Lights of the cistern
Pid, pid, pad, pit, pad . In the dark went the sound of the cup. Pid, pid, pat, pad, pit, tup, tip, tap There went the cup, bumping into the bag. Rid, tid, pid, tid, pad, bump . shhhhap , went the bag, adjusted on Joanna's shoulders. She pulled it up, levitated by her thumbs alone and, thmp , dropped it back onto herself. Thp went the cup, clipped to the bag. In the mine, as in every mine, there is a minimum requisite echo; these sounds swirled behind her as she walked until they dropped to the ground like litter. Some sounds traversed ahead of her, like a light making way for her. They never came back. Never told her what way to actually go. tid, pid, pat . goes the sound of the small, dented cup of hers, hanging, forever rebounding off her pack, more audible than her own footsteps. By now, with all the time in and out of the mines, Joanna never noticed the sound of the cup, much less the other noises her or her gear might make. At the beginning, there was concern that it might betray her presence to unwelcome ears, but she had long ago dropped that fear. People were few and far between. Even more so, in the mines. Her last contact had been in spring. It was summer now. Her favourite time to be in the mines. Temperature perfect, she adored the darkness against the long days of summer overhead and out of sight, and of course, the sounds that her little tin cup made as she walked on, through the summer mine-air. tip, pid, pad, thp, baht . She came to a fork in the mine and looked at the two descending tunnels. No signage that she could discern, as usual. A cool draft coming from the path on the right and no sense of smell, wind or anything else from the left. She mostly walked in the dark. It was something she was so accustomed to that revealing any source of light in a place like this not only felt wasteful, but cruel to the space, to her eyes. She stood still in her silence and considered her choices. With no decision revealing itself (like it sometimes did), she made up her mind. Went the match. And the light of it exploded into the darkness. At junctures like this, though, some light, garish as it was, was worth it. Joanna walked closer to the wooden scaffolding bordering the two tunnels and slid her fingers along it gently. Her eyes traced the blinding light of her single match. There were no signs that carts had been employed in either of the tunnels, but she couldn't be sure of that from the entry alone. She saw no signs of tracks or other infrastructure. These were likely walking mines. They could be connected, circling an underground lake. They could both surface to the above world. They could squirrel off in completely different directions. Anything was possible. Standing back now and eyeing both, Joanna knew the left was the correct choice. Despite the draft, which was always compelling in its promise of movement and circulation, she knew the path to the right would not work. The movement of air usually promised a path out, back up, to the world. That was not in the plan. She stared to the right, as if she could see the patterns of the air itself. She willed it to come meet her and sure enough it did: with an invisible snap, it struck down her light. If there was a sound for a match being blown out by a dark wind, that would be it. But there isn't, and instead this is what Joanna imagines, now back in the comfortable darkness, her decision made for her. Joanna walked the left tunnel for several hours before she decided it was time to stop. Her trek remained uneventful, yielding nothing right up until she set down her pack and made camp. Now she sat, cross-legged and eyes closed. She took several deep breaths, not waiting or wanting for anything, but a breath to take and release. Here, she felt the ground under her bottom. It was cooler than earlier in the day. This confirmed her suspicion that she had been walking on a nearly unnoticed decline. Joanna's body was adept at noticing the barely noticeable. She felt the decline in every part of her foot. She could perceive sensory information from each toe, her heels, her soles. Tiny muscles taut, balanced perceptively, always feeling out the rope of her path: tightrope-walker of darkness. There was no need to set up a tent in the mines, other than to provide some semblance of psychological safety. Some measure of inside in contrast to that outer world. At this point, the darkness was the same everywhere. The only time she would set up a tent in a mine was if harmful particulate was migrating from one part of the mine to the other. Of course, sometimes it felt cozy just to set up the tent for tent's sake, but like most days, it wasn't worth the effort. She unrolled her sleeping mat, grabbed her quilt and lay in the darkness. Did she even have to close her eyes to sleep, dark as it was? Yes, it sent the signal to her body that it was time to rest, but as far as she (or the darkness) was concerned, she may as well lie wide-eyed through the night. Joanna snuggled under her quilt and kicked her feet together a few times. With this movement, the thrill of sleep always rattled up through her body to the top of her head (and, surely, then went rattling off into the depths of the mine in search of other life to lay its sleepy hands upon). The movement was a signal to say the day was over—her feet could rest. They were now free of their duty of carrying her and her pack along, along, along. Joanna closed her eyes. She thought about the right tunnel, and the subtle draft that had emanated from deep within it. Then, she fell asleep. "Joanna, catch!" yelled Theo. He lobbed the fizzing rock high into the sky, its geometry flashing as it rotated under the blinding sun. Joanna took a couple steps back and received it in her arms with a soft thump . She swore she could feel the warmth of the rock right through her wool sweater. Her fingers warmed up immediately as she turned the rock in her hands. Simultaneously brilliant and modest flashes of yellow, white, even blue. The rock was a snake, hissing loudly, ready to strike, in her hands. "Now, now!" she heard Theo yell. Joanna squatted down, deftly swung the rock between her legs, and then launched it as high as she could. The rock sailed back into the air, the fizzing, hissing sound of it receding into a vibrant, blue sky. Reaching its zenith, and about to fall, it exploded into thousands of pieces and rained down on them. Joanna and Theo watched in silence as the puff of smoke, timeless