Authors: Rob Boffard
The footsteps have stopped.
I freeze, listening hard. How long have I been walking? Is he still ahead of me?
But then I hear his breathing, haggard and rough, right next to me, and it’s all I can do not to scream. Instead, I quickly flatten myself against the tunnel wall. I can hear him moving now, a faint rustle of cloth, then the tiny glow of a keypad. He’s up ahead on the opposite side, his back to me. The beeps as he
punches in the code seem as loud as klaxons. There’s a click, and suddenly light floods the tunnel. He steps through, and the door shuts behind him with a resounding slam, plunging the tunnel into darkness again. When the echo fades, there’s the only sound of my heartbeat, so loud that I’m sure he must be able to hear it behind the door.
I hop the tracks, and run my hands over the keypad, mentally
kicking myself for not thinking this far ahead.
Of course
he’d
have a lock on the door. He wasn’t just going to leave it open for anybody to find. I look around, my eyes searching the gloom for anything that could help, but see nothing. Carver would know how to hack this thing, and if I’d waited for him … I swear under my breath, and I’m about to turn back to the keypad when I glance up, and stop
dead.
Surely not even I can be that lucky.
One of the plates in the roof is loose. There’s just enough light to see that it’s pushed very slightly to one side, with darkness beyond the opening.
I have no idea where it goes, or if I’ll even be able to squeeze through, but it’s the only option I’ve got. Getting into it is going to be tricky. I consider tic-taccing off the wall, as I would to
enter the Nest, but that’s no good. It’ll be way too noisy. No, there’s got to be another way.
I look around, and see the struts on the wall next to the door. They’re old and rusted, but look like they’d support my weight. I brace my hands on the outer lips of the strut closest to the hatch, then lean back experimentally. The rust bites into my palms, and the strut groans slightly, but it holds.
I lift my feet onto the wall, and start to pull myself up, hanging back off the strut, my arm muscles flaring in protest. When I reach the top, I very carefully reach one hand back. My fingers catch the edge of the roof plate, lose it, catch it again and pull it towards me. With a creak of old metal, the loose plate slides across the opening.
I tense, take two quick breaths, then throw myself
backwards, grabbing the lip of the opening with both hands. Part of the edge is jagged, slicing into my right palm. Hot blood runs down my wrist, and I have to stifle a howl of pain as I swing backwards. I force myself to use my momentum, and as I begin to swing forwards I pull myself up in one movement.
I’m forced to my stomach almost immediately. The crawlspace
above the opening is tiny, enough
for me to lie prone but no more. It’s thick with wires and cables, and everything has a fine film of dust which tickles my nose. I run my thumb over the wound in my hand, hissing with pain: it’s cut deeply in a ragged line, just where the fingers meet the palm.
One more injury to add to the list
, I think.
Racking up quite a score there
.
The sound of air rushing down the tracks has vanished.
I have no idea if the crawlspace even follows the path Gray took; it could diverge, or swing off in a different direction entirely. Worse, it could split into multiple paths. And – I taste another dose of bitter fear at the thought – there’s no way to turn around. The only way out of here is backwards.
I’ve never had a problem with enclosed spaces – when you live with a million other people in
close quarters, you sort of get used to the idea – but the tunnel ahead seems to tighten as I look at it. My throat twinges – the familiar thirst, biting down again. I shake it off, and begin to crawl, using my arms to pull my body forwards. My jacket hisses as it rubs against the side.
My fingers scrape a wall ahead of me that I can’t see. I run my hands along it, and discover that the path
turns sharply to the right.
There’s no way I’m going to turn the corner prone. I push my body up, leaning hard onto my left side. The zipper of my jacket digs into my waist, an unexpectedly sharp pain that I can do nothing about. I concentrate on slowly inching forward, pushing past the turn: first my head, then my shoulders, squeezing through. A skein of dust falls onto my face from the roof
of the tunnel, tickling my nostrils.
Something moves under my hand. Something alive.
Forcing back a shriek, I rip my hand away, and in the darkness I hear a tiny flutter, a skittering sound as something crawls
along the metal. A bug. A beetle, maybe. One that got lucky and escaped from the buzz box. I shudder as I imagine them breeding, forming colonies in the blackness of the vent systems.
