hate peas."

"My boy eats them."

"Then your boy is strange."

"My boy eats anything. He ate half a candle once."

That earned a genuine, if tired, laugh from Hargreaves.

Mallory seemed pleased with himself. "Margaret caught him behind the pantry door chewing the bloody thing. Looked her straight in the eye and swallowed because he thought she'd make him spit it out otherwise."

Nathan smiled before he realised he was doing it.

Then a voice behind Mallory said, "Bell's gone."

The sentence was so simple that nobody understood it at first.

Mallory walked another half step before stopping.

"What?"

The man who had spoken was staring behind himself. For an instant he looked more confused than afraid, as though he expected Bell to step around his shoulder and make him feel foolish for raising the alarm.

"Richard?"

Mallory lifted the lamp.

The chamber behind them was empty.

"Bell?"

Nathan felt the chain pull sharply against his wrist as Ward spun around.

"What happened?"

"I don't know."

"You were directly in front of him."

"I know."

"When did you last see him?"

"I don't bloody know!"

The chamber took the shout and hurled fragments of it back at them until the word became almost meaningless.

Know.

Know.

Know.

Nathan backed up with Ward, unable to move independently because of the chain.

"Richard!" Ward shouted.

Nothing answered.

Mallory immediately started back the way they had come, but Petru caught him by the arm.

"Don't."

"He was just there."

"I know."

"He was coughing. I heard him."

"So did I," Nathan said.

Mallory turned toward him with a desperation that made the question almost an accusation. "When?"

Nathan searched his memory. Bell's cough. Mallory's story. The scrape of boots. Someone's coat brushing against another man's pack.

"Less than a minute, I think."

Mallory stared at him. "A minute?"

"I cannot be more precise."

"He cannot simply disappear in a minute."

Nathan said nothing.

They already knew that he could.

Then someone farther back whispered, "Where's Martin?"

This time there was no delay between understanding and fear.

Every man turned at once.

Another absence.

A man who had been among them moments earlier simply no longer occupied the place where memory insisted he should be.

Ward started swearing.

Petru shouted Martin's name.

Mallory pushed through the others and made it ten paces before Ward seized his coat and hauled him back.

"No!"

"Let go of me!"

"We stay together!"

"They're behind us!"

"You don't know that."

"Where else can they be?"

Nobody answered him.

That was the moment their fear stopped being something they carried quietly and became something that possessed the group.

It was not heroic fear. Nobody drew a weapon and stood bravely against an enemy. It was the ugly sort, the human sort. One man began calling Bell's name over and over as if persistence could force him to exist again. Petru moved from wall to wall searching desperately for a passage that was not there. Harcourt kept pushing his cracked spectacles up with trembling fingers and insisting that there had to be some hidden opening.

"There has to be something. Men don't simply—there must be a shaft, a fissure, something."

Nathan crouched and ignored him.

A layer of fine grey dust coated the floor. Their boots had marked it heavily, but Bell's tracks were easy enough to identify because the heel of his right boot was damaged.

Nathan followed them.

One print.

Then another.

Then another.

And nothing.

The final footprint was perfectly ordinary.

That was what frightened him.

Bell had not stumbled. His foot had not twisted. There was no sudden shift of weight, no scrape suggesting that something had dragged him sideways, no deeper impression from a man struggling to remain upright. The mark showed the normal pressure of a heel rolling forward onto the ball of the foot.

It was the footprint of a man walking.

There simply should have been another one after it.

Ward crouched beside him. "What?"

Nathan kept looking.

"Nathan."

"The tracks stop."

Ward followed his gaze.

Mallory came closer.

For several seconds none of them spoke.

Mallory finally whispered, "No."

Nathan reached down and touched the edge of the print. Fine dust clung to his fingertip.

"No," Mallory said again, stepping back. "That's impossible."

Nathan's mind had already begun searching for explanations whether he wanted it to or not.

A concealed opening beneath Bell?

No seam.

A collapse?

No disturbed dust.

Movement sideways?

No secondary marks.

Something from above?

No drag.

Nathan looked toward the ceiling.

Stone.

Only stone.

Behind them, Harcourt's voice had risen. He was insisting there might be ventilation shafts concealed in the walls. Petru was trying to stop him from striking the rock with the heel of his hand. Someone had begun crying.

Ward stood and shouted for quiet.

No one listened.

Mallory called Bell.

Petru called Martin.

Harcourt demanded the other lamp.

The chamber took all those voices and magnified them until it sounded as though a crowd of terrified men were trapped beneath the mountain instead of eight.

Ward drew his revolver.

Nathan saw the movement too late.

"Ward—"

The shot tore through the chamber.

The sound was enormous. Nathan felt it in his chest and teeth, and for an instant the muzzle flash gave every nearby face the colour of bone. The bullet struck the ceiling perhaps twelve feet above them.

Harcourt swore.

Petru ducked.

Someone shouted at Ward.

Ward lowered the weapon and began telling them that no one was splitting up, but Nathan stopped hearing him.

He was staring overhead.

A bullet striking stone should leave damage.

Even hard stone chipped under force. It fractured. It cast off dust.

The place Ward had shot did not look chipped.

It looked dented.

Nathan's mind rejected that description immediately.

Stone did not dent.

Then something beside the impact moved.

The movement was almost imperceptible. A tightening in the dark surface. Something drawing itself fractionally inward around the wound.

Nathan went completely still.

It moved again.

"Hush."

Ward was still talking. "We stay in one—"

"Hush."

Something in Nathan's voice silenced him.

Nathan lowered himself slowly, bringing the lamp up until its light reached higher across the ceiling.

Mallory whispered his name.

Nathan ignored him.

Once the light reached the impact point, the surface ceased to look quite like rock.

There were lines within it.

Nathan stared until his eyes adjusted.

They were not lines.

They were separate structures.

Long, narrow things lay pressed together so closely that the eye had taken them for mineral veins. One slid almost imperceptibly over another. A second seemed to contract around the bullet.

Mallory made a small sound behind him. "What is that?"

Nathan had no answer he trusted.

Roots, perhaps.

Vines.

Those were merely comparisons his mind offered because it had nothing better.

The structures were thick in places and almost threadlike in others, arranged in overlapping layers and covered by some dull outer surface that copied the colour and texture of the surrounding stone so perfectly that Nathan had walked beneath them without ever seeing them.

They were pretending to be rock.

The thought was absurd.

Nathan believed it completely.

Harcourt whispered, "Dear God."

The bullet remained embedded within the strange material. Around it, the surface had pushed inward instead of cracking. Nothing bled. There was no rupture, no recoil, no obvious wound response.

Nathan would have preferred blood.

Blood would have made sense.

Instead, one narrow tendril bent toward the bullet.

Touched it.

Stopped.

Another pressed against the indentation, withdrew, and approached again from a different angle.

Nathan felt the skin along his arms tighten.

Ward spoke very quietly. "What is it doing?"

Nathan watched the motion repeat.

Contact.

Pause.

Adjustment.

Contact again.

It was not repairing the damage.

It was investigating it.

"It doesn't know."

Ward looked at him. "Doesn't know what?"

"What happened."

Mallory frowned. "You shot it."

"No." Nathan's gaze never left the ceiling. "The bullet struck it. That is not the same thing."

No one understood him, and Nathan found himself forced to explain while the thing continued feeling around the metal.