particulate, dispersed high above them. Dust and smaller rock particles rained down on them, the larger pieces glittering in the same way as the rock in its whole form. "Well done!" Theo laughed. He walked over to her, crunching on some of the debris. "Want to do another?" Joanna listened to the sound of his steps and looked at him. She said nothing, then smiled, turned around, and started walking toward her gear. She picked it up and continued. There was still a certain warmth on her hands, maybe even in her stomach, where she had held the rock for that moment. It would be cold in the Wastes and there would be no such sources to heat them come nightfall. In the distance: a hazy line of a dead forest ahead, some five or six kilometres. Theo started after, quickly picking up his gear. He watched her as he threw his sack over his shoulder and shoved his boots on. Her head turned over her shoulder as if to say something, but no words came out. She simply moved: onward. Joanna woke up. She propped herself up on her locked arms. Another dream with Theo in it. She sighed into the darkness of the mine. A dream, or maybe a memory. When she was in the mines, it was never really clear: memories and dreams became intermingled. You became a different person when you were in the mines. Your history disappeared. Your dreams blossomed. One could just as well be the other. Either way, she was alone. There was no Theo. Joanna packed up quickly and continued walking. As usual, she was in absolute darkness. The path into the mine was well-trod and caused no need for concern. She wouldn’t trip over anything. Thp, Tip, Bip, Thp went the cup. Joanna fell into a reverie, walking, listening to her little cup bopping along against her rucksack. Her feet told her when the path curved, and she would reach out with her hands, fingers glancing off the curving tunnel of the mine as it descended deeper into the earth. Walking in the dark could just as well be sleeping and dreaming. Her thoughts returned to her dream. It had been a pleasant one—to see Theo again—to be near his liveliness. Playing hot potato with Hollow Rocks. When she looked at life, it seemed like the insides of most everything had been carved out, including rocks. It was like Theo to find a way to blow things up and have a good time of it. Joanna continued walking, wondering where he was now. They had met in the Spring, in Eris, a growing collective, a fledgling little anarchist town. But then again, every town across the Wastes was a fledgling anarchist town. Too small for power to be drained from the communal pool into the hands and homes of a select few. Still, their governance was strange. They had sought help from outsiders in digging a well and looking for underground resources—which, Joanna felt, was her specialty. But helping out only meant having a bed and a meal. The people who called their little group "Eris" were reluctant to welcome stragglers into the group without them putting in a certain amount of dues . Joanna and Theo had met there serendipitously, her coming from the south after an extended stretch in the Loest Mines—about a month she had guessed—and Theo coming from a mine in the East. Neither had expected to stay long in Eris, but they had found each other, both mine-wanderers that they were, and had connected at the communal meal. Joanna stopped and placed a hand on the mine wall. It was refreshingly cool, not that she was overheating. She stood for a moment in the darkness, straining her ears and eyes. Had there been a sound, a moment of light, just then? Or had she been conflating her memories with the present moment? With the accumulated time that she had spent underground in utter darkness, Joanna had developed a vivid mind’s eye: dreams came to life, memories could be pulled up, aired out, inspected, folded neatly, held up to a light that existed inside her. In the stillness, she realized she had fallen for the liveliness of a memory. Most of the time that’s what it was. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t— let herself cry wolf on her memories when there could well be a real danger in the mine. And yet, as days and weeks went by, the solitude of being in a mine lengthened out like an infinite thread woven underneath the Wastes. She didn’t have to search the cabinets of her memories to know that she had never encountered anyone, any living thing down in the mines; it was an embedded reality. The scattered populations of earth were only driven into such dark places out of necessity: to scavenge some crucial tech-waste, to find water, or, more bleakly, in seeking an infinite blackness they could no longer run from: death. It was true, she had come across the dead in the mines. Some had thrown themselves down mine shafts, others had wandered deep in the mines until they could walk no further. Joanna shuddered. She was no stranger to such bleak realities, but losing her empathy was a far greater fear than an encounter with the Lifeless. So she intentionally practiced letting such tremors of sadness and despair ripple through her. Occasionally. "We could work together," Theo said. "They aren’t going to find water in that sad attempt of a well, and we both know there will be some in Cambor." "To what end?" Joanna responded. He didn’t respond. They were perched like vultures in the Eris Tree —a magnificent tree, stripped and dead, marking the center of Eris. Joanna looked over at him, up one branch from her, lying on his stomach, his limbs dangling on either side of the large branch. And while he looked uncomfortable, he lay there with his eyes closed looking peaceful. "If you fall asleep and fall out of this tree, I’m not going to catch you," Joanna said, waving her arm at him from her branch to show the distance between them. "Even if you were on my branch, I wouldn’t expect you to," Theo replied with his eyes closed. He still hadn’t answered her question. Work together to go to Cambor, map their way to some kind of water source, return and what—become members of this little town? Get roped into leading a construction crew into the Cambor mines to establish a primitive aqueduct? Joanna shifted her weight on her branch uneasily and huffed. Theo was under no obligation to explain himself or make his intentions known. That wasn’t the kind of world they lived in. Or maybe he just didn’t feel like saying more in the proximity of others—there were a few people in the tree and some walking idly by. Joanna surveyed Eris in its shambling infancy. One