Eleven Kilometres to Daylight

Chapter One: Nineteen Seconds

The recording was nineteen seconds long, and Leila Hobbs had listened to it forty-one times.

She played it again on the hotel bed in Mount Hagen, headphones on, the ceiling fan turning slow shadows across the wall. The first four seconds were water — not rain, not surf, but the particular grinding hiss of a river squeezing through limestone, a sound she could have identified blindfolded in a room full of recordings. Then, at 4.2 seconds, the clicks began.

They came in bursts. Not random. Dense at first, a rattling stutter like a stick dragged fast along a fence, then spacing out, then a second source answering from further off, then a third. She had shown the file to an acoustics man in Cairns without telling him where it came from. He had said dolphin, then bat, then said neither, then stopped returning her calls.

At 15.8 seconds a man screamed. It was not a long scream. It stopped the way a phone call stops.

Leila took the headphones off and sat with her hands flat on her knees until they were steady. Outside, a truck ground up the hill toward the market, and somebody was burning rubbish, and the air through the louvres smelled of wet ash and frangipani. Ordinary world. She had come to like ordinary things in the eighteen months since Oaxaca, in the way that a man who has been at sea comes to like the feel of a kerb underfoot.

There was a knock. Two knocks, evenly spaced, patient.

Adele Rutledge came in without waiting and set a slim aluminium briefcase against the wall by the door as if it were an umbrella. She was perhaps forty-five, in a linen shirt that had been ironed that morning in a country where nothing stayed ironed, and she looked at the room the way a surveyor looks at ground.

"You've been listening to it," she said.

"How would you know that?"

"Because you haven't asked me a single question about it since Brisbane. People who don't listen ask questions. People who listen stop asking." Adele took the chair by the window, crossed her ankles. "You know what a geophone is, Ms Hobbs."

"A microphone that listens to rock."

"Our survey team dropped a string of them into the streamway at Mabu to map the aquifer. They were transmitting to a repeater on the rim. At 3:14 in the morning on the eleventh of April the repeater logged nineteen seconds of anomalous acoustic activity and then nothing at all, ever again. Six people. Their camp is presumably still down there. So are they."

"And Kepler Resources sat on it for six months."

"Kepler Resources sent two extraction attempts, both of which got as far as the second terrace and turned back because of water." Adele's voice never changed pitch. It was the voice of a woman reading a shipping manifest. "The first attempt was in May, when the wet was still running. The second was in August and lost a man to a rockfall on the descent, not to anything else, and after that our insurers declined further attempts by non-specialists. Which is why you're in this hotel and not in Cairns."

Leila stood and went to the window. From here you could see the ridges going away north-west in soft blue ranks, one behind another behind another, the last of them barely a suggestion. Somewhere out there, four hours by helicopter and then an hour by boot, was a hole in the top of a mountain that the maps called Mabu and the geologists called a tiankeng and the people who lived under it called something else entirely.

"Say the number again," she said.

"Four hundred thousand US on completion. A hundred thousand on descent, non-refundable, paid before you go down, into whatever account you like. Plus a discretionary bonus at my recommendation." A pause. "And I understand there's a family in Oaxaca de Juárez that receives a transfer from you on the fourteenth of every month. Two thousand, four hundred dollars. That must be difficult on contract work."

Leila turned around slowly.

"You looked into my banking."

"I looked into whether you'd say yes." Adele didn't blink. "I'm not going to pretend otherwise or apologise for it, because you'd hear it in my voice and you'd trust me less. Yes, I know about Rodrigo Sandoval Vaca. I know that the two of you were four hundred metres into a flooded sump in Oaxaca and that the ceiling came down between you, and that you held his line for eleven hours because you couldn't dig and you couldn't let go. I know his widow has two children and that she never asked you for a cent, and that you have paid her anyway, at the cost of your own solvency, for a year and a half. I know you haven't put your face in water deeper than a bath since."

The fan ticked. Leila found she was gripping the windowsill and made herself stop.

"So you know I'm the wrong person."

"I know you're the only person." Adele leaned forward, and for the first time something like heat came into her. "Do you want to hear the part of this job that isn't about corpses? Because I've been sitting on it for two days and it's killing me."

"Go on."

"Mabu is a collapse sinkhole four hundred metres deep and two hundred and eighty across. A river enters it. That river comes out at a resurgence spring in the gorge on the far side of the massif, eleven kilometres away and six hundred metres lower. We've dye-traced it. Transit time in low water is thirty-one hours. Nobody has ever seen a single metre of it." She held Leila's eyes. "Eleven kilometres of active river cave, unmapped, unentered, undived. It is the largest untouched system on this planet. It is the last one. There will not be another. And I can put you at the top of it on Thursday."

Leila said nothing for a while. That was the trouble. She knew exactly what she was being handed, and she knew exactly what was being bought, and the two things were not the same, and Adele Rutledge understood that better than she did.

"You're buying me," Leila said. "You're not hiring me. You know what I'll do for that. You know I'll go down a hole that ate six people because you dangled a first descent in front of me, and you know I'd have gone for a quarter of the money if you'd said the cave part first, and you said the money part first so I'd feel like it was a decision."

"Yes," said Adele. "Does that change your answer?"

"No."

"Then I'd rather be honest with you than kind." She stood and picked up the aluminium case. "Wheels up at five. There's a weather window — the last dry window before the monsoon. Our modelling gives us sixty hours from the first rope. After that the rim waterfall goes from a shower to a cannon and the entrance series becomes unclimbable. Sixty hours, Ms Hobbs. In and out."

At the door she paused.

"One more thing. There's a clan whose land the rim sits on. They've agreed to guide us as far as the third pool, and no further, for reasons they'll explain themselves. Be respectful. Their consent is the only reason we have a permit."

"What do they call it?" Leila asked. "The cave. Not Mabu, that's the hole. What's in the cave?"

Adele Rutledge hesitated. It was the only time, in all the weeks Leila had known her, that she had ever seen the woman weigh a word.

"Araka," she said. "Ask them. Don't ask me."

When she was gone Leila lay back on the bed with the headphones in her hand and did not put them on. She didn't need to. She could hear it perfectly: water, clicks, and a scream that ended like a door closing.

She should have been afraid. What she felt instead, lying in the dark of a hotel room in the highlands with the smell of burning rubbish coming through the louvres, was the thing she had not felt in eighteen months and had believed was gone for good.

She was hungry for it.