"If you cut yourself, your body does not need to discover what a cut is. Tissue responds before you consciously understand the injury. Burned flesh reacts to heat. A wound begins closing because the body already has mechanisms for damage."

The tendril tightened around the bullet.

Nathan swallowed.

"This doesn't."

Harcourt shook his head. "That's impossible."

Nathan barely heard him.

One structure pressed inward. Another retreated. The bullet shifted.

"It's interpreting it," Nathan whispered.

Mallory looked at him with something close to anger. "Would you stop saying things like that?"

Nathan could not.

Understanding was what he did.

Understanding had always made the world safer.

"It hasn't been shot before."

Ward turned fully toward him. "How could you possibly know that?"

"Because if it had, it wouldn't still be deciding what a bullet is."

The bullet disappeared.

Petru made a strangled sound.

It had not fallen.

The ceiling had taken it.

The strange structures folded slowly around the metal and pulled it inward. For several seconds the spot remained slightly depressed.

Then the surface tightened.

The indentation vanished.

The colour returned.

Within moments, Nathan could no longer tell where Ward's bullet had struck.

There was only perfect black stone.

Nobody moved.

Nathan realised that his hand was shaking when the lamp flame began to tremble with it.

Then he looked away from the impact point and understood that he had made a mistake.

Because once the eye knew what to recognise, it became impossible not to see.

The seam running along the wall beside Harcourt was not a fracture.

It was the edge of one structure lying over another.

The rounded ridge near the floor was not mineral accumulation.

The ceiling was layered.

And when Mallory shifted, Nathan could have sworn the wall behind him tightened.

Nathan stood so quickly that the chain snapped taut and Ward nearly fell.

"Nathan?"

Nathan backed away from the wall.

Mallory stared.

Nathan had seen him frightened before, but the expression that crossed Mallory's face now was different. Mallory had watched Nathan approach things everyone else avoided. He had seen him inspect unknown substances with his bare hands, lean over fissures deep enough to swallow lamplight, and calmly calculate the likelihood of surviving a collapse.

Nathan Drake did not retreat merely because something frightened him.

But he was retreating now.

"Nathan."

Nathan looked down.

Grey dust.

Bootprints.

Stone beneath them.

Except perhaps it was not stone either.

Bell's final footprint returned to him.

A heel pressing down.

A normal step.

Then nothing.

Nathan's mind constructed an image before he could prevent it: the floor separating without visibly opening, swallowing a man and closing again before anyone turned around.

No scream because perhaps it happened too quickly.

No blood because perhaps nothing had torn.

Then he remembered the others.

Every place they had slept.

Every wall they had leaned against.

Every time one of them had steadied himself with a hand against the rock.

His stomach turned.

"We've been touching it."

Petru stared at him. "What?"

Nathan looked around the chamber.

The walls.

The ceiling.

The floor.

The tunnel behind them.

Possibly everything they had walked through for hours.

"We've been touching it."

Harcourt jerked away from the wall hard enough to stumble.

Mallory did the same.

Another man looked down and lifted one boot before realising there was nowhere else to put it.

Ward's voice became hoarse. "How much of it?"

Nathan shook his head.

"The wall?"

"I don't know."

"The floor?"

"I don't know."

Ward looked around at the chamber as though seeing it for the first time. "The whole bloody mountain?"

"I don't know!"

Nathan's voice broke across the space.

Everyone flinched.

He closed his eyes.

Losing control embarrassed him almost as much as the fear did.

When he opened them again, Ward was staring.

Nathan spoke more quietly. "I don't know."

That was worse.

Ward looked into the darkness ahead. "Then what do we do?"

Nathan hated the question.

Men always asked him eventually.

They looked to him because he could explain things. Even after Cole. Even after what Nathan had done. Whenever the world stopped behaving properly, they turned toward the one man who usually knew why.

Nathan wished they would stop.

There was nothing useful inside his head this time.

"We keep going."

Anton gave a broken laugh. "Across that?"

Nathan looked at him.

"There isn't anywhere that isn't it."

No one spoke after that.

There was no kindness in the answer, but Nathan had not intended cruelty. There was simply no softer truth available.

They moved again.

Nobody wanted to touch the walls now. When the passage narrowed, the men twisted sideways rather than brush against the surface. If someone slipped, his hands jerked instinctively toward the rock before he stopped himself.

Nathan found every footstep unbearable.

Before, boots had struck stone.

Now each step was pressure applied to something that only resembled stone.

He imagined the contact being felt beneath them.

Weight.

Movement.

Temperature.

Pattern.

Learned.

He tried not to think about Bell.

By the time they stopped again, exhaustion had almost become a mercy.

Nathan counted them before sitting.

Then counted again.

Eight.

He trusted numbers less than he once had, but he still needed that one.

Nobody discussed the missing men. They no longer needed to. The explanation they feared was too close to their skin.

Harcourt removed the little wooden box containing the spare wicks. He opened it with such care that the gesture looked almost ceremonial. A handful of ordinary woven fibres rested inside, and every man watched them as though they were gold.

Harcourt touched one.

Then another.

His fingers began trembling.

Mallory saw. "How many?"

Harcourt did not answer.

Ward leaned over and looked inside.

Three good lengths remained.

One poor one.

That was all.

Mallory sat back, carefully stopping himself before his shoulders touched the wall.

No one spoke.

Ward reached for one of the two burning lamps and extinguished it.

Darkness surged toward them.

Several men flinched badly enough that Nathan heard fabric scrape against fabric.

No one mocked them.

The surviving lamp illuminated only part of the chamber.

Nathan found himself staring at it.

It was such a simple thing.

Cotton.

Oil.

Flame.

Human beings had understood all three for thousands of years.

Their entire world had been reduced to that.

Petru began crying.

Quietly at first.

He turned away from Anton as if there were any possibility his brother would not notice.

Anton put an arm around him.

Petru shook his head. "I don't want to die here."

Nobody answered.

"I don't want this to be the last place I ever see."

Anton pulled him closer. "I know."

"No one will know what happened."

"They'll know."

"How?"

Anton said nothing.

Petru pressed his face into his brother's shoulder.

Harcourt removed his spectacles and rubbed both eyes. Hargreaves stared at his hands. Ward eventually set the revolver on the ground beside him because, Nathan suspected, he no longer wanted to feel its weight.

Nathan watched them.

They seemed terribly small.

Not small in the way he had once considered people small. He had often thought of human beings as limited biological things: muscle, bone, fear, hunger, attachment, predictable reactions arranged inside fragile bodies.

That was not what he saw now.

He saw something temporary.

Something unbearably specific.

Petru had a mother somewhere who probably still expected him home.

Anton had once been chased across a field by a goose, a story he apparently hated because Petru laughed whenever he told it.

Hargreaves had a sister with a cat he complained about.

Harcourt had spent thirty years studying dead civilizations.

Ward had a daughter he had not spoken to since she married.

Mallory had Margaret.

Emily.

James.

Lives that had once seemed enormous had been compressed into eight exhausted men sitting around one dying flame.

Nathan discovered, with some surprise, that he hated whatever surrounded them.

Not merely because it frightened him.

Because he suspected it understood none of those things.

Perhaps it understood people exactly as Nathan once had.

Heat.

Weight.

Movement.

Sound.

Patterns.

Objects to examine.

Mallory looked at him. "You're thinking again."

Nathan glanced over. "I always think."

"Yes. That's generally the problem."

Normally Nathan would have argued.

Instead he stared at the lamp for another moment.

