She edged past large pipes and rattling units, and stopped in dismay at a wall of fine mesh across the air tunnel.
This was definitely new.
She stepped closer, and found there was a door set into it, and when she tried the handle, it opened easily.
Probably there to keep the baby friens out, she guessed. She stood on the safe side, studying the darkness up ahead of her, wondering if she really wanted to risk getting bitten.
Escape was one thing. Being poisoned was a whole extra level of risk.
Bunny ran down her arm and then looked back at her.
“I’m being a wimp,” she told him. “I looked a frien in the eye once, and it was not a pleasant experience. The adults are about the same size as me, but long and low to the ground.” She shuddered, then straightened her shoulders. “The tunnel had motion lighting last time I was here, so if that’s still working we should be able to see where we’re going once we get walking, and I’m going to ask you to be your most vicious self if we meet up with a frien.”
And she wasn’t completely without weapons of her own.
She jerked the silver rod off her necklace, which no one had even seemed to notice, let alone considered confiscating, thank goodness, and flicked it to extend it. She was still wearing her bracelet. The Balcoans had left her with all of her defenses. Not that she’d had a chance to use either one.
She gripped the rod tightly, opened the door, and stepped into the tunnel.
There was a relatively steep incline with the compacted sand floor she remembered from last time. No quick-set had been wasted along here.
To her relief, the lights flickered on as she walked, and while they were low-level, it was a comfort to see where she was going.
There were definite burrows in the walls, though.
She hesitated when she came to the first one, then forced herself to walk past it.
There were two more in the same stretch of passage.
A wind was blowing in, hot and dry on her face, sucked into the base from the desert above, and she kept blinking fine dust out of her eyes.
Bunny suddenly squeezed her arm, and she stumbled to a stop, eyes watering a little. It took her a moment to notice the frien.
It was staring at her, body angled across the tunnel, head turned toward her, mouth open and teeth bared.
Shit.
She’d passed a burrow a minute or so back, and she wondered if she was blocking the frien from its home.
Maybe the thing to do would be to reverse and give it a shot at its hole in the wall, wait for it to get in there, and try again. She could attack with the silver rod, but that would be unpredictable.
She decided to keep that as a last resort.
She began to ease back, step by step, keeping her gaze on the frien.
Bunny had been looking at it too, but he ran up her arm and perched on her shoulder, looking behind her, and suddenly dug his forelegs into her shoulder.
“Ouch.” She stopped, and glanced back, but she couldn’t see anything.
The passage beyond was in darkness, the only light coming from two low-level fittings set into the tunnel wall on either side of her.
“What is it?” she whispered to Bunny. “I don’t see anything there.”
But Bunny wasn’t exactly prone to flights of fancy. Quite the opposite.
If he thought there was something back there, there was something back there.
Maybe it was the frien’s babies.
