PART 16
The drive out of Blackwood Harbor was silent,
the old station wagon cutting through a thick,
milky fog that seemed to cling to the tires like cobwebs.
As we crossed the town line,
the radio in the dashboard crackled to life,
emitting a high-pitched,
modulating frequency that made my teeth ache.
It wasn't a song,
or a news broadcast,
but a sequence of numbers spoken by a voice that sounded exactly like my mother's,
though she had died when I was a child.
"Four,
eight,
fifteen,
sixteen,
twenty-three,
forty-two,"
the radio repeated,
the cadence steady and unfeeling.
Daniel reached out to turn the knob,
but the plastic dial snapped off in his fingers,
and the voice continued to pour from the speakers.
"She's counting,"
I whispered,
staring out at the pine trees that lined the highway,
noticing how their branches were perfectly symmetrical,
like computer-generated models.
"She's counting the remaining operational hours of the second node."
The air inside the car grew heavy,
and the windows began to frost over from the inside,
despite the fact that it was the middle of July.
Daniel gripped the steering wheel,
his knuckles turning white as the car began to slide on an invisible layer of ice that covered the asphalt.
"The GPS is dead,"
he said,
tapping the dark screen on the dashboard,
which suddenly flashed a single image of the underground vault before going black again.
"We are driving blind,
Amelia,
the road isn't matching the map anymore."
I closed my eyes and reached out with my mind,
feeling for the subterranean pulse that I had connected with back in the control room.
It was there,
but it was faint,
a distant heartbeat that was being muffled by miles of solid rock and tectonic pressure.
"Turn left at the next fork,"
I commanded,
opening my eyes,
which now held a distinct silvery ring around the irises.
"There is no left turn on this highway,"
Daniel argued,
but as he spoke,
the headlights illuminated a narrow,
unpaved trail that hadn't been there a second ago.
The trees seemed to pull back,
creating a path through the dense forest that looked like an opening into a dark,
bottomless cavern.
He turned the wheel,
and the car plunged into the darkness,
the suspension groaning as the tires hit the rough,
uneven earth.
Behind us,
the highway we had just left simply vanished,
replaced by a wall of solid,
ancient stone that looked as though it had stood there for millennia.
May you like
We were no longer just traveling across the surface of the country;
we were moving through the internal veins of the system itself.