"I don't think we're getting out."

The sentence entered the silence gently.

Nobody contradicted him.

That hurt more than Nathan had expected.

Ward lowered his eyes.

Harcourt gave a small, exhausted nod.

Hargreaves closed his.

Petru began crying harder.

Mallory watched Nathan for several seconds before saying, "You know, for a clever man, you have a remarkable gift for saying the worst possible thing at exactly the wrong time."

Nathan looked at him.

"I could lie."

Mallory's mouth twitched. "Could you?"

"Yes."

"Would you?"

Nathan considered the men around them.

"No."

Mallory nodded. "Didn't think so."

He shifted slightly closer.

Their shoulders did not quite touch.

They almost did.

No one spoke for several minutes.

The flame shortened, and Harcourt leaned forward to adjust the wick. His fingers shook so badly that Ward eventually reached over and steadied his hand without saying anything.

Nathan looked beyond them.

The walls had vanished into darkness.

Somehow that was worse than seeing them.

He imagined those interwoven structures pressed together beyond the light, wearing stone as camouflage. Somewhere inside them was Ward's bullet. Perhaps they were still examining it. Perhaps that tiny piece of metal had already become information.

Nathan had spent most of his life believing intelligence was protection.

Intelligence gave fear a structure. It turned mysteries into mechanisms. A monster ceased to be a monster once one understood how it worked.

Beneath the mountain, that belief was beginning to fail him.

Sometimes understanding did not make a thing less frightening.

Sometimes understanding merely removed the comforting possibility that you had misunderstood it.

The lamp guttered.

Every man looked toward it.

For one terrible second the flame shrank until Nathan thought it had gone.

Then it rose again.

Nobody relaxed.

Without discussion, the men moved closer together.

They did not do it because closeness could save them. They had given up pretending that it could.

They did it because there were only eight of them left, and somewhere in the hours before the final lamp went dark, the presence of another human being had become one of the last things the mountain had not yet managed to take.

...

They did not truly sleep. They simply reached the point where exhaustion dragged one of them unconscious, held him there for a little while, and then released him so that fear could take its turn again.

Nobody wanted the lamp extinguished.

Ward suggested it only once. He did so quietly, almost apologetically, while examining how much wick remained and calculating aloud that they might gain several additional hours if they allowed themselves to rest in complete darkness. The suggestion had barely left his mouth before he saw the answer on the faces around him. Petru stared at him as if the constable had proposed cutting one of their throats to conserve food. Harcourt immediately shook his head. Anton looked away toward the surrounding blackness, while Mallory said nothing at all, though Nathan saw his fingers close tightly around the edge of his coat.

Ward regarded them for another moment, then looked down at the lamp.

"All right."

He turned the flame lower instead.

That was as much darkness as any of them could endure.

The little pool of light contracted until it barely covered the men gathered around it. Beyond them, the chamber ceased to exist. The darkness became absolute only a few feet from their boots, swallowing the walls, ceiling and passages alike until Nathan could have believed they were suspended inside some immense empty space rather than sitting beneath a mountain.

Without anyone discussing it, they arranged themselves close together.

Nathan noticed that only after they had settled. During the first days of the descent, the men had spread their blankets around whatever chamber they happened to find, each grateful for the few feet of privacy afforded by stone and shadow. Men snored. Men complained. Men turned their backs on one another and pretended for a few hours that they were sleeping somewhere else.

There was none of that now.

Their boots touched. Shoulders nearly pressed together. Mallory slept with one arm almost against Hargreaves, while Petru and Anton lay side by side with Petru's hand twisted into the back of his brother's coat like a frightened child refusing to be separated in the dark. Harcourt had somehow ended up close enough to Ward that, whenever exhaustion overcame him, his head occasionally tipped sideways and rested against the constable's shoulder.

Ward never moved him.

Nathan sat with his back deliberately unsupported.

The wall was perhaps three feet behind him.

He could feel it without touching it.

That was absurd. He understood that perfectly well. Whatever composed the tunnels was beneath his boots too. It surrounded them on every side. Refusing to lean against the wall did nothing except make his back ache worse.

But each time he imagined resting against that apparently solid surface, he saw Ward's bullet entering it.

He remembered the material shifting.

Not crumbling.

Not breaking.

Moving.

He remembered the slow deformation around the wound as the substance seemed to examine what had happened to it.

Testing.

Considering.

Learning what injury meant.

Nathan could not make himself touch the wall after that.

Ward remained beside him because the chain allowed neither of them much choice. The iron joining their wrists rested across the ground between them, dull beneath the lowered lamp, and every so often one of them shifted enough to make the links scrape softly across the floor.

Nathan had once despised the sound.

Now he listened for it.

There was something reassuring about iron. Something made by human hands, with a purpose Nathan understood. Links connected to links. Weight. Friction. Cold metal. The chain did not pretend to be anything else.

At some point, despite every intention to remain awake, Nathan lost consciousness.

He knew he must have slept because the next thing he became aware of was Mallory's hand clamped over his mouth.

Nathan came awake violently.

His fingers closed around Mallory's wrist before thought returned, and for one brief instant something automatic and ugly moved through him. Mallory saw it. Nathan knew he did because the man's eyes widened, though he did not pull away.

"Easy," Mallory whispered. "Easy, Nathan."

Recognition returned.

Nathan released him.

Mallory kept his hand over Nathan's mouth.

Instead of speaking again, he raised one finger.

Listen.

Nathan became aware of the chamber piece by piece.

The lamp had been turned almost as low as it would go without dying. Its flame was little more than a trembling bead of light, barely illuminating the men nearest it. Harcourt was awake. So was Ward. Petru had lifted his head from Anton's shoulder. Hargreaves sat perfectly still with his blanket around him.

Beyond that small circle there was nothing.

Nathan listened.

At first he heard only the ordinary sounds of tired men trying desperately not to make noise. Someone breathing through his nose. The faint settling of cloth. The almost imperceptible crackle from the lamp.

Then something whispered from the passage ahead.

Nathan's body tightened before his mind had understood what he had heard.

The sound was so faint that it barely resembled a voice. It came stretched through the tunnel, distorted by distance until the word seemed to have been pulled thin across the dark.

"...help..."

Someone inhaled sharply.

Nathan could not tell who.

Nobody moved.

The whisper came again.

"...please..."

Every man around the lamp went rigid.

Mallory slowly removed his hand from Nathan's mouth.

Hargreaves closed his eyes. Petru made the sign of the cross so quickly that his fingers shook. Beside Nathan, Ward's hand immediately went toward the revolver beneath his coat before memory caught up with instinct. He stopped halfway.

The last time they had fired a weapon down here, the mountain had answered.

The voice faded.

For several breaths there was nothing.

Then it returned.

Closer.

Clearer.

"Ward..."

Nathan turned.

The change in the constable's face disturbed him more than the voice itself.

Ward simply stared into the passage.

"Ward... help me..."

Mallory's answer came immediately, scarcely louder than breath.

"No."

Nathan knew why.

So did every other man there.

They had heard that voice before.

Edwin Cole.

Nathan felt memory open beneath him.

For one terrible instant he was back in that earlier chamber with Cole above him, one hand covering Nathan's mouth while the other drove a knife downward beside his head. He remembered the struggle. The animal panic. Cole's breath against his face. The chain dragged across the man's throat when Nathan had managed to get behind him.

He remembered pulling.

