Marcus Slidwell's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Marcus spent the first day in the bunker setting the jar on the bench and watching the slug inside it. The spines glowed pink and green through the reinforced glass. He counted forty-one spines on the crown alone. He wrote the count down. Then he looked at the door, the concrete floor, the low ceiling, and understood the problem. The jar was strong. The lid was tight. But if it cracked, or if he opened it wrong, the slug would fire spikes into the walls of the only hidden room he had. One loose specimen could turn the bunker into a place he could not enter. He needed a holding space outside the bunker. Somewhere sealed. Somewhere he could lose without losing the guide. Reid came down at dusk with a strip of dried meat and news that the six-legged one had passed the ridge trail that morning, going east. Marcus asked him about the slope behind the bunker. Reid chewed and thought. "Rock face. Split in it. Goes back maybe two arms deep. Dry." He swallowed. "You could wall the mouth." They went out at first light. The split in the rock was where Reid said. Marcus crawled in with a lamp. The back was dry stone. No cracks to the surface. He crawled out and started stacking flat rocks across the opening, fitting them close, packing the gaps with clay from the streambed. He left a small hatch of two loose stones near the top. Reid handed him rocks and said nothing for an hour. By afternoon a woman came down the slope on foot. She wore shell beads and carried a short blade. She stopped ten paces off and looked at the wall Marcus was building. "You're sealing it wrong," she said. "Clay cracks in three days. Use ash and clay mixed, one to one. And leave a lip at the base so you can flush the floor without opening the top." Marcus asked who she was. "Kaia Shellmark. I keep slugs in the basin caves." She looked at his hands, then at the jar he had set in the shade. "That one fires. You'll want the lip deeper." She stayed until sundown. She showed him the ash mix and the drainage lip and how to test a seal with smoke. Marcus paid her in wire. She said she might come back and she might not. She had her own fight in the basin, something about drills and breeding tunnels. She walked back up the slope before dark. When she was gone, Marcus opened the jar inside the sealed rock and slid the slug through the top hatch with a length of pipe. He set the two loose stones back. He listened. A soft tick as a spine hit stone inside. Then nothing. He walked back to the bunker with the empty jar under his arm and opened the guide to entry forty-eight, and corrected the spine count to forty-one.