Most of us live underground, away from the wind and the clouds—and the uncertainties of the sun. Most of us prefer it that way. But there are a few—a very few—who head toward the surface of their own free will. It’s the darkness, they say, the closeness of the tunnel walls, the ever-present struggle as they try to find the room to breathe.

  There are those who choose to go …and then there are those who are taken. They are taken because they cannot take themselves. They are the ones who reach the Narrows on the other side of The Great Break, and who drop to their knees. Some fall down weeping, some with a scream, and some curl in on themselves with a whimper. Others just stop, and stand, and stare; they are the ones who do not make a sound.

  We come across them, almost catatonic, and then it’s up to us—the ones who feel no terror in the deeps, or at the sight of day. I am one, and I, although I will not admit it, sometimes find a cliff ledge from which to watch the rising sun. I, also, will not speak of the pleasure it brings when I see that sun turning the sky from indigo to gold with every color in between. There are days when those memories carry me through, the memories of those colors and the sun’s warmth on my skin.

  But I will not speak of it, for the caverns shelter us from a danger far worse than the sun, one that resides in our heads, and I fear that to speak of the sun-gifted pleasure would only encourage others to seek it, for to go to the surface is to put yourself in the path of demons. I suspect those interdimensional terrors are the reason our ancestors fled below ground in the first place. It is why I pity those who must return, and, on the surface, remain.

  Sometimes, when we find them, those who seek the surface are in no condition to survive it, and then the squad has to stay with them and help them find their feet. We take them a good day’s march from the caves, being careful to cover our tracks. It would do us no good if the demons found the gateway to our underground home.

  We set camp, and tend them, bringing them out of sedation, giving them food, giving them directions to the settlement. Sometimes, I am able to find one that I can warn, one that will not run screaming off the nearest cliff. For the surface-drawn can sometimes sense the other dimension, and instinctively fear what lives there. Of those that can sense it, very few don’t instinctively take flight, when it nears.

  This time, we’d camped two days out. I have to admit I didn’t feel comfortable with that, but I’d felt less comfortable at our usual site, and four of our five surface-seekers had come out of sedation early—and they’d come out screaming. They hadn’t stopped screaming, until we’d travelled half a night more, and they hadn’t settled completely until the second sunrise.

  By that point we were exhausted and had to stop.

  “No more stimulants,” Squad Leader Tanko said. “Second shift, take over.”

  And then he unpacked his sleeping bag, chose a patch of ground clear of stones and bushes, and bedded down. His confidence in his Second was well-founded. She had camp set and the seekers fed by full light. I stayed awake long enough for that, and then went to my rest. Second Katika acknowledged my departure with a nod of approval, and I wondered when she had been planning on darting me. I was glad she’d waited. I don’t react well to the sedative.

  This time, I fell asleep within seconds, and was woken some twelve hours later to eat. I spent supper, watching the sky change color as the sun set. By then, most of the surface-seekers had recovered enough to feed themselves. In another twenty-four hours we could send them on their way.

  When I finished eating, I checked in with Tanko and Katika.

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  “Go back to bed,” they said, and, for once, I obeyed.

  I woke in the grey light before dawn, when the air was still cool with night, and the sun was a trembling presence just below the horizon. I woke uneasy, but no-one else stirred, as I repacked my gear, and headed for a low hill overlooking the camp.

  The night before, I had watched the sun set from the rocky crest of that hill, and I intended to watch it rise from the other side. Taking a self-heating meal from my pack, I settled in for the show, and that is all that saved me.

  At first, I thought the warming air was a natural result of the coming sun, that the nausea I felt was a result of trying to eat so early in the day. It was with a sudden jolt of shock that I realized it was not.

  Setting the meal pack behind me, I turned and looked back at the camp, and all thought of food fled. A second sun had woken in the centre of the camp, but instead of the roses, lemons and gold I had come to appreciate, this light was a burning, ruddy orange—an interdimensional inferno.

  Forgetting the sunrise I’d come to admire, I crouched low behind my escarpment of rock, and watched as a tear opened in the fabric of my world, letting the orange light spread. I tried to shout a warning, but my breath caught in my throat, and my mouth grew dry.

  As I watched, one of the seekers woke, screaming in alarm. The rest of the camp woke, too, but they were still scrambling from their sleeping bags, when the first demon stepped clear of the rift.

  I was barely aware of the figures fleeing from the camp, as I studied the monster crossing into our world. Seven-feet tall, and narrow of build, it was encased in blood-red armor. Almost like an exoskeleton, the armor gleamed, refracting the light from two worlds.

  I was aware of the dawn, even as I watched the demons run down squad member and seeker alike, and carry them back to their own dimension. The attack lasted less than a quarter of an hour, from the moment the first seeker screamed to when Squad Leader Tanko was dragged through the rift by the last of the raiding demons.

  I was scarcely breathing, when the rift closed, and the orange light gave way to the golden touch of my own world’s sun. The numbness of complete surprise wrapped itself around me, and I could not think of what I wanted to do next. Stone rattled on stone, and I turned.

  One of the seekers was coming up the hill, approaching from the opposite side to that of the camp. He was staring at me, as though trying to make sure I was real. I looked from his anxious face, back to the camp, feeling the air return to normal, the first touch of the sun, cool compared to the searing breeze that had bled in through the rift.

  The seeker covered the last few meters of hillside, and crouched beside me. He peered over the escarpment to the empty camp below.

  “Are they gone?”

  “How did you know they had been?”

  “I felt them coming, and I hid.” He gestured with both hands. “The hill and the stream, I hoped…”

  He didn’t bother finishing the sentence. I knew what he had hoped—that the hill and stream would be enough to hide him from whatever means they had used to find the camp. I had hoped the escarpment would do the same.

  We crouched in silence, the morning sun driving the last of the night away. Our backs grew steadily warmer under its touch, as the hill’s shadow stretched over the camp.

  “Should we go and get the gear?” he asked, and I looked down at the pack he carried in one hand.

  “I didn’t want them to count, and realize one was missing.” He nodded at the pack resting beside me.

  “I don’t go anywhere without my gear.”

  “Not even to watch the sun?”

  And I remembered I had left both bedroll and equipment behind, when I’d watched the sunset the night before.

  “That was different,” I said, and he smiled.

  “You can sense them, too,” he murmured, and I knew he wasn’t talking about my pack and sleeping bag.

  “Yes.”

  “Nausea and unreasoning fear?”

  “A sense of unease rather than fear, but nausea, yes. Once they’ve arrived.”

  “But you’re not afraid of the underneath?”

  “No,” and it was true. Right now, I missed being in the caverns, feeling the friendly closeness of rocky walls.

  “They cannot go there,” the seeker said.

  “No.”

  “I wish I could.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. Just as the fear prevented some of my people from stepping into broad caverns, or out beneath an open sky, so it prevented others from living beneath the earth. It was just the way the gene pool fell, an unbalanced dealing of life’s cards.

  I contemplated fetching the rest of the gear, but the very thought of returning made me feel sick. Reminding myself we had to move, and that we did not know how long the journey would be, did not help. Nervousness seized my limbs, and my skin danced with fear.

  “We’ll leave it,” I said, and he breathed a sigh of relief.