He remembered Cole's fingers clawing at the links.

And, most clearly of all, Nathan remembered the exact moment the man's strength disappeared.

There had been no ambiguity in it. No chance that Cole had merely been stunned or unconscious.

Nathan had killed him with the iron currently joining him to Ward.

Cole was dead.

That fact should have made the voice impossible.

Instead, it made the voice worse.

Ward swallowed.

"Cole?"

Mallory seized his sleeve immediately.

"Don't."

Ward looked at him as though he had forgotten the other man was there.

"That was him."

"No."

"I know his voice."

"So do I."

The passage whispered again.

"Thomas..."

Ward recoiled slightly.

Nathan felt the movement through the chain before he saw it.

"Thomas Ward..."

That was wrong.

Not because Cole had never known Ward's name, but because he almost never used it. During the expedition he had called him Ward, as nearly everyone did. Nathan searched his memory and found perhaps two occasions on which Cole had used the constable's Christian name.

Whatever was speaking knew both.

A coughing sound came from the darkness.

Wet.

Painful.

Human enough to make something twist in Nathan's stomach.

Then Cole whispered, "Please."

Petru began praying under his breath.

Anton caught his shoulder.

"Quiet."

"I am praying."

"Quiet."

Cole's voice came again.

"Help me, Ward."

Silence.

Then, "Help me."

Another pause.

"Help me, Ward."

Nathan frowned.

Something had changed.

He waited.

The voice repeated itself.

Exactly.

Not approximately.

Exactly.

The breath before the first word came at the same point. The weakness in help was identical. The tiny hesitation before Ward was identical.

Again.

"Help me, Ward."

Nathan felt cold move through him despite the stale warmth of the chamber.

It was not merely repeating the sentence.

It was repeating the performance.

He listened through another cycle and realised that he could predict the next intake of breath before it happened.

Mallory leaned toward him.

"That isn't him."

"No."

The voice called again.

Nathan listened.

Again.

He knew the next sound before it came.

"It isn't speaking," he whispered.

Harcourt looked at him. "What?"

Nathan kept his eyes on the dark passage.

"It is using speech."

Mallory stared at him as if that somehow made the situation worse.

"I don't know what that means."

Nathan did.

He wished he did not.

Before he could explain, another sound drifted up from somewhere much farther below.

At first it was so faint that Nathan thought exhaustion had finally begun inventing things for him.

Three notes.

A pause.

Two more.

Mallory stopped breathing.

Nathan looked at him.

The tune came again.

Soft humming.

Three notes.

A pause.

Two.

The final note slightly flat.

Nathan felt the hairs rise along the back of his neck.

Mallory had hummed that melody during the first days of their descent. Nathan remembered because the repetition had irritated him enough that he had once considered asking the man to stop.

Mallory's mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

The tune repeated.

He looked from Nathan to the others, desperately searching their expressions for evidence that he had misheard.

"What?"

Nobody answered.

Mallory swallowed.

"That was me."

There was no kindness in lying now.

Nathan nodded.

"Yes."

Mallory turned toward the passage.

"No."

The humming continued.

Very faint.

Very far away.

His expression changed.

"My father used to whistle that."

Hargreaves edged closer to him.

Mallory's eyes remained fixed on the darkness. "I've been humming it since I was a boy."

There was something in his voice Nathan had not heard before.

Not merely fear.

Violation.

The tune belonged to a place the tunnels should never have been able to reach. It belonged to childhood, to a father, to some sunlit life that had existed long before Mallory entered the mountain.

Whatever surrounded them had heard it.

Taken it.

Kept it.

Mallory whispered, "It listened."

Nathan looked into the dark.

"Yes."

"How long?"

Nathan had no answer he was willing to give.

The humming stopped.

The silence that followed felt expectant.

Then Cole's voice returned.

"Nathan."

Every face turned toward him.

Nathan did not move.

Cole had rarely called him by his first name either.

"Nathan."

The second repetition was clearer.

Then the voice changed.

It carried an approximation of Cole's anger now. The cadence was familiar, but wrong in some difficult way, like an actor reproducing a feeling he did not possess.

"Murderer."

Nathan's stomach clenched.

Cole had called him that.

More than once.

The accusation drifted through the chamber.

"You're the reason."

A pause.

"You killed me."

Mallory looked at Nathan.

Nathan could not tell whether the thing speaking to them understood what those words meant.

Perhaps it knew enough to choose them deliberately.

Perhaps it had simply collected sounds and discovered that certain combinations made the humans react.

Nathan could not decide which possibility he feared more.

"You killed me."

Mallory's childhood tune began again beneath the voice.

The two sounds overlapped.

One belonged to a dead man.

The other belonged to a living one sitting a few feet away.

Nathan became aware that his hand had closed around the chain joining him to Ward. He was gripping it hard enough for the links to bite into his palm.

Harcourt's whisper sounded very small in the chamber.

"Why is it doing this?"

Nathan looked toward the nearest wall.

The question connected things in his mind.

Ward's bullet.

The way the tunnels had changed after they fired into them.

The voices beginning only now.

The missing men.

The creature—if creature was even the correct word—concealing itself as the very stone around them.

Nathan slowly leaned closer to the others.

"Don't answer it."

Ward glanced at him. "No one was planning to."

"I mean don't speak to it at all."

Mallory looked confused. "Nathan?"

Nathan lowered his voice further. The others instinctively gathered around him until their heads nearly formed a circle above the dim lamp.

"I think it knows."

Hargreaves frowned.

"Knows what?"

"That we found it."

Nobody moved.

Nathan looked upward even though the ceiling had vanished beyond the light.

"Before Ward fired into the wall, it didn't need to pretend for us. We already believed the tunnels were stone. We went where they led us. We touched the walls. Slept against them."

Petru's face tightened in disgust.

"Stop."

Nathan did.

For a few seconds.

Then Harcourt asked, "And now?"

Nathan turned his gaze toward the passage from which Cole's voice continued to drift.

"Now we know they're alive."

Somewhere in the darkness came a faint murmur.

Not one voice.

Perhaps several.

Too soft to separate.

Nathan listened until it faded.

"And I think it knows that we know."

That changed the fear in the room.

Until that moment, the thing beneath the mountain had been terrifying because it was incomprehensible. A landscape that moved. Tunnels that rearranged themselves. Stone that behaved like flesh.

But if it understood them—

If it recognised that they had discovered the deception—

Then they were no longer merely trapped inside something unknowable.

They were being watched by it.

Ward rose first.

"We move."

Hargreaves stared at him. "Now?"

"Yes."

"Into that?"

Ward's restraint finally broke.

"We are already in it."

Nobody argued after that.

They packed with the clumsy speed of frightened, exhausted men. Harcourt raised the lamp enough for them to see properly and winced at the wick disappearing into flame. Blankets were rolled badly and shoved into packs. Bread and water disappeared without order or counting. Nobody bothered pretending they might rest again.

Cole kept calling while they worked.

Sometimes for Ward.

Sometimes for Nathan.

Once, the voice whispered, "Robert..."

Mallory jerked so badly that his pack slipped from his hands.

Nathan picked it up before he could think about doing so and offered it back.

Mallory did not immediately take it. His eyes remained fixed on the black passage.

"Don't listen," Nathan told him quietly.

Mallory finally looked at him. His eyes were red with exhaustion.

"How exactly am I supposed to do that?"

Nathan had nothing useful to say.

