The Girl Who Found the Sun Read online

  The Girl Who Found the Sun

  Matthew S. Cox

  The Girl Who Found the Sun

  © 2019 Matthew S. Cox

  All Rights Reserved

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead, actual environmental catastrophes, or mutant life forms are coincidental. No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author except for quotes posted in reviews or blogs.

  Cover and interior art by: Ricky Gunawan

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-950738-14-4

  ISBN (paperback): 978-1-950738-15-1

  Contents

  1. Ninety Feet Down

  2. Lesser Evils

  3. Sick

  4. Short Straw

  5. Obligations

  6. The Endless March

  7. Glint

  8. Hallucinations

  9. Plan B

  10. Under Wraps

  11. A Hundred Little Flaws

  12. Rules

  13. Our Secret

  14. The Great Death

  15. Dying Air

  16. Permission

  17. In Ghostly Footsteps

  18. By The Book

  19. First Breaths

  20. The Lost

  21. Critter

  22. Fallen Saints

  23. Canaries

  24. A Place to Go

  25. Father’s Daughter

  26. Feral

  27. Expedition Plus Six

  28. The Garden

  29. Together

  30. What Was and What May Be

  31. Den of Bone

  32. Quiet

  33. Silver

  34. The Oasis

  35. Tess

  36. Above Ground

  37. Weapons

  38. Wanderer’s Spirit

  39. Crushed

  40. Mommy

  41. Breaking the Seal

  42. Rubble

  43. Outside Hope

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other books by Matthew S. Cox

  1

  Ninety Feet Down

  It started with the insects. Whole species died off one after the next. No one cared. Maybe if they had, we’d remember what the sun looked like. – Ellis Wilder.

  Confining walls closed in around Raven, shrinking more and more the deeper she crawled into the wiring conduit. Already stale air thickened, leaving the taste of dust and melting plastic on her tongue. Other maintenance tunnels had enough room to let her walk hunched over, but this one barely allowed her up on all fours. The feeble crank light hanging from her shoulder tossed a wobbly nimbus of yellowish light around ancient concrete walls, long ago stained various shades of green and rust.

  Thirty-six fat wires ran along the passage, covering the 268 from the northernmost end of the Arc to a field of eighteen wind turbines. Technically, the conduit led to a spot directly below it, not the field itself. Half the wires had been originally installed as redundant backups, but they’d all been swapped into use decades ago, the original wires cannibalized to repair them when they failed again. The same held true for all the pipes, tubes, PVC lines, and everything else running around the Arc. One would be hard pressed to find a stretch of any wire, pipe, or hose more than three feet long that didn’t have a patch or six.

  Raven grumbled under her breath as she dragged herself forward. Every wake cycle, she hoped for a lull to shorten her work period so she could read or spend time with her daughter, Tinsley. However, the Arc had other plans. Of the seven people in the engineering group, she had the dubious distinction of being the smallest—hence whenever one of the power lines crapped out or something looked wonky with the voltage levels, Ben, her boss, sent her to do the repair. Shaw would probably do more damage to the wires trying to squeeze himself down here. If not for Trenton, she’d also be the youngest, even if she only had him by one year. Neither of them had any real seniority despite her having done the job since age seventeen.

  You’d think five years’ experience would give me some say, but oh no. Power main problem and it’s ‘Oh, Raven, need you to check the wiring.’

  Every few feet, she stopped to trace her fingers over the suspect wire, 14B. Unlike the others, it had become cold. The chemical air scrubbers and hydroponic farm lights drew so much electricity that these wires routinely heated up. In her experience, they’d always been hot to the touch. The others only thought it a problem if they burned fingers on contact. Raven disagreed. Wires an inch thick shouldn’t be heating up so much.

  Fortunately, two things worked in her favor. One: the indicator lights at the inside end still worked, so the team knew exactly which wire failed. Two: the main wires ran in mostly straight lines along the conduit walls—even on her right, odd on her left—which made them far easier to check. Ordinary power cables all over the Arc connecting the capacitor system to power outlets hadn’t been installed so thoughtfully. Tracking down breaks there could sometimes take several days merely to find the offending wire in the spaghetti. But at least those passages had room to breathe in.

  The failure had probably occurred close to the L-bend where the conduit went vertical. On her last slog down here, she’d noticed multiple iffy patch repairs likely to fail within months. In all honesty, she should have preemptively replaced them, but the big boss, Noah, hated shutting down power lines for repairs. It made sense, though since without power, everyone in the Arc would die in short order. The hydroponic farm couldn’t process CO2 fast enough for the current population. Electricity kept the air scrubbers going.

  No electricity meant no oxygen… and everyone dying quietly in their sleep without ever noticing a problem. Thoughts like that had been keeping Raven up at night for months ever since she noticed her normally energetic six-year-old acting as sedate as a middle-aged adult.