or two people eyed her warily in return. Any burgeoning community would be wise to be suspicious of newcomers; they were only just learning to trust one another. She turned to say something to Theo and he was, most certainly, asleep. Joanna walked beside this memory, hearing Theo’s voice clear as day. Remembering him draped over the tree branch. It was almost as if she was still with him—that she had agreed to his proposition. A proposition with as yet unexplained intentions. She couldn’t help her wariness. That was something that built up over time. But so too did a certain kind of loneliness. Previously, Joanna may have subconsciously told herself that this sort of living memory she walked with was enough company here in the dark. Deep down, she knew this was not true. But she kept walking. Several days passed of the same sort. All the while, Joanna steadily descended deeper underground. She had been in the Cambor mines for eleven "days" at this point. A "day" was marked by an internal rhythm she had developed from walking mines in the dark. For all she knew, she could be walking through the night above ground, and sleeping during the day, but she was still following roughly a 16-hour day to 8-hour sleep schedule. After every sleep, Joanna placed a small pebble in her left pocket to mark another day. She fingered her pocket full of tiny pebbles now, probing from stone to stone, as if she could remember the day each pebble represented. There had been times when her pocket had grown heavy with the number of days it had accumulated. Her longest stretch in a mine had been forty-one days. Joanna was still undecided on what was a healthy amount of time away from the surface of the planet. It probably wasn’t doing her any good to be in the dark so long—messing with her circadian rhythms, depriving her of the warmth of sunlight and so on. But being underground was sometimes the safest place to be. She didn’t understand why more people didn’t do it—the surface of earth wasn’t inhospitable. Yes, it was barren, but more in a soul-crushing, apathetic way. At least in Ri. Entire cities destroyed by earthquakes and floods of the subaquatic bombs. There were surely other cities unaffected outside of Ri, but they were as unknown to her as the moon. The world had become smaller, closer, more immediate, when everything had gotten turned upside down. But she supposed that maybe fear kept people out of the mines. They only entered out of necessity. This is what the people of Eris had wanted—what Theo had offered to help her do. And she had declined. And here she was in the dark, doing it anyway. She had effectively declined to help the town. Joanna wondered what her real motivations were. She often felt she was operating like a wind-up toy—something charged her up and she went off to do her task without really having a purpose behind that. She had left Eris in the middle of the night to depart without being seen. The people had asked her twice to help, to build the well, and she had given them a non-answer. Then she slipped away, evading them, evading Theo. Not a good character trait, Joanna thought. The world was full of characters and their not-so-good-traits. Joanna didn’t feel particularly bad. In many ways, today’s world was freer, albeit far, far more dangerous. There was the implicit understanding of survivorship and any pretences, all masks, had evaporated during the collapse. Joanna continued walking, chewing on the changes she was seeing in her lifetime. A lifetime with a far shorter life expectancy, too, she thought to herself. Before she could contemplate how many more steps she would have on this earth, she noticed a change in the air—water was close. She stopped on the path and listened. There was little chance she would run into anyone down here. But being careful only cost a little time, a little energy. She listened intently. At first, with her eyes closed, she heard nothing. Then, a slow swell, nearly inaudible. There was a white noise in the distance. The sound grew louder. It was the sound of waves. Then, a blinding light. She staggered backward, the sound of her footsteps lost in the swell. She opened her eyes to a dazzling sun, a cerulean sky, and crashing green and indigo waves on a beach. People were running up and down the sand, some diving headfirst into the water. A few stray boats drifted up and down the coast. An image from another time. Joanna opened her eyes again—really opened her eyes, uninhibited, untricked by an illustrious memory. She was still in the mine. But there was a sound: footsteps, approaching. It was Theo, in the dark. "A little farther this way. The water is here." They walked in silence. Joanna let her thoughts swirl in her head. Days in the darkness, days of silence and not speaking—it all made it harder to speak up now. And the surprise—what was he doing down here? How long had he been down here? How did he get here before me? Joanna had left Eris in the middle of the night. Theo had still been there when she left. Theo didn’t seem to mind the silence. He probably even expected it. He must have been down here long enough to experience that same binding spell that makes it difficult to speak. His voice had certainly croaked when it had spoken. A little farther this way. The water is here. So they walked on for a few more minutes. Then, the sound of their steps began to widen and fan out with a subtle echo. Neither of them could see in the darkness, but Joanna knew the sound: the widening of a passage into a cistern. How could she describe it? It was like opening the door from the inside of a cluttered closet and stepping into an open field and a swelling blue sky. It was still dark, but the breadth of difference in the sound of their walking alone seemed to balloon up infinitely. Joanna stopped. Theo stopped a step ahead of her. He looked back at her. "It’s huge." In the dark he may have nodded, but didn’t say anything. "Do you have a light?" "Yes." "Here:" There was some rustling in a bag and Theo pulled something out, and held it toward her. She felt for it with her hands, fumbling, until she felt the lantern. Joanna nodded to herself. She felt for her matches and dug them out of her pocket and lit one. The light that sprang to life overwhelmed them in its furious charge into being. Neither Joanna nor Theo looked at one another. Both focused on the lantern between them: held at an arm’s length by Theo, Joanna close up to it to understand how it would open, unlatch, light, before