The airship’s spotlights played off the vast rocky sides of the shaft that plunged deep into the Earth’s core through the lithosphere and eventually to our destination: the Center of the Earth!

I yawned.

We fell so slowly, the sides of the shaft several hundred feet away, and it had been a long, boring day of this. There’d been a boy, earlier, that caught my eye. But now he was talking to Bridgette with the French accent and the big chest. Laughing at anything she said like it was the cleverest thing in the entire world.

Or below it.

I wondered how long it would take for Bridgette to reach Mashu if I pushed her off the side. The tour guide had told us how far down the Earth’s crust really stretched before the hollow core began, and then how much farther down the land of Mashu was from even that.

For a second, I started to work the math. Three thousand miles down, and terminal velocity being about two hundred miles an hour.

“Good grief, that’s hours of falling,” I said out loud.

It was a bit delicious, really, now that I thought about it.

“What’s that, Kia?” my mother asked. “Who’s falling?”

Mother, one Patricia Baker, her face tan from a week in San Marino, peered over the tour brochure to look at me. I scowled at her. “Nothing. I wasn’t talking to you.”

God. Wasn’t this the worst? I could almost reach out to touch any one of the fifteen people crammed into the observation gallery, including Bridgette and the cute boy mooning over her.

I kicked the back of her chair.

“Sorry!” I pretended to look flustered and apologetic.

The Boy (because now that’s how I thought of him) looked positively thankful at getting to see Bridgette jostled about.

How pathetic.

I could go back to my room, but my brother, Anthony, had been eating everything the dining room had to offer. His flatulence clung to the walls. Just thinking of his smell made me move over to the edge of the gallery for even more fresh air.

Grandpa Taylor clung to the railings there, looking down into the darkness with a toothy grin. “The first time I descended we didn’t know how far this all went. We kept expecting to hit the bottom, so we dropped even slower than this. It took a whole week!”

His knuckles looked like they might puncture his thin, splotchy skin at any moment. I looked over at him, and his bushy eyebrows, then back down into the never-ending darkness.

“I ought to jump off just to speed it all up. I don’t know if I could bear this being any longer,” I said with a sigh.

Grandpa Taylor grunted. He wanted to say something, but bit it back. I could tell he wanted to call me impatient or ungrateful, but we were still all at the honeymoon stage at the start of a family vacation where everyone was in good spirits and pretending to like each other.

“I miss Ryan,” Grandpa Taylor finally said, moving the conversation somewhere else. “All this would have left him lost for words.”

“Who?”

“Ryan! Ryan. My partner.” Grandpa looked at me like I was something he’d found moldering in the fridge. “We were the first ones to descend. To find that the Earth really was hollow. Ryan St. Claire.”

“Oh.” That Ryan.

The truth was I could give a shit. It was all ancient history. I’d been forced to come along during the holidays instead of going to Mallorca like I’d wanted because Mother wanted to reconcile with Grandpa Taylor. She’d been written out of the will—for what, I had no clue, earthly or unearthly. For Mother this was an apology tour, a period of groveling and emulating the actions of an actual doting, caring, real daughter.

I was to be Best Supporting Actor to her leading role.

“If we stay cut out, there’s no more Mallorca, no more private school, no more personal driver,” she’d hissed at me on the flight to Iceland. “You’ll be of age soon, you’ll need his legacy if you’re to live well. Or at least to marry well. There isn’t much time: his health is failing. That’s why he’s taking this last nostalgia trip.”

To Mashu, the land in the Center of the Earth.

I huffed in annoyance. You couldn’t get a tan by going where the sun doesn’t shine, and a tan was all the rage in those new Hollywood pictures. My holiday was going to be ruined by this.

• • • •

In the summer of 1774 the Schiehallion experiment took place on an isolated, almost symmetrical mountain in Scotland. Apparently it involved some tweedy scientists and a pendulum.

They swung the pendulum, measuring the length of its swing against stars and took hundreds of measurements near the mountain to verify that, yes, the mountain did indeed slightly deflect the pendulum’s swing. Gravity worked.

