The impact didn't kill me. The smell almost did.
I plunged into the black sludge of the drainage canal. The cold shock seized my lungs like a vice. I didn't swim. I thrashed. My dislocated shoulder screamed as the dirty water flooded my nose and mouth. It tasted of copper and sulfur and human waste.
I breached the surface. I gasped for air and spit out the filth before I could swallow it. The darkness down here was absolute. It was broken only by the faint grimy light filtering down from the grate twenty feet above.
"He went down the chute!" a voice echoed from the opening. It sounded distorted and metallic. "Flashlights! Sweep the tunnel!"
A beam of harsh white light cut through the gloom. It swept across the churning water just inches from my head.
I didn't think. I submerged again. I forced my body down into the freezing muck. I kicked off the slimy wall and let the current drag me deeper into the tunnel away from the light. My lungs burned. My shoulder felt like it was being pried apart with a crowbar.
This wasn't a game. There was no restart button here. If I drowned in this filth then I died. If they caught me then Grix would peel the skin off my fingers one by one to find out where his money was.
I surfaced twenty meters downstream. I tucked myself behind a rusted support pillar. I dragged myself out of the current and onto a narrow slick concrete walkway that ran along the side of the tunnel.
I lay there for a moment shivering violently. The cold was sinking into my bones. Hypothermia was a real threat down here even with the ambient heat of the planet's core.
System Notification:
[Physical Status: Body temperature dropping. Infection probability: High. Right shoulder joint: Unstable.]
[Suggestion: Move.]
I ignored the text. I forced myself to sit up. I popped my shoulder back in again with a grimace that was more snarl than expression. The pain cleared my head.
I checked my surroundings. The drainage tunnels were the veins of the mine pumping the toxic runoff down to the reprocessing centers near the core. They were unmapped and unmonitored and lethal. The air was thick with methane. One spark down here and the whole sector would turn into a bomb.
I stood up swaying. I needed to get back to the barracks. I needed to wash this filth off before the toxins soaked through my skin. But I couldn't go back up the way I came. Grix's men would be camping the exits.
I had to go deeper. There was an old maintenance hatch in Sub-Sector 5 that connected to the ventilation shafts. If I could reach it I could climb back up to Sector 4 without being seen.
It was a three-mile trek through the dark.
I started walking. My boots squelched on the concrete. The only sound was the rushing of the sludge water and the dripping of condensation from the ceiling.
I walked for ten minutes. My senses were dialed to maximum. My Seismic Sense picked up the distant rumble of the mining drills miles above. Down here it was dead silent.
Too silent.
I stopped.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a vibration. It was a feeling. The feeling of eyes on my back.
I spun around. My good hand reached for the sharpened spoon I kept in my boot. It was my only weapon now.
Nothing. Just the empty dark tunnel stretching back the way I came.
"Paranoia," I whispered. My voice was raspy. "Just the dark getting to you Kael."
I turned back around.
She was standing right in front of me.
I didn't hear her. I didn't feel her approach. She was just there.
She was small. She was wrapped in layers of scavenged grey rags that blended perfectly with the concrete walls. Her face was covered by a rebreather mask made from old mining parts leaving only her eyes visible.
They were violet. Intense. Calculating.
And she was holding a jagged serrated knife against my throat.
I froze.
"Don't breathe," she said. Her voice was muffled by the mask but calm and cold. "You smell like a corpse."
"I had a bad day," I rasped. I was careful not to move my Adam's apple against the blade.
"You're the Dim," she said. It wasn't a question. "The one who broke the rock."
My blood ran cold. She had seen.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I lied. "Laser malfunction. Ask Merrick."
"I saw the gold light," she whispered. She pressed the knife harder. A trickle of blood ran down my neck. "I saw you delete it. Dims don't have light. Even Volatiles don't have that kind of light."
I analyzed her stance. She was balanced perfectly. Her grip on the knife was professional. She wasn't a slave. She wasn't a guard.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Someone who is deciding if you're worth keeping alive," she replied.
She stepped closer invading my space. She smelled like ozone and old rain not the rot of the mines.
"Grix has a bounty on your head," she said. "Five hundred Chits. Alive or dead. Mostly dead."
"I have the Chits," I said quickly. "I won big. I can pay you double."
Her eyes narrowed. She tilted her head studying me like a biological specimen.
"I don't want your money Dim. I want to know how you did it."
"Did what?"
"How you cheated the laws of physics," she said. "I've lived in these walls for six years. I know every Resonance type. I know every mutation. You aren't on the chart."
She pulled the knife back an inch giving me room to breathe but she didn't lower it.
"My name is Elara," she said. "And you're going to come with me. Because if you stay here the Dredge-Maw will smell that blood on your neck and eat you whole."
"Dredge-Maw?" I asked glancing at the water.
As if to answer the question the sludge water exploded.
Something massive surged out of the canal. It was a nightmare of translucent scales and mutated muscle blind and pale white the size of a mining cart. It lunged at the walkway its jaws snapping shut inches from my leg.
I stumbled back tripping over my own feet. My injured shoulder hit the wall and I cried out.
Elara didn't flinch. She moved.
She didn't run. She blurred.
One second she was in front of me the next she was beside the beast her knife flashing in the dim light. She drove the blade into the creature's gill-slit with terrifying precision.
The beast roared thrashing and slid back into the water dragging a trail of black blood with it.
Elara wiped her knife on her rags looking at me with unimpressed eyes.
"Move," she commanded. "Unless you want to be dessert."
I scrambled up my heart hammering against my ribs. I looked at the water then at the girl who moved like smoke.
I realized two things.
First I was way out of my depth.
Second I had just found the most dangerous person in Sector 4.
And for the first time since I woke up in this hell I was intrigued.
"Lead the way," I said.