Authors: Matt Stephens
Connie kept reading. "Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life."
Tecca sniffed and shifted over, to sit closer to Connie. He leaned against her, looking for pictures in the book, and Connie was suddenly quite certain that the boy had never seen a real garden before.
~oo00oo~
Vincent was awake and clear for the first time, and had no desire to go back to sleep. Yasi was sitting opposite him, staring intently down at a notepad. "Hey."
She looked up from her notes and put them away. "Hey." She reached over to a bowl beside his bed. "The Healers say you need to eat something."
"When am I going to meet these Healers exactly?"
"You have met them. They've been treating you and checking your bandages."
"The big Bird-People? They're your medical staff?"
"It's a Renaissance style outfit. The big mask is where they store their supplies like a First Aid Kit. They… like their privacy."
Vincent couldn't even shake his head without groaning. "I couldn't eat."
"Of course not, your teeth are barely holding themselves to the inside of your head as it is." Yasi said without pity. "Nevertheless, you need something. I brought you some broth. If you ache too much to sit up, tilt your head back and let it trickle down your throat."
Vincent started to argue when she put the spoon to his lips and the decision was made. A moment later he gagged again.
"It tastes dreadful." She conceded reasonably. "But it's good for you."
"Hey."
They both looked up and found Connie coming over to them. "Um. This isn't what it looks like." He said reflexively, waving at Yasi.
Connie barely blinked. "It looks like she's forcing you to eat something nasty."
"Well, then it's exactly what it looks like." Yasi responded dryly, and handed her the bowl. "Is he always like this about taking his medicine?"
"Oh God yes." Connie agreed instantly and took Yasi's place beside the bed.
Vincent rolled his eyes at his girlfriend and quickly regretted it. "Well. Your mood has improved."
"Archivist has been giving your girl here the nickel tour." Yasi explained. "Or at least, as much of it as we're willing to let her see."
"I'm glad I went." Connie admitted. "I know where that whispering comes from now… It's not even remotely scary. I thought I was just being paranoid, always feeling watched."
"It's not paranoia." Yasi promised. "We
have
got people watching. They're there to protect you."
"You think the men who attacked us are coming here?" Vincent asked.
"Well… that's a more interesting question than you think. One that we don't need to discuss here. The walls have ears all over The Chapel. We've got a room set up for you two." Yasi nodded. "Give me a minute and we can shift Vincent there."
~oo00oo~
Vincent's recovery was going well, and he was able to walk under his own power; though not quickly.
"Oh thank god…" Vincent breathed as they entered the Twelfth Level. "I was afraid I remembered it wrong."
"By the way Vincent…" Archivist said warmly. "Just in case nobody said it yet… Welcome back."
Aching as he was, Vincent wanted to laugh joyfully. He was back in the Underside, the place he'd dreamed about for three straight years.
Yasi waved over at the baskets on the ropelines, and the Lostkind there held one for him. Between Connie and Archivist, he was able to walk stiffly into the basket, and Yasi worked the counterweights, raising them off the ground, toward one of the chambers.
Having seen it before, Vincent was able to pick out more detail this time. The baskets that they used for elevators worked by counterweights on ropes.
So it's not so much an elevator, as it is a cable car…
Yasi selected one of the dozen odd ropes hanging by the controls, and wound it around the counterweight cogs. She pulled a lever and somewhere beneath them the weights released, and just like that their basket was off the ground, winching its way up the rope Yasi selected.
"How many rooms are there?" Connie asked, curious about this strange wonderland, despite her earlier unease.
"Hundreds." Archivist responded. "The rope network is strung across them all. Some only lead up to the next set of ropes. You pick the right combination of ropes, you wind them around the counterweights yourself, and you can get carried to any chamber on the level."
"A do-it-yourself rope swing elevator." Vincent laughed.
Connie pointed out across the empty space. There were hundreds of ropes, and a lot of them had people climbing on them like kids at a jungle gym.
Yasi followed her gaze and shrugged. "Who can wait for an elevator when the stairs are right there?"
Connie felt embarrassed about that briefly. So did Vincent. They always took the elevator, no matter how long they had to wait.
Their basket was moving slowly, the weights moving with a steady pace, and Connie finally got a sense of the scale of the Twelfth Level. The dome was as big as a skyscraper, with the chambers facing into the open space. If she squinted her eyes and adjusted her glasses, she had a view of people living in those rooms.
"You know one thing I can't figure out?" Vincent said idly. "And I've been trying to work it out since I last saw the place."
"What's that?"
"Where's the River lead?" Vincent waved at the water far below the Seven Steps. "I mean; we're underground and water all flows downhill; right?"
Archivist chuckled. "The Panama Canal acts to make traffic between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean travel two ways; upstream and down. More than a million ships have passed through it over the years. With effort, water
can
flow uphill. Construction on Panama began in 1904."
"Roughly the same time the Underside was made, give or take a few years." Vincent nodded; looking down at the water again. "You're telling me the whole place is protected by Canal Locks? Enough to take the run-off of half Uptown out to the Hudson?"
"Most of it goes there anyway." Archivist shrugged it off. "It's not like the whole city trickles down to us. Just a few tunnels that we use; and even then only to get in and get out."
"Yeah; but you use the River for dumping, don't you?"
"Not as much as everyone makes it sound." Archivist explained. "In the words of Coleridge: 'Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.'"
