Day 29, continued. 12:41 p.m.
Nobody tells you that a slime doesn't hit you.
I'd had a picture in my head for a month of what this would be, and in the picture there was impact. Something comes at you and you brace and it strikes the shield and you absorb it, the way Coach's pipe insulation strikes the shield, the way everything I had ever trained for strikes the shield.
That is not what they do.
They arrive, and then they keep arriving. The first one came onto the face of the shield at walking pace and just continued, pressing, spreading out sideways against the ply, and the load came on slow and even and did not stop coming. Then a second one against my left boot. Then the first one was around the rim and over the top and there was cold wet weight on my forearm inside the enarme.
My back foot slid. Only an inch, on the wet the slimes had left on the dry stone, and then the boot found a seam in the stone and stopped, and I put everything I had into that seam.
And the sting, about what a lemon does to a cut, everywhere at once, on every piece of skin that wasn't covered. My wrist. The side of my neck where the collar didn't reach. The backs of my fingers where they came out of the enarme to hold the rim.
They didn't smell like anything. That's another thing nobody tells you. Wet stone, and that faint warm bread smell the whole place has, and nothing else, right up against my face.
I got my hips under it and pushed them off and they came back, and that was the first ten seconds.
"Angle it down," Tom said, from somewhere behind my right ear. "Down, or they come over."
* * *
Then he went to work, and for about four minutes I let myself believe we were going to just handle this.
He's good. Tom Guzmán with a maul in a low room is an efficient, unhurried, unromantic piece of machinery. Flatten, break, step. Flatten, break, step. He never took two swings where one would do and he never took a swing he didn't have to.
The maul made a sound on them like somebody dropping a wet towel on a tile floor, and then no sound at all, because nothing echoes down there. The slime would let go of its shape and two gallons of water would run out across the stone, around his boots and mine, and he'd already be stepping over it. His feet never once went wrong on that floor. That's his trait, and I'd been watching it for five hours without really seeing it, and in that room I saw it.
Six seconds on each one, near enough, and then the step and the reset and the look for the next. Call it half a minute a kill, all in. I know because I was counting, because I am always counting, because it is the only thing I have ever been good at without being taught.
Four in the gap, the strip of floor at the foot of the ramp that he had to empty for us to get up it. He took one. Three in the gap.
Then two came out of tunnel two.
He took another. Four in the gap.
And I stood there with my shield down at an angle and my forearm starting to talk to me and I did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic was very simple and very bad.
"Tom."
"Busy."
"They're getting into the gap at about one every twenty seconds."
He didn't answer. Flatten, break, step.
"You're killing one every thirty. That's not enough. Not even close to enough, because you've got twelve feet of them stacked up behind the gap already, and for every one you put down, one and a half more get here."
Flatten, break, step.
"Tom, we are losing ground and the rate is getting worse, not better."
He stopped. He stood there in the grey-green with the maul hanging and his chest going, and he looked at the gap, and I watched him check my numbers, and I watched him get the same answer.
"How long have I been doing this," he said.
"Four minutes and ten seconds."
"How many."
"Eight."
"And the gap?"
"Was three. It's seven."
Tom Guzmán said something quiet and then wiped his face with the back of his wrist.
"Okay," he said. "So we don't do that."
He came back and stood at my shoulder. His hands on the maul handle were shaking a little, the fine fast shake you get when a muscle has been asked for too much and hasn't been told it can stop.
"How's the arm," he said.
"Talking."
"Tell me when it starts yelling. Not after. When."
"Okay."
"I mean it, North. I can't see your arm from back here, so you say it."
"I'll say it."
He nodded once, at the gap, not at me.
* * *
Behind us and up, I could hear Ren and Colby on the ramp, arguing in the flat fast way of people who are trying not to be loud.
Then boots going up, fast, one set.
"Colby's out," Ren called down. "He's gone up. He'll hit the reader."
"How long," Tom said, without turning around.
"He's fast."
"Ren. How long."
A pause. She'd done the same arithmetic. Three hundred feet of ramp, then the ring, then the first level, then the slope, then a door in a parking lot.
"Twenty-five minutes to get out," she said. "Then whatever the Association is."
"The Association is an hour," Tom said. "On a Saturday, in July, for an F-rank, it's an hour and a half."
He said it like a man reading a bus timetable.
"Go up, Ren."
"I'm at the last turn."
"Go up."
"I'm at the last turn," Ren said again, in exactly the same voice, and did not move. Tom didn't ask again.
He went back to it anyway. Slower now, only the ones closest to the foot of the ramp, keeping that one patch of floor clear like a man shoveling his front step in a storm he already knows he's losing. I've never shoveled snow in my life. It's just the picture I had.
I held the shield and kept counting, because nobody had told me to stop. The forearm had gone from talking to something lower and steadier, a hum under the skin, and the sting on my wrist had stopped being a sting and started being a fact. My breath came back off the inside of the shield, warm, the only warm thing in the room.
"Seven," I said, when he looked back at me. "Still seven."
"Yeah," he said. "I can count to seven."
* * *
At 12:47 the light changed.
It came on slowly enough that I had time to be wrong about it twice.
First I thought it was my eyes. Five hours in a room with no shadows does something to you and by then I had been staring at a moving floor for nine minutes and my vision had gone grainy at the edges, like the end of a plank you've held too long.
I blinked hard, twice. Tom saw me do it.
"What," he said.
"I don't know yet."
Then I thought the migration had thickened, because the green pool coming out of the fourth tunnel seemed to be reaching further across the chamber floor.
It wasn't reaching. Something was coming up it.
* * *
It came out of the fourth tunnel at the same pace as everything else.
It was chest high on me.
Not knee high. Chest. And it was the wrong shape, taller than it was wide, with a kind of standing set to it, and where a slime is translucent grey-green this one was the color of the tunnel it came out of, a green with an actual light in it, and the light moved.
The core was the size of a fist, where theirs are walnuts, and it sat up high near the top and stayed there. In a slime the core wanders around inside like a seed in jelly. This one didn't wander. Something was holding it.
It came out into the chamber and it went about twelve feet.
And then it stopped.
Nothing had stopped all day. In five hours and two levels and forty-one counted and God knows how many I couldn't, not one thing in that portal had ever once stopped on our account. They didn't see us and they weren't for us, and that was the only thing about the whole day that had been survivable.
It stopped, and the light inside it turned over, and it faced us.
Behind me on the ramp I heard Ren say, "Oh," very quietly, like somebody who's just dropped a glass in another room.
The slimes in the gap kept going around it. They parted for it on both sides and closed up again behind, and none of them slowed down, and that was somehow worse than if they'd all stopped too.
Tom took one step back and put his shoulder against mine. He did not say anything for about three seconds.
Then he said: "That's not an F."