Red Sky: Chapter 38
Hades made the mistake of letting me out of the box.
I did not crumple out of the box. I stepped onto the cold floor of the prison and stood on my own two feet. Nothing helps during the confinement, madness always comes after several days of darkness, but experience taught me I could recover. It also taught me that with effort I could stand up after the box and put on my clothes with dignity.
The last time I exited I looked away when Hades stared at me. This time I stared back at him, into the sunken recesses where his eyes should be. We both held the look for a second then he gave the familiar order to march. I walked by him as I marched out.
While I was in that darkness, I made a map in my head of the areas that Max and I had explored while looking for his secret tunnel. Then I made a second map that covered the entire mine with all thirty main tunnels and all of the secondary tunnels I could remember. There were nearly two hundred in total. I tried counting up all of the sharp right turns, but there were just too many. The only way I was going to find that secret passageway was by exploring each tunnel one at a time as Max had tried before I stopped him.
Renn would be a problem, I knew that. How could I convince him to go down those tunnels without telling him about the other mine? If I explored them systematically like Max he would catch on. But I had a different plan.
Max searched the tunnels like the spokes of a wheel, hitting one tunnel, then the sub-tunnels, then turning the wheel and moving on to the next spoke. That’s why I could figure out what he was doing. I thought of the mine differently. Instead of a wheel, it was the face of an old-fashioned clock. I would remember times instead of tunnels. Each of the main tunnels represented intervals on that clock. The secondary tunnels would be minutes in between those intervals. This would allow me to vary my search. It wasn’t a complicated system, but I hoped it wouldn’t be as obvious to Renn.
I started to teach myself to keep track of time in my head. That was my second challenge. It worked when I dove into the cave-in, but now instead of counting for one hundred seconds I would have to count for ten hours. I would need to train myself to know what a half a day in the mine felt like.
I practiced at night with the red clock and then during the day in the mine. I needed to know when the changeover started and also when the first shift would return to the shoebox. If what Lara told me was true, there was an entire hour when Hades and Goodwell were the only ones in the prison. My ascent would have to be timed perfectly to take advantage of that hour as much as possible. The towers of the secret mine’s elevators were halfway to our mine. That was fifteen minutes already lost. I needed to be on top waiting for the second shift to appear to maximize my time.
The third challenge was the collar. Any number of mining implements could break open the wrist shackles. I was confident of that. I would also be able to clearly see what I was doing. The wrist shackles were going to be easy. The collar was going to be a problem. As long as the collar was on they could paralyze me in an instant. No matter how far away I was or how fast of a hover I was on I would be in danger.
At first, I thought I could disable it somehow. If I was able to disable the shock then I could figure out how to remove it later when I had more time and better equipment and a mirror. I searched the contours of the collar to find anything that might resemble a receiver or a chip. I tried to find where the electrical charge came from, anything that would allow me to render it ineffective. My search was futile. Most likely all of this was inside the collar itself. My only chance was to remove it.
I would lie in bed at night trying to find any gaps I could exploit or weak areas where it would break. After much manipulation, I was able to move it slightly. Although it was tight around the neck, there was one place on the right side where it was tightest. This was opposite the small hole on the left side where the airtag had been inserted. I couldn't get any movement there at all. It felt like it was fastened with a screw.
Was it possible I had a screw in my neck the last two years and never felt it? Do all of the inmates have this screw in their neck? I was faced with the possibility that even if I found a way to remove the collar without chopping my head off, the gaping hole left by the screw would cause me to bleed to death.
My final challenge was Renn. Even if he never caught on to my search, I would still have to deal with him when I discovered the secret tunnel, if I discovered the secret tunnel. Would I need to neutralize him somehow? Neutralize is such a nice word. If anything I trusted him less after several weeks. Hades searched Com’s cell two days after Renn returned Com’s manuscript. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe not. But I couldn’t afford to believe in coincidence.
All of these plans needed that secret tunnel to exist. Max was right about Aya. I had to have faith he was right about the tunnel. That he was right about the card and the elevator. The secret tunnel meant nothing without that card. The secret mine meant nothing without working elevators. If I multiplied the likelihood of each of these things existing and working I would give up before even trying.
But Max had already been proven right once. I would devote every day I had left on the red moon to finding that tunnel. One month, two months, three years, nothing else mattered. I had two promises to keep.