The Subterranean Vault Core Level 3

Malia's POV

"Come alone" was the part Jarrah kept reading out loud, as if the words might rearrange themselves.

"It's a trap," I said for the third time.

"Probably."

"Then why are we in a lift going down?"

"Because it's also the only door we've found." He didn't look at me. He was watching the numbers on the vault's old brass dial tick past, the ones that said how far beneath the city we'd come. "And because we are not alone. That's the only part of the message I'm ignoring."

I should have been angry that he'd said we. Instead I felt it settle somewhere under my ribs, small and warm, and I was annoyed at how much I needed it.

Marcus had stayed at the surface entrance with two men and a radio. Jarrah had told him to count twenty minutes, then come in. I'd added a number I thought was safer, ten. The two of them had looked at me, and Marcus had said, Ten, then. I suspected he'd always been quietly on my side.

The lift bumped to a stop at Level 3. The doors scraped open in darkness that smelled of wet stone and old iron.

Our torches made small, nervous circles. The corridor beyond was wide, much wider than the levels above, with a vaulted ceiling that swallowed the light before it reached the top. Rusted shelving lined both walls, empty except for a few collapsed crates. Somebody had stripped this place a long time ago, and somebody had left in a hurry.

"My father brought me here once," Jarrah said quietly. "I was nine. He made me promise I'd forget the way."

"Did you?"

"No." A pause. "He didn't really believe I would."

I wanted to ask what his father had said, what he'd shown him, but Jarrah's shoulders had gone tight in the way they did when he was close to saying something he couldn't take back. I let the silence hold. Our boots rang off the floor, steady, careful, and every few steps I caught myself matching his stride.

At the end of the corridor, a steel door stood open an inch. Beyond it was a circular chamber with a raised walkway around its edge and a central platform where a black machine sat in the dark, tall as a wardrobe, ribbed with old cables. The offline mainframe. Even from the doorway, it looked like something that had been waiting for us.

"There," I said.

"Wait."

His hand caught my wrist. Not hard. Jarrah never grabbed.

"Floor," he said. "Look at the seams."

I swept my torch down. The walkway was made of heavy stone slabs, and between them ran thin, dark lines I'd taken for cracks. Now I saw they weren't random. They ran in a perfect ring.

"It's a mechanism," he said. "Counterweighted. It'll hold a certain amount before..."

"Before what?"

"I don't know. My father never got that far in the story."

I looked at the machine, ten careful steps away, and at the grey brick in his hand. I thought about my mother's name sitting in an index nobody had let me read. The pull of it was almost physical.

"We go along the wall," I said. "Slow. One at a time."

"Malia."

"You said no secrets." I turned the torch to his face. His eyes were tired and certain. "I said I'm not going anywhere. So get behind me or get in front, but don't tell me to stay."

His mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile. "In front, then."

We made it six steps.

Jarrah went first, one palm against the wall, testing each slab with the toe of his boot. I followed with my own hand on his back, feeling the muscle under his jacket tense and release with every stride. Water dripped somewhere. The machine in the centre loomed larger, and I began to hear a very faint tick from it, like a clock deciding whether to wake.

Then I put my foot down, and the stone didn't.

It wasn't a crack. It was a drop, the whole slab tilting away as though a hinge had given, and I had the stupid, slow thought that I should have been more afraid of the quiet. My torch flew out of my hand. The wall slid out of reach. I opened my mouth to scream, and nothing came out of it.

Something caught me by the coat.

The fabric bit into my armpits and pulled so hard my breath left in a rush. I swung. My boots found nothing. Far below me, in the torch beam spinning down into the dark, I saw water. Black, flat, and enormous, filling a space much larger than any room had a right to be.

"Don't kick," Jarrah said.

His voice was right above me, strained and low, and when I looked up I saw him lying flat on the broken edge of the walkway with one arm hooked around an iron ring set into the stone and the other fisted in my coat. His face was grey in the light of the second torch, which had landed beside him and was rolling slowly toward the edge.

"I'm slipping," I whispered.

"I know. Look at me. Not down. At me."

I looked at him. His jaw was clenched. Blood ran from his temple where he must have hit the stone. The slab I'd stepped on was gone, and the one he lay on was starting to tilt too, with a grinding sound I felt in my teeth.

"Let go of me," I said. The words came out of a part of me I didn't know I had. "The ring won't take both of us. You'll go in too."

"No."

"Jarrah, please..."

"I said no." He wasn't shouting. That frightened me more. "I'm not doing maths, Malia. I'm not choosing. Give me your hand."

I'd been dangling by my coat. I reached up with both hands and locked them around his forearm. He gritted his teeth and heaved, and my chest scraped against the edge of the stone as he dragged me upward inch by inch. The ledge groaned under us. Somewhere beneath me, a piece of masonry broke away and fell, and I counted three full seconds before it hit the water.

Then my elbows were on solid rock, and then my hips, and he pulled me in against him so hard that the breath went out of both of us.

That was when the ledge finally gave out.

It dropped about a metre, a sickening lurch, and stopped with a crack that shook the whole chamber. We hit a shelf of stone below the walkway, and I felt Jarrah twist in the air to put his back between me and the impact. His body took it. I heard what it did to him, a flat, ugly sound, and a breath torn out of him that was almost a word.

We lay there. Dust rained down on us. My ears rang.

"Jarrah." My voice cracked. "Jarrah."

"Here."

He was on his back with me half across his chest. His eyes were open, and he was staring at the ceiling.

"Are you hurt? Tell me where."

"My ribs." He winced. "Possibly a few of them. And my pride, I think, because I told you I'd go in front and then fell through the floor." He tried to laugh, and it turned into a cough.

I started laughing too, the wrong kind, the kind that comes out of the edge of terror, and then I wasn't laughing at all. I pressed my face into his shoulder and shook, and his hand came up and cupped the back of my head, heavy and warm and not quite steady.

"You didn't let go," I said into his jacket.

"No."

"I told you to."

"I know what you told me." His breath hitched. "Don't ever tell me that again."

I lifted my head. In the glow of the one surviving torch, I could see the whole shape of the room. We hadn't fallen into the cistern. We lay on a long stone ledge that ran around its edge, just above the waterline, with the broken floor a long way overhead, and the black water breathing very softly below. Jarrah had caught me an arm's length above it.

I took his face in my hands, carefully, the cut at his temple under my thumb. I'd never been this scared of losing someone. I understood that now, with a clarity that felt like cold air, and it didn't feel like a revelation. It felt like a debt I'd been quietly running up for months.

"I love you," I said. It came out wrong, breathless, as something dropped. "That's it. That's all of it. I needed you to hear it down here."

His eyes closed. When they opened, they were wet.

"Say that again when I can sit up," he said hoarsely. "I want to be standing."

"Idiot."

"Yours."

I only noticed the sound after the laughter had gone.

A low rush, constant, coming from somewhere behind the far wall of the cistern. At first I took it for the breath of the water. Then my torch, found at last and fumbled back on, caught the stone pillar beside us, and I saw a dark line creeping up its surface.

Water. Climbing.

"Jarrah." I was already reaching for his arm. "The level's rising."

He turned his head and saw it. I felt him go very still.

"That wasn't from the fall," he said slowly. "Something just opened."

Above us, in the broken ceiling, a thin white beam swung across the gap and settled on the two of us. It stayed there, steady and unhurried. Then, very distinctly, I heard a pair of boots stop at the edge of the hole.