Talen

“You kept repeating, ‘This isn’t me,’” she says. “Everything else was just mumbling.”

I avoid looking at her as I swallow hard, trying to remember what I had been dreaming about. The pit in my stomach is back.

“We need to get going,” Aerin says. She stands and grabs her empty bowl from the table. “Long walk ahead.”

I gather supplies from the cabinets and load them into our packs as Aerin gets dressed in the bathroom. When she returns, her hair is pulled back into a long ponytail that snakes down her back and waves back and forth when she walks. I watch her as she slips the blue diary into her pack and then looks up at me.

“Ready?” she asks.

“Ready for answers,” I reply.

We return to the main corridor and head off to the west. It takes a few moments for my eyes to fully adjust to the dim light of the flashlight, but even when they do, I still can’t see the end of the corridor.

“How far does this passage go?” I ask.

“Most of the way through the mountain,” Aerin replies. “We can follow this all the way to the western exit.”

“Fifteen miles?”

“About that.”

“Damn. How did they even build this?”

“It was here before the Great Eruption, as far as I know. Technology worked then. Communications worked. Planes flew all the way across oceans. Energy was wasted; leftover food was thrown away, and there was a strong global economy.”

“Straight out of the history books.” I have to walk a little faster to keep up with her. “People used to walk around the focal point of the quake, you know. It was a tourist destination.”

“Hypocenter.”

“What?”

“It’s called the hypocenter, not a focal point.”

“Oh. Gotcha.”

“It was a national park,” Aerin says. “Yellowstone National Park.”

“Right! I forgot the name.”

“Changes to a geyser first alerted geologists to the coming quake,” she says. “It had erupted on a regular schedule as long as they’d been paying attention to it, and it suddenly just stopped. They were just examining their findings and getting them ready to present to Congress when the whole thing blew.”

“April 1, 2029,” I say with a nod. “A lot of people thought it was an April Fools’ Day joke. Half the continent was gone within forty-eight hours.”

“The Great Eruption triggered catastrophic events all over the world. Reports were coming in from Australia and Japan before the ash clouds blocked satellite and cell communication. Solar power was useless, dams broke, tsunamis wiped out everything coastal, and here we are now.”

“Still trying to figure out where our society went nearly a hundred years later,” I say.

“As you can imagine, my geologist mother had a particular interest in the science stuff more so than the social stuff.”

“Well, my dad has a thing for politics, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I noticed.” She glances over at me though her features are barely noticeable in the dim light. “Was he always power hungry?”

“He likes control,” I reply. “His way is always the best way, and power gives him the ability to make sure everything goes his way.”

We continue along the corridor, mostly in silence. Though we stop briefly to eat and rest, our pace remains steady. We pass several more rooms and other passageways, but Aerin is determined to make time, so we don’t stop to check any of them out. I’m overwhelmed by the size of this place, and I shake my head often in wonder.

“How far have we come?” I ask. My legs are beginning to fatigue, and I’ve lost all track of time. It must be getting late.