So instead he remained beside Mallory until the man had managed to fasten the pack again.

They left the chamber in a tight cluster.

Nobody volunteered to walk last.

For the first time, even the pretence of bravery disappeared. Men who had previously argued about order and discipline simply avoided looking toward the rear passage until Ward settled the matter himself. Nathan remained beside him near the front because of the chain. Mallory and Anton took the rear together, with orders that the positions would rotate every few minutes.

The passage descended more sharply than the tunnels above.

Within minutes Nathan noticed that the air had changed.

Warmth brushed his face.

At first it felt pleasant.

They had spent days in cold and damp, their clothes permanently chilled, their fingers stiff whenever they woke. Sleep had meant wrapping themselves inside inadequate blankets and waiting for the stone beneath them to draw the heat from their bodies.

The warmth felt almost luxurious.

Ten minutes later it no longer did.

Harcourt wiped his forehead.

"Is anyone else—"

"Yes," Nathan said.

Mallory tugged open his collar.

"Good. I thought I had a fever."

"You may still."

Mallory glared at him.

Nathan considered the remark.

"Sorry."

A short laugh came from Ward before he could stop it.

That was the first human sound in several minutes that had not been frightened.

It vanished quickly.

The heat continued rising.

The surfaces around them radiated warmth now. Nathan could feel it from several inches away, though none of them touched the walls to confirm it. He guessed the temperature had increased by perhaps ten degrees since they left the chamber.

The smell had changed as well.

That faint metallic sweetness Nathan had noticed earlier was stronger here.

Iron left beneath rain.

That was the closest comparison he could find.

Yet beneath it lay another scent.

Organic.

Not rot.

Not death.

Something living.

The first red particle landed on Mallory's sleeve.

Nathan noticed it because the man's coat was grey.

A single dark fleck resting against the fabric.

Nathan instinctively reached toward it.

Mallory snatched his arm away.

"Absolutely not."

Nathan stopped.

After a moment he nodded.

"That is sensible."

Mallory peered down at the speck.

"What is it?"

Nathan was about to answer when several more drifted through the lamp beam.

At first they looked like ordinary dust.

Then the light caught them properly.

Red.

A deep, dark red.

Not the colour of fresh blood, but something older and darker, almost brown at the edges.

The particles moved strangely in the warm air. They fell slowly, only to rise again when the faint current moving through the passage caught them. Soon dozens drifted through the light.

Then hundreds.

Petru pulled his sleeve over his mouth and nose.

Everyone else copied him immediately.

Nathan did the same.

"Don't breathe deeply."

Mallory looked over the edge of his coat.

"Were you planning to?"

"I already have."

"That wasn't reassuring."

"No."

The red material gathered in the shallow seams of the floor.

Nathan watched it accumulate.

Pigment was the first word his mind offered him, though he had no reason to believe the substance was merely colour.

Harcourt's voice came muffled through his sleeve.

"Spores?"

Nathan looked toward him.

"Possibly."

Petru made a frightened sound.

Mallory muttered, "Could you perhaps begin lying now?"

Nathan almost smiled.

Then one of the particles touched the lamp glass.

He saw it clearly.

It rested there for perhaps a second.

The heat should have destroyed it.

Instead the speck darkened.

Flattened.

And seemed to vanish into the glass.

Nathan stopped.

Ward was pulled half a step backward when the chain tightened.

"What?"

Nathan stared at the lamp.

There was nothing on the glass.

No ash.

No stain.

Nothing.

He considered telling them.

Then he looked at the men around him.

Petru's sleeve pressed over his mouth.

Hargreaves barely upright from exhaustion.

Harcourt sweating.

Mallory already watching the red particles as though each one might crawl beneath his skin.

Nathan said nothing.

They kept moving.

The temperature climbed steadily until they had no choice but to remove their outer coats despite the dust. Sweat soaked Nathan's shirt beneath his arms and along his spine. Hargreaves's hair plastered itself across his forehead. Harcourt began breathing heavily and needed Ward's help to negotiate one particularly steep drop.

Then the stone changed.

The difference was gradual enough that Nathan initially blamed the red material coating the surface.

But the lamp passed close to one section where the grey outer layer had worn thin.

Something dark crimson lay beneath it.

Nathan slowed.

Thick branching channels disappeared through the wall.

Veins.

The comparison came instantly.

He hated it.

He looked away before anyone else noticed where his attention had gone.

There was enough fear in the group already.

Cole's voice became weaker as they descended.

For some time they could still hear him calling Ward's name somewhere high behind them.

Then only Mallory's tune remained.

Three notes.

Pause.

Two more.

Eventually even that became too distant to hear.

Nathan found the silence comforting.

That should have warned him.

A new whisper emerged ahead.

He stopped listening to his own footsteps.

This voice was not Cole.

Not Bell.

Not any missing man Nathan recognised.

Then he realised it was not one voice at all.

Several voices murmured ahead of them.

Broken fragments.

Some pleading.

Some laughing.

One sounded as though it were crying.

Another repeated a single syllable again and again until it ceased resembling language.

There was no rhythm to it. No conversation.

Mallory edged closer.

"What is that?"

Nathan listened.

The sounds overlapped and separated without meaning.

Fragments.

Collected noises.

Something experimenting with them.

"Don't answer," he whispered.

They kept descending.

Before long the air itself looked red inside the lamplight.

The particles had become so numerous that they formed a haze, drifting around the men in slow currents and settling across their hair, shoulders and packs. Ward wiped sweat from his forehead, then stared at the reddish smear left on the back of his hand.

Nathan glanced at the others.

"No one lick their lips."

Mallory looked at him in disbelief.

"Who in God's name was planning to?"

Nathan gave a slight shrug.

"People do foolish things when frightened."

Ward looked at him.

"You murdered a man with my chain."

"He attempted to kill me."

"That does not make you the authority on sensible behaviour."

Mallory laughed.

The sound escaped him before he could suppress it.

A genuine laugh.

Small. Ragged. Almost painful.

Everyone looked toward him.

Mallory covered his mouth with one hand, still smiling weakly.

"Sorry."

Ward shook his head.

"No. Keep doing that."

Something loosened.

Only for a little while.

They were still trapped miles beneath a mountain that might itself be alive. Men had vanished. Their lamps were dying. Dead voices followed them through the tunnels while red matter filled their lungs and clung to their skin.

But Mallory had laughed.

Ward had answered him.

Harcourt managed a faint smile.

Nathan realised he was smiling as well.

For perhaps twenty steps, they were simply exhausted men together in the dark.

The feeling was so painfully human that Nathan almost wanted to hold on to it.

Then the passage opened.

Heat struck them.

Not warmth.

Heat.

The lamp flame bent away from the opening as if something were breathing toward them.

Nathan stopped so abruptly that Ward nearly collided with him.

Ahead, the tunnel fell into a cavern vast enough that their light could not find its far boundary.

The red haze was thicker there.

It rose from below in slow clouds.

Nathan stared into it.

Something deep beneath them moved.

The sound came first.

A long contraction.

Wet.

Immense.

Every trace of laughter disappeared.

Nobody spoke.

The false stone around the cavern entrance was thinner here than anywhere they had yet seen. Beneath the grey surface, the red branching structures were unmistakable now. Massive channels descended through the walls, splitting and rejoining as they vanished into the darkness below.

Nathan thought of blood vessels again.

This time the comparison disturbed him for another reason.

Blood vessels belonged inside something.

