The Boy Who Fell from the Sky, Jule Owen [classic romance novels txt] 📗

Mathew bends back his neck and is once again aware of the crushing weight of rock above their heads and now how deep inside the mountain they are. If anything happens, there’s no easy escape. He’s starting to feel chilled. 

Lev speaks aloud for the first time, using his voice for the benefit of Evgeny. “We need to dive and swim underwater for a while. Straight in front of us, under that wall, is a lip and a narrow underwater tunnel. Your breathing equipment will work. You have to trust it and follow the man in front. It’ll be fine.” He glances between Evgeny and Mathew. “Okay?”

They both nod. Evgeny is shivering. Lev takes their life jackets from them and passes them to Tristan and one of his brothers. Then he dives. 

Tristan takes Mathew to the wall at the end of the cave and pulls him underwater with him. Looking in his eyes, he speaks through his e-Pin: “Breathe normally like you were doing all along. Look ahead. Resist the temptation to panic.” He waits until he sees Mathew take a few unsteady breaths, then he says, “That’s it.” Pointing, he shows the way to a tunnel, lit by Lev’s headlamp. Up ahead, Lev is swimming on. “Pull yourself through with your hands,” he says, indicating the stalactites hanging down from the roof. 

Mathew says, “Thank you. I’m okay. Help Evgeny.” 

Tristan nods and swims to the surface. Mathew follows Lev into the tunnel. Taking Tristan’s advice, he pulls on the protruding rocks to give himself momentum. His hands and feet are numb with cold. He hears music, and he thinks he must be hallucinating, but then he realises Lev is humming down his e-Pin. 

Lev disappears from view. Mathew swims after him. They have come into another cavern. The water now stretches out below and beside him and far above his head. Raising his eyes, he can see Lev swimming at the surface, silhouetted against the light. Following, pulling with his hands, he kicks and then bursts through. Lev is there beside him.

“Take off your mask,” he says. “You can breathe.” Treading water, he helps Mathew, who takes a grateful, shuddering gulp of air. 

His eyes are drawn upwards. 

The roof of the cavern is two hundred feet above his head and brightly lit. They are swimming at the bottom of a cliff in an underground lake. Water cascades down the rock side, the terminus of another underground stream. Ferns grow on shelves and crevices nourished by spray from the water. Lev swims strongly to the shore and wades out, climbing steps to dry land. He beckons to Mathew. All around, lining the lakeside, there are people – women, men, children, young people, elderly people, people of all ethnicities, dressed like Lev in strange civilian clothes. Two of Tristan’s brothers break the surface with Evgeny between them. They swim him to the water’s edge and help him to the shore. 

Mathew follows them, shivering. A tall, bulky elderly woman with wild, dyed red hair comes towards him with towels. “I’m Rose,” she says. “You need to get warm. Come this way.” 

Carved into the sides of the cavern are thousands of steps zigzagging to higher levels. They provide ways to balconies, walkways, and landings, which he later discovers lead to yet more staircases and passageways carved into the rock. Rose climbs steadily, and Mathew, Evgeny, Lev, Tristan, and his brothers follow. The shallow, deep steps are carved with precision, as if machine-made, cross-hatched on top to prevent slipping, with high edges and railings made from some kind of material Mathew doesn’t recognise. 

Rose leads them to a landing and then into a corridor and from there into a cave or room carved into the rock. Here there is a steaming bath. 

This cave has tall windows overlooking the larger cavern. Rose checks the temperature of the water and then says, “I’ll leave you to it,” and disappears back the way she came. 

Lev and the others strip from their jungle clothes, wash under a shower to one side of the pool, and then get into the hot water. Mathew and Evgeny step in after them. Mathew feels his bones thaw, and the blood returns to his hands. He gazes across at Tristan. He and his three brothers are grinning. They reach across the water and high-five each other. 

Even Lev is smiling. 

“Welcome to our home, Mathew and Evgeny,” he says.

25 Friends Under the Mountain

Tristan is giving them a tour of the place he calls the Theseum.  

Mathew and Evgeny are wearing the clean, dry clothes Rose put aside for them, made of the loose light fabrics Tristan and the others wear. Mathew takes a bit of the cloth in his hand and examines it. It looks like linen, but it doesn’t feel like linen and it’s surprisingly warm. 

“It’s made of a special type of material made partly from carbon nanotubes,” Tristan explains. “Something we’ve developed ourselves over the years. It’s intelligent. It generates and stores energy. It maintains optimum body temperature whether we’re in the jungle or in the cave. It’s also waterproof, but breathable, and lightweight so it doesn’t get in the way of physical activity. And it’s self-cleaning, and self-repairing, so we need few changes of clothes. Our boots are hyper-lightweight but tough.”  

Evgeny has been fitted with a kind of e-Pin, a clip-on device that sits inside his ear providing simultaneous translation and allowing him to join in any silent conversation. Mathew has already discovered that even when they’re speaking aloud, Tristan’s people use mind speech and a subtle kind of super-fast mind communication, a sort of inter-brain emotional gesturing. 

