Down in the Dim Kingdoms
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…
Quasar links out; the story lives on Lightspeed, where the author gets the click.