“The driver?”
She said, “Asleep, with his seat laid back.”
“Good. Okay. So, I’ll check out the entrance. You chill. If it looks good, I’ll signal you.”
“Fine, but we go in together,” Storey said.
“You realize how stupid that would be?” Maybeck said. “If I’m caught, I need you to get me out.”
“Strength in numbers.”
“Battle tactics,” he countered.
“It’s a deep cave with a bunch of rooms. If you don’t signal me to join you one minute after you go inside, I’m going to drop in.”
“You said that would make a scene.”
“Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” Storey said proudly.
THE STAIRS HAD BEEN CARVED out of the rock that formed the cave. Maybeck stopped near the top, made himself flat against the stone, and edged closer to get a look inside.
Storey Ming had hinted to Finn that the 2.0 upgrade was beta testing for a second generation of DHIs, that Finn and the others were about to be “retired” and replaced. Standing there, about to enter a cave infested with bats that supposedly embodied the souls of dead slaves, Maybeck saw a miniature Disney Channel blimp in the distance and was reminded how much he liked being a Keeper. Being part of Disney had made him famous, had given him a sense of real purpose. The idea of returning to his “normal” life really wasn’t what he hoped for.
Pushing the thoughts away, he slipped around the rock and into the mouth of the cave.
Dark. Cool, almost cold.
He heard the voices that Storey had mentioned, but they were a long way off.
The awful smell hit him immediately: bat guano. Shafts of light streamed through the overhead holes. It was like entering a slab of Swiss cheese; he’d gone from daylight to dusk. It was hard to see more than a few yards in any direction.
Maybeck cautiously continued inside, dodging stalagmites that rose from the sand floor like melted candles. If Storey jumped down onto one of those, she’d be killed.
He hurried back to the entrance and signaled. She joined him a moment later. Together, they crept quietly forward toward a second “room.” Darker. Colder. The sickening smell grew more intense; Maybeck’s sandal squished into a deep pile of guano. He thought he might puke.
They followed the cave wall slightly to the left and lower, the darkness swallowing them. The overhead holes emitted marginal amounts of sunlight, barely penetrating the gloom.
Maybeck steered Storey away from a cone of this faint light, moving them deeper into the dark. He took the long way around this second room, ducking under stalactites that hung down like stone icicles.
As the ceiling grew progressively lower, the distant voices grew progressively louder. Here, the stalactites reduced the clearance to five feet, forcing Maybeck and Storey to weave in between. With the eerie gray light, it was like trying to see through smoked glass.
But there was enough light to see the shapes of two women.
Storey touched Maybeck’s arm and turned him. She pointed to herself and then at the two women who were crouched, talking.
Before Maybeck could register if she was asking or telling, Storey was on her stomach, crawling through the sand and guano. She reached the far side of the “room” and held to its edge, trying to get near enough to overhear what they were to up to.
Maybeck felt worthless, like he should do something to help. He didn’t appreciate Storey’s tricking him like that, but he knew better than to follow. There were other words for guano, after all.
He carefully dodged the rock icicles that hung from the ceiling, moved to the nearest wall, and placed his back against it, wishing his eyes would adjust to the light. After another thirty seconds of watching Storey, who was nothing but a dark, slithering shadow, he realized his eyes had adjusted—there just wasn’t much light back here. It was about one birthday candle shy of pitch-black.
Storey got closer still.
Whatever was being said by the two women sounded like gibberish, all grunts and chants. Maybeck couldn’t tell who it was. Maleficent? The Evil Queen? It might have been a couple of tourists, for all he knew. Maybe he and Storey had gone to all this trouble over a pair of old ladies from the ship!
That was when he spotted a second moving shadow. This one was standing almost upright and moving through the stalactites across the cave in the direction of where Maybeck had last spotted Storey.
The new shadow paused. It, too, vanished a moment later, a trick of the low light. Maybeck dropped to his hands and knees and, despite the bat guano, crawled toward where he’d lost the standing shape only moments before. His fingers sank into the gooey stuff, unleashing the worst smell—a combination of outhouse and puke. He held his breath and tightened his throat to keep from hurling. Trying to see between the stalactites was like trying to see with a comb in front of your eyes; they created optical illusions of impenetrable walls; they looked like spears, knives, icicles, and snakes. Maybeck didn’t want to run into the shadow-shape guy—if it even had been a guy. Maybe it was nothing but an illusion.