her match went out, wasted. She quickly unlatched the window, found the wick and lit it. She fumbled around for the fuel release valve and couldn’t find it, touching gently but quickly, all surfaces of the lantern seeking a knob, a switch, a lever. Theo’s hand grazed hers, a foreign touch in the darkness of the mine, the darkness of a body that hadn’t had contact in some time. He moved his hand up and twisted a knob at the top of the lantern underneath the handle. The flame blossomed, doubling, tripling in size, until he readjusted it to a steady glow, a bit brighter than the now extinguished match. Joanna stepped back and breathed out a held breath. The flame had seemed huge for a moment, engulfing. The sun on a beach, the sound of crashing waves. She listened now. There was no sound of movement of water. They continued their walk in silence. Now, with the lantern, each footstep was lightened. Step by step. Soon the forbidding silence that had them cowering and hiding was lifted. "How did you get ahead of me?" "I took the right path." The right path! Joanna laughed to herself. What she had mistaken for a path leading up out of the mine—toward a clear blowing air—had been a ruse. A mistake. She had been fooled. Whatever it was, she had taken the long way, and her intuition had been wrong this time. "Wasn’t pretty," Theo said. Or perhaps, her intuition wasn’t wrong after all. "Dangerous?" Theo nodded, visible this time, by the light of the lantern. She watched the shadows dip and bounce back with the movement of his head. "Definitely not pretty." Not Pretty . He had said that phrase before, she remembered now. He had spoken that way in describing any number of changes that appeared after the floods that had wiped away the old world. "Do you see it?" He asked, changing the subject. He held out the lantern. She could make out the edge of the cistern. There was movement. What had once been a deep, underground blast-mine was now an underground lake. They continued their approach, and soon the lantern appeared as a ghostly reflection in the water—rippling." "How is the water moving?" "Beats me," Theo said. They got right up to the edge and stopped. The water was only a foot or two below the rock ledge where they stood. Joanna crouched and dipped first one hand, swirling the water, feeling the bounds of it move up her arm as she reached farther in, and then bringing both hands up to her mouth as a cup. She drank. "I would have had to turn back tomorrow if I hadn’t found this." "How long have you been down here?" "Eleven days. But you knew that didn’t you? How long have you been waiting for me?" "Four days." "The right tunnel was that much faster." A statement, not a question. "Yes. And that much more dangerous, too." "And you’ve just been camping down here?" "Yes. Finding ways to keep busy. I didn’t know how much longer I would stay." "Running low on food?" "A little," Theo admitted. "And matches." Theo and Joanna fell into another silence. The lantern burned between them, now set at their feet on the edge of the cistern. The flame stood steady, hardly flickering at all. Its reflection in the water moved more, due to some strange eddies of unknown origin: the water moving more than the flame. Joanna stood in the silence, then slowly crouched down again by the water. Sit in the silence, lay in the silence. All of it felt good. Lifted her up. Finally, she was ready to speak again. "What are we doing here?" "I know. It’s stupid." "Neither of us came here to help Eris, right?" "No." "So what does that make us?" Joanna’s voice felt hollow, felt like it was disappearing into the darkness and swallowed up by the water. "I don’t know. Explorers?" "There is no other way of being than to keep moving, it feels." "I know that feeling," Theo said. He sounded sad. Sad and tired. "It’s not that there is anything wrong with us, I don’t think. But more than anything, it is becoming clear to me that most of us are just ghosts roaming across the landscape. Looking for a solution to a problem. Maybe looking for a place to call home, a place to rest." "How long?" "Probably years now. This is the sixth mine I’ve gone into." "Tenth for me." "Why do you think more people don’t do it?" "Plenty do," Theo said, "but you don’t see them. You don’t run into them. I think we make it so that we don’t run into each other." "But surely it is just a fraction of the population." "You are correct about that. I think we come down here for signs of life. Because that’s where water is. It’s trouble to get to it, that’s for sure, but there’s something unrelentingly pure about it. Not just the water itself, but something like this existing, far way, untouched." "You’re saying it’s like a vacation? A stay at the beach." "No." The tone of his voice betrayed a furrowed brow, maybe even annoyance. "People get by with the water on the surface, but, but I don’t know, I guess a select few are drawn to the cisterns and the underground reservoirs. The ones who don’t mind the dark, at least." "I guess that’s me," Joanna sighed, "I don’t mind the dark. Some days I even prefer it, I think." "Soon the people will come en masse to seek it out, I suspect. Who knows how many of these mines exist, natural or unnatural. But I don’t think the water on the surface can sustain the aggregating peoples." "I hadn’t really thought about that. I think maybe I’ve been avoiding thinking about it," Joanna said. "Is that why you disappeared from Eris?" "I don’t know. Maybe," Joanna said uneasily. She didn’t like that Theo seemed to be getting into her head, poking around, analyzing her decisions, drawing possible conclusions that existed in his mind before he even asked a question. Maybe he was trying to connect with her—she could deal with that. But it was that his questions and probing seemed to get closer to answers she wasn’t even aware of. Joanna didn’t like that. "I think I’ll retire for the night. Let’s talk more tomorrow." She splashed water in her face. She pulled herself up and went about setting up her tent, the water fighting through days of grime to touch her skin. Joanna couldn’t fall asleep. Theo wasn’t making any sound, but just knowing that he was there made sleep elusive. Lying in her tent, she enumerated her thoughts, trying to get to the root of what was preventing her from drifting off, like searching around in a pool to pull a plug and drain the water that was the tiredness of her body and mind. It wasn’t that she felt unsafe in his proximity. She didn’t