The tunnel opened into Hell.
I stopped. My metal boots crunched on the salt floor.
We were in the deepest chamber of the mine. The air here vibrated. It wasn't sound; it was energy.
In the center of the cavern lay the "Reactor."
It wasn't a sleek machine. It was a crude, ugly pile. Blocks of black graphite stacked like a child's fort, interlaced with glowing uranium ore.
It sat in a pit of water that was boiling. Steam hissed and curled around the black bricks.
"The Chicago Pile," I whispered inside my helmet. "Fermi's design. But 150 years too early."
My Geiger counter was screaming. A constant, high-pitched whine in my ear.
Radiation Critical.
"There he is," Charles said. He pointed to a rusted iron gantry hanging above the pit.
Cagliostro stood on the walkway.
He didn't look like a wizard anymore. He looked like a corpse that had forgotten to lie down.
His hair was gone. His skin was gray and peeling in sheets. He leaned heavily on the railing, coughing into a rag that was already soaked with blood.
"Alex!" Cagliostro shouted. His voice was raw, amplified by the acoustics of the cave. "You made it to the finale!"
"Turn it off," I rasped. My voice boomed from the chest speaker. "The game is over."
"The game is broken!" Cagliostro laughed, then doubled over coughing. "I broke the save file, Alex. Look at me! I'm glitching!"
He held up his hand. His fingers were fused together. The radiation burns had melted his skin.
"I'm not a wizard," Cagliostro wheezed. "Just a drifter. Like you. I wanted to see what happened if I gave cavemen a lighter."
He pointed to the pile below.
"And now the cave is on fire."
"What is that?" Napoleon asked, eyeing the glowing pile.
"A dirty bomb," I said. "If that pile melts down, it will poison the groundwater of Europe. The Rhine. The Danube. Millions will die."
"Boring," Cagliostro sneered.
He held up a device. A detonator. Wired to bundles of dynamite strapped to the cavern pillars.
"Meltdowns are slow," he said. "Collapsing the mountain on top of it? That spreads the dust instantly. A cloud of death covering the continent."
He thumbed the switch.
"I'm bored, Alex. Let's reset the server."
Napoleon raised his pistol.
"Don't!" I shouted. "If he drops the switch, we all die."
"I have the shot," Charles whispered. He raised the Whitworth rifle.
"No," I said. "The reflex will trigger it."
I stepped forward.
Clank. Clank.
I walked toward the pit. The heat was intense. My suit temperature warnings flashed red.
"Stay back, Tin Man!" Cagliostro yelled. "Or I blow it now!"
"You don't want to die," I said. "Drifters survive. That's what we do."
"Look at me!" he screamed. "I'm already dead! My DNA is soup!"
I reached the edge of the pit. I was ten feet below him.
I looked up at his ruined face.
"You're bored," I said. "Blowing it up is easy. It's lazy."
I reached for the valve on my chest.
"Fixing it..." I hissed. "That's the challenge."
I turned the valve. Not the intake. The vent.
HISSSSSS.
A cloud of pure oxygen sprayed from my suit. It filled the space between us. Invisible, tasteless, but highly flammable.
Cagliostro frowned. "What are you doing? Surrendering?"
"I'm changing the variables," I said.
I looked at Charles. I tapped my helmet twice.
Charles didn't hesitate. He knew the signal.
He didn't aim at Cagliostro. He aimed at a high-pressure steam pipe running along the wall next to the gantry.
BANG.
The bullet punctured the pipe.
SCREEEEE.
A jet of scalding steam blasted out. It hit Cagliostro in the face.
He screamed. He stumbled back, blinding himself.
The oxygen cloud swirled around him.
I raised my brass gauntlet. I triggered the piezo-electric starter in the palm—a simple welder's spark.
SNAP.
The spark hit the oxygen-rich air.
WHOOSH.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a combustion. The air around Cagliostro ignited.
For a second, he was wreath in a halo of blue fire.
He flailed. He dropped the detonator.
It fell.
It bounced off the railing. It fell toward the reactor pit.
"Catch it!" Napoleon screamed.
I moved. My servos whined. I lunged forward.
I caught the detonator inches above the boiling water.
My metal glove sizzled in the steam.
Above me, Cagliostro fell. He tumbled over the railing, wreathed in flame.
He hit the graphite pile.
CRUNCH.
His body struck the core. The uranium sizzled.
He didn't scream. He just burned.
"Target liquidated," I rasped.
But the pile was unstable. Cagliostro's impact had shifted the bricks. The reaction was spiking. The blue glow turned blinding white.
"It's going critical!" I shouted. "Run!"
We scrambled back up the tunnel. The ground shook. The salt walls began to crack.
"We have to seal it!" Charles yelled. "Bury it deep!"
We reached the blast doors—massive iron slabs designed to seal the mine sectors.
"Blow the supports!" I ordered the engineers.
They lit the fuses on the tunnel beams.
BOOM. BOOM.
The ceiling collapsed. Rock and salt rained down.
The blast doors began to slide shut. But they were slow. Rusted.
"They're jamming!" Napoleon shouted. He pushed against the iron, but it was too heavy.
The cloud of radioactive dust was rushing up the tunnel behind us. If it escaped, the forest would die.
I stepped into the doorway.
I turned my back to the closing doors. I braced my hydraulic legs.
WHIRRR.
I pushed.
My suit groaned. The servos screamed. I forced the doors shut.
"Go!" I yelled. "I have to hold the lock!"
"No!" Charles screamed.
He didn't run. He grabbed a discarded rifle. He jammed the barrel into the locking mechanism, wedging it shut.
"We leave together!" Charles shouted.
He grabbed my arm. "Move, Administrator! That is a direct order!"
I looked at him. He wasn't a boy anymore. He was a leader.
I let go. The rifle held the lock.
We ran.
Behind us, the mine collapsed.
Miles of rock crashed down, burying the reactor, the wizard, and the nightmare technology forever.
We burst out of the mine entrance into the cool night air.
The ground rumbled beneath us one last time. Then silence.
I fell to my knees in the grass.
My suit was dead. The oxygen was gone. The battery was drained.
I clawed at the helmet release.
"Help him!" Napoleon shouted.
They pulled the helmet off.
I took a breath. Real air. Sweet, pine-scented air.
I looked at the mine entrance. It was a pile of rubble.
"It's over," I wheezed. "The future is buried."
Charles sat beside me. He looked at the stars.
"Back to the 18th century," he whispered.
I nodded. I coughed, spitting black fluid onto the grass.
"Good," I said. "I prefer the math in this century anyway."