Inside an organism.

That implied a body.

A boundary.

A place where the thing ended and the rest of the world began.

Nathan looked at the vast cavern, at the branching red structures continuing beyond the reach of their lamp, and realised he was no longer certain such a boundary existed.

Mallory stopped beside him.

"How much farther?"

Nathan looked at him.

There had been a time when that question irritated him. Mallory often asked things Nathan could not possibly know, as though intelligence were supposed to function as prophecy.

Now Nathan understood.

Mallory did not expect an answer.

He was frightened and wanted to hear another man's voice.

Nathan looked back into the red cavern.

"I don't know."

Mallory nodded slowly.

"All right."

Nathan glanced at him.

The man's face was streaked with sweat and red dust. His eyes were hollow from exhaustion. He looked older than he had when they began the expedition.

Yet he remained beside Nathan.

Behind them, Ward quietly counted the men again.

Once.

Then again.

The voices whispered through the tunnels above.

Somewhere impossibly distant, Cole was still asking for help.

From much deeper came Mallory's childhood tune, faint enough now that Nathan could almost convince himself he had imagined it.

And beneath both came that enormous movement from the cavern.

A slow contraction.

A release.

Another.

Not quite breathing.

But close enough that Nathan could not stop thinking of it that way.

He watched the red particles drifting around them.

Then he looked at the men.

At Ward gripping the lamp.

At Mallory beside him.

At Harcourt leaning heavily against the rock without actually allowing himself to touch it.

At Petru whispering something soundlessly behind his sleeve.

Something changed inside Nathan then.

Not understanding.

Something colder.

Certainty.

Until now he had believed the thing beneath the mountain had merely allowed their descent because they were too insignificant to matter. Ants crossing the skin of some incomprehensible organism.

But the tunnels had changed around them.

The passages had opened where they needed to go.

Voices had drawn them downward.

The air had warmed.

The red haze had thickened.

And this cavern waited beneath them like an open throat.

Nathan stared into the immense red darkness.

Whatever lived beneath the mountain was no longer merely allowing them to descend.

It was leading them somewhere.

...The deeper they descended, the more oppressive the heat became.

Nathan had expected warmth eventually. They were going down, after all, farther beneath the mountain than any of them had ever intended to go, and some increase in temperature ought to have been natural. What surrounded them did not feel natural. There was too much moisture in the air, too much heaviness. The heat seemed feverish rather than geological, as though they had crossed from the cold outer surface of something into a warmer interior.

The red particulate had thickened with it.

It drifted constantly through the narrow passage, visible wherever Ward's lamp cut through the dark, settling over every exposed inch of skin and fabric. It had gathered in the fine creases around Ward's eyes and turned the sweat at his temples faintly crimson. Harcourt's beard, once grey and respectable, was streaked through with rust-red powder. Mallory wiped his forehead with the heel of his palm and stared for several seconds at the pink smear left behind.

None of them said what Nathan suspected they were all thinking.

If that material was coating their faces, their tongues, the inside of their noses, then some amount of it was already inside their lungs.

Nathan had considered the implications almost immediately.

He saw no benefit in sharing them.

They moved closer together now than they ever had before. Whatever embarrassment grown men might ordinarily have felt about clinging to one another had been burned away by exhaustion and terror. Someone's hand was always resting on the shoulder ahead. Packs brushed against packs. Elbows knocked ribs whenever one man stumbled. Ward kept Nathan close even when the chain between their wrists hung slack, while Mallory followed near enough that Nathan could hear every breath dragged through the cloth covering his mouth.

Nobody wanted to take the rear anymore.

They had never formally admitted that, which somehow made the fear worse. The position simply rotated because someone had to occupy it. When a man's turn came, he went without complaint, but the change in him was always obvious. He became quieter. His steps shortened. His head turned less often, because turning meant looking into the darkness behind him.

Nathan could usually tell when his own turn was approaching by the way the line tightened ahead, each man unconsciously pressing closer to the one in front.

It was irrational.

Whatever hunted them had already demonstrated that distance of a few feet meant nothing.

Still, even men who knew better wanted to believe proximity might make them harder to take.

The voices followed them as they descended.

Cole sometimes called from far behind in a voice weakened by pain he could no longer possibly feel. Bell coughed from places where no passage should have existed. Once, a burst of laughter came floating through the tunnel so perfectly in Martin's voice that Hargreaves simply stopped walking.

Nathan almost collided with him.

Hargreaves did not say anything. He covered his mouth, bowed his head and began crying silently.

No one mentioned it.

No one answered the voices anymore either.

That had become one of their few rules.

The tunnels could speak.

The men would not speak back.

They had kept two lamps burning despite the dwindling oil: Ward carried one at the front, while another remained with whoever occupied the rear. Nathan suspected the second mattered to them more than the first. The forward lamp allowed them to see where they were going, but the rear lamp meant there was still light behind them. It meant the last man in the line did not have darkness beginning directly at his shoulders.

For perhaps half an hour, nothing happened.

Nathan almost preferred the voices.

Silence forced them to wait.

The passage continued its gradual descent through the red haze. It had widened enough that they no longer needed to walk in perfect single file, though none of them took advantage of the extra space. They stayed packed together while the false stone surrounding them became thinner in irregular patches. Beneath its grey surface, those dark-red branching structures appeared more frequently now, thick forms dividing and rejoining beneath the tunnel skin.

Nathan tried not to study them.

He had already decided they resembled blood vessels.

The comparison had become impossible to dismiss.

The word alive no longer troubled him much. Evidence had made that argument pointless.

The word that bothered him now was body.

If the mountain was a body, then they were not beneath it.

They were inside it.

Mallory stumbled hard enough to nearly fall. Nathan caught him beneath the arm and held him upright while the others halted.

"You all right?"

Mallory remained bent for several seconds, breathing heavily through his sleeve before nodding.

"Just tired."

"You're dehydrated."

Mallory glanced sideways at him. "Thank you, doctor."

"I'm not a doctor."

"You always seem deeply offended whenever someone assumes you have useful qualifications."

Nathan opened his mouth to answer, but Ward abruptly lifted a hand.

Everyone stopped.

At first Nathan thought another voice had appeared ahead.

Then he recognised the sound.

Water.

Actual running water.

It trickled somewhere beyond the next bend with an irregular splashing rhythm no imitation had yet managed to reproduce.

Harcourt let out a weak laugh.

"Water."

The sound seemed almost miraculous. After hours of whispers, copied voices and the slow internal contractions of whatever surrounded them, something as ordinary as water striking stone was enough to make Nathan's chest loosen.

Ward remained suspicious.

"We check it first."

Harcourt looked at Nathan.

"Nathan?"

Irritation rose in him immediately. He was tired of being asked what things were. Tired of men looking at him as though the right amount of thought could somehow make the impossible understandable.

Then he saw Harcourt's expression.

The professor was not asking because he believed Nathan possessed an answer.

He was asking because he was frightened and needed somebody to make the next decision.

Nathan's irritation faded.

"I'll look."

They moved toward the bend together.

Nobody volunteered to wait behind.

That was when the second lamp struck the ground.

The noise itself was insignificant compared with almost everything they had experienced beneath the mountain. Glass hit stone with a sharp clatter, followed by metal and then the delicate crack of the oil reservoir breaking.

Every man understood what the sound meant before he turned around.

Someone had been carrying that lamp.