trust him, that much was true, but that didn’t mean she found him to be a threat. Maybe it was just that she didn’t know how to share this massive yet intimate space: the darkness that surrounded them, the water discovered and novel, the swirling sound of it tugging and releasing at her thoughts. The swirling water? That shouldn’t be. She lay, holding her breath. The water was certainly moving. It lapped against itself, eddying like a lost traveller. Every now and then, the water would slap up against itself with the sound of a tiny clap. She had noticed some slight movement before, hadn’t she? Earlier, the lantern’s flame had not moved but its reflection in the water had. She let out her breath slowly, and breathed in deeply. Held it. Held it and listened to the water roar into life. A deep, guttural, gurgling echoed all throughout the cistern, the sounds swelling and bouncing to such a volume that Joanna realized the cavern they were in was even larger than it had seemed. Then, a great, gnarling sawing sound reared up over the gurgling, seized it and wrestled it into submission. Joanna tore out of her tent. Theo was already there, standing, staring up into the darkness. She felt her way over to him. "What the hell is going on? Where’s the lantern?" "I don’t dare light it," he replied. She could hardly hear him over the sounds. "What? Why not?" "Something’s out there." It was obvious something was out there, but the way he said this scared Joanna. His voice was empty, hollow, like a soldier surrendering, his will to fight gone, a bland readiness for execution. "Someone’s siphoning off the cistern. They’re just getting started. They’ve been here this whole time. Longer than me. I should have known. That would explain the right mine-tunnel, it was rife with signs of life. What do you think we should do?" "What do I think? You talk like you’ve got a plan most of the time." "No plan," his arms may well have been spread, palms open helplessly to the cavernous ceiling. But this she could not see in the darkness. "It’s funny," he said. "Did either of us know we would find water down here? No. And yet, at least for me, having been here a few days, I feel like it is mine. My cistern. And someone is stealing from me. Draining away my property." "Are you sure it’s being drained?" "What else could it be? Have you not seen this happen before? Not stumbled upon the drained cisterns of other mines?" "No," Joanna admitted. "Tell me." "It’s what you’d expect. Someone is hoarding the water. There is a mine in what was once Mistra, about a two hour walk outside of the ruins of the city. I checked it out a few years ago. When I arrived the whole cistern had been sucked dry. They even had set up electricity in the mine, somehow. Had lights bordering the cistern. Of course, by the time I arrived all the lights were off and the people gone. The whole cistern was drained and was being stored underground in their little town outside the mine." "Why are they draining it instead of just setting up piping to establish an aqueduct?" "Some people have done that, but I suspect the people outside the Mistra mine didn’t like the idea of sharing. Rather than have to guard the cistern, they drain it and then store the water in huge underground containers that are the foundation for the towns they build." "That seems like a lot of work when they could just live above the mine, or hell, in the mine." "You and I are down here. Maybe we could imagine a life in the dark. But most people don’t seem so keen. And besides, they have their huge machines that do the work for them." Joanna had not seen the machines that Theo was referring to. She assumed the grinding, sawing and deep rumbling surrounding them were from the very same machines. And what of the people behind them? People with machines so large that they could route and direct massive underground cisterns—these were not the kind of people she was used to dealing with. She remained silent. Even shouting at the top of her lungs would be like remaining silent against the noise that surrounded them now. Something deep in the water was churning up the cistern enough to make waves on the surface. She could hardly imagine what nefarious mechanisms were being put to work. "I don’t think I can take the noise." Theo said, breaking the noise-filled silence between them. "I’ve never heard anything like it," Joanna replied. "I certainly won’t be able to get back to sleep." "I wouldn’t want to be caught sleeping here," Theo said. "Hmm," Joanna assented. Theo’s mind seemed intent on issuing these sorts of warnings. He often spoke with a foreboding tone. She wasn’t sure what his angle was. If he wasn’t offering these low-grade warnings, then he was taking an edifying tone with her. It was beginning to get annoying. She was seeing now that her hunch to leave him behind in Eris had been correct, and yet here he was: an overprotective brother, a macho show-off, or some awful combination of both. In her mind, she did not allow for the possibility that perhaps he was seeking a simple, platonic companionship. She was already giving him more of a benefit of the doubt than most of the people she encountered in the world. It had been outside of her playbook to talk with him the first time they met, and yet she had. But the continual gut checks were starting to tire her out. Building trust was too exhausting. "Well, I guess I’ll fill up, and head out." "It sounds like you want to go alone." At least he was perceptive enough. "I’m not going to stay either, but if you want to set off on your own, don’t feel you have to wait on me." Joanna sighed inwardly. What was she going to do, tell him to walk a hundred paces behind her? She supposed she could take the right tunnel—the one that had gotten him here faster. "The right tunnel, you said something about it," she asked. "I wouldn’t take it out of here." "Why not? You said you’d gotten down here four days faster than me." An uneasy silence (despite the roaring of the machines). "Well, there were a few people in there." "A few people?" Joanna asked, surprised. "I think most of them would be goners by now. But I got attacked by one. A desperate last stand by someone who had been either left behind or had been cut down, probably by whoever is running these machines." Joanna blanched in the darkness. She felt for the long knife at her belt. It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle herself if things got ugly. But the kind of ugly she was willing to put herself