The journey out of the sealed bunkhouse was slower than the descent, measured by the deliberate, rhythmic crunch of heavy boots over fractured limestone spall.
Len Vey walked at the rear of the file, his courier satchel strapped securely across his chest to balance the weight of the bronze key Q-SUB-01 against his ribs. His stitched left forearm throbbed with a nonstop, low-grade fever that radiated upward into the lymph nodes of his armpit, the horsehair stitches stiff with dried crust beneath the linen bindings. Every three paces, he touched the outer cloth of his breast pocket with his right fingertips. He felt the rigid, box-shaped bulk of Cira’s unsealed parcel resting against his ribs.
Beside him, the rows of white enameled iron cots stretched into the green-tinted haze of the emergency chandelier like markers in an abandoned town cemetery.
The six child doubles remained exactly where the severance of the main channel had numbed their forward driving force. They stood in the center aisle, their giant gray woolen smocks hanging straight and motionless in the dead, draftless air of the vault.
As Len passed Bed 19, his boots paused on the white pine floorboards.
The small figure wearing Elsi Marr’s seven-year-old face had not shifted her feet. Her bare heels remained planted over the open hatch in the decking, her waxy, featureless face turned forty-five degrees toward the dark lead-jacketed copper channel pulsing faintly beneath the floor beams. In the sharp, sharp-angled blades of green light cast by the…