Connie put it together. "You
don't know
how it works, do you?"
Archivist was silent for a moment. "Not for sure." He admitted; and shook his head. "The Riverfolk took over the whole area long ago; and we..." He chuckled despite himself. "We don't think about it that much. The early history of the place was kept secret; because that's what the place was meant to be. The Twelfth Level doesn't flood; the water stays down where it should. Maybe it gets back up there somewhere, maybe it flows deeper until it hits some groundwater table, who knows? It's worked long enough that we don't have to worry about it. How many New Yorkers ask themselves where garbage or sewerage or whatever else goes? Out of sight, out of mind."
"Like everything else here?" Vincent guessed.
"Like
everything
Lostkind."
"And nobody knows
any
of this is
here
…" Connie whispered in open awe.
"You know how impossible it is to keep a secret these days." Yasi said. "We hide the place the same way you hide a person. You keep them hidden, you make sure that nobody knows where to find them, and you let everyone forget they were ever there. The only way to keep a secret is to never have anyone talk about it."
"You keep making comparisons between the city and a person." Connie observed.
"A city is a living thing." Yasi told him warmly, with obvious affection for her home. "Any city is a complex system. It lives and breathes like a person. Every person in it is a cell. They work, they function, they can starve or receive nourishment. The city consumes fuel, puts out waste, it thinks and reacts to stimuli. And as your body does, it does so automatically. The city has a pulse. A rhythm. It circulates and it adapts and it grows."
"So where do you fit in?" Connie asked with interest as the basket came to a halt against the dome wall, the opening to the nearest room easily close enough to step into as they helped Vincent stand..
"We're the ghosts. The subconscious. The gremlins."
There was the sound of a child giggling from somewhere in the chamber they entered, and Connie turned, peering toward the opposite end, where the lights were low. Something moved in the edge of her vision, and by the time her eyes focused, there was nothing there.
Connie shivered unconsciously. A fact that did not go unnoticed by Archivist.
"Whose room is this?" Vincent asked with interest. "It not empty, there are things on the shelves, food on the table, coverings against the walls…"
"You wouldn't recognize the tenants' name." Yasi shook her head. "But you met him. Last night he took a spear to the back in your apartment."
Connie felt her jaw drop open at the easygoing way she said it. "And… what? So his room opened up?"
Yasi was not impressed. "What? Space is a premium business down here. You two need someplace private, and
I'm
the one that lost a man, so you don't get to be pissed at us." Yasi went over to the wall and considered one of the hanging draperies. "Besides..." Yasi drawled. "New York is an old city. You've stayed in a dead guy's place before."
"Yasi." Archivist chided her. He and Keeper had been following this silently from the entrance.
"Icewater." Connie said to Yasi with disapproval. "Nothing but Icewater in your veins."
"If you two could just…not." Keeper waved a hand vaguely. "There are a few things we need to sort out."
"Yes we do." Yasi agreed. But instead of speaking, she moved to the deeper part of the chamber, half-disappearing into the gloom. A moment later the rest of the space was lit up by a warm yellow glow, from a few lamps. They were big brass things, which would have been at home in a turn of the century manor.
Looking around, Connie got a sense of the size of a room at last. It was about twice the size of their apartment's living room. Stone walls, with draperies and rugs, lamps to provide light and warmth. There was no sign of a bathroom or shower, but there was a stone shelf set into the wall at the back, which seemed to be a kitchenette. Whoever had owned the place had set up his own shelves, his own wardrobe… Like everything else, his personal effects and furniture was a patchwork collection of all possible styles.
With the golden light of the lamps, the room was actually quite welcoming, and the three of them sat down to talk.
"First things first." Yasi said. "Vincent, did you ever tell Owen about us? You and me? Not where I came from, but… that I existed at all?"
"No, I didn't tell anyone. Why?"
"Because I just questioned him… and he knew. He knew we had met before. He knew that we knew each other before the Attack." She threw a look at Archivist. "Somebody told him."
"Well, we already knew there was somebody on the inside connected to this." Archivist was not surprised.
"Connected to what?" Vincent said quietly. "What happened? What were those things that attacked me and Connie?"
Yasi nodded, having expected the question for a full day, and she leaned forward. "Not long after this place began, a group of us went deep. Deeper than anyone has ever gone, deeper than we dare go now. At the lowest level, there is a River. Nobody knows how deep it goes, but it provides us with water at its head, and it carries out everything we don't use and can't get rid of any other way. It feeds into the Hudson, and is fed by many many places in this city, where water seeps through. When those first explorers got there, they stayed too long. When they tried to come back up, they started getting the bends. The depth meant that their bodies couldn't take the decompression when they came back closer to surface level. When you go the top of a mountain, your ears pop. You go too high, your blood literally fizzes. Down at that great River, the same thing happens. To the Riverfolk, surface level is Everest. Seven years ago, there was something of a revolution in the Underside. I was one of the newest Shinobi to graduate. My Sensei was killed in the first few minutes of the attack. They boiled up out of the River, trying to take us by surprise. They succeeded. I gathered what was left of us into a counter-attack, and we managed to keep the Underside safe."
"The Underside's Boogeymen." Vincent hummed.
"So if they can't survive the surface, what the hell were they doing halfway between our apartment and the Starbright Restaurant?" Connie demanded.
"That's a very good question." Archivist agreed reasonably. "One we were hoping you'd be able to answer for us."