through was more the desperation of the living, not the desperation of the near-dead. "Alright, we’ll take the left tunnel." Joanna and Theo fell into a comfortable rhythm by day three. By then, Theo had exhausted his seemingly inexhaustible reserve of questions. After that, Joanna finally felt herself begin to unwind. At the end of the first day they had left the noise of the machines behind, save for a deep rumbling that was more felt than heard. Now, in their silence, they would periodically feel tremors moving the ground beneath them. Vibrations of an unnatural frequency and cause. Joanna found she had to move slower for Theo. She listened to his footsteps now. Sometimes, he would walk a few paces behind her, either in a narrow passageway, or perhaps when he was feeling less confident in his footing. She liked this, not that she enjoyed seeing herself as the leader per se. But after plenty of solo expeditions, having someone who was sort-of-there-but-not-there was something she realized she appreciated. She listened to the quiet echo of her walk that he was—the sounds of his steps fitting in with the imprints of hers. By day five they were both humming. Joanna wasn’t sure who had started it, but it became regular. Both of them seemed to appreciate it in the other, and the resonant sounds expanded from within them, out into the mine air, buzzing and sawing about. It was a much preferred vibration to the still occurring vibration of the machines deep in the tunnels behind them. Sometimes, they would lapse into a silence, only for one of them to emit a wavy melody hum, let it drift into place, a thread in a current, ready to be picked up by the other. And so it was that a thread of melody could float between the two, be picked up, put down, shared. Sometimes, although not often, they would both hold that thread and harmonize. Neither spoke about the humming. It seemed sacred. It would only be disdained by words. Neither of them ever sang. The resonant buzzing within them never escaped through open lips, into the shape of words or otherwise. At night they would speak again, though not much. The days were silent save for humming, the nights were quiet save for a few words: how to make use of their dwindling rations, speculations on the fate of the cistern. No discussion of their respective pasts. On the seventh day of walking they reached the juncture of the two tunnels. It was nearing the end of the day when they reached it. "Well here we are, two paths diverged in a wood, and so on." Theo said. Joanna looked quizzically at him in the dark, but did not say anything. By now, none of the workings down in the cistern could be heard. Occasionally, Joanna felt a tremor in the ground when she wasn’t walking, but she could well have been imagining that. "We could go another hour or two or we could stop here, if you like." "Let’s stop here," Theo responded assuredly. They set up camp. "What about a fire, tonight?" Joanna said, surprising herself. "A fire? What do you propose to burn?" "The struts. Most of them are wood." "Couldn’t that make the mine collapse?" "Do you ever want to come back here?" "You’re not serious!" Theo exclaimed. Joanna shrugged in the dark, knowing full well that Theo couldn’t see her. "One strut would be enough for a fire. It won’t make the whole tunnel collapse. I suggest we take one from the right tunnel. Based on your description of it, I figure if one were to collapse, it should be that one." "Ah, why not," Theo responded after a moment of silence. "I have a saw and some rope. If we’re not going to walk for another hour or two, we might as well do something productive." Joanna set her bag down and pulled out a foldable saw, always in the side pocket behind the zipper. She flipped it open in the dark until it clicked into place, locking securely. She pulled her medium rope out of the main enclosure of her bag. "Light the lantern," she commanded, walking over toward the right tunnel. As she approached, she remembered the match she had lit, the one blown out by the faintest wind emitting from the tunnel. Walking over now, she felt that same wind approaching. She heard the striking of a match behind her. Facing away, the illumination of it wasn't so bright that she had to turn her eyes away. Instead, she saw her shadow cast toward the right tunnel. Behind her, she heard Theo light the lantern and then a greater flame casting larger shadows followed. She stood before the entrance to the right tunnel watching as her shadow morphed and shifted as Theo walked up behind her. "Ok, let’s find the closest wooden strut." Together they walked a few steps into the right tunnel, inspecting each strut as they went. Several of them seemed to be made of an alloy metal. The first wood one was only a few paces in on the left. "Perfect." Joanna said. She set about tying her rope around the middle of the strut and then began sawing at the top. This took several minutes and Theo just watched as she did this. After breaking through, she crouched down and began sawing at the bottom of the strut. It was about 6 inches wide. Both cuts took a matter of minutes. Her saw was in great shape, fine-toothed and sharp. "Careful," Theo said uneasily. "I'm going to finish sawing all the way through and I want you to stabilize the strut so that when I kick through the end of it, it doesn't move." Theo stood over her, placing all his weight into stabilizing the strut while he looked down at Joanna sawing intently. The lantern, despite only showing the smallest flame, was a spotlight upon them. Theo, having never seen her this close in the light, watched her closely. Like turning over a quartz and seeing its sides, he took in the shapes of her face. "Almost there," Joanna said, as if aware of his lack of focus. Theo tightened his grip on the strut as the saw came through to the other side. The strut moved imperceptibly. Theo was sweating. "Okay, let's let go in a moment and we're gonna back away slowly. Make sure you grab the lantern." They did this, Joanna grabbing the rope, uncurling it as they walked backwards carefully. Eventually they retreated to the open area before the two tunnels. Joanna held the rope in her hand as if it was the trigger of a trap. Theo held the lantern and watched the light recede into the darkness before them. "I’ll pull on three , okay?" Theo nodded. Joanna yanked at the rope with both hands. And the strut came loose, clattering with a bang onto the ground and echoing down the corridors of the