He nodded as if to say, “Okay. I’ll wait until we get there to ask the eight hundred million other questions I have.” He did ask one more question though.
“Pendragon, are we safe?”
Wow. How could I answer that one? I felt totally unsafe every second of every day. But I couldn’t tell him that. I decided to play dumb to the more cosmic issue and only deal with the here and now.
“Yeah,” I answered. “The flume is safe. I promise.”
Moments later we arrived. The flume deposited us into an underground cavern. Big surprise, right? Spader looked back into the flume that had now gone dark, his eyes wide with wonder.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It works both ways. We can take it right back to Cloral.”
“You mean we’re not on Cloral anymore?” he asked in shock.
Oh man, this guy had a lot to learn and I didn’t know where to start explaining.
“Let’s find my friend,” I said. “Then we’ll try to answer your questions.”
Trywas the right word. There was only so much I was going to be able to explain to Spader. Once he started asking the big questions as to what all of this meant, I’d be just as lost as he was. I needed to find Loor as soon as possible.
I looked around the cavern and saw a pile of clothes. A quick exam showed me they were lightweight white robes, like those long togas they wore in movies about ancient Rome.
“We gotta wear these,” I said. “It’s what people wear around here.”
Spader didn’t question. We took off most of our Cloral clothes, but left on our shorts. Technically that was against the rules, but I wasn’t going commando here. No way. There were also leather sandals and we each put on a pair. As we dressed, I hoped that Spader wouldn’t ask me how these clothes got here because I wouldn’t have a good answer. I supposed they came from the mysterious acolytes that Uncle Press had told me about, but that’s all I could say. Luckily Spader didn’t ask.
As I placed our Cloral clothes on the ground, I saw something that made me smile. There was another pile of clothing there. It was a pair of denim overalls and a pink shirt and a pair of Dr. Marten’s boots — the clothes Loor wore when she came to Second Earth. Seeing these gave me confidence. Loor was definitely here. Of course the trick now was to find her. Up until now Uncle Press had been my tour guide. Now I was on my own. Gulp. I glanced around the cavern but saw no way out. We were surrounded by walls made of brown, sandy stone. A complete 360 showed no entrance, no door, no passageway, no nothing. But that was impossible. There had to be a way out. Then, just before I began to hyperventilate in panic, I saw it. There were footholds and handholds chiseled into the rock that led up toward the ceiling. I walked to the wall and looked up to see. Sure enough, the cutouts led up into a dark crevice. This was the way out.
I wanted to shout “Woo hoo!” but decided I should be cool. Like it or not, I was in charge and I wanted to show Spader I had total confidence, even though I didn’t. So without a word, I began to climb. The cutouts led up into the dark crevice. In seconds, I was totally surrounded by rock. I knew this had to be the way out, so I didn’t panic. After climbing for another few seconds, I hit a dead end — with my head. Ouch. That hurt. My first thought was that we were trapped, but then I realized my head didn’t hurt as much as it should if I had just bashed it into hard rock. I carefully reached up and found that I was right. The ceiling wasn’t rock, it was wood. A quick push up revealed that it was a trapdoor. We were out!
I scrambled up and out, followed right behind by Spader. Once he was out, I threw the trapdoor shut and saw that carved on the top of it was the star that showed this was a gate.
So far, so familiar.
We found ourselves in what looked to be a storage room. The walls were made of the same sandy stone as below, but there were large wooden storage bins that were filled with what looked like metal machine parts. The floor was covered with sand, which made me realize the trapdoor was normally buried. So I quickly covered it over with a few inches of sand.
Spader watched me but didn’t say anything. I’m sure he was trying to process all this new information. His questions would come later.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s find Loor.”
A wooden door led out of this storage room and as soon as I reached to open it, it hit me that I had no clue what to expect on Zadaa. All I knew was that Loor was a warrior. Obviously that meant that Zadaa wasn’t exactly a futuristic society. I could only hope that it wasn’t like the Wild West and that we wouldn’t have to fight for our lives every step of the way. That would suck.
As soon as we opened the door we heard a loud, steady sound. It was a constant, unwavering roar.
“It’s water,” Spader said.
That’s exactly what it sounded like. Rushing water. But the sound was huge, so if it were rushing water, then there was a lot of it. We left the storage room and made our way through a labyrinth of tunnels cut into the rock. It reminded me of the mines of Denduron, but these passageways were more like corridors than wide mine shafts. Every few feet was another wooden door. We didn’t bother to look inside any of them. This wasn’t about exploration, this was about getting out and finding Loor.
The farther along the rocky corridor we walked, the louder the roaring water became. Finally we reached the mouth of the tunnel and stepped out into an awesome scene. We found ourselves on the bank of an underground river. It was about twenty yards across and moving fast. The cavern we were in was huge, with a high ceiling. To our left, about fifty yards downstream, the river split into three smaller rivers. Each new river disappeared into its own separate tunnel.
Upriver to our right was a waterfall. The water shot into the fast-moving river from a tunnel in the rock face about four stories above us. Mental note to self: Do not fall into this river. Swimming would be impossible because the water was moving so fast. There was no telling where the split rivers led.
“What are you doing here?” came a stern voice.
We both spun around to see a man wearing a similar white robe to the ones we wore. He was a small guy who wore a round gray hat that looked like a baseball cap without the brim. It looked hard, like it was for protection. In his arms were a bunch of rolled-up papers that could have been plans. He had come from the same tunnel we had, which meant he must have been behind one of the doors we passed. He was light skinned, which surprised me because both Loor and her mother, Osa, were very dark.
“I’ve never seen you two here,” he said suspiciously. “What do you want?”
He seemed to be in a hurry and was all sorts of agitated as if our surprise appearance had thrown off his schedule. This was going to be tricky. I had no idea what kind of explanation to give the guy except to tell him the truth — sort of.
“We, uh, we’re looking for a friend,” I said. “Her name is Loor.”
The guy’s eyes widened further. Uh-oh. I must have said the wrong thing.
“Loor?” he said in surprise. “That is a Batu name. Why would you be looking for a Batu down here?”
Good question. Too bad I didn’t have a good answer. Forget the truth. It was time to start lying.
“She, uh, she told me she might be coming down here,” I said.
“Ridiculous!” the guy snapped. “No Batu would miss that barbaric tournament of theirs. If she told you she was coming here, she was lying. But they are all liars, no?”
With that the man hurried off, clutching his rolls of paper. Spader touched me on the shoulder and I saw that he had a look of total confusion on his face. Welcome to the club.
“What did he say?” he asked.
“You heard him,” I answered. “Loor isn’t down here.”
“But how did you understand him? He was talking all gibberish.”
At first I didn’t know what Spader meant, but then it hit me: He was new to the Traveler game. He hadn’t gotten to the point where he could understand all languages, yet.
“Long story,” I said, and ran after the man with the scrolls. Spader followed dutifully. I caught up to the guy and walked alongside him.
“I’m embarrassed to say this, but my friend and I are lost. You know, all these tunnels and whatnot. Could you show us the way to the surface?”
The man stared at me suspiciously. This was a critical moment. If he started questioning me on who we were, we’d be sunk.
“You work in the manufacturing sector, don’t you?” he asked.