Tristan is now talking aloud in plain speech. “In this cave we use geothermal energy for heat. That’s what heated your shower and your bath. We’ve rigged solar power through trees in the forest with a liquid we paint on the leaves. It doesn’t harm the trees. The liquid contains nanomachines that capture energy from sunlight and disseminate it via a secure coded wireless transmission system, which is, of course, encrypted and masked from the various military populations that pass through. The energy collection device is embedded on the side of the mountain and we have a system to route the energy inside, even when we are in lock-down. We don’t use real fire down here because of smoke pollution and because any chimney would give away our location. We have ample water from the underground supplies, although we use a filter. For fresh air circulation we have drilled vents that open high on the mountain. They should be hard to detect for outsiders, and they can be shut as required. We have a system to recycle air when the refuge needs to be airtight.”

Mathew, Tristan, and Evgeny walk past an area where a group of men and women are preparing a large meal. They raise their eyes when Mathew and Evgeny pass, smiling and saying hello. 

Tristan says, “We are self-sufficient in food. We grow a lot of vegetables using hydroponics, and we get what we can’t grow through the advanced replicators we have. Our waste is recycled to produce fertiliser for our hydroponic gardens.” 

A large terraced garden is cut into a wall. The terraces are filled with a brown water solution and filled with plants. Hanging above them are sets of hot lamps. 

“We grow salads, fresh vegetables, and even flowers under high-energy light.”

They climb one of the many sets of stairs and walk down a brightly lit corridor carved out of bare rock and polished to a high sheen. 

“These are my quarters,” he says. 

He takes them into a simple room, with a comfortable, neatly made bed, a table with a vase and real flowers, a product of the hydroponic gardens. Above the bed, hanging on the wall is a large, thin Canvas, which is showing various images of rocky, dusty, arid landscapes and deserts, thin, parched shrubs all surrounded by aquamarine waters. 

“I’m terribly nostalgic,” he says ruefully. “I miss home. So I have all these memory images, probably idealised. It’s a human failing,” he continues. “Nostalgia. But then, I am human . . .”

“Memory images?”

“The images on the walls are made from my memories.”

“How?” Mathew says, amazed.

“I don’t understand the tech in detail, but like everyone’s here, my brain is connected to our central computer system. Parts of my brain, mainly images, can be downloaded, if I choose, for storage or sharing, or in this case, my childhood home.”

“Where is home?” Evgeny asks. 

“England, of course,” Tristan says. 

“That is England?” Mathew says incredulously. 

“Yes . . .” Tristan says, for a moment not understanding Mathew’s horror. “To me it is beautiful. Of course . . . you wouldn’t. . . . I’ll let Lev explain.” They leave Tristan’s quarters and head back towards the main cavern, pausing to observe it from the stairwell. Tristan says, “We have only been here six months, so our build is crude but adequate for our purposes.”

“Six months?!” Evgeny says, astounded. “You have only been here six months and you have built this?”

“Yes, this is the most basic type of facility we’ve made, but we didn’t have much time to do it.”

“There are others?”

“Hundreds.” 

“Where?”

“Everywhere Lev managed to get to and was successful in persuading people he wasn’t a crazy man. He mostly failed, it has to be said. He walked all the way from Britain to Tierra del Fuego, via continental Europe, with some detours into Scandinavia, through Russia, sailing across to Alaska, then on foot again down through the Americas and back again, covering territories he missed on his way down. We believe his message has spread further via people he met on his travels – he was walking for forty years. It’s why we call him the Pathbreaker. People not so keen on him have other names for him, but you’ll have to ask him yourself.”

“How old is he?” Evgeny asks.

“Sixty-five.”

“He’s amazingly fit.”

“He’s not especially youthful amongst the Kind, which is a shame, because we wish we could have him around forever. However, he’s surprising healthy, given his adventures, the dangerous territories he’s travelled through, the physical privation of his journeys, the battles he’s fought. A necessary evil in his line of work, and more recently ours.” 

“What is the Kind?” Mathew asks.

“It’s what we call ourselves. I believe the name was first used in irony by people who thought we murdered people put outside the City walls. However, we think it accurately describes behaviour we aspire to, so we’re happy to adopt the name.”

“You are non-people,” Evgeny says with a shocked expression. 

“We say Non Grata. Strictly speaking, we’re a branch of the Non Grata. There are many different types. The term originates from your time, I believe, Mathew.”

Mathew is puzzled.  

“It comes from persona non grata. People not welcome, who are put outside; people who, as Evgeny suggested, are legally non-existent. We are all people who have been ostracised or are descended from the rejected. We live beyond the reach of the main cities protected by government. We don’t live by their rules and laws. We have our own.” 

“And you all live like this, underground?” Evgeny asks.

Tristan shakes his head. “No. Only the Kind and those willing to listen to Lev and take our technology. And we wouldn’t live like this if we didn’t have to. The proper place for people is under the sky, not in tunnels and caves.”

“So why do you do it?”

“I will let