tunnel. Both of them waited, listening to the garish echoes dissipate. In the silence that followed, they both may have imagined the possibilities of a mine collapsing in on them. But, in the naïvety of their evident safety, the idea of sitting before a fire was both energizing and worthy of the risk. Joanna set about pulling out her hatchet and chopping the strut into pieces. The wood was dry and thick and took some time to break apart. She splintered a quarter of it into kindling and then quickly started a fire in the center of the ground facing the two tunnels before returning to chop larger pieces to burn. She added to the fire as she went, stacking the larger pieces of wood close by. The fire danced and flicked, painting the mine walls with light, and fired off pops and cracks, sending little echoes of life down the tunnels like rolling stones. "I guess the tunnel isn’t going to collapse." Theo said timidly. He seemed different in the light; less bold, or perhaps just more self-conscious. Joanna watched him curiously. "It’s not that I knew it wouldn’t," Joanna said slowly. "I think it’s more that I didn’t care. That sounds bad. I didn’t think I was putting ourselves in danger, but maybe I was. You spend so long in a mine, needing to be cautious every which way, that sometimes a reckless feeling comes over you. I need to do something care-free." "It’s not far from here, I think." "To the surface," Joanna said. "Yes." Their shadows never quite stayed the same on the walls behind them. Theo watched Joanna’s and Joanna watched Theo’s. "Should we cook up something extravagant?" "Ooo," said Theo. "I have some dehydrated soup. We could have warm soup." "I have some dehydrated black lentil I’ve been saving, as well as a bit of dessert." "Dessert!" Theo nearly shouted. "Dehydrated cake." "No such thing," Theo said. "I guess you won’t have any, then." "Well, maybe there is such a thing." The two prepared their first hot meal over a fire in weeks. Their thoughts of cisterns, siphoned water, huge machines, collapsing mine-tunnels—all of it disappeared behind steaming bowls of soup. "This is the cake," Joanna said, after rummaging in her bag and pulling out a small dense brick, wrapped in brown paper. "You just add a bit of water. Having warm water will make it taste even better, I think." Theo watched her closely as she grabbed her cup, downed the last dregs of it and dipped it in the pot of water over the fire. Joanna flicked open a small knife and pressed it through the dense cake, cutting it in half. Carefully, she poured the contents of her cup over both pieces. "We have to let it sit for some time so the water can absorb and it can cool." "Warm cake," said Theo, in disbelief. "In the depths of an abandoned mine." "Special occasion," Joanna said flatly. Not something for every day, she thought to herself, especially sharing with someone else. When the cake was ready. she pushed the package over to Theo, that he might have first pick. He took the smaller piece. They both ate the cake with little noises of delight and wonder. Its taste was perhaps amplified by the strange circumstances it was being consumed in. This had actually been the first time that Joanna had tried this cake—she had picked it up from a vendor while travelling before she reached Eris. She had nearly forgotten she had it, stuffed away in a pocket of her pack. "I wish I had some milk," Theo said. "It was good." "It was so good!" Theo exclaimed. He sighed and rolled from a sitting position to lay down on the ground, resting with his hands supporting his head. Joanna watched him. In the firelight she could see the days in the mine on him: oily skin, pale of daylight, his face dirty and unwashed. She felt much the same. Unconsciously, she took a swig of her water as if it could cleanse her. They stayed in this restful way until the fire burnt low. The strut had served them well and provided more than enough wood, a shame really, Joanna decided—she had no intention of carrying it around. Still, they should be exiting the mine soon, she figured. Maybe three or four more days. After a night like this, though, the other days of walking and nights of rest would feel bland and uninspired. Joanna stared into the fire, thinking. Her expedition had been a success, in a sense. But I’m just a wanderer, and that’s the truth isn’t it, she thought. There had been no greater goal than to explore the mine. She would not be helping anybody with what she had learned, having decided not to help the people in Eris. Though, she supposed she could go back to the town to tell them about the excavation that was happening in the cistern. Joanna felt restless, her days of wandering and meandering were strange in this landscape. She needed some kind of purpose. Wandering from place to place, exploring mines and caves had given her some semblance of satisfaction and motivation over the last few years, but that was growing thin. All the while, violence and conflict was springing up more across the region. Factions seemed to be growing and cobbling together stockpiles as they could: land, water, weapons. If the world got more and more hostile she couldn’t keep doing this. She had been lucky already, avoiding most of it, moving solo through the world. Joanna looked at Theo. He was asleep on his back. She set up her tent quietly, hoping not to wake him, but failed. "Jo?" No one called her that. "What?" "Thanks for the fire, and the cake." he mumbled sleepily. "It’s nothing." She got into her tent, and went to bed. They reached the entrance of the mine without incident after four more days of walking. They did not have any more fires. They did not speak much of anything. Their relationship had shifted since the fire. It had made real the private and the public in Joanna’s life. She slept in her tent after the fire every night from then on. For the light of the fire had brought each other’s faces into view. Even though they had no more fires, lit no more matches, even though they continued marching in darkness, the light stayed with Joanna, and she felt continually seen. So the tent made for an escape, even in the pitch darkness of the mine, at the end of the day. Theo made no comment about this, and occasionally set up his tent, too. Despite this renewed need for privacy, Joanna enjoyed falling asleep in the presence of someone else. It was comforting, and she realized as she approached the opening of the mine—the splash of light marking the entrance—that she would miss it. "What now?" she