Stray

by Evan Fuller

  2.

  Burrows

  The single incandescent bulb in the space that served as bedroom, living room, and kitchen emitted a low, wavering buzz whenever it was on. The light itself wavered too: it was the sort of bulb whose glass was clear enough that the shape of the filament was visible inside it. The room it illuminated in varying shades of yellow, brightening or dimming as other lights throughout the building were switched off and on, was small enough to induce claustrophobia, but at least it was usually kept clean. Over the past weeks it had taken on an uncharacteristic messiness.

  The scraping sound of the bathroom door opening roused Lydia from her dazed stare at the filament. She lay back down on the bed and pretended to be asleep. Of course, it was no good: when she heard his footsteps coming in her direction, she hoped he’d just lie down and let her be, but she knew it was a dim hope at best. True to form, he sat down on the bed and shook her arm (probably trying, poorly, to be gentle) and asked, “Are you okay?”

  Lydia opened her eyes long enough for him to tell she was pointedly avoiding eye contact. “I’m fine, Mikul.”

  He gave a shrug to mirror her passive aggression and slouched staring at his hands for a while. Lydia pulled away and sat up, observing him in glances. Sullen, passably attractive, with shower water still trickling down his shoulders from his hair. Lydia tried to recall why she’d let him come over. She failed and decided to attempt conversation to kill the awkward silence. “What time do you have work today?” When are you leaving?

  Another shrug. “Three.”

  “What’s going on with your promotion? Any word on that?”

  Sullen glare. “I told you about it last night. Remember? I’m on hold for another month after I messed that motor up.”

  “Oh, right.” It was with the same certain people that both quiet and conversation were most unbearable. Now that he mentioned it, she did vaguely remember a story about some kind of fire after Mikul had done his job in a rush. He was learning automobile repair and might make a good living doing it, but he’d been an apprentice for three years now and couldn’t seem to advance beyond that. “I’m sure you’ll get it soon.”

  “Yeah, I better.” It was with a suspicious sideways glance that Mikul returned the question: “Do you work today?”

  Lydia shook her head. “I might end up going over there later, though,” she added, “just to check up on things.”

  “Of course.” Mikul plodded across the room, nearly hitting his head on the low-hanging lightbulb. Lydia was glad he didn’t. The apartment was windowless, situated on the inside of the massive complex. Even though it was late morning, the room would be pitch black in the absence of electric light.

  “Will you stop it?” Lydia replied. “We’ve been over this.”

  “And you’ve never told me everything,” he accused. “You have something going on with him, don’t you?”

  “I already told you, no.” Not anymore. “He’s my boss, Mikul, and my friend, and if you aren’t going to drop this…” she trailed off. She didn’t even have the energy to argue with him anymore. She hadn’t quite decided whether he was worth any effort to keep.

  “I don’t get what that dago needs so much help with,” Mikul continued. “He’s got that big house but he’s the only one who lives there. He doesn’t have company over. He doesn’t even work, he paints…”

  At least he’s good at what he does, Lydia wanted to reply, but she caught herself and looked away again instead.

  “… and besides, nobody believes that’s what he’s really doing over there. There are all sorts of rumors, you know, about you and him. People say you guys are involved in illegal stuff, stuff I have a right to know about if you and me are together.” His eyes narrowed. “What exactly happens in that house?”

  “If you’re not going to trust me when I answer you, what’s the point?” She put on an offended look. It was a trick that wouldn’t work on a more astute questioner, but Mikul lumbered back to the bed and sat down beside her. “I’m sorry,” he said in that hurt-puppy way, “it’s just that I care about you so much…”

  Lydia barely heard him. She was still thinking about the lightbulb. If Mikul had broken it, she could afford to replace it; it was just the inconvenience of it. She didn’t want for money. Emery paid her well enough, and if she asked for more, he’d almost certainly grant the request. With a slight raise, she could probably even move to a better apartment in the complex, one on a higher floor, with a floor-to-ceiling glass window in a separate living room. She was just so used to spending all her time at the estate that she’d never needed much more than a place to sleep. It was only in the two months since Timothy’s death that she’d been spending whole days in this cramped room.

  “I love you,” Mikul was saying now. Lydia thought she should probably respond to that. She didn’t return the phrase, but she graced him with a glance and a sympathetic “I know.”

  Maybe he’d been expecting something else. Apparently frustrated, Mikul returned to his previous line of question, albeit with a gentler tone. “So,” he ventured, “how is he, anyway? Your boss, I mean.”

  It was Lydia’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s the way he always is.”

  –

  The first stages had been simpler than expected. The hiding place came first: the plan had been to make a false wall in the basement of the estate, concealing a new partition that housed four bunk beds and a storage area for dry foods. But they had no sooner begun to demolish the wall than they discovered that Michael Garis, the estate’s eccentric former owner, had beaten them to it. Rather than constructing a space from scratch, they had only to renovate the cobwebbed hideaway that already lay beneath the foyer. And then the real work had begun: the digging of the tunnel that would lead from Rittenhouse to the outside.

  Water and time had eroded the integrity of the sewer wall to the point that once they started digging, it came down almost too easily. Ensuring that the tunnel didn’t collapse on their heads took more effort than actually digging it. With picks and wrecking bars, they had torn a walkway into the division between the sewer and the subway tunnel in a matter of days.

  It was only once they’d passed through it that they began to understand the real difficulty of the task before them.

  Emery’s plan had been to create two doorways in the wall: the one they had already completed, just fifty feet from the manhole that led to the estate, and the other further down, near where the refugees from New Providence entered the sewer when they came to Emery. In doing so, he hoped to bypass the squalid, perilous labyrinth of the sewer system almost entirely, creating a faster and far safer means of transit into and out of the city. The maps that Michael Garis, Emery’s second cousin once removed, had left behind in the estate’s study indicated that the section of the tunnel Emery planned to utilize was closed off on both ends. That meant it should be safe both from discovery by Rittenhouse’s authorities and from the threat of the cannibals who resided in many of New Providence’s other old subway tunnels.