Surveyors then measured the mountain to determine its mass.

Once they had that, if they added the amount the pendulum bobbled compared to a normal swing on Earth, they could run the math and figure out how dense the Earth was.

So, you can imagine, the brochure I had in my hands said, that it was quite a shock when Mashu was discovered in 1930.

My eyes glazed over as I got to the part about <em”>extra dense exotic material that <em”>interfered with measurements. I crumpled the brochure up and threw it over the railing when the dinner bell rang.

All thirty passengers poured out of our rooms or meandered over from the observation galley. We pulled out the aluminum chairs from the brushed aluminum table to sit. The captain of the airship hosted one of the tables and the navigator the other.

Now came my utterly favorite part: the ant-people.

They swarmed around us, bigger than dogs, but smaller than llamas. Their big, expressionless eyes glittered in the lamplight as they poured drinks from pitchers held in their many hands.

“Scubbies!” Grandpa said, delighted. He’d taken his meals in his room until today, not feeling well due to the changes in air pressure as we descended through the Earth.

“They prefer to be called—”

Grandpa cut the navigator off with a wave of his hand. “When we landed on the first day they swarmed the craft, chewing up our helium tanks and destroying the rigging until I fired a warning shot. Poor creatures had never seen a gun before. They tried to attack, but I put lead right between those big eyes and they backed off awful quick when they saw what happened to their friend.”

“A different time, before the accords,” the captain said diplomatically.

“Now they’re crawling your rigging and serving us drinks, different times indeed, Captain,” Grandpa agreed. He held up a cup. “More wine, my old buddies!”

The navigator and captain looked uncomfortable, about what, I couldn’t say. Sometimes people got a bit starstruck around Grandpa. He was the discoverer of Mashu, the man who’d changed the entire world’s understanding of, well, the entire world.

“Oh.” The captain looked up from his pocket watch. “It’s time.”

With a nod from him, the ant-people stepped to the side of the dining room and dimmed the interior lights. At the same time, more exterior spotlights blazed into life. It looked like daylight thrown onto all the walls around us.

“Would you look at that!” a passenger next to me breathed.

The walls crawled with ant-people, moving small metal girders into place. Welding torches flickered, and rock drills nattered away like woodpeckers.

“This is to be the trans-surface elevator,” the captain announced grandly. “Capable of taking hundreds of people per car on seven different tracks to the surface of Iceland, and down to the interior of the Earth all the way to Mashu. Soon anyone will be able to buy a ticket to the Center.”

“It’ll ruin the whole place,” Grandpa muttered. “It’ll change it all.”

To which I could only think, good. I really didn’t want to travel down to some barbaric world hidden away in the middle of the Earth. I wanted room service, those fancy new air-conditioning systems, and maybe to sneak a few rum punches.

Who was I kidding: there was no maybe when it came to rum punches and vacation.

None of that existed in Mashu right now, according to the guides. No, it was all thatch huts and ant-people hives. Dim stretches of land lit only by the phosphorescent burning of the cavern’s ceiling. Droves of weird animals that had survived the descent somehow.

It was a dreadful place to go on vacation.

But, as Mother said, needs must.

The things one did for family . . .

Bridgette caught my eye over a roll that she nibbled at with all the grace of a chipmunk. The Boy pushed his long dark hair out of his eyes and offered to butter another roll for her.

“Oh, I just couldn’t eat anything more,” Bridgette chirped.

She’d only eaten that single roll, and it had been a delicate ten minutes. I wanted to stuff the whole chicken the ant-person was carving for my parents down her throat.

I raised a fork, and left my middle finger in the air as I took a big bite of the steak I’d opted for.

“I saw that,” whined Anthony.

I kicked my brother under the table, hard enough that he coughed up a piece of chicken.

“Anthony!” Mother hissed.

“It wasn’t my fault!”

“That’s not how we behave at the table.”

Seeing my brother choke on that piece of chicken brightened my day up somewhat.

