Again the friends placed their trust in their female guide. When they reached the bottom of the rise, they came upon a concrete kiosk in the middle of the field.
“This looks like the place where we arrived,” Dean whispered to Jak.
“Same, but different.”
There was a door on one side of the kiosk. Clarissa opened it and gestured to the four friends. “After you, boys.”
“What’s this?” J.B. asked.
“An entrance to a water tunnel.”
“That leads where?”
“To one of the power plants downriver,” Clarissa answered. “I can’t be sure which one, since most of them aren’t operating anymore and to find out I’d have to walk some five miles in the dark. I figured it’s not that important.”
J.B. followed the other three friends inside. “What about the muties?”
“They’re content to wait for me outside at the entrance until I reappear in the morning.”
“I must say that is an excellent security measure,” Doc said.
“For some reason, they don’t like going underground, or the dark,” she said, closing the door and making sure it was locked.
The tunnel was indeed dark. With the door closed, J.B. couldn’t see his hands, even when he held them directly in front of his face. “Anyone have a gas lighter?” J.B. asked.
In answer, a small point of light came on to J.B.’s left, illuminating Jak’s pale figure.
But a moment later another, much brighter light came on in the tunnel. “There’s a few live wires around the falls,” Clarissa said, twisting a plastic connector knob onto the ends of two wires. “You just have to know where to look, and not use so much that Baron Fox would notice someone is stealing juice from him.”
“Wow!” Dean gasped, his neck craning to take in the enormous size of the tunnel.
“Wow indeed,” Doc echoed.
“Big,” Jak said.
They were standing at the bottom of a huge concrete tunnel that was roughly fifty or sixty feet across and stretched out in both directions for what seemed like forever. It was like a redoubt, J.B. thought but the tunnel was completely cylindrical—like a blaster barrel—and there seemed to be no end to it.
“And this carried water to the power stations downriver?” J.B. asked.
“When there was water to be carried there,” she answered.
But despite it being dry, there was still a soft wash of sound echoing through the tunnel, as if the river’s ghost still haunted the caverns beneath the city.
“Now it’s just a safe place to sleep.”
“An excellent idea, my dear,” Doc said.
“What is?”
“Sleep.”
“Be my guest.”
She had transformed a section of the tunnel into a living space, with several sleeping places made of grasses and twigs.
The companions settled in.
THE FOOD in the farm’s cafeteria was as good as one would expect from a farm. The soup and stew had both been made fresh, and Ryan was amazed to find real bits of meat floating around in both.
He took a seat on a bench at one of the tables near the exit, and Brody sat with him. When they’d left the showers, there had been plenty of activity among the sec men as they got rid of Purvis’s body and cleaned the showers for the next crew coming in. Ryan wondered why they didn’t get the slaves to do the job for them, but figured it was easy to keep the man’s death secret from the baron if they handled the problem themselves.
“Nobody will miss Purvis,” Brody explained. “But if the baron catches wind of what happened, he might want an explanation. They’ll tell him the man slipped on some soap and that will be the end of it.”
“But that was what happened,” Ryan said with a wink of his eye.
“You’ll do all right here, Ryan.”
Halfway through the meal, Mildred came and joined Ryan, sitting across the table from him. “Aren’t you eating anything?” Ryan asked when he noticed Mildred had no tray in front of her.
“Nursery workers get fed first, and best,” she said, running a hand over her stomach. “I didn’t think I’d ever eat steak again.”
“How is…?” Brody began, then hesitated, looking around to see if any sec men were listening. “How is Jasmine?”