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There is a buzz around campus all morning.
The source of a buzz is a newspaper article. The newspaper article announces that the governmental bureau handling the Sentinels has used them to depose the rest of the government, who "have time and again refused to take seriously the mutant threat."
Yeah that's fair. This is one of the oldest ones; the tunnel it makes is big enough for two people to crawl through it side by side. Unfortunately that means that it's a giant scaly worm-thing whose front end is mostly composed of big sharp rock-chewing teeth and it's five feet in diameter at that point. She has it close its mouth and attempt to look contrite while she rearranges the Clay to retract it.
Then the Tunneler slurps back down its slime-lined tunnel, and half a minute later, a very wet raccoon pops out and starts beckoning to the mutants with humanlike sweeps of its little arm.
(Meanwhile, she leaves Third Naomi curled up at the southernmost point of her range making Tunnelers one after another, and has First Naomi and the slightly bedraggled suitcase start heading north. She's pretty sure a couple of those Tunnelers have made it past the border unharmed, and she would like at least one of her to follow them. Second Naomi starts gestating another clone.)
It's dark in there, and slimy. But the slime doesn't slip under their feet or linger on their hands when they touch it. Very well-behaved, that slime.
The tunnel angles downward. When it forks, Naomi blocks the same-level fork with a wall of living Clay, to direct the mutants down the fork that leads to the next level down.
First Naomi and her suitcase are getting close to the border. Third Naomi is the one nearest the mutants. She sighs, abandons her latest Tunneler spawn, and slime-slides up the tunnels to meet them; she can't think of a way to get a raccoon to mime 'please ride the sixty-mile-an-hour underground waterslide to Canada', and she doesn't want to alarm them by snatching them away without warning, so this is going to require actual human words.
And a naked girl covered in slime comes rocketing up the tunnel toward them.
"Hi," she says, stopping about ten feet away. "Sorry about the mess. I can get you all to Canada but you have to go waterslide-style and let the tunnel do the work unless you want to walk all fifty-odd miles of it five hundred feet underground—that's how low you have to be before the Sentinels can't see you anymore. Well, they can't see me that far down. I don't know if it's different when you're actually a mutant."
The one in front steps forward. "It would certainly be a good thing to have a route out. Is this a one-time or ongoing offer?"
"...I hadn't realized you might want to delay taking it. Uh, the offer's open indefinitely, unless you all get murdered before you make it back into the tunnels, in which case sucks to be you?"
"We'll certainly want to evacuate the children immediately, but we have the ability to fight Sentinels and win, and the resources to find other mutants with less ability to get out on their own."
"Oh, I've found the big boys, have I. Well. I'm digging more tunnels as fast as I can; keep the gross raccoon, I can use it to hear you if you're in range of my network. Who's going to Canada on this trip? Send 'em down. And if you don't have any more questions, I'd really better get back to work."
"Bye!", she says, and zooms away on a splash of goo.
(Second finishes feeding Fourth, and sends her out into the network while Tunnelers dig her a cave near the middle. Third starts another clone on her way to her resting place. The western Tunnelers are making headway under the lake, and First in the north has just about decided she's far enough past the border to risk coming up for a look around.)
The mutants return to the surface, confer for a little while, and then a group of them consisting mostly of children but with a few adults along, presumably to mind them. The children seem delighted by the slimy tunnels, and have to be dissuaded from attempting to do unwise enthusiastic things.
As each person enters the tunnel, the slime bunches up to wrap around them and pull them farther in. Soon the expedition is a long train of slime-blobs, steadily accelerating up to speeds that could keep pace with a car. Just to make sure, Naomi blocks off all the wrong turns with plugs of hardened Clay, ten feet thick and indistinguishable from the lining of the walls, long before the slime train ever reaches them. They spiral down to the lowest level and then head north, taking the most direct possible route to the Canadian-side tunnel entrance where First Naomi is currently de-sliming herself and putting on clothes.
Meanwhile, the gross raccoon is licking slime out of its fur.
The raccoon is deposited in the lap of a man in a wheelchair, and then the group starts leaving the way they came.
Deep underground, Naomi's Tunnelers keep pace with the departing mutants.
It's going to take almost an hour for the kids to reach Canada. In the meantime, she keeps producing new clones, making sure she only hatches one at a time so the distraction won't interfere with her work. It gets easier as the number of Naomis grows. Third hatches Fifth, Fourth hatches Sixth, Second hatches Seventh, Fifth hatches Eighth... she pays close attention, but as far as she can tell, every copy is perfect no matter how many generations stand between her and the original. She stops keeping track of who hatched who when she's satisfied that it really doesn't matter. Her bodies distribute themselves into the tunnels, producing new Tunnelers as fast as they can lay the eggs without sacrificing the mental clarity she needs to extend the tunnels and transport the children and pay attention to that raccoon.
I'm not reading your mind! I'm talking to you. I'm not listening to anything except what you send back on purpose.
That is a long, gross, terrifying, irrelevant story, she says. Wait, are you one of the kids?
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