Chapter 16
Protection
The water keeps getting shallower until they’re not wading at all, they’re stepping up onto a concrete platform.
The tunnel is otherwise unchanged, but just being out of direct contact with the water makes it feel warmer …
for now. Lilianne knows that won’t last for long.
Their bodies will realize that they’re still wrapped in wet cocoons, still buffeted by cold air, and the freezing will resume, if it ever actually stopped to begin with.
But Smita isn’t shivering as hard, and the motion of the pendulum is getting more and more focused, not swinging at all any longer, only pointing toward whatever lies ahead.
She shakes it, trying to see if she can change the direction of its focus, and nothing she does will make it shift or swing: it only points.
They’re almost there.
It’s almost anticlimactic when the light hits a rough concrete wall, free of waterlines or graffiti.
In the center is a door, plain wood painted white, like something you might find in the back halls of a hospital.
It’s unimpressive enough to loop back around to becoming impressive in a unique, half-terrible way.
“Is it locked?” asks Smita.
“I don’t know, but my pendulum wants us to go there,” says Lilianne. She steps forward, Smita’s reassuring light at her back, and reaches for the knob.
“The light will guide me home,” she murmurs just before her fingers close around it, mantra and plea and prayer all at the same time, so jumbled up together that they can’t be picked apart.
She grasps the knob. She turns it.
The door swings inward under her hand.
She pushes it about a foot open, revealing a narrow strip of darkness that manages to be even deeper than the darkness in the tunnel. A faint smell escapes, like formaldehyde and some kind of cleaning fluid, lemon-bright and utterly impossible.
“Is this it?” asks Smita.
Lilianne almost wants to snap at her, to remind her that they’re both here for the first time, that she has no more way of knowing what’s going on than Smita does.
But even more than that, she wants to squeal and throw her arms around the other woman, dancing with delight over the fact that it’s here, it’s really here, they found it.
The lost lab is hers. All she has to do is step inside and claim her destiny.
“I think so,” she says. “I hope so. And I hope that it has a working dryer, whether it is or not.” She grasps what little bravery she has left and steps forward, pushing the door the rest of the way inward. Smita follows her, phone raised to cast as much light as possible.
They’re in a kitchen, large and industrial, with chrome shelving and countertops.
It looks like the sort of thing you’d expect to find at a summer camp or school, someplace where the staff is expected to feed enormous numbers of people very quickly and out of industrial vats.
It’s hard to imagine so many alchemists in one place that this sort of setup would be necessary, but here it is, and it’s even harder to imagine another situation that would put this many people in a windowless underground kitchen and force them to eat whatever the cafeteria could produce.
The walls are concrete. The floor is tile. The ceiling is high, and yet the room doesn’t echo as they step inside, or as the door swings shut behind them. Lilianne shifts to stand closer to Smita, like she thinks the warmth off her body could help the smaller woman without the need to touch her.
“There must still be power down here,” says Smita.
“Why would you say that?”
“We can still breathe.”
It’s a simple statement, and yet. There are no windows: the door, when closed, forms an almost perfect seal.
There’s no way air is getting down this deep without some sort of ventilation system, and there’s no way it would be this fresh if the vents weren’t actively doing their jobs.
Lilianne blinks, then turns to start scanning the nearby walls.
“What are you looking for?” asks Smita.
“The light switch,” says Lilianne, and then: “Ah-ha!” She moves toward the wall, then flicks the switch she spotted there.
The fluorescents overhead sputter and groan as they flicker into life, filling the kitchen with a lambent white light that makes the flashlight immediately unnecessary.
Smita grunts approval as she flicks it off, then moves to stuff the phone into her pocket.
She freezes before she can finish the gesture.
“Try your bra,” says Lilianne. “That’s what I did. It should still be dry enough to be safe.”
Smita shoots her a grateful look, then tucks the phone into her bra, safely away from her sodden clothing. She turns, looking at everything around them with wide-eyed curiosity.
“The alchemists built all this?” she asks.
“I think so,” says Lilianne. “If I’m right and we are where I hope we are, they definitely did.”
“How? This must be right under at least one major intersection! There’s no way they could build this much without someone catching them!”
“Have you ever heard of Roman concrete?”
“What?” Smita blinks at her, clearly thrown by the sudden change of subject. “Concrete?”
“Yeah. It was this famous Roman discovery. A concrete that could move with its environment, meaning it had incredible tensile strength and didn’t buckle in earthquakes.
It could even heal itself under the right conditions, or follow lines drawn by the people who used it, constructing whole rooms without the need for an architect.
But then Rome fell, and the secret of the concrete was lost.”
“That sounds a little close to magic for me,” says Smita dubiously.
“Not magic. Alchemy. It was pure human innovation and science being bent toward fulfilling the needs of the alchemists who made it. There was nothing magical about it.”
“And that has what to do with this lab?”
“This whole place was built using Roman concrete, following lines of resonance implanted in the soil.” Lilianne tries to make her answer sound as matter-of-fact as possible, like this is the sort of thing Smita should expect.
“Modern alchemists working for the Alchemical Congress rediscovered the secret a few years ago, and they were able to use it to build labs all over the country.”
Oh, she’d been so excited on the day the news of the discovery leaked into the independent alchemists’ community, when the whispered rumors became openly spoken facts.
One of the cockier alchemists she knew, a boy from Decatur, Georgia, who had been refining gold out of sand since his eighth birthday, had even managed to acquire a brick-sized sample of the stuff, which had looked entirely unassuming until it was hit by a hammer.
Watching it put itself back together with the methodical silence of a healing muscle had been sobering in the extreme.
“It’s the real deal,” she says, more sedately. “It works, and it should stand up for centuries, even in earthquake country. It just recovers from whatever people throw at it.”
“That should be the sort of thing that changes the world,” says Smita.
“It was, and it did, and then the world forgot about it, and now the world doesn’t deserve it anymore,” says Lilianne. “Lost knowledge belongs to the people who rediscover it.”
“But you said it was the Alchemical Congress who rediscovered it. Why are you talking like you should have any say in what happens to the information? You just said that it doesn’t belong to you.”
There’s an unexpected sharpness in that question, and for a moment, Lilianne isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do.
The moment passes. “If it belongs to one alchemist, it belongs to all alchemists. We’re equipped to understand it, and that’s the most direct form of ownership there is.
This place is Roman concrete. No steel to rust, no wires to corrode.
Just solid, self-healing stone shot through with vents and wiring.
It’ll still be here long after the city of Berkeley is forgotten.
It may even have grown by then, depending on the blueprint they used.
If they told the lab how to expand itself over time, then that’s exactly what it’s going to do, year after year, until the entire underground is just rooms and chambers. ”
“All empty,” says Smita. “The alchemists are gone.”
“For now.” Lilianne takes another look around. “The place isn’t even dusty. The self-cleaning processes are still working.”
“Is that part of the not-magic magic concrete?”
“No. But there are ways to program air scrubbers, modified fungus and the like. We prefer to work with the natural world whenever possible, because alchemy is the oldest of the natural sciences. It doesn’t require anything falsified.”
“Huh,” says Smita.
Lilianne leads her to the door, testing it to see if it, like the door into the sewer passage, has been left unlocked. When the knob turns, she grins, giddy as a schoolgirl, and says, “I bet we can find some towels in one of the main labs.”
Smita doesn’t have time to object before Lilianne’s through the door and she’s alone in the empty, echoing kitchen. Her soaking-wet clothes are sticking to her body, pressing her core temperature further and further down: she needs those towels or she’s going to freeze.
But she stays where she is, and does not follow, and is finally free to think about what she’s done for the first time since she decided she was going to do it.