“Oh, no,” he groaned. “You’re not having a thing with her, are you?”
“Of course not,” Julius snapped. Not that having a thing with Marci would bebad, but… “I just trust her, okay? Leave it alone.”
He stomped away, leaving his brother to follow. For a moment, the metal walkway was silent, and then, with a long sigh, Justin jogged after him. His brother quickly matched and then beat his pace, leaving Julius to run alone behind him through the dark.
***
Thirty minutes later, the Kosmolabe had led them up, down, and over more disgusting, slime-covered, bug-riddled pipes and tunnels than Julius ever wanted to see again in his life. Even Justin was starting to look a little green. Marci, however, was practically skipping in delight, all her earlier fear completely replaced by the dazzling sparkle of the Kosmolabe.
“It works!” she cried yet again, nuzzling the golden ball with her nose. “I knew you would work, you beautiful darling!”
“Works nothing,” Justin snarled, shaking something unmentionable off the toe of his boot. “We’ve been walking for half an hour, and we still haven’t seen so much as a Keep Out sign.”
“It works perfectly well,” Marci said. “It’s not the Kosmolabe’s fault your mages decided to hide in the one drain that apparently doesn’t connect to any of the others.”
“But why do we keep goingdown?” Julius asked, stepping over a stagnant puddle. “It would be one thing if we were going in circles around a fixed point, but we’re not. We just keep heading lower.”
Marci shrugged. “That’s where the signal goes.” She tapped her heel on the dank cement floor. “There’s an enormous magical concentration right below us. It has to be our mages. Nothing natural could generate pressure like that. I mean, just look at it.”
She held the Kosmolabe out for them to see, but while the gold leaf flecks were indeed all waving like tiny flags in a storm, they didn’t seem to be waving in any particular direction. Julius imagined it would look different if he focused on seeing the magic instead of the physical reality, but since physical reality was the one that was going to soak him with disgusting water if he slipped, he kept his attention on the real world.
“Okay,” he said with a sigh. “So we’re closing in. What’s the plan when we get there?”
He directed the question at Justin, partially because he needed to know, and partially to prevent his brother from snipping at Marci again. He’d taken to playing peace-keeper for the last quarter hour just so he wouldn’t have to hear them bicker, and he’d quickly discovered that the key to keeping harmony between his mage and his brother was to keep each of them focused on their respective jobs. Fortunately, both Justin and Marci were highly distractable when it came to their areas of expertise.
“Recon comes first,” Justin said, drumming his fingers on his sword hilt. “We need to know what we’re up against. Once we’ve got that, we make a battle plan from the information and proceed from there.” He glanced back at Julius. “I’ll do the actual fighting, of course. The way you’re panting like an old woman, you’d probably just give yourself a heart attack.”
“I am not panting like an old woman!” Julius protested, albeit breathlessly. This hike through the pipes had been a lot more exercise than he was used to. “I’m just a bit out of shape.”
“I can’t tell you ever had a shape to start with,” his brother said, giving him a caustic look. “Seriously, what happened to you? You used to be the fastest of all of us, but I think even Jessica could run circles around you now. Did you completely stop training when you exiled yourself to your room?”
More or less, Julius thought with a sigh. He hadn’t liked combat training even back when he’d been relatively good at it, and once he’d turned seventeen and his clutch had been declared ready to enter the world, he’d seen no reason to continue. This was especially true living at home since the nature of combat training meant it had to be done in the same gym used by the exact hyper-competitive, aggressive older siblings he’d hidden in his room toavoid. Before he could think of a more flattering way to explain his lapse to Justin, Marci’s voice rang out down the tunnel.
“Found it!”
Justin was moving at once, racing down the pipe and around the corner Marci had turned. Julius followed hot on his heels… and nearly crashed into him when he rounded the corner to find both Justin and Marci standing right on the other side. They were perfectly still, staring at what appeared to be a black wall. A second later, though, Julius saw it wasn’t actually a wall at all. It was a precipice.
Beyond the cement lip, the sewer fell away into a space so huge, Marci’s flashlight couldn’t penetrate the darkness to find the edges. Julius couldn’t even guess how big the room beyond must be, but what really bothered him was the smell. The air here was still, far too still for such a large space, but the draft that did reach him had a cold, oily thickness to it that he didn’t like at all.
“What’s down there?” he asked, covering his nose.
“No idea,” Marci said, glancing at the golden ball in her hands. “But the Kosmolabe says our target is dead ahead.”
She pointed straight down into the inky dark, and suddenly, Julius was more certain than ever that this was not something they should be doing. “I—”
“There’s a ladder right here,” Justin interrupted, reaching out to grab the condensation-beaded metal ladder bolted to the wall beside the ledge. “Let’s go.”
Julius grabbed his brother’s sleeve. “I don’t think we should go down there,” he whispered, deliberately pitching his voice too low for Marci’s ears. “I don’t like the smell of this place.”
“You don’t like anything,” Justin said. “It’s part of being a wuss.”
Julius ignored the insult and tightened his grip. “I mean Ireallydon’t like it.” Even just standing on the edge, he could feel the strange, oily power of the darkness below coating his lungs with every breath. “We shouldn’t do this.”
His brother smacked his hand away. “Enough. Stop being an embarrassment and come on.” With that, Justin grabbed the metal ladder with one hand and swung out, pivoting like a hinge to land on the nearest rung. The moment he was steady, he clamped the insoles of both his boots against the ladder’s side rails and let go, sliding down the ladder into the blackness.
Marci watched him vanish with a look of grudging respect. “Fearless, isn’t he?” she muttered, stowing the Kosmolabe back in her bag.
“I think it’s more that his arrogance has created a shell so thick, no fear can get through,” Julius replied, reaching out to grab the disgustingly slick, cold ladder. “Let’s get this over with.”
