Hollow Ground

Chapter 1: The Plateau

The road ended where the basalt began.

Peter Stafford felt the rented Suburban lurch as its tires left cracked asphalt and bit into volcanic gravel. Behind him, the second vehicle—a white Ford Expedition driven by Jose Fuentes—bounced over the same transition, its headlights briefly flashing in Peter's rearview mirror as it crested the lip of the road.

"Welcome to the middle of nowhere," Jenny King said from the passenger seat. She had her window down despite the dust, one arm resting on the frame, her dark hair whipping across her face. She didn't seem to mind. Jenny never seemed to mind discomfort. It was one of the things Peter liked about her as a student—she was built for fieldwork the way some people were built for libraries.

"Technically," Peter said, "we're about twelve miles southeast of the middle of nowhere. The actual middle of nowhere is back near Harker."

Jenny smiled but kept her eyes on the landscape. There wasn't much to see yet—just the sage flats and juniper scrub that characterized most of eastern Oregon's high plateau country. But the ground was changing. Even from the vehicle, you could feel the shift in the earth's personality. The soil thinned. Rock pushed through in dark, angular plates. The basalt flows from ancient eruptions had left their signature everywhere out here, and the deeper they drove into the plateau, the more the land looked like something that had been broken and only half-repaired.

Peter checked the GPS unit mounted on the dashboard. Ninety-one miles to Harker. A hundred and forty to Bend. The nearest gas station was a two-pump operation attached to a feed store, and that was an hour behind them. Ahead, there was nothing but geology.

Exactly the way he wanted it.

He glanced in the rearview again. Through the dust cloud, he could just make out the shapes inside the Expedition: Jose at the wheel, Ruby Adams beside him, Brett Walker in the back with the equipment cases. Four graduate students. His students. Each of them bright, each of them eager, each of them trusting him completely.

The thought sat heavy in his chest. He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel and pushed it aside.

"How much further to the campsite?" Jenny asked.

"Seven miles. Maybe eight. There's a flat spot near a seasonal creek bed that should work. I scouted it on satellite imagery."

"Scouted it." Jenny glanced at him. "You've been planning this trip for a while."

"Two years," Peter said. Which was true. He didn't mention that he'd been thinking about this place for twenty.

The campsite was everything the satellite imagery had promised: a level stretch of packed earth bordered on one side by a shallow ravine and on the other by a ridge of exposed basalt that would serve as a windbreak. Peter pulled the Suburban to a stop and killed the engine. The silence that rushed in was enormous—the kind of silence that only exists in places where no one lives.

Jose pulled up alongside and cut his engine too. The doors opened, and the five of them stood in the late afternoon light, stretching, looking around.

"It's like Mars," Ruby said. She was the youngest of the four students, twenty-three, with close-cropped red hair and a constellation of freckles across her nose. She turned in a slow circle, taking in the expanse of rock and dust and sky. "A really dry, really empty Mars."

"Mars doesn't have juniper," Brett said, climbing out of the back seat. He was tall and broad-shouldered, the kind of person who looked like he should be studying kinesiology rather than petrology. He squinted at the horizon. "Or that wind."

A steady breeze moved across the plateau, carrying the dry-sage smell that Peter associated with every field season he'd ever spent in the high desert. It was late September, and the air had a bite to it—warm in the direct sun, cold in the shadows.

"All right," Peter said, clapping his hands together. "Let's get camp set up before we lose the light. Tents go along the windbreak. Jose, you and Brett handle the equipment staging. Ruby, Jenny—water purification and cooking station. I want everything squared away by sundown."

They moved with the practiced efficiency of people who'd done fieldwork before. Peter watched them for a moment, then turned and walked to the edge of the basalt ridge. From here, the plateau stretched east in a series of low, undulating swells—frozen waves of ancient lava, long since cooled and cracked and colonized by lichen. The light was going amber. In another hour, the shadows would stretch and the temperature would drop thirty degrees.

Peter put his hand on the rock. It was warm from the sun, rough under his palm. He'd touched this same kind of rock twenty years ago, in this same landscape, when he was younger and hungrier and willing to make choices he'd spend the rest of his life trying to justify.

He pulled his hand away and went back to help set up camp.

Dinner was freeze-dried chili and instant coffee, eaten sitting on camp chairs around a portable propane stove. The stars came out in layers—first the bright ones, then the medium ones, then the impossible millions that only showed themselves when you were truly far from artificial light. The Milky Way hung over the plateau like a luminous scar.

"So walk us through it again," Jose said, cradling his coffee. He was compact and precise, the kind of student who took meticulous notes and asked the question everyone else was afraid to ask. "What exactly are we looking for out here?"

Peter leaned back in his chair. "The Harker Plateau sits on top of one of the most extensive basalt flow fields in the Pacific Northwest. We know the major features—the shield volcanoes, the cinder cones, the surface flows. But the subsurface is barely mapped. There are lava tube systems out here that nobody's ever documented."

"And that's significant because..." Jenny prompted.

"Because lava tubes are time capsules. The conditions inside them—stable temperature, low humidity, minimal biological contamination—mean that whatever's in there has been preserved. We're talking about geological formations, mineral deposits, possibly even evidence of paleoclimatic conditions going back thousands of years. One good lava tube system could generate a dozen papers."

"And one good paper could generate a lot of grant money," Brett said. He wasn't being cynical—just accurate. They all understood the economy of academic geology.

Peter nodded. "That too."

"Have there been any previous surveys of this specific area?" Ruby asked.

"Some aerial work. A few surface surveys in the eighties and nineties. But nobody's done systematic subsurface exploration. The terrain is too remote, the access is too difficult, and frankly, there hasn't been much institutional interest. Lava tubes aren't sexy."

"I don't know," Jose said. "I think they're pretty sexy."

Ruby threw a wadded napkin at him. The group laughed. Peter smiled, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

Later, after the students had turned in, Peter sat alone by the dying stove. He pulled his pack closer and unzipped the inner compartment. Inside, beneath a layer of maps and field guides, was a leather-bound journal, its cover cracked and stained. He didn't open it. He just rested his hand on it, the way he'd rested his hand on the basalt, feeling the weight of what it contained.

Then he zipped the pack closed and went to his tent.

He didn't sleep well. He never did out here.