State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy by Ryan Winfield

and you’re ground algaeburger when you hit the turbines down below. We rap-jump down. Usually Jillian waits to pull the ropes in before she heads up, but we’re running late tonight.”
    Jimmy grabs one of the ropes and wraps it in loops around his body, stepping up toward the edge, ready to rappel.
    “Looks like you’ve done this before,” Bill says.
    “My pa and me used to drop down cliffs for bird eggs,” Jimmy replies, looking proud.
    “Well, step out of that there rope, young man,” Seth says, handing us each a harness. “We’ve got better equipment here that will keep you from using your crotch as a friction break.”
    I follow Seth’s lead and slip into the harness, buckling it and pulling it tight. Bill has his secured in seconds, but Roger seems to struggle. When we’re all harnessed in, Seth shows us how to attach our harnesses to the rope and use the hand brake to lower ourselves down. Then he disappears into the shaft. Bill goes next on the other rope, and Roger goes after him.
    “You sure this will hold?” I ask Jimmy, now that we’re alone on the ledge.
    “I dunno,” he says, “but they dun’ seem worried.”
    Then he’s gone too.
    I back up to the edge, lean back, and lower myself off into the shaft. The harness bites into my legs some, but otherwise it’s a secure and relatively weightless descent. As I drop farther into the windy shaft, the rope disappears above me until it seems as though I’m climbing down the very darkness itself—deeper and deeper, heading in the wrong direction, if you ask me. I drop for a long time before there’s a tug on the rope below, and I’m pulled toward the wall of the shaft, and a strong hand yanks me into another intersecting duct, this one with no lights—just a pitch black wormhole in the middle of the Earth. I hear clinking buckles as everyone gets free of their harnesses.
    “Make sure you leave them clipped to the rope,” Bill’s voice says next to me in the dark. “There. Good. Everyone ready? There are a lot of twists and turns down here, so we link up and hold hands. Here, take mine, Aubrey. And grab Jimmy’s with your other. Okay, let’s go. Steady and slow.”
    We walk off together into the blackness, hand in hand like a chain of children being led to some secret fort you can only get to by trust. My shaved head is tickled by alternating gusts of wind that tell me we’re passing other ducts or fissures into even deeper voids. As we twist and turn and wind our way slowly forward, I’m painfully aware of how vulnerable I am here in this subterranean underworld with no sight and nothing to guide me but the hand pulling me ahead. Jimmy must feel it too, because he squeezes my hand in his as if it were the only thing connecting him to life.
    Finally, the heads of the men in front of me are silhouetted against a growing blue light. Eventually, it engulfs the entire tunnel until we’re all standing in the wash of its melancholy glow and looking out from a raised vent onto the growing fields below. I’ve never seen so many lights, mirrors, and plants. The plants are packed together on shelves with the light reflecting through them in some kaleidoscopic trickery that makes the shelves themselves seem illuminated. Beyond the racks of plants are algae tanks, also glowing blue.
    “Wow,” Jimmy says, eyeing the operation. “It’s like an underground garden.”
    “Where do you all live?” I ask.
    “Oh, Level 5 isn’t like your cavern,” Seth says. “It’s comprised of many smaller wings, if you will. That way we can create different conditions for different cycles of plants. Our living quarters are north of here, but we’ll be heading south.”
    “And we had better get hurrying that way, Seth,” Bill says. “You’ve still got to get back in time.”
    “Maybe I should stay behind with Seth,” Roger suggests.
    “If I had my way, Roger,” Bill says, “I’d have left you behind up there. But you heard Hightower. Now let’s