The spilled oil caught immediately, flame spreading across the floor in a sudden orange wash that filled the rear passage with wavering light.

Nathan turned.

For perhaps half a second, his mind refused to understand what he was seeing.

There should have been eight men.

There were five.

Mallory stood beside him.

Ward.

Harcourt.

Hargreaves.

Nathan.

Behind them there was only the broken lamp, its fire licking across the floor.

Petru was gone.

Anton was gone.

The man carrying the rear lamp was gone.

Nathan realised with a sickening jolt that he could not even remember which of the brothers had been holding it during the last rotation.

Hargreaves spoke first.

"Petru?"

His voice was barely audible.

Nothing answered.

He tried again, louder.

"Petru?"

Mallory turned completely toward the empty passage.

"Anton?"

Their names disappeared into the tunnels as uselessly as stones dropped into deep water.

Ward raised the surviving lamp.

The pool of burning oil behind them was already shrinking.

Nathan stared at the empty stretch of passage.

They had been there.

He knew that with absolute certainty.

Petru had coughed less than a minute earlier.

Anton had muttered something when Mallory stumbled.

One of them had cursed the heat.

Nathan remembered the words.

He remembered the exact irritated tone in the man's voice.

What he could not remember was when those sounds had stopped.

Mallory's expression changed as the same realisation reached him.

"No."

He moved backward.

Ward caught his coat.

"No."

"They were right there."

"I know."

"I heard them."

"I know."

Mallory tore his arm free.

"No, you don't. They were touching us."

His voice broke on the final words.

Nathan looked down.

The broken lamp lay several yards from where the rear of their group should have been.

That was wrong.

If the man carrying it had simply disappeared, the lamp should have fallen at his feet.

Instead it had travelled sideways.

Thrown.

Knocked away.

Dropped in a struggle.

Nathan stepped toward it.

Ward was dragged after him as the chain tightened.

"Nathan."

"Something happened."

"No bloody kidding."

Nathan ignored him.

The little fire guttered as the remaining oil burned away, its light crawling unevenly across the wall.

Something pale moved within the grey surface.

Nathan stopped.

At first he thought exhaustion had distorted a fold in the false stone.

Then he saw the fingers.

Five human fingers protruded from the wall.

His breath caught.

They were not reaching outward.

They were being pulled in.

The wrist had already vanished beneath the surface. The remaining hand clawed weakly at the stone as though whoever it belonged to was desperately trying to drag himself back into the passage.

"Ward."

The constable immediately heard something in Nathan's voice.

"What?"

Nathan lifted one shaking hand and pointed.

Nobody spoke.

The hand jerked once.

Mallory made a strangled sound.

"Petru."

Nathan could not have identified it by shape alone.

Then he saw the ring.

A plain metal band around one finger.

Petru had worn it. Nathan remembered catching the flash of it every time the man crossed himself.

"Yes."

The word scarcely made it through Nathan's throat.

Hargreaves lunged forward.

Ward caught him by the back of his coat.

"Don't touch it!"

"He's alive!"

The fingers twitched.

Whatever hesitation remained vanished from Hargreaves.

"Petru!"

He fought Ward's grip so hard that the older man nearly lost his footing.

The hand flexed again.

Nathan watched the material around Petru's wrist.

It did not crack.

That was what terrified him.

Stone should have broken around flesh being pulled through it.

This did not.

The grey surface softened.

There was no other word Nathan could find. The apparently solid material yielded around Petru's arm, separating into thin layered strands that folded around the flesh without resistance.

The hand slid another inch inward.

Petru's fingernails scraped across the surface.

One tore.

Bright blood appeared beneath it.

Real blood.

Not the dark red dust filling the air.

Fresh human blood.

Hargreaves screamed.

"PETRU!"

Something answered from inside the wall.

A muffled sound.

Nathan could not tell whether it was a voice.

It resembled a man screaming through several feet of wet tissue.

Mallory moved forward.

Nathan grabbed him.

"No."

"He's still alive!"

"For the moment."

Mallory rounded on him so quickly that Nathan almost stepped back.

The hatred in his face struck Nathan harder than any shouted accusation could have.

Nathan heard his own words again.

For the moment.

There had been a time when he would have considered that precise.

Useful.

Accurate.

Now, suddenly, he heard it the way Mallory did.

A man being reduced to remaining time.

A measurable quantity of life.

Nathan loosened his grip.

"I'm sorry."

Mallory stared at him.

The apology seemed to frighten him almost as much as the wall.

Petru's hand slipped farther in.

Only the fingers remained visible.

Hargreaves stopped fighting Ward.

He could only watch.

The ring caught against the grey surface.

For one brief, absurd instant, Nathan hoped it might stop the movement.

Then the wall adapted.

A narrow depression formed around the band, perfectly matching its shape. The metal slid beneath the surface with the flesh.

Nathan's stomach turned.

The last two fingers scraped once.

Then disappeared.

The material flowed shut.

Within seconds there was no seam.

No indentation.

Nothing.

The wall looked as though no human being had ever touched it.

Nobody moved.

Behind them, the remains of the broken lamp crackled weakly.

Nathan stared at the place where Petru had vanished, and a thought formed in his mind with terrible clarity.

The bullet.

Ward's bullet had entered the wall earlier.

The structure had reacted to it.

Examined it.

Learned it.

Now Petru's ring had passed into the wall without resistance.

"It learned."

Ward looked sharply at him.

"Don't."

Nathan scarcely heard him.

"The bullet."

"Nathan."

"It learned how to take the metal with him."

Mallory seized the front of Nathan's coat.

"Stop."

Nathan looked at him.

Mallory was crying.

Not loudly. Tears simply cut clean tracks through the red dust on his cheeks.

Nathan had become used to seeing grown men cry beneath the mountain.

There was no shame in it anymore.

Mallory's grip tightened.

"You don't need to understand every bloody second of it."

Nathan opened his mouth.

Nothing came.

Mallory released him.

"Just let him be dead for a moment."

Nathan turned toward the wall.

He understood.

That surprised him.

For perhaps the first time in his life, he deliberately attempted not to solve something.

The attempt lasted less than three seconds.

A sound came from behind them.

Small.

Enough.

Hargreaves turned.

Ward followed.

Harcourt twisted around.

Mallory did the same.

Nathan reacted with them.

The broken lamp.

The darkening passage.

Nothing else.

For an instant all five of them were facing backward.

Nathan understood too late.

He spun toward the front.

"Hargreaves—"

The name died in his mouth.

Hargreaves was gone.

His journal lay open on the floor.

Nathan stared at the empty space beside Harcourt.

One moment earlier the man had been there.

Nathan knew he had.

He remembered the shape of Hargreaves's shoulder in the corner of his vision. He remembered the slight rasp of the man's breathing.

Now there was only empty passage.

Harcourt looked at the space beside him.

"No."

His voice was almost calm.

That made it worse.

He turned slowly.

"Hargreaves?"

Nothing answered.

Mallory looked from Harcourt to Ward, then down at the floor.

"No."

Ward lifted the lamp higher.

His hand was shaking.

"Hargreaves!"

Silence.

Harcourt bent stiffly and picked up the journal.

His fingers trembled so badly that he nearly dropped it.

One strip of leather had been torn from the binding.

That was all.

There was no blood.

No sound.

No hand caught inside the wall.

Nothing at all to prove Arthur Hargreaves had existed there except the book left behind.

Harcourt pressed it against his chest.

For several seconds his expression remained blank.

