by Jada Fisher
“Mickey?” My head jerked in the direction of what I knew was my sister’s voice. “Bro—”
“I heard her. Already on it.”
Bronn took a sharp turn down the next hall and barely a beat later, my sister was running up to us. “Oh, you’re safe!”
“Not sure that’s the right word for the situation,” Bronn said tightly. “How far are we from one of the escape routes?”
“I, uh, not far, I think. Maybe—”
“We’re not going to one of the escape routes.” Almost out of nowhere, Mal appeared from under a collapsed beam. “Follow me. I realized something a week or so ago.”
“Wait, what?” Mickey asked, but Mal was already taking off. Bronn followed her without question, which was a relief because I wasn’t sure I could handle an argument on top of an attack.
“What’s even going on?” Mickey asked, looking up after a particularly violent shake. “We’re so far underground. He couldn’t possibly be digging down this low, can he?”
“You haven’t seen him,” I groused, my head spinning. Goodness knew that the image of that awful, evil creature was burned into my mind. His massive, rotting carcass, the open pustules and broken patches of skin.
“I don’t think he’s directly attacking us,” Mal said. “I think he’s messing with the city and the earth is reacting.”
“Messing with the city?”
“Yeah, you know. Drawing on energy that’s not meant for him. Disrupting the flow of things. You suddenly change how things work and the ground ain’t gonna be happy about it.” Her tone grew thoughtful, which made it hard for me to concentrate on it. Gosh, my head was spinning. “I read about something like that happening back in my world. How there were unprecedented earthquakes and thousands died in that. It’s part of what helped hobble the resistance right off the bat. Didn’t even stand a chance.”
“Wait, the anti-humanists learned how to abuse the magic in your world?”
“No, but destroying half of the dragon population certainly did a number, I imagine. Also, heard they killed the last oracle about twenty years before I was born.”
“Huh.” That was about all I could manage.
Everything sort of faded into a hubbub of noise, flashing lights, and fallen debris. I was aware that Bronn stumbled a couple of times and that my pain level was rising bit by bit, but none of it seemed to be able to stick.
Man, I wasn’t going to miss being drugged up. Even though I was relatively coherent, I wasn’t myself. Not entirely. Especially considering that my nighttime meds usually were a bit stronger than my daytime ones.
Was there a time where I had ever been a threat? Someone that people looked to for protection? It seemed like another lifetime. I couldn’t do anything to help anyone. Even myself. I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Hey, so where is it we’re going if not the escape route?”
“Old waste tunnel.”
“Waste tunnel?” Mickey snapped. “You are aware that Davie’s immune system is incredibly compromised right now as she recovers, right? Do you want her to get a staph infection?! Because that’s how you get a staph infection.”
“You act like I know what those things are,” Mal said flatly. “Anyways, I said old waste tunnel. From what I found out, it was decommissioned less than ten years after the dwarves dug it out. They replaced it with an entirely new system. A more sustainable one. Ain’t nobody’s poop been in it longer than any of us or our parents were alive.”
There was another cracking sound and a chunk of ceiling slammed down onto Bronn’s shoulder, jostling the both of us. He recovered quickly, however, and strode forward. “Let’s go then.”
And we did. Maybe we were running. Maybe we were walking. I didn’t have a good sense of our speed or how we were moving through space. Or at least I didn’t until it sounded like there was a boom of thunder right above us and I was thrown to the ground.
Ow.
It was weird feeling pain when I was full of so many drugs. It was like I could feel it, but it didn’t quite reach my brain. Trippy.
“Is everyone alright?” Mal asked from somewhere beside me. I tried turning my head to the side, but mostly I just saw darkness. And there was…. Something pressing into my chest? I raised my arms to pat at it, but I couldn’t quite interpret what was going on underneath my fingers. It was hard, solid, but very…crumbly?
“Davie is pinned!” That was Mickey. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t a big deal, but I was pretty sure that I was just murmuring about peer pressure. “Help me get her out.”
“I’ve got this.”
There was a shifting sound, then grating, and then I could breathe normally again. My body grew warm and realized maybe I had been a little more crushed than I had thought.
“Hey, are you alright?” Bronn asked, scooping me back up again. I wanted to answer him, I really did, but everything was so swirly and fast and jumbled together.
He really messed you up, huh?
My head lolled back, hanging over the edge of Bronn’s strong forearm to see my own personal reaper standing close to us. I tried to point, but I mostly ended up sort of half-smacking myself in the face.
“Drugs,” I said in the way of an explanation.
Yeah, I see that.
“You come for me?” I asked, blinking slowly. Except I forgot that I was blinking about halfway through it and only remembered to open my eyes back up after what was probably a solid minute.
It made sense that she was finally there to collect me. I’d asked her for more time, and she’d given it. And in the meantime, I’d lost my best friend, my arm, and some chunk of my cognitive function. If there was ever a time I was out of excuses for her to extend my already artificially long life, we had definitely arrived at that moment.
No. The opposite, actually. I need you to hold on, Davie.
“No fair.”
“Davie, are you alright?” That was Mickey. She sounded concerned, which I guessed I would be too if I heard only half of the conversation I was having with a shepherd of death.
I know it’s hard right now. And that you’re not exactly yourself. But I think that you and your friends are the only ones who have the tools to stop the rotted dragon.
“Stop him? He’s already here.” She knew that. She was there…wasn’t she? Was she the one that had cut my arm off? I… I was pretty sure that I remembered something like that. “Can’t stop that.”
“Less worrying and more running,” I faintly heard Mal say. “Come on, we’re almost there.”
It was strange. I was mostly certain that my friends were all having an intense escape during a tunnel collapse, but I was so removed from it. So removed from it that I was having a calm, if slightly stunted, relationship with the grim reaper.