wished to say, as the light of the entrance drew closer. In some respects, she could have marched through the mine with Theo forever, if they had had the provisions for it. This was the tone of her life, in this world, now. A companion with these sorts of comforts was far more rare than the most precious of stones. And yet, she couldn’t help but feel their separation was both imminent and necessary. Above ground, things were different. In the light of day, even the not-dark-enough of night, she was unsure she could stand to be continually seen so visibly. As if he could sense Joanna’s rumination on the topic of himself, Theo did not speak. Joanna listened to the familiar sounds of his footsteps, now right beside her rather than behind her. The light of the entrance illuminated enough of the path that they could walk two abreast. The sound of his footsteps stopped. Joanna took a few paces and then stopped. She turned and looked back. "What’s next?" his voice rang out. Nearly exactly what she had wanted to say. Joanna sighed, lifting her pack by her thumbs and settling it back down. Thmp , went her cup. Familiar. "Sometimes I get these glimpses of a life where I can bear to wonder of what’s more," Joanna said. "Of hunting down some purpose. But instead, it all feels like purposeless wandering. No wonder. Just wandering. Wandering and surviving." Theo nodded at this. "I’ve been wondering the same thing." "You’d like something bigger." "Yes, and you too, I suppose." "Yes," Joanna said plaintively. "This is most of what I’ve known, though my past feels far away, inaccessible." "How well do you remember the path to the cistern?" Theo asked. "Well enough." "You could map it?" Joanna furrowed her brow at this. Theo could see her reaction now. "To make something—to provide what others can’t do?" "Theo, it was just two tunnels. Follow them to the water. Anyone with an affinity for walking about in the pitch black could do it." "I don’t think that’s entirely true. But I mean, you know, to do something greater. Make a map, provide people with a path." "The water is just going to be siphoned off, anyway. We’re helpless at that. They have machines, electricity, they have power, and they’ll have more of it—the ability to sustain it—after they do whatever they’re going to do with the water." "Maybe they’re not bad people." "That’s good of you to think that." Theo sighed audibly and started walking. "Good of me to think that," he echoed. Then they were outside. The stark difference silenced them in a new way. No more discussion of maps, of greater purposes. They were subjects under the sun—albeit, one that was hiding behind the clouds. Subjects of a brazen wind. The still air of the mine left them feeling raw and exposed to even the slightest moving particulate. Joanna surveyed the descent from the mine. She could see Eris in the distance—like blocks of a child’s toys—clustered in a seemingly illogical fashion. The wind buffeted about any clear thought she might have had about what was next. Joanna felt a rising anxiousness in her body, a vibration—at having to decide what to do. Theo stood beside her. She felt like she had to make a decision for the next step—whether to sever ties, or stick together. Despite all her wasteland wanderings, this sort of thing still never came easy. The awkwardness of connection—not their connection—of any connection, any fragment of a person has with another fragment. They were all fragments now, and the vibrating was turning to tremors and she felt herself growing unsteady— "Run!" Theo shouted, grabbing Joanna’s arm and pulling her from her spiral. She found herself involuntarily running, yanked along, the tremors in her body multiplying with each step contacting the ground. Or was it the ground that was shaking? Theo shouted again, something about the tunnels. She couldn’t hear him over the noise. His grip on her arm was painful as he pulled her up toward the rocky hills surrounding the mine. Joanna’s body ached and complained with each pounding step, being used to walking at a steady clip, not running with a loaded bag, in the blinding daylight. They were halfway up the crag flanking the mine when the earth exploded upward behind them. In a moment, Joanna was in her dream with Theo, of playing with the Hollow Rocks, watching them explode. Blink twice, between reality and dream: rocks of all shapes and sizes were soaring upward, arcing in all directions. More explosions. Theo pulling Joanna to the ground out of the way of falling debris. Then, the water of the cistern exploding out of the mine. Spraying into the sky, rushing out of all the mine’s orifices, rushing downhill, an unstoppable force, toward Eris. Joanna uncovered her head, pushed herself up, and kneeled to watch through the haze of rock dust: the water had already reached Eris, and while it had dispersed to some degree in its rampage, the path to the town may as well have been a cutout valley, and the water crashed through it. Within seconds, the child’s blocks had been knocked down, the town washed out. They stood in a stunned silence. The dust of the exploded rock was quickly carried away on the wind, out into the wastes. "There was more water in that cistern than we thought." "We never could have seen the full size of it," Joanna said reattaching herself to reality. They watched as the water eventually diminished. Most of the homes of Eris, weak structures that they were, were knocked over. In the distance, they could see the small figures of people milling about in the now diminishing water. To the right, the mine had become an open crater. "It’s a miracle we didn’t get squashed." "Or drowned," Theo added. "What do you think happened?" "Some kind of machinery malfunction, I suppose. Or something went wrong with an explosive." "They must be huge, powerful machines." Theo nodded. They stood in the wind and looked at the landscape. It was desolate. Joanna found herself wishing for the sound of her cup again, thumping along on its string attached to her pack. "Well, we know what happened to Eris," Joanna said, stretching out her arm at the decimated town. "Why don’t we go see what happened to the other party?" "I suspect that they are somewhere around the north or east side of the mine, since we’re westward right now, though I don’t see any signs of life." "And there may not be any," Joanna said blankly, and began walking. thmp, pid, pad, pt , went the cup. Theo followed.
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