Yara took point without asking. She'd been mapping these corridors for nine hours, so nobody was going to argue with that, and she moved fast for someone with a burn running up her forearm, checking corners with a short blade held low and waving them through when it was clear.
Her two able Unit 4 members flanked the injured, the boy with the splinted leg — Malik, someone called him — hobbling between them with his teeth clenched every other step. The other injured one could walk but kept leaning into the wall, eyes going blank, then coming back, then blank again. Caelum didn't know his name.
Dawson fell in behind Yara, and Caelum ended up in the middle with Éloise and Kifah.
Blancard drifted to the back. He just saw Malik struggling and slowed down until he was beside him, then got the kid's arm over his good shoulder. Didn't say a word about it. His left arm hung useless, gauntlet scraping stone with every step, and he was hauling half a stranger's weight through a corridor he'd never seen with a shoulder that was losing range by the hour. Caelum watched him for a second longer than he meant to, then faced forward.
They moved in silence. Yara signalled with her blade at turns, and Dawson relayed them back with hand signs, which was pointless since they could all see her, but that was Dawson.
Ten people in a tunnel made more noise than five. The echoes layered and came back wrong, boots and breathing and the drag of Malik's splint folding over each other until it sounded like twice as many. Caelum kept his grip on the spear loose and his breathing even, but every reflected sound made his shoulders want to tighten. The dark beyond their lamps hadn't changed. Still empty. He kept checking anyway.
The corridor got wide enough for two, and Éloise matched his step. She wiped the dried blood above her brow with her sleeve and looked at him, held it, then just turned forward again. Caelum didn't ask.
Yara stopped at a junction. Two paths. She pointed left.
"Left goes down," Dawson said. "I can feel the grade."
"Loops back up after thirty metres. The right side has collapsed about twenty in."
Dawson stared down the left passage, and you could practically hear it building in his throat, whatever objection he was chewing on, when Blancard's voice came from the back without any heat in it at all. "She's mapped it. Just go."
He went. It did loop back up.
Yara set a brutal pace on the incline, and Caelum could hear Malik's breathing go ragged behind him, short wet gasps between the scrape of his splint on rock.
One of Unit 4's fighters muttered something Caelum didn't catch, and Yara slowed without turning around, just took half a step less per stride, barely noticeable unless you were paying attention. She knew her team's limits. That impressed Caelum.
After a while, Caelum let himself fall back to Blancard's pace. Malik had found some rhythm to his limp or maybe just stopped caring about the pain, but Blancard stayed beside him anyway, the wrecked arm swinging at his side.
"Your shoulder's worse," Caelum said.
"Probably."
"Éloise could—"
"She already did. 'Not broken, lost range, can fight if he has to.'" Flat imitation of her voice. Close enough that Caelum almost laughed, which surprised him, given where they were and what was probably waiting ahead.
Water dripped somewhere. Steady. Annoying.
"You remember Instructor Alec?" Blancard said. "CQC. Used to make us do wall-sits outside the lunch hall in full kit. Twenty minutes. Said if we couldn't hold a position against gravity, we had no business holding one against anything else."
"He made me do thirty once. I asked him if we'd ever actually need to fight a wall."
Blancard grinned, "That sounds about right." He shifted Malik's weight, and his face tightened. "Feels like a wall-sit right now."
"You could put him down."
Blancard looked at Malik. Glassy eyes, barely tracking the conversation. Looked back at Caelum. The expression wasn't anything you'd write home about, just the obvious look of a person who hadn't considered the option and wasn't going to start.
"Nah. Nearly there."
They weren't. Both knew it. The corridor narrowed, and they went single file again.
Caelum took the rear. Checked behind him every thirty seconds, the dark staying empty each time, which should've been reassuring but wasn't really. More than once, he heard something behind them. The problem was that he couldn't tell if it was an echo or something else.
The air was getting warmer the further they went, and the rock around them had changed colour, darker veins of something metallic threading through the walls, catching the edge of his lamp when it swung. He could feel it in his resonance too, a dull heaviness under his ribs, like the ore was sitting on his chest.
He dug the RS stone out of his pouch halfway through a long, straight section and fed resonance into it while he walked. Thin strands of energy, not forceful. The crystal sat cold in his hand, five seconds, ten, and he was reaching to put it back when his palm went warm. Faint. Barely anything. Then gone, and the stone was just a rock again.
He tried once more and got nothing.
But it had been there. A half-second where the crystal found something to reach for and couldn't quite hold it. Higher. Need to get higher. The thought didn't feel like his.
He put it away.
Yara stopped them at a wider chamber, nothing special about it except the far wall where a vertical shaft cut straight up through the rock.
Three metres across, maybe, edges rough, half caved in. A strange, natural spiral of stone that wound along the wall, like steps formed by chance or some slow, alien logic. The stone spiral was too steep for comfort, its steps slick and narrow, each one blending awkwardly into the next, so you'd have to climb as much as walk, pressed close to the rock and testing every foothold. Rubble packed the bottom, and loose scree fanned out across the chamber floor where sections of the wall had given way at some point. A draught came down from above, warm and carrying something organic and thick that stuck in the back of Caelum's throat.
Above all that, past the reach of any lamp, breathing. Slow. Heavy. Rhythmic. Something big, a long way up, sleeping.
Yara killed her lamp, and everyone followed.
Total dark.
"That's them," she whispered. "The bats-things. All the way up, dozens, probably more."
"Bats don't breathe like that," Dawson said. "These do," Yara replied.
"The bigger one?" Caelum said.
"Heard it. Didn't see it. The small ones kept their distance from whatever it is, so."
Dawson was close enough that the smell of sweat and dried blood on his clothes hit Caelum's nose. "We're not fighting up a vertical shaft."
"No. Climb quietly, lights off, weapons away unless something comes down."
"If they come down, we don't hold that position," Dawson said. "We break through."
Blancard came up from the back, breathing harder than Caelum liked. Malik was now on one of Unit 4's fighters. Blancard looked at the shaft, then up into the nothing above it, and just rolled his good shoulder before going to test the rungs.
Kifah's voice came from somewhere to Caelum's left. Small voice. Tight. "What if we wake them?"
Nobody answered. As if a reply or entertaining the thought would make it a reality.