The Journey Prize Stories 28 by Kate Cayley Page A

says.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œClay the door, and then crack an air header on the two-inch pipe. That’ll fix the pressure so no smoke can get in.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Roxane asks. “You’re not going out there—”
    Wycliffe heaves the door open. The curling tendrils of smoke pause upon the threshold, then pull him out the door and into the drift, so white with smoke she can’t see the rock on the other side. He hauls the door shut behind him.
    Roxane’s headlamp reflects off the steel, showing her a ghostly shape—a long, white face with shaded eyes. She starts, looking behind her. But no one’s there. It’s her own reflection staring back at her.
    The crazy bastard
, she thinks.
He won’t get a hundred metres. I’m not getting myself killed going after his sorry corpse—
    An image of Johnny flashes into her thoughts. Twenty men died huddled under that tarp, waiting in the dark for the flames to burn overtop of them.
    If you sit tight you’ll be all right
. That’s what Wycliffe said.
Someone will come for you
.
    Roxane drops back down to the picnic table. Minutes pass. The rock walls writhe. She hears something; her light sweeps the room, finally focusing on a shape, matte shadow in the moist grey-black, a shape that shouldn’t be there. It’s another fossil, small and jagged and curved upward like a smile, jabbering through clenched teeth. The word
“escapeway”
dissipates in the air like a whisper. Roxane can’t tell if she heard it in the darkness in front of her eyes or the darkness inside her head.
    She climbs to her feet and opens the locker near the door, digs through until she finds a breather—a “self-rescuer,” they’re called. They can last up to one hour.
    If she could only get to the escapeway…It’s four thousand rungs to the top. She had to climb it once, back when she was in training. There was a bum-ledge every twenty metres, where you could sit and rest. When you got to within five hundred metres of the surface you started to see the top of the tunnel, just a tiny prick of light. All you had to do was keep pulling it closer. That wouldn’t be the hard part, anyway; the hard part would be finding the escapeway in the smoke.
    When she opens the door smoke billows into the refuge. The two hundred metres to the ladder might as well be two kilometres. If she misses it and has to double back…
    No. Don’t think about that
. The escapeway would be safe because they send air down the raise from the surface. And the fire will be downwind of the escapeway, if it’s on 4000 at all.
    She keeps her hand on the side of the drift, measuring each step at a metre, counting her steps to keep track of the distance. Two hundred steps, then four thousand rungs. Then she can breathe the clean, free air and see the daylight.
    As she walks through the white, the smoke clawing at her eyes, she thinks of Johnny again.
    There were no fires in the north that year, so Johnny and his crew were being shipped off to California to help put out the wildfires that were burning up the state. He ended up having to stay at the last minute because of the fire that broke out and ate up half the town.
    Roxane’s hand slides into nothing and she knows she’s found the entrance to the escapeway. She gropes for the first rung, latches on, pulls herself up. Starts the long climb.
    Just past 4000 level, she hears footfalls sounding on the rungs below her, a split-second after her own.
    â€œWycliffe?” she calls, but the sound’s thrown back in her mouth by the breather mask she forgot to take off. She pulls the mask down and takes a slow, deep lungful of air, fresh and sweet like it’ll be on the surface. There’s a landing in front of her and she wants to stop and rest and breathe deep, free lungfuls—but she doesn’t dare. She keeps pulling herself up and up and up, arms burning,