Metaphorically speaking.

• • • •

We burst out of the roof of the world’s interior the next morning, the phosphorescent sky dazzling the airship’s cabins with a hot light that woke us all, a welcome change from the perpetual gloom we’d been descending in.

The airship edged away from the massive elevator that now hung in the air like a line of silver thread that connected the roof of rock far over Mashu and the ground below.

Eventually, though, the novelty wore off and people stopped hanging on to the railings in the observation room to return to the dining car or their own rooms.

By night, I was alone except for the navigator. Only down here “night” was just more of the constant dim glow that would be our companion for the week ahead, as there was never really any dark in Mashu, its only natural illumination being the faint light from its vast phosphorescent ceiling.

“So many of them are clambering around on the outside,” I said to the navigator as I peered over at the elevator works from the observation railing. I liked the fresh air; the cabins got stuffy and Anthony whined if I opened the portholes. “Isn’t it dangerous?”

The navigator, Mr. Kelly, stood upright in his uniform. It had been starched so severely that it made him something of a statue. He had kind of a silver fox, “cute old guy” thing going for him, and I’d been pestering him with questions since The Boy still had shown no inclination to dislodge himself from Bridgette’s gravitational pull.

“Mashu doesn’t have a lot of resources like above-worlders,” Mr. Kelly informed me gravely. “And what they did have, they lost to the first adventurers who traded information and technology to them in return for precious metals. The Mashunites work wherever they can find it.”

First adventurers. Like Grandpa Taylor.

“We were like the goddamned conquistadors,” he’d growled at a recent “family dinner” Mother forced us to throw for the first time in ages in a weak attempt to try and make up to him. “We blew through their kingdoms, with thousands of scubbies behind us carrying our spoils back to our ship. We were like gods.”

He spent a lot of time talking about the good old days when he’d dropped down into the dim kingdoms like a ravaging plague.

Sometimes I felt like being back on the surface depressed him. I wondered why he didn’t just go back down and live there.

I tried to flirt with Mr. Kelly. Nothing could come of it, my parents would be more than scandalized. Plus, where could we even retreat to get into trouble together? The airship’s cabin, swinging precariously under all the rigging, had few nooks and crannies.

Well, maybe Mr. Kelly would know of some.

But he wouldn’t say. He was as stiff as his uniform and brushed off my hints and advances with all the excitement of a decrepit pensioner’s doddering harrumph. As he walked away, closing the door to the crew quarters and mechanical rooms, I made a note to write a damning letter about him to his company.

It would insinuate that he had pressed himself on me, a young waif, unwise to the ways of more seasoned and traveled men. Why, it was conduct unbecoming—

The Boy passed by me on the walkway to the passenger rooms.

“Hi!” I said, as brightly and eagerly as Bridgette ever had. I touched his shoulder and smiled. I looked deeply into his eyes.

He rushed away from me, contracting in on himself like a turtle as he did so.

“But what’s your name?” I shouted at the empty space.

He’d been interested enough in my neckline that first day we motored out over the Atlantic toward Iceland. I’d cornered him near the door to the dining room when everyone had gone to the observation deck.

Apparently he’d not spent time in France, as he’d said, because when my tongue found his he’d coughed, fought me off, and run right into the arms of Bridgette a day later. Bridgette with the French name, but who was so dreadfully Anglian.

Her parents had airs.

Bridgette.

I’d spent a lot of the trip wondering what she whispered into The Boy’s ears about me. He looked so ashen whenever he saw me. Then they would turn away and whisper to each other.

What were they saying?

I hated that she’d taken him away from me.

What was his name?

I just wanted his name.

Then I saw her, alone, standing by the rail of the observation deck. She was eating a piece of chicken like a savage, and throwing the bones over the side.

Too delicate to eat in front of anyone at dinner, but here I found the real Bridgette. The faker.

“Bridgette,” I snarled.

She jumped, like a half-startled cat caught on the counter, as I pressed close to her plain face.