  What the map failed to show was that within this space, a portion of the tunnel had collapsed. What had begun increasingly to seem like a short and simple project suddenly became one of indefinite length: with no way to see how far ahead the collapse stretched, Emery and the other residents of the estate had worked for nearly two months since beginning the project, never knowing if they would find another open section beyond each day’s cleared rubble.

  Everyone who lived at the estate was working on the tunnel for at least a few hours each day now, but presently the rest of them were inside eating lunch. Emery had opted to keep working and told them to bring something down to him when they were finished preparing it. He was finding it harder and harder to get away from the tunnel: though he was unsure how much further the collapse went, every day had to be taking him closer to the other side.

  He’d been clearing out broken-up rubble with a shovel, but presently he dropped it and sat down on
the packed earth floor. He'd long since learned to ignore the blisters, but working week after week in the frigid space was taking its toll on his hands. His fingers were locked in place as if still grasping the shovel, and only after a minute did they sluggishly open. Fatigue was another constant. Worse was his right side, where the bullet wound from his encounter with the drug lord Three Dogs had begun to ache as he dug. He wondered if it would ever heal completely.

  Emery stared at the stark glare of the little gas lantern that lit his work; besides it, no light entered the tunnel. But after a long moment he saw the beam of a flashlight cutting through the haze of dust that thickened the air. “Carrot?” he called. Carrot was the son of an outsider named Clay, whom Emery had met on his last venture outside Rittenhouse in the autumn. More recently, hearing of Emery’s newfound eagerness for more residents, Clay had sent his son by way of the king to become the newest resident of the estate. Carrot wasn’t diseased, merely malnourished and ill-equipped to weather the winter. Emery could fix that problem, at least. In all likelihood, the boy would be returned to his family come spring.

  The beam turned upward to light its bearer’s face, ghastly white against the black backdrop. “Sorry, just me,” Oliver replied as he came closer. His pale face, inky hair and gray eyes looked unearthly in the flashlight’s glow, magnifying the contrast.

  “Cool.” Emery grunted as he pushed himself to his feet. “You have some food for me?”

  Oliver shook his head. “It’s not done yet. You can come up for it, anyway. I was coming down to tell you that Juliet is here to talk to you. She says it’s something important.”

  “If it’s that important, send her down here to tell me. I need to keep working.”

  “Yeah,” Oliver agreed, “because you were getting so much done sitting around just now.”

  “I was taking a break for a minute. If I come up, it’ll take me half the day to get back down here. There’s a difference.”

  Oliver barked a little single-note laugh. “I don’t think anything could keep you from coming down here for half a day. She’s not going to be happy, but I’ll tell her.”

  “Good,” Emery said. “And have her bring me something to eat.”

  He was back to digging by the time Juliet came down, and he only knew she was there when her flashlight beam bled blueish white into the yellow light of the lantern. Emery turned to regard her: a thin, pretty girl with long dark hair, mostly unsoiled but with a streak of mud across her cheek and a displeased look on her face. She was wearing a pair of green rain boots that clearly didn’t match her outfit and holding a green apple, which she proceeded to lob in Emery’s direction the moment he faced her. He caught it, fumbled, caught it again. “You want a drink with that?” she asked sharply.

  “Sorry.” Emery’s tempestuous hair was tied back, but a single brown lock had escaped captivity; he pushed it aside. “I was just in the middle of this.”

  “As if you ever aren’t.” She looked around at the tunnel, the piles of rubble and the bars supporting the ceiling of the space they’d cleared so far. “You never showed up the other day.”

  “Sorry, yeah.” Emery glanced at his filthy boots. “I got a bit caught up here, and my hands were aching anyway so I didn’t think I’d be able to get much painting done. I thought I told Lydia to send you a message.”

  “Yeah, well, she must have forgotten. I hope you had a good birthday down here in the dark.” Juliet came a couple of steps closer. “There was a Unity inspector loitering outside, by the way. He looked really inconspicuous.”

  Emery decided to ignore his quickening heartbeat. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “Listen, I came to tell you something important. I figure you haven’t heard this yet if you’ve been down here all day. You might want to be sitting down…” she looked around again. “On second thought, I have no clue where you’re going to do that.”

  “I can sit here.” Emery sank to the ground again, assuming a cross-legged position. “What is it?”

  “Rex Muratore had another heart attack last night.” It was his third. The beloved Roccetti sovereign had been ailing recently, but he had approached his health crises with the smiling tenacity for which he was known. “He was taken to Rittenhouse General like before, but he got a lot worse overnight. He passed this morning.”

  Emery found himself back on his feet in a dizzying instant. “The Rex is dead?”

  Juliet nodded, wide-eyed now. “Sixteen years.” The regent had ruled since both of them were children, since long before Emery had come south to Rittenhouse from his hometown of Ambler. Rex Muratore had been a fact of life, as much a fixture of the city as its walls. Most days Emery didn’t give him a thought; still, news of his death was shocking. “The hospital staff say he passed in his sleep, at least,” she added.

  Emery nodded. “I guess that’s good,” he said. “So what happens now?”

  “There’s going to be a funeral service Friday afternoon. Every Roccetti business in Rittenhouse is going to be closed; the whole circle is coming out.” She shrugged. “Chances are a lot of people from other circles will be coming out too. He was well loved. You think you’ll be able to get away from this hole long enough to make it out?”

  “Of course,” Emery said.

  “Good.” She looked him over. “I hope you still own something that’s not mud-stained.”