“Your relationship with Max must have really blossomed while I was in prison,” Nicole commented a few moments later.
“Yes, it did,” Eponine replied easily. “Quite frankly, it surprised me. I didn’t think a man was capable of having a serious affair with someone who . . . you know … but I underestimated Max. He is really an unusual person. Underneath that brusque, macho exterior . . .”
Eponine stopped. Nicole was smiling broadly. “I don’t think Max really fools anybody—at least not those who know him. The tough, foul-mouthed Max is an act, developed for some reason, probably self-protection, back on that farm in Arkansas.”
The two women were silent for several seconds. “But I don’t think I have ever given him full credit either,” Nicole added. “It is a tribute to him that he adores you so completely even though you two have never been able to really—”
“Oh, Nicole,” Eponine said, suddenly emotional. “Don’t think I haven’t wanted to, haven’t dreamed about it. And Dr. Turner has told us many times that the odds are very small that Max would contract RV-41 if we used protection. But ‘very small’ is not good enough for me. What if somehow, some way, I passed to Max this horrible scourge that is killing me? How could I ever forgive myself for condemning the man I love to death?”
Tears filled Eponine’s eyes. “We are intimate, of course,” she said. “In our own safe way. . . . And Max has never
once complained. But I can tell from his eyes that he misses—”
“All right, now,” they heard Max say on the radio. “We can see the bottom. It looks like a normal floor, maybe five more meters below us. There are two tunnels leading away, one the size of the smaller tunnel up at your level, and another that is really tiny. We’re going on down for a closer inspection.”
The time had come for the explorers to enter the subway. Richard’s mobile camera had not found anything substantively new and there was definitely no exit the humans could use on the only level below them in the lair. Richard and Patrick finished a private conversation in which they reviewed, in detail, what the young man was going to do when he returned to the others. Then they rejoined Max, Nicole, and Eponine, and the five of them walked slowly around the platform to the waiting subway.
Eponine had butterflies in her stomach. She remembered a similar feeling, when she was fourteen, just before her first one-woman art exhibit opened at her orphanage in Limoges. She took a deep breath.
“I don’t mind saying it,” Eponine said. “I’m scared.”
“Shit,” said Max, “that’s an understatement. . . . Say, Richard, how do we know this thing is not going to hurtle over that cliff you told us about, with us inside?”
Richard smiled but didn’t reply. They reached the side of the subway. “All right,” he said, “since we don’t know exactly how this thing is activated, we want to be very careful. We will all enter more or less simultaneously. That will preclude the possibility that the doors will close and the subway will take off when we are not all yet on board.”
Nobody said anything for almost a minute. They lined up four abreast, Max and Eponine on the side closest to the tunnel. “Now I’m going to count,” Richard said. “When I say three, we’ll all step on together.”
“May I close my eyes?” Max asked with a grin. “That made it easier for me on roller coasters when I was a little boy.”
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“If you like,” Nicole answered.
They stepped into the subway and each of them grabbed a vertical rod. Nothing happened. Patrick stood staring at them on the other side of the open door. “Maybe it’s waiting for Patrick,” Richard said quietly.
“I don’t know,” Max mumbled, “but if this fucking train doesn’t move in a few seconds, I’m going to jump off.”
The door closed slowly only moments after Max’s comment. There was time for two breaths each before the subway lurched into motion, accelerating rapidly into the illuminated tunnel.
Patrick waved and followed the subway with his eyes until it disappeared around the first corner. Then he put his rifle on his shoulder and began climbing up the spikes. Please come back quickly, he was thinking, before the uncertainty becomes too much for all of us.
He returned to their living level in less than fifteen minutes. After taking a short drink from his water bottle, he hurried down the tunnel to the museum. While he was walking, he was thinking about what he was going to say to everybody.
Patrick did not even notice that the room was dark when he crossed the threshold. When he entered, however, and the lights came on, he was momentarily disoriented. I’m not in the right place, he thought first. / have taken the wrong tunnel. But no, his jumbled mind now said, as he glanced quickly around the room, this must be the room after all. I see a couple of feathers over there in the corner, and one of Nikki ‘s funny diapers. . . .
With each passing second his heart beat faster. Where are they? Patrick said to himself, his eyes now darting frantically around the room for a second time. What could have happened to them? The longer he stared at the empty walls, carefully recalling all the conversation before he had departed, the more Patrick realized that his sister and friends could not possibly have left of their own volition. Unless there was a note! Patrick spent two minutes searching every nook in the room. There were no messages. So someone, or something, must have forced them to leave, he thought.
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Patrick tried to think rationally, but it was impossible. His mind kept jumping back and forth between what he ought to do and terrible pictures of what might have happened to the others. At length he concluded that perhaps they had all moved back to the original room, the one his mother and Richard called the photo gallery, maybe because the lights in the museum were malfunctioning or for some other equally trivial reason. Buoyed by this thought, Patrick dashed out into the tunnel.
He reached the photo gallery three minutes later. It was also empty. Patrick sat down against the wall. There were only two directions his companions could have taken. Since Patrick had not seen anyone on his climb, the others must have gone toward the cathedral room and the sealed exit. As he walked down the long corridor, his hand tight around the rifle, Patrick convinced himself that the Nakamura troops had not left the island and that they had somehow broken into the lair and captured everybody else.
Just before he entered the cathedral room, Patrick heard Nikki crying. “Mom-my, Mom-my,” she screamed, and then let out a mournful wail. Patrick charged into the large room, not seeing anybody, and then turned up the ramp in the direction of his niece’s cry.
On the landing beneath the still-sealed exit was a chaotic scene. In addition to Nikki’s continued wailing, Robert Turner was walking around in a daze, his arms outstretched and his eyes upward, repeating over and over, “No, God, no.” Benjy was quietly sobbing in a corner while Nai was trying, without much success, to comfort her twin sons.
When Nai saw Patrick, she jumped up and ran toward him. “Oh, Patrick,” she said, tears running from her eyes, “Ellie has been kidnapped by the octospiders.”
12
It was several hours before I Patrick put together a coherent story about what had happened after his exploration party had left the museum room. Nai was still near shock from the experience, Robert could not talk for more than a minute without breaking into tears, and the children and Benjy frequently interrupted, often without making any sense. At first all Patrick knew for certain was that the octospiders had come and not only had kidnapped EHie, but also had taken away the avians, the manna melons, and the sessile material. Eventually, however, after repeated questioning, Patrick thought he understood most of the details of what had occurred.
Apparently about an hour after the five explorers had departed, which would have been during the time that Richard, Patrick, and the others were down on the subway platform, the humans who had remained in the rguseum room heard the dragging brush sound outside the door. When Ellie went out to investigate, she saw octospiders
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approaching from both directions. She returned to the room with her news and tried to calm Benjy and the children.
When the first octospider appeared in the doorway, all the humans moved as far away as they could, making space for the nine or ten octos who came inside. At first the creatures stood together in a group, their heads bright with the moving, colored messages that they used to communicate. After a few minutes, one of the octospiders came slightly forward, pointed directly at Ellie by lifting one of its black and gold tentacles off the floor, and then went through a long sequence of colors that was quickly repeated. Ellie guessed (according to Nai—Robert, on the other hand, insisted that somehow Ellie knew what the octospider was saying) that the aliens were asking for the manna melons and the sessile material. She retrieved them from the corner and handed mem to the lead octospider. It took the objects in three of its tentacles (“A sight to behold,” Robert exclaimed, “the way they use those trunklike things and the cifia underneath”) and passed them to its subordinates.