The fear is back, fighting for control.
I’m halfway around the turn, about to reach my arms out and pull my legs around, when I feel it. The vibration. It’s only slight at first, a tiny tremor in the back of my heels, which are forced into the far wall. But it rapidly grows, and the entire crawlspace begins to rumble and shake. The noise is huge, a low rumble that takes hold of a deep part of
me and shakes.
The train. A monorail passing on the tracks behind me. I’m in no danger, but every fibre in my being wants to scream. I try to clamp my hands over my ears and shut off the insane noise, but they’re pushed ahead of me, and I can’t get them back far enough. I lie, trembling, until the train passes, its behemoth rumbling replaced by a high-pitched whine in my ears.
I remain still,
breathing hard for a moment, before reaching out and pulling myself round the corner. The crawlspace is still completely black, and I realise that at some point, if I can’t find a way to Gray, I’m going to have to push myself backwards down the tunnel.
I’ve been crawling way too long. I could be anywhere, maybe even near the outer hull, unprotected by the thick shielding and getting a dose of
lethal radiation. I pause for a moment, panting, the exertion of pulling myself along seeming to catch up with me in one awful moment. Thick, sour saliva coats my mouth. I swallow, and as I do, I hear them: voices. Very faint, but there.
I stop, hardly daring to breathe. For a moment, I think I’ve imagined them, but then they catch the edge of my hearing again. I force myself forwards, pushing
on through the blackness. The voices get louder. I can’t make out the words. One
of the speakers is Gray, I’m sure of it. But who is he talking to?
Around another corner, I see a tiny shaft of light, piercing the darkness of the tunnel and revealing grimy, dirt-blackened walls. The light is coming from a small chink in the tunnel’s bottom panels, a gap which looks like it wasn’t welded properly
and which came loose over time. The voices are louder now; I still can’t make out who Gray is talking to, although I have a good idea who it might be. Slowly, I pull myself along to the gap, and look through.
A room. Brightly lit, with the usual plate-metal floor. A storeroom of some kind. Gray is there. He has his back to me, and he’s talking to his companion, a blur at the edge of my vision.
I can finally hear his words, coming up through the gap in the tiles. “I did what you wanted,” he says.
The other person in the room replies, “No, you didn’t. You screwed up, Arthur.”
I know that voice. It’s the same fluty, gentle tone that offered me a job barely hours ago.
Oren Darnell steps forward, into my field of vision. And as he does so, I catch sight of Prakesh.
He’s behind Darnell,
sprawled on the floor – not bound, but unconscious. My breath catches in my throat. Not just because of him.
Lying next to Prakesh are Yao and Kevin.
Prakesh doesn’t realise he’s awake until he hears the voices. They’re muffled, metallic, but as he slowly fights his way out of the darkness, they become clearer.
“I ask you for one very simple thing, and you can’t deliver,” a man says. “I don’t have a lot of respect for people who can’t keep their promises.”
That’s Mr Darnell
, Prakesh thinks. The thought is fuzzy, indistinct. His
eyes are closed. He tries to open them, but it’s like they’ve been glued shut. For some reason, he finds this very funny. Not that he can laugh; there’s an ache in his throat, a hot ring above his Adam’s apple. It doesn’t seem important.
“You wanted him dead, he got dead!” says another man. And that’s when Prakesh remembers everything. Remembers his boss’s hands around his throat. He is suddenly
awake, more alert than he’s ever been, but his body refuses to obey him. His eyes remain stubbornly shut.
“I also wanted his left eye delivered in such a way that it didn’t attract the attention of
every tracer on Outer Earth
,” Darnell says. “You should have brought it to me yourself, instead of
using a little delivery girl to do it for you. Now I have to kill a lot of people to make this go
away.”
This is all wrong
, Prakesh thinks. With an effort of will, he finds that he can force his eyelids open a crack. Sharp light lances through, and he closes them again. Pain stabs deep into his skull, takes up residence, starts beating out a drum line.
“Don’t worry about them,” says the other man. He sounds confident, but his voice tremors ever so slightly. “The quicksleep did the trick,
didn’t it? We can deal with them whenever we want.”
