Nerida Quickwave's Arc

Chapter 5 of 12

Nerida pressed her back to the cold wall and tried to slow her breath. The air in the bunker tasted flat. It scraped at the back of her throat. She looked up at the seams of the hatch and saw the old rubber there, cracked and crumbling. This place had been built to be forgotten, a stone and metal box sunk into the cliff and locked with crystal pins. It had kept her mentor hidden long enough to carve. It would not keep her alive much longer. She crawled along the floor and found the bone-handled chisel where he must have dropped it, its crystal edge dulled by metal dust. Beside it, his last lines bent downward and trailed off. He had run out of air too. Nerida set her palm flat on the wall and counted her breaths. Ten short ones. Then eight. The fungi on the scratches dimmed as if they felt it with her. She crawled to the slit in the hatch and looked out. The beast and the metal thing had not moved. They stood together on the open shelf like one carved figure, horned head above a steel body, a single shape made of two. They were not hunting her. They were waiting. She understood then that staying inside meant dying the way her mentor had died, quietly, with a warning no one would read in time. Nerida braced her shoulder against the hatch and shoved. The old seal cracked. Water rushed in, cold and clean, and the stale pocket emptied around her in a rising bubble. She breathed. She drew the bone shard from her belt and crawled out into the open, in full view of the two waiting shapes. The bunker was behind her now. It would not shelter anyone again.