Then his knees failed.

Ward barely caught him before he struck the floor.

"No. No, no."

Harcourt spoke into Ward's shoulder like a man trying to reason with something that had already happened.

"No. Arthur. No."

Nathan stood nearby and watched him break.

He had seen grief many times before.

Courtrooms.

Hospitals.

Prison visiting rooms.

Nathan had once found grief interesting because of the way it changed people. Rational men became irrational. Quiet people screamed. Violent people became gentle. Some spoke endlessly while others ceased speaking altogether.

He had observed it.

Categorised it.

Now the memory of having done so made him hate himself.

Harcourt had known Arthur Hargreaves for nearly thirty years.

Nathan remembered the professor mentioning that during the early journey through the mountains.

Thirty years.

Arguments over translations.

Lectures.

Excavations.

Letters sent across countries.

Dinners after work.

Thousands of ordinary conversations neither man would have considered important at the time.

Now thirty years had been reduced to a torn journal clutched against Harcourt's chest.

Mallory crouched beside him and rested one hand against the back of his neck.

Harcourt's cracked spectacles had slipped halfway down his nose.

He did not seem to notice.

"Arthur was beside me."

"I know," Mallory said.

"I felt his sleeve."

"I know."

"I turned around."

Mallory did not answer.

Harcourt slowly lifted his head and looked toward Nathan.

"He was there."

Nathan nodded.

"Yes."

"You saw him?"

"Yes."

"When?"

Nathan's mind immediately supplied a measurement.

Seconds.

Distance.

Sequence.

He forced all of that down.

"Before we turned."

Harcourt closed his eyes.

A tear ran through the dust coating his face.

"I shouldn't have turned."

Something tightened painfully in Nathan's chest.

"No."

Harcourt looked at him.

Nathan crouched in front of him.

"No. Don't do that."

The professor stared blankly.

Nathan struggled to put the thought into words without dissecting it.

"It wanted us to look."

Ward slowly raised his head.

Mallory became very still.

Nathan looked toward the wall where Petru's hand had vanished, then back to the broken lamp and the empty passage behind them.

The sequence was obvious now.

Petru had been shown to them.

Not hidden.

Shown.

His hand visible.

His blood.

His screaming.

Enough horror to pull every eye in the same direction.

"It showed us Petru."

Ward's voice dropped.

"You think it planned that?"

Nathan wished more than anything that he could answer no.

"Yes."

Harcourt's face crumpled.

Nathan continued, quieter now.

"It knew we would all look."

Mallory turned his head toward the darkness ahead.

"And while we were looking…"

"It took Hargreaves."

Nobody said anything after that.

The implication did not need explaining.

Whatever surrounded them was no longer merely learning how human bodies moved or how metal behaved.

It was learning attention.

It understood where they looked.

Perhaps even why they looked there.

Ward stood slowly.

Something had changed in him.

There was little left now except exhaustion and a hard kind of determination.

"How many?"

Nathan knew what he meant.

Still, his eyes moved automatically.

Ward.

Harcourt.

Mallory.

Nathan.

Four.

Nathan could not make himself say it.

Mallory did.

"Four."

The number seemed absurd.

They had entered the mountain with twelve men.

Nathan remembered them above ground with painful clarity. Dry coats. Full packs. Men complaining about the weather. Mallory laughing loudly enough to irritate him. Cole glaring whenever Nathan spoke. Petru arguing with Anton over something so meaningless Nathan had already forgotten it. Hargreaves writing constantly in that journal.

Harcourt carrying his absurd survey case as though the mountain might politely wait while he catalogued it.

Now there were four.

Harcourt still held Hargreaves's journal against his chest.

Mallory wiped his face with his sleeve.

Ward looked down at the surviving lamp.

Its flame trembled in the warm red air.

Nathan studied the three men around him.

Ward, who had originally been assigned to guard him.

Harcourt, whose obsession had brought all of them beneath the mountain.

Mallory, who had begun this expedition as an irritating labourer with an easy laugh and somehow become the person Nathan was most afraid to lose.

Then himself.

Something settled inside Nathan.

He recognised the feeling only after several seconds.

Responsibility.

He disliked it immediately.

Responsibility was a terrible thing once other people mattered.

Danger had been much simpler when Nathan could observe it only in relation to himself. Once another life gained weight, every possibility multiplied. Every decision became capable of hurting someone who could not simply be replaced.

Nathan suddenly understood why attachment exhausted ordinary people so thoroughly.

Mallory noticed him staring.

"What?"

Nathan shook his head.

"Nothing."

Mallory gave him a faint, broken smile.

"You're still terrible at that."

Nathan almost smiled back.

Then Cole's dead voice drifted through the tunnel ahead.

"Four."

Every man froze.

The voice came again.

Closer this time.

"Four."

Harcourt clutched Hargreaves's journal tighter.

Ward raised the lamp.

Nathan felt the chain shift between them.

Mallory stared into the red darkness.

Then the walls began repeating the number.

Not one voice.

Many.

"Four."

Another voice answered from farther away.

"Four."

Then another.

"Four."

Some belonged to men they had lost.

Nathan heard traces of Cole.

Martin.

Bell.

Others sounded almost human but not quite, their vowels shaped incorrectly, consonants produced by something that seemed to understand the idea of a throat without ever having possessed one.

The number moved through the tunnels.

"Four."

"Four."

"Four."

It was not counting them.

Nathan realised that almost immediately.

It was practising.

Mallory edged closer.

"Nathan."

"Yes?"

"Please tell me you have some very clever idea."

Nathan stared into the passage.

The red haze was thick enough now that Ward's lamp illuminated only a short distance ahead. Heat pressed against Nathan's face like breath.

He considered lying.

For once, he did not.

"No."

Mallory shut his eyes briefly.

Nathan continued before the silence could swallow them.

"But I'm not letting it take another one without seeing how."

Ward looked toward him.

"That sounded dangerously close to courage."

"It wasn't."

"What was it?"

Nathan's gaze remained fixed on the dark.

"Anger."

Ward studied him for several seconds.

Then nodded.

"Good."

He raised the lamp higher.

Harcourt forced himself to stand. His legs shook, and one arm remained wrapped around Hargreaves's journal as though letting go would somehow finish killing the man.

Mallory moved closer until his shoulder pressed against Nathan's.

Then the four of them continued.

This time they refused to form a line wherever the tunnel allowed otherwise. They walked abreast, shoulder against shoulder, even when it slowed them. When the passage narrowed and forced them toward single file, they took one another's hands instead.

Nathan held Ward with one hand and Mallory with the other.

Mallory held Harcourt.

It was awkward.

Their arms twisted when they climbed.

Their packs collided constantly.

At times they looked less like explorers than frightened children crossing a dark room together.

None of them cared.

Behind them, the remaining flame from the broken lamp dwindled.

For several seconds it was still visible between their bodies, a weak orange patch upon the floor.

Then it guttered.

Shrank.

And finally disappeared.

Darkness swallowed the passage behind them.

The voices continued whispering from within it.

"Four."

"Four."

"Four."

Nathan tightened his grip around Mallory's hand.

Mallory tightened his in return.

For once, Nathan did not analyse the gesture.

He simply held on.

The mountain had already learned their voices, their names, their memories and the direction of their attention.

Now, as the four remaining men descended together through its burning red interior, it learned something else.

It learned what frightened men did when they finally understood that being separated meant death.

They refused to let go.