“But you said the mountain could break apart,” I say. “If we’re on top of it, near the cliffs, we could be caught up in it without warning.”
“What if we go along the back side of the mountains?” Aerin says. “We could travel north or south…keep in the eastern valley until we get to the end.”
“That’s hundreds of miles.”
“Do you have a better idea?” She folds her arms over her chest.
“No. I can’t even cope with what I’m seeing.”
What she’s proposing isn’t quite at the impossible level, but it’s close. Scaling those cliffs isn’t going to happen unless we stumble upon a group of rock climbing experts with their gear. Walking around the mountains to find the sea could take a month or more, and we’d probably freeze or starve to death along the way.
I’d spent the last two days in a relatively warm, secure place with an actual bed. Inside there is food, water, and Plastictown isn’t all that far away if something else is needed. The idea of leaving such a place where I could shower and sleep in a bed with Aerin seems completely ridiculous to me. The only logical course of action is to get her to go back inside.
“Didn’t you say there was a lower level of the complex?” I ask.
“Yes.” Aerin narrows her eyes at me. “Why?”
“Well, how low is it? Could there be another exit farther down, closer to the water?”
“I don’t know. My map isn’t complete. It’s not even all that accurate.”
“Maybe we should go back inside and look,” I say. “If that complex has been here through all these eruptions, it might be safer inside that out on top of the mountain anyway.”
Aerin furrows her brow and stares at the floor of the lookout tower in contemplation. I lean back in the corner of the tower’s railing, but it offers no protection from the cold, western wind as it continues to blast me in the face. I cough into my arm and remind myself to locate something that can be used as a scarf.
Mostly, I’d like to get back inside and out of the ash and wind.
“Power!” Aerin suddenly shouts as she jumps to her feet.
“Power?”
“You asked before, ‘Where does the power come from?’”
“So?”
Aerin grumbles as she rifles through her pack and pulls out a folded paper map. She sits back down and opens it, leaning close to me to block the wind as she starts pointing to sections of the hand-drawn diagram of the complex.
“This is the living area, where we spent the first night,” she says. “That’s on level one. Here’s the corridor going from east to west, through the mountain, and the exit behind us. Over here is the elevator shaft going to level two, where the geology and chemistry labs are located.”
“I don’t see anything about power,’ I say.
“I don’t either, but it has to be there, and there must be access to it from somewhere. The power is still operating at the living quarters. At the very least, there must be a maintenance shaft to get to the power source even if the primary access is blocked.”
“Makes sense.”
“We just need to find the area on level two that connects to the power below.”
“Why do you think it’s below?”
“Heavy equipment,” Aerin says, “is difficult to transport, even back then. They’d keep it lower on the mountain. Also, I’ve been thinking about the source of the power.”
“What about it?”
“If it’s still working, it must be fed by something constant. The shower also still provides hot water, so the energy source is probably geothermal. If that’s the case, there will be shafts going deeper into the mountain. It also means the equipment was most certainly brought from the West, where most geothermal energy was developed. The access point will be on the west side of the mountains, which is where we need to be.”
“Damn,” I say and then let out a low whistle. “You’re smart.”
“Don’t act so surprised,” she replies with a wink.