  She stopped dragging herself forward, gave the crank on her flashlight a few rapid turns, then held it up to examine the wire before the battery drained again. Rapidly dimming light illuminated green spray-painted ‘14B’ on the wall above the dusty black wire. Even winding the little handle for ten minutes straight would only yield about forty seconds of usable light, so she didn’t bother overworking the coil. Given the thing’s age—measurable in centuries—that the flashlight worked at all surprised her.

  Not seeing any obvious breaks, she hooked the light on her poncho and continued crawling, sniffing at the air. With power remaining in the line ahead of the break, the failure point would probably be smoldering. Ages ago, a console in the engineering room could shut off power in each line selectively. The wire linking the control box there to the switching unit at the L-bend failed some years back and no one bothered fixing it. Why waste materials when operational switches existed at the far end?

  Easy for him to say. Ben’s not the one who’s gotta drag his ass down this tunnel.

  Even if the break occurred twenty feet in from the access hatch, she’d still have to crawl the whole way to the L-bend to turn off the wire before she could repair it. The energy level of the turbines might be well below optimal, but each cable still carried enough punch to cause serious injury.

  Upon reaching the midpoint of the passage, she caught a suspicious whiff in the air: dampness.

  “Oh, no…”

  She froze, shining her weak light into the murky passage ahead of her, momentarily gripped by fear. Eighteen pairs of wires continued ahead into the void, surrounded by dusty concrete. This conduit didn’t have any water pipes. She could think of only one reason to smell moisture here—the seal at the top of the vertical shaft that protected the Arc from the toxins outside failed. A moment later, another theory came to mind, allowing her to relax. Moisture here could al
so have come from a crack in the concrete, allowing groundwater to seep in.

  Get a grip. Dad’s been outside. He didn’t melt instantly like everyone says will happen.

  Still, hearing stories of what he did couldn’t compare to the idea of being face to face with outside air in person. Growing up, she’d been taught the world outside was so toxic a person would literally melt into a puddle of slime-covered bones within minutes. Somehow, despite her father having been outside and back multiple times, everyone still believed that. Other than his word, he’d never brought back any proof… so maybe they all thought he made up stories for attention.

  She grabbed the flashlight, cranked it up, and shone the beam at the walls, examining numerous stains on the concrete. Some of the brackets holding the cables up bore visible signs of moisture corrosion. Damn! The red-brown is rust. Water’s been getting in for years. She angled the light at the thick gunk coating the floor. The loose, dry uppermost layer reminded her of the snow described in some of the books she’d read, though not the right color and certainly not cold. Beneath it, the sediment had hardened into a cement of sorts, another sign that moisture routinely crept into the tunnel, dried out, and re-wet.

  The side walls didn’t have marks suggesting a significant quantity of water flooded it, but rust trails streaked down from most of the brackets holding the cables in front of her.

  “Uh oh. This isn’t good.”

  Raven cringed, thinking of numerous splices all up and down the conduit that lacked insulation. Damp air would definitely lead to corrosion. If she couldn’t find the source of the water and plug it, they’d have to find a way to insulate any exposed wiring.

  She hurriedly crawled onward, still sniffing for a burning fault in the line while continually cranking the flashlight to better see her surroundings. Seventeen active power cables throwing off heat in the tight confines made the passageway uncomfortably warm. Sweat got into her eyes and dripped off her nose, but it didn’t deter her. The lives of all 183 people in the Arc depended on her keeping things running.

  The faltering flashlight reflected back at her from a neon-orange paint line indicating the three-quarter mark of the conduit, closer to the L-bend. She traced the beam along the wire, searching for damage until the charge died and it went out, leaving her again in darkness.

  While she felt around to find the crank, an unexpected flash and a sizzle went off a short distance ahead, startling a yelp out of her. She winced, closing her eyes. After a few dozen blinks, the spark pattern glow faded from her retinas.

  Well… found the fault.

  As soon as she could see again, she cranked the flashlight and scooted up to the spot the spark came from. The thick cable had indeed broken, a six-inch chunk sitting on the floor, detached from both sides. Silvery splatter marked the concrete around it. From the look of things, an old splice had fallen out. Likely because the wire had overheated to the point the solder liquefied.

  Damn. That’s a bad sign. Are the scrubbers malfunctioning?

  Considering the obviousness of the break, she didn’t need to leave a yellow rag so she could find it again. Cursing the idiot who installed such a half-assed repair job, she continued on toward the glowing green lights in the chamber at the bottom of the L-bend.

  Roughly thirty feet from the end, her hand squished into wet muck rather than dry dust. She stopped short, tensed with worry. She angled the flashlight down, examining the dark grey mud on her fingers.

  “Crap. Crap. Crap.”

