The Human Division #7: The Dog King Read Online Free

nothing.”
    “What if you get lost down there?” Schmidt asked.
    “My BrainPal will let you know where I am, and I’ll let you know if I get stuck,” Wilson said. “You’ll be able to tell by the screaming panic in my voice.”
    “Okay,” Schmidt said. “Also, I don’t know if this is information that you need to know right now, but I just got a ping from Ambassador Waverly’s assistant. She says the negotiations should wrap up in an hour and then the ambassador will want Tuffy for, and I swear to God this is a quote, ‘a little snuggle time.’”
    “Wonderful,” Wilson said. “Well, at least now we know how much time we have.”
    “One hour,” Schmidt said. “Happy spelunking. Try not to die.”
    “Right,” Wilson said. He knelt at the tear, tore it just enough to shove his body through, put the light between his teeth, got on his hands and knees and started crawling.
    The first hundred meters were the easy part; the tunnel was narrow and low, but dry and relatively straight as it descended through the rock. Wilson figured that if he had to guess, he’d venture it was once a lava tube at some point, but at the moment all he really wanted was for the thing not to collapse on him. He wasn’t ordinarily claustrophobic, but he’d also never been dozens of meters down a tube in a rock, either. He thought he was allowed a spot of unease.
    After a hundred meters or so, the tube became slightly wider and higher but also more jagged and twisting, and the angle of descent became substantially steeper. Wilson hoped that somewhere along the way the tunnel might become wide enough for him to turn around in; he didn’t like the idea of having to back out ass first, dragging the dog along with him.
    “How is it going?” Schmidt asked him.
    “Come down here and find out,” Wilson said, around his light. Schmidt demurred.
    Every twenty meters or so Wilson would call out to Tuffy, who would bark some times but not others. After close to an hour of crawling, the barks finally began to sound like they were getting closer. After almost exactly an hour, Wilson could hear two things: Schmidt beginning to sweat up on the surface and the scrabbling sounds of a creature moving some distance ahead.
    The tunnel suddenly widened and then disappeared into blackness. Wilson carefully approached what was now the lip of the tunnel, took the light out of his mouth and panned it around.
    The cave was about ten meters long, four or five meters wide and roughly five meters deep. To the side of the tunnel lip was a pile of scree that formed a steep slope to the floor of the cave; directly in front of the lip, however, was a straight drop. Wilson’s light played across the scree and caught glimpses of dusty paw marks; Tuffy had avoided the drop.
    Wilson directed the light to the floor cave, calling out to the dog as he did so. The dog didn’t bark, but Wilson heard the clitter of nails on the floor. Suddenly Tuffy was in the light cone, eyes reflecting green up at Wilson.
    “There you are, you little pain in the ass,” Wilson said. The dog was dusty but otherwise seemed unharmed by his little adventure. He had something in his jaws; Wilson peered closely. It looked like a bone of some sort. Apparently, Tuffy wasn’t the first live animal to get sucked down into the fleur du roi after all; something else fell in and escaped down the tunnel behind the tear, just to die in this dead-end cave.
    Tuffy got bored of looking into the light and turned to wander off. As he did, Wilson caught a glimpse of something sparkly attached to the dog; he trained his light on the animal as it moved and focused on the sparkly bit. Whatever it was was stuck to Tuffy in some way, encircling one of the dog’s shoulders and riding around to his undercarriage.
    “What the hell is that?” Wilson said to himself. He was still following Tuffy with the light, which was why he finally saw the skeleton of the creature the dog had taken his chew toy from.