Tunnels 03, Freefall

blank page like a madman. When he was finished, seconds later, he shoved the pad in front of Will.
    "Was there a drawing like this in with them?"
    Will contemplated the outline his father had sketched, and the three blocks of text within it. The quickly formed letters rather resembled swatted mosquitoes the way Dr. Burrows had reproduced them. "Yes, I definitely had that page, with the three areas of writing on it," he said.
    "And pray, where is it now?" Dr. Burrows demanded.
    "I put it in a safe place, in Martha's shack."
    "In... Martha's... shack..." Dr. Burrows repeated slowly, emphasizing each word. His face was already white from months of living underground, but it seemed to Will that it had now completely drained of blood.
    "Why -- is it important?" Will asked tentatively.
    "I need that page with the Burrows Stone to translate these tablets. Yes, it's important."
    Will frowned at the mention of the Burrows Stone, then shot his father a brief look to see if he was being serious. Turning his attention back to the tablets, Will helped himself to another one from the handkerchief.
    "The Burrows Stone is like the Rosetta Stone ," Dr. Burrows explained. "It has three distinct areas of writing on it, all saying the same thing, but one is in Phoenician. That enables me to translate the other two languages, neither of which I believe has ever been seen on the surface. If I had it now, I could translate these tablets and..." he tailed off.
    "What?" Will said as he looked from one tablet to another.
    "And I think it might be the route map to this inner world the ancient civilization believed in. The Garden of the Second Sun ."
    "The second sun," Will repeated absently.
    Dr. Burrows was surprised by the lack of reaction from Will, but his son's attention was elsewhere. He was moving the tablets around on the tabletop, and helping himself to more from the handkerchief until they were all laid out, apart from the one in his father had been working on.
    "Can I have that?" he asked his father, indicating the tablet in his hand. "Dr. Burrows passed it to him, and Will turned it one way then the other as he examined the edges, then placed it carefully with the others.
    "Dominoes," Will said, "they're like dominoes. The edges are quite worn, but didn't you notice the little notches on them? Look," he said, choosing one to show his father. "This has four notches on the end, and so it fits with the next, which has the matching four notches." He put it back into place, and straightened up.
    "Genius!" Dr. Burrows yelled, studying the arrangement intently, but then his shoulders sagged again. "So now I've got the sequence, but it doesn't really make any difference. I still need the Burrows Stone to decipher the script on them. And we also don't yet know where the route starts from."
    Will held up his hands. "I've got something else for you! Wait here!" he exclaimed, tearing over to his bunk, where he'd left his rucksack.
    "I'm not exactly going anywhere," Dr. Burrows said bemusedly.
    Will ran back to his father with something in his hand. But before he showed his father what it was, he drew his attention to the stone tablet that came first in his new arrangement. "Look at this, Dad. See the sign... right here?" He pointed at the three-pronged symbol carved minutely into the very top left-hand corner of the tablet.
    "Sure," Dr. Burrows shrugged as if it was nothing exceptional. "I found quite a few incidences of that symbol in the Deeps," he added as his son shuffled through the pack of photographs Rebecca One had given him.
    "These belonged to a sailor on the sub. Just look at the last of them." Will slapped the photograph down in front of his father. "The same symbol," he announced. "The sailor must have taken that photo somewhere near the sub, near enough that he managed to get back there without being picked off by the Brights."
    "No!" Dr. Burrows shouted. "So without knowing it, I could have been in the right place all along!"
    "Then... then we've got to go there, now!" Will cried, matching his father's enthusiasm.
    But Dr. Burrows just shook his head. "No, Will, we can't."
    "Why not?" Will asked.
    "Because it's important we establish a way back to the surface that we can use. Because I don't want us to become cut off from civilization again, in case there's any sort of emergency. If we can navigate to the top of the river, then it's going to be a cinch to get down here again. We can just let the river carry us." He was about to