  She shifted her weight onto her knees and cranked the flashlight hard, trying to eke a little more brightness out of it to survey the walls. They appeared dry and devoid of cracks, suggesting the water flowed along the floor rather than seeped in from the sides. However, water down here didn’t prove the seals at the top failed. The crack could be anywhere along the vertical portion. Also, despite what everyone ‘knew’ about the deadliness of the outside world, she didn’t fully believe it. If topside was as dangerous as everyone claimed, how could her father have gone off for days at a time and returned? It would’ve taken more than a filter mask to keep him alive. The stories he told her made her want to see something more than a world of drab concrete.

  Raven dreaded spending her entire life underground in the Arc.

  Perhaps she could see a scrap of sky if the seal had failed? Shaking from nervous excitement, she crawled forward. Eerie green light filled the chamber at the end, cast by the status lamps on the control box. No visible puddle of water remained, but discoloration on the walls indicated about an inch of it had collected at the end of the conduit not long ago.

  She ducked into the chamber at the L-bend, a place she could stand up in but didn’t bother to since she intended to crawl right back out after cutting the power to line 14B. Thirty-six cables, half of them scavenged to dangling bits of scrap, entered the chamber along each side, curving upward to follow the vertical shaft to the surface. Somewhere outside, far above her, eighteen wind turbines converted moving air into electricity.

  Schematic diagrams of the turbines usually occupied her time during breaks or if she had a few minutes to herself or ended up waiting on someone else to do something before she could work. She’d studied them for hundreds of hours, but never once laid eyes on the actual machinery. Often, she’d daydream about going out there, wondering what color each part would be. How tall were the towers they sat on? What had exposure to the toxic atmosphere for centuries done to the metal? How in the hell did they keep functioning after so long? It didn’t seem possible for any machine to go centuries and continue working, an unexplainable reality that only served to add to their mythic nature. The lives of everyone in the Arc depended on those turbines.

  Squinting, Raven stared up along the wirepaths to the limit of her weak flashlight. This passage couldn’t be opened to the outside world, but if the seal really had failed, it might be possible to force the cap plate up and peek outside. Temptation to see the turbines got her reaching for the narrow ladder bolted to the wall. She hesitated, gazing toward the top—until a single droplet splattered on her forehead.

  “Ack!”

  She recoiled, wiping at her face, then glared up into the darkness, unable to tell if the droplet had fallen all the way from the top or from an old scrap of damaged wire only a few feet above her. However, touching water that didn’t come from the enclosed system of the Arc set off a minor case of the jitters. Any manner of disease or toxic chemicals could be in that water. Still pawing at her face, she whirled around and knelt again, faced the switch box, and flicked the toggle marked 14.

  The green light next to the switch went out.

  Supposed to turn red. Guess it broke, too.

  Part of her wanted to shut down everything before touching any wire, but Noah would lose his mind if she did that. Also, a complete loss of power to the Arc for as long as it would take to repair the broken wire could cause serious problems with air toxicity. Those CO2 scrubbers had to keep operating. Besides, turning everything off and back on again would probably blow out a third of the ventilation fans and any number of other important machines.

  After crawling back to the damaged section, she picked up the detached piece to examine. Whoever fixed it years ago had cut the wire exactly to the length of the gap, relying on solder alone to fuse it in place, as opposed to doing a correct splice.

  “Ugh. No wonder. Idiot.”

  She stowed the hunk of wire in her satchel, since she’d need a longer piece—by at least two inches—to repair the break properly. For the better part of the next hour, she crept around the conduit, checking the decommissioned A-set wires (the original ones) for a usable length. According to Ben, the A-set wires had been active from the date the Arc went live and lasted anywhere from eighty to 150 years before the last of them had been cut over to the B-set. By then, the A wires had become so damaged their usefulness amounted to little more than providing spare materials. And… the more she looked around, the more it seemed that the B set verged on
complete failure as well. The makers hadn’t installed a C-set, nor did Ben and the rest of the engineering team have enough materials on hand to manufacture a C-set. At some point in Raven’s lifetime, they’d need to start coming up with alternatives to use in place of wire.

  17A finally offered a scrap of usable length to mend the break in 14B. Raven held up the former patch wire as a measuring gauge, added three inches, then cut a new length of old wire to use as a splice.

  After crawling back to the break, she set to the task of meshing the wire frays together, mulling over the power demands on the system. The two biggest draws came from the air scrubbers and the hydroponic equipment. Considering all the artificial sun lamps in that room plus the pumps for the growth fluid, maybe the garden consumed more energy than the ventilation system. The farm did help contribute to re-oxygenation, but the doc—Preston—said the plants couldn’t keep up if the scrubbers ever shut down. Some claimed the Arc had been designed to support 2,000 people, and may have even had as many as 3,000 citizens at one point. Raven found it difficult to imagine that many people crammed into the underground warren she called home. The 183 who lived there now stressed the ventilation system’s ability to keep everyone alive.

  How could there ever have been thousands here? If it’s true, why did we lose so many?