Chapter 10 #3
I followed along, eyes sweeping the corridor around me.
Smaller stones skittered beneath our feet as we walked and kicked them along.
The stone here was not the charcoal gray of the mines or the lighter gray of the upper levels.
It was black and shimmering in a way that made it appear oily on its surface.
I could tell, from the massive cracks running along the walls from floor to ceiling and branching off in all directions, this was likely not the first cave in this level had experienced.
We stopped so suddenly I nearly collided with Roiben’s back.
The man’s lip curled as he stepped away from me.
Once he moved, I could see why we'd stopped.
The path forward no longer existed. It was blocked entirely by enormous chunks of the same oily black rock that seemed to make up the walls around us.
The cave in was recent. The dust still hadn’t settled.
It rose up in plumes around us, encasing the fallen rock and the corridor before it.
Mosi coughed, waving an arm in front of his face and stepping back as if trying to avoid soiling his uniform.
Pointless, I thought, if I had any indication of what Tiberius intended.
As it turned out, I was right.
“We’ll use our enhanced strength to lift the boulders out of the way. Then the miners will come up here and use the material we can salvage to repair the walls,” he announced, eyes swinging from his men to me as he issued his orders. “You can use your enhanced strength, yes?”
I crossed my arms and shot him a scowl that used to have Warren raising his hands in surrender.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I snapped.
“Somehow,” Roiben muttered.
My gaze jumped to him, lips already opening, poised to respond.
“Let’s get to work,” Tiberius said, interrupting our argument before it could begin. “This tunnel grows weaker the longer we wait. The sooner we can repair it, the better.”
Without any further argument, we stepped forward as one and began our work in silence.
I clenched my fists, willing the strength within me to infuse my limbs the way Dante and I had practiced.
Gritting my teeth against the very thought of my former partner, I reached for one of the looser boulders before me and pulled.
And so we worked, speaking only when it was necessary to communicate which boulders should be removed and in what order.
If we pulled too much from the bottom, we risked the top collapsing on top of us.
But Mosi and I were the only ones small enough to scrabble up to the top of the pile in order to toss stones down to the other two to set aside.
That process was slow going as well and I found myself wiping sweat from my brow, dirt and dust streaking across my face, despite my enhanced abilities.
Hours later, we'd cleared enough of the central stones to have created a path for the miners to join us. They sorted through the rock we’d set aside, making piles of their own as they decided what could still be usable and what was far too old and disintegrated to assist in any repairs.
It was a small team of them, only five that I counted.
I couldn’t help but wonder why Tiberius hadn’t recruited more for the repairs.
If it was as important to get them finished completely, as he'd said, wouldn’t more workers finish the job faster?
I scrambled up the pile on the right side of the path we'd cleared, still wondering about Tiberius' choice of workers.
Tiberius himself waited at the bottom for whatever stones I would pass down for him.
He was currently turned away, addressing the miners working below.
Mosi was opposite me, balancing precariously on the thinning pile of rocks to the left of the pathway, passing down stone after stone to scowling Roiben.
I turned away, reaching into the darkness at the very top of the pile, in the corner of the tunnel itself where no light at all reached.
I had to blink a few times, even with my enhanced vision, to adjust to the complete darkness there.
I reached for a larger stone, pulling it away so the smaller ones trickled down to the ground below, causing Tiberius to curse and jump out of the way.
But I hardly noticed. My gaze was planted firmly on the stone wall behind the boulder I'd just removed. It wasn’t just cracked here, it was shattered.
Thick, spider webbed cracks ran from the center outward, stretching far out into the corridor around us.
I knew, without a doubt, this was what had created the cave in.
But it wasn’t just a crack that naturally appeared in a stone hall after centuries of disuse and ill repair.
The spider webbed cracks all met in the center where the stone was shattered and flaking away.
This wasn’t natural decay. This was an impact. And there was something off about it.
“Did you hear me, Adrian?” Tiberius shouted up at me.
I blinked, looking down to find him staring up at me, face practically red with fury. The miners behind him were looking my way as well. Even Mosi and Roiben had stopped their work to see what the commotion was about.
“What?” I asked.
“I said be careful up there,” he snapped. “You nearly crushed me with that last slide.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
Then I handed the stone in my hands, the one I'd removed and was still holding, down to him. But when he turned away to set it down, I turned back to the shattered rock and realized why it seemed so strange. The center wasn’t a crater.
It was shattered stone, falling away inward.
Which meant that whatever had struck the rock hard enough to crack the walls and cause a cave in of this size hadn’t done so from within.
The impact had come from outside.