“They belong to the same crew as the tracer you hired,” Darnell says. “It’s not just them. Are you beginning to understand the problems your failure has caused?”
“But you got the eye, didn’t you?” A sullen note has crept into Gray’s voice. “You can crack the scanner. So what’s the problem?”
It’s all Prakesh can do to open his eyes again. He
focuses every ounce of energy he possesses into the muscles around his eyes. He makes them stay open. Slowly, with every moment bringing agony, Prakesh lets the light in.
He’s on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He can just make out Oren Darnell, upside-down above him, and he can see the person he’s talking to – a bald man, his skin shiny with sweat.
Darnell’s eyes are cold and black, and
the face they’re set into seems made of steel. “Do you know why you’ve been left alone for so long? Why the stompers never cottoned on to this nasty little habit of yours?”
The other man moans, sweat dripping down his face.
“We spent a long time recruiting sleepers,” Darnell says. “People we could count on. And you – you were the only one who knew about killing.”
It’s then that Prakesh sees
movement. Up in the ceiling. There’s a smudge on one of the plates – no, not a smudge, a
gap. And there’s something behind it. An eye. Someone is watching them. Someone is looking down. The eye isn’t focused on him; it’s looking away, flicking between Darnell and his accomplice. Prakesh wills his eyes to stay open, wills the other eye to look at him.
The eye shifts. Prakesh gets a quick glimpse
of a nose, the edge of a mouth. And at that moment, the person in the ceiling snaps into focus.
No, Riley
, Prakesh thinks.
Don’t come in here
.
“You could have been very useful in the days to come,” Darnell says.
“I still can!”
“I disagree,” says Darnell, and whips a knife into the side of the man’s neck.
Prakesh can’t scream. He can’t do anything. As blood spatters onto the floor, dotting
his cheek, he feels his grip on his eyelids slipping. Then it fails completely, and the world goes dark.
The move is so quick, so immediate, that it takes a second for me to realise what Darnell’s done. Gray gives a horrible, strangled cough, as short and sharp as the blade itself. Darnell pulls it out, with a horrible sucking sound that reaches up into the crawlspace like a long, black tendril. I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from crying out.
He pulls a rag from his pocket and
wipes off the knife, running it gently down the blade. His expression is calm, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, and with a sickening feeling I understand that the sweat isn’t from guilt or apprehension, just exertion. He looks as if he’s just hefted a heavy crate.
At his feet, Gray shudders and jerks as he dies. A gout of dark blood is spreading across the floor.
I’ve got to get in there.
I’m the only person who knows where Prakesh and the Twins are. Going back isn’t an option; it’ll take far too long to squeeze myself backwards in the black crawlspace, and even then I’ll be stuck facing the locked door with no other way to enter, while Darnell does to them what he did to Gray. I’ll have to keep moving forwards, but even as
the thought occurs I realise with a start that I can’t
do that either. The crawlspace I’m in goes right over the middle of the room, and I can’t move along it silently enough. If I make even the slightest noise while pulling myself along, I’m done for. I see the knife rammed upwards through the thin metal and into my stomach. Darnell could do that and walk away, leaving me to bleed out in the duct, with no one to hear my screams.
Through the gap,
I see him turn to the Twins, his knife in hand, and my heart leaps up into my throat. But all he does is look at them for a long moment before striding out of view, stepping over Gray’s body as he does so. I hear the door below me open, and close again. Faint footsteps echo up into my crawlspace as Darnell heads back towards the tracks.
Very quietly, I take a few deep breaths, and then pull myself
forwards through the tunnel. The noise of my elbows and knees banging the metal seems far too loud, but I’m pretty sure that Darnell won’t hear them, and before long I’ve reached the wall at the other end of the room.
I badly want to rest, to lie in the tunnel and let my aching arms and legs take a break. No chance.
Ahead of me, the tunnel splits in a T-junction, and I impulsively take the right
fork, bending my body past the turn, my fingers feeling ahead of me for changes in the tunnel floor. And suddenly, my fingers collide with something: a raised knot in the floor, gritty with rust. I pause, and slowly move my hands over the surface. I thought my eyes would adjust to the dark, but after the piercing light of the peephole I’m blind again.