Chapter 10
WORK NOW, MAKE QUESTIONABLE DECISIONS WITH HOT ALIENS LATER
MIKAELA
We edge out of the alcove sideways.
It’s somehow worse than coming in. Now I’ve had a full, unobstructed view of the drop, and my brain has zero illusions about how bad it would be to slip.
Three feet of ledge.
Then nothing.
Beyond nothing: darkness and the sound of trickling water, louder now, echoing up from somewhere I do not want to meet in person.
We walk for what feels like twenty minutes, but time is slippery in the dark. The tunnel changes as we go deeper. The air grows heavier, thicker. The chill of the cave begins to recede, replaced by a humid, stifling warmth that makes my scale-tunic stick to my skin.
I wipe sweat from my forehead, frowning. “Is it supposed to get this warm up here? I’m starting to feel… sticky?”
Sarven pauses ahead of me. He lifts his head, testing the air.
“Wh-arm,” he rumbles, before the translator pulses the rest in my ear. “And… smell.”
I sniff the air. At first, it’s just the usual damp stone scent. But then, as we round a sharp bend in the tunnel, it hits me.
Sharp. Metallic.
It smells exactly like a handful of old copper coins held in a sweaty palm. Or… blood.
“I smell it,” I tell him, voice tight. “It’s metallic. Like iron.”
Sarven growls, a low vibration that I feel in the soles of my feet. “Wrong,” he says. “Not stone smell. Alive smell.”
He stops at the edge of a wide tunnel. His glowing arm rises, illuminating the space ahead.
I step up beside him, ducking slightly to peer under the solid shelf of his arm.
My breath stops in my throat.
“Oh…God.”
We aren’t in a tunnel anymore. We’re in a wound.
The cavern ahead is coated in something…red.
Thick, viscous slime covers the walls, oozing from fractures near the ceiling like an infection. It drips down in slow, heavy strands, pooling in the natural basins of the floor before overflowing into the darkness beyond. The red muck pulses faintly in the light of Sarven’s glow like a living thing.
“It looks like the mountain…is bleeding,” I murmur, eyes and mouth widening at the sight.
The smell is overpowering here. Hot copper and rotting sweetness.
Sarven moves forward, his feet squelching in the red muck. He dips a claw, pulls it away, and the substance stretches likemelted cheese. He brings it to his nose, his lip curling in a snarl that exposes nearly all his teeth.
“Poison,” he rumbles, flicking the substance away with a violent jerk of his claw. “Do not…touch.”
I force my scientist brain to take the wheel, wrestling my panic into the trunk.
“It’s a bloom,” I realize, stepping carefully onto a dry patch of rock. “Algae. Bacteria. Extremophiles. They feed on iron or heat. But... this much?”