“You,” she said. “You.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked.

“Do what?”

Her insouciance lit a fire deep within me. Like a trans-Atlantic steamer coming up to full boil, the coal all stoked.

“Why did you take The Boy?”

“Andrew?” She wiped smeared lipstick and grease. “I didn’t take him. You repulsed him. Sticking your tongue down his throat like that. We know who you are. We know who your whole family is.”

I controlled my anger. I remained cool.

I rushed forward and shoved her over the rail without even a hint of hesitation. One moment, I just wanted to wipe that smile away, and in the other, a flurry of petticoats slapped the other side of the railing as Bridgette exhaled in tight surprise: “Oh?”

And then, a split second later, as she fell, she began to scream.

At the same moment, I heard a footstep near the rooms, and the door slam.

• • • •

I once saw a play where the actor, Reginald Gorby, threw himself so into the role of bereaved father that he cried real tears right on the stage before us all at the matinee. I remember being so impressed by his utter command of the stage. I’d set out at once to become an actress, and learn everything I’d seen Gorby do.

My mother eventually had our butler, Mr. Edsby, whip that plan of becoming an actress right out of me. But now those days of staring at myself in a mirror willing those tears to form came back to me with all the speed of a door slam.

“My God!” I shrieked. “My God! She’s fallen from the rail!”

Reginald Gorby never threw himself into a role so deeply as I threw myself into the part of Ms. Kia Taylor, stunned at the horror of seeing her fellow passenger fall to her death.

I wept. I screamed. People woke up and rushed to the gallery in their nightclothes. They even had to wrestle me down as I leapt up onto the railing, as if to jump off after Bridgette.

A doctor joined my parents in our room and gave me a dose of something that made my whole body prickle and warm up as I began to fall asleep.

Rarely had I ever felt so deeply satisfied as when I laid there, listening to everyone speak in hushed, sympathetic tones around me.

Maybe now The Boy would pay some attention to me. I’d been through a horrible trauma, hadn’t I?

That was a thought I wrapped around myself like a blanket as I floated on opioid dreams until I opened my eyes and saw Grandpa Taylor sitting on a chair alone with me, his fingers crossed with each other, staring intently at me.

“I saw what you did,” he said in a soft, curious voice.

I played dumb, but Grandpa shook his head.

“Don’t. Don’t do that.” His firm growl stripped decades away from the frail old man. I saw, in the shadows of the room, the man who had descended down into the heart of the Earth to force strange new empires to bow at his feet and give him their gold.

I swallowed hard.

How to describe the fear that rose inside of me like a horrid flood? The storm that churned within my chest?

“Do you want to know why I dropped all my children from the will?” Grandpa asked, pulling the chair closer to me.

I stared at the silver hair jutting out of his ears so that I didn’t have to meet his piercing eyes.

“I did it because they are weak,” Grandpa hissed. Clear hatred curled his lips. “Cushy, soft people in comfortable lives. They create nothing, do little, and are no better than vampires sucking at my generosity. But I was wrong about you. I thought you were like your aunts and uncles. But you’re not.”

I barely dared breathe.

He leaned closer until our noses almost touched. “Do you know the truth about explorers? We talk about conquistadors and Columbus as if they were bold adventurers. But have you read about the things they had to do? They were willing to kill. Rape. Murder. They did what they had to do. Those gunslingers in the American West? The soft and rotten pretend to be them, want to be them, but they’re just vagabond murderers as well. Ill-fitted for city life.”

His voice cracked, and so did the knuckles of his hands as he massaged them together.

“Grandfather . . .” I had never been scared of him before. His eyes gleamed with such excitement as he talked about rape and murder.

“They call me an adventurer. Ryan too. But they always gloss over the things we had to do. Building empires, changing the world like I did, it requires a lack of patience with soft civilization.”

He stood up with a groan and hobbled over to the porthole to look down at the patchworks of farms, the dark splotches of wild forests, and the shimmering sea in the distance where he’d once told me giant squid waited to pull Mashunite ships down under the surface.

“It used to be a hard place down there,” Grandpa said. “A place that forged you. Where only the strongest could exert their will. I came back to feel it again, before civilization tamed it. But here I see it came to show me something else. It has revealed your true self to me. You’re a colonizer. You’re an empress. Oh, the granite skipped a generation, but I see it’s finally resurfaced—in you. You might be just a girl, but I could put a pith helmet on you and send you to the darkest jungle. I know it, now. I feel a fool that I didn’t see this earlier. But I saw it in you when you pushed that annoying girl over the side of the ship.”

I sat up, groggy no longer. “Please. Grandfather. You won’t tell anyone?”

“No, my child.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a fresh, crisp sheet of parchment. “I am the last creature that would dare such a thing.”

He handed me his last will and testament. Signed. Witnessed by the very doctor who had treated me just hours ago and the captain of the airship. An unimpeachable duo of co-signatures. The thing my mother had so long quested fruitlessly for.

“What is this?” My fingers trembled.

“Everything. It’s yours. Not your mother’s, not anyone else in this family. Because I can see that only you have the fire to grasp what you want. You’ll do something interesting with it, whereas, everyone else would only spend it.”

Grandpa Taylor laughed and hugged me, his cologne stinking of alcohol and cedar, and for the first time in my life, he planted a dry kiss on my forehead.

The man was damn proud of me.

“The scubbies might try to kill me when we land,” he said.

Startled, I pulled away from his embrace. “What?”

“They blame me for their ills, instead of their own shortcomings. Ever since we made contact, they act as if I personally did everything horrible that ever happened to them. They refuse to take responsibility! I see the murder in their compound eyes. The crew can barely stand to walk past me. I will stand against them and find my measure when they come for me.”

“And when will that be, do you think?” I asked politely, and with a genuine interest, looking down at the will in my hands.

• • • •

It was a horrible thing when Mr. Kelly, the navigator, found Grandpa Taylor’s body staked to the ground outside the landing mast a day later.

“A savage business,” he said. And though he had spoken in favor of the Mashunites, the whole business had him quite rattled.

The way poor Grandpa Taylor had been slashed at and mutilated, it put everyone right off continuing the vacation. And without our family patriarch to force us all to continue on, we really had no choice but to demand the captain take us back on the very next airship.

I certainly demanded it, through terrified tears.

“We should have an investigation,” one of the passengers said. “We don’t know what happened or who’s responsible.”

That sentence made my stomach twist in a slight bit of fear.

But this wasn’t London. There was no Scotland Yard to come sniffing around for fingerprints. And if they did come, by airship, their arrival would still be days away.

So Grandpa’s body was preserved in alcohol for us to bring home, and we were soon back on the stuffy old airship, climbing for the shaft in the sky that would take us back to the old world above.

“The Mashunites are terrified that this incident will be in the papers,” the captain mournfully told us over dinner. “They have put everything into this project with Grand Oceanic Travels to build the elevator. Their entire country will go bankrupt if this fails and no one wants to come here.”

Everyone made sympathetic noises about the poor ant-people as the very creatures served us our roast beef and pudding.

It was a dreary country to be visiting anyway, I thought. And Grandpa said it was a hard place. Things like this happened in tough places. Though, I’d expected him to fight back harder than just scratching up my arms as I’d gagged him and staked him to the ground. He’d looked so shocked when I stepped back to consider exactly how to slash his body up in a way that would look like the ant-people had done it.

It was tiring work and I couldn’t wait to get back up to the surface and put this emotionally taxing experience behind me.

Because I had things to look forward to. The Boy’s parents had panicked about how dangerous Mashu was and were returning with us.

He saw me staring at him across the table, and he looked down, nervous.

Yes, my little rabbit. Soon I would have you too.

Because, I thought as I watched a flock of graceful pterodactyls skim the clouds we rose into, I would take what I wanted, damn the consequences, destroy anything, full steam ahead. I was the granite, the explorer, the adventurer.