A grim reaper?
The grim reaper?
Was there more of her or was she the only one? Was she oracle specific? I should have probably asked her more questions about things.
There’s still hope, okay? I know it doesn’t seem like it, but— She cut herself off, skull face looking up, dark smoking swirling around her. I have to go. I’ll return to you later. Look, if anyone can find a way around this, it’s you. Got it? You’re basically a god of loopholes, Davie Masters.
“Pffft god of loopiness maybe.”
Nobody laughed at my joke. Oh well. Their loss.
I’m going to try to help you, okay? It’s going to break a lot of the rules, but I can’t have you like this. You can’t even think, can you?
Hey! I could think. Just like…not particularly well. But I wanted to know how she would act when she had several concussions all chained together in a single day combined with losing her arm, being poisoned, and otherwise getting the absolute crap beaten out of her by a couple dragons.
But the figure that was supposed to be haunting me vanished before I could tell her off, leaving my head bouncing up and down during what was probably a fraught dash to safety.
“Down here. Jus
t need you to rip off this grate, dragon boy.”
“Um, Mal, if you need Bronn to rip off the grate, how do you know where this leads? Or that it’s going to be safe?” Mickey asked.
“Well, last time, I happened to have a whole lot of time and an old screwdriver on me. I have neither of those now, so lifty please. ASAP.”
“I’m going to put you down, Davie,” Bronn said gently.
“I’ve got her,” Mickey answered quickly. I was going to tell my older but much smaller sister that there was no way she would be able to hold me up, but then Bronn was setting me on the ground and she was holding me up.
Huh, I really didn’t want to know what I looked like. Big ol’ yikes there.
There was an ear-piercing screech followed by more rattling, and I found myself being picked up by Bronn again. This time, however, he adjusted me so that I was over his shoulders, in the strangest fireman’s carry I had ever been in.
Then we descended into the dark. I couldn’t see anything then and I was pretty sure it wasn’t because of my injuries. That period of darkness seemed to last forever, with only the sound of my friends breathing around me and the scrape of their shoes on something that most definitely seemed to be rusted metal.
And it was right about then that I realized it wasn’t the right number of sounds. We were short.
“Where’re the others?” I managed to ask, jerking my head up—or was it down? I wasn’t quite sure of my orientation—and looking around as if that would help.
“What was that, Davie?”
I swallowed, trying to summon some moisture to my mouth and get myself together enough to not only remember what I had just said but also repeat it.
“Krisjian. Sokhanya,” I said instead. It seemed to get the point across enough for Mal to answer.
“Sokhanya and I were studying together when all this happened. She went to fetch Krisjian and bring him back here.”
“She knows about this place?” Mickey asked as Bronn finally stepped down onto solid ground.
“Yeah, I brought her here after I found it. Figured it would be important in the case of an emergency.”
“Well, I’d say this is an emergency.” Bronn pulled me down from his shoulder, resuming his more comfortable carry that made me feel less like a sack of potatoes. “How are we doing, Davie?”
“M’fine,” I answered honestly. Because I really was. Sure, there was an underlying panic, but it was so buried under everything else that I really couldn’t take the time to think about it.
“Anybody got a torch?”
“I have my phone,” Mickey answered. “The cell towers are down but it still works as a pretty nice flashlight.”
“I can see just fine,” Bronn said, striding forward. “And it looks exactly like Mal said. We’re in basically what they used as an old septic tank and runoff system.”
“Gross.”
I couldn’t tell if Bronn smiled at my remark, but I felt like he did and that was all that mattered.
“That’s nice that you can, but we need to if you don’t want us all holding onto your belt and stumbling around.”
“…right. I knew that.”
There was a flash and then I had to close my eyes against the brightness, the simple light of the phone blinding me like it was the sun itself. I was pretty sure that I was drifting in and out of consciousness after that, the dull shakes left over from the collapsing systems above leaking into my dreams, because when I tried to open my eyes, there was definitely a thin layer of crust on them.
Still definitely very gross. I wanted a bath. And not the soft, almost too-tender sponge baths my sister had been helping me with, but a real, honest-to-God soak. Maybe even with a bath bomb. Man, I definitely regretted that my almost-drowning followed by teleportation with Sokhanya had me avoiding tubs for a while. What a bummer.
“Is this a good place to stop for a while?” Mickey asked. I could tell through my eyelids that she was shining the light on my face to look at it and I tried to give her a comforting smile. Pretty sure it didn’t come across that way, however. “I don’t feel any more tremors.”
“I think… Hold up a minute. Can I see your phone?”
“Sure.”
I brought a hand up and somehow managed the dexterity to rub my eyes open just in time to see a fuzzy Mal take my sister’s phone and shine it up into a corner of the underground room we were in.
It wasn’t anything too huge, but it was a couple of heads taller than Bronn and big enough for us to spread out. I could see a couple areas where the walls were cracked and the support beams above were bowed in the middle, but all in all, the structure was very sound.
“This looks really familiar,” Mal said, walking the perimeter. “I feel like… Do any of you know where we might be in the city?”
“I’m not exactly overly familiar with human architecture.” That was Bronn, of course.
“Nope. I can try to see if my GPS can pinpoint where we are, but I think we’re too far down for that. And again, that whole cell tower not doing so great thing.”
Mal let out a resigned swear, rubbing her chin, before heading out. “Hold on, you wait here and see if the others catch up. I think… I think I may be on to something.”
There was no further debate after that, the smallest of our group taking off before anyone could say anything. Things went a little wibbly around the edges again, but I could feel the drugs slowly wearing off as the minutes ticked by. It was like becoming aware of myself in increments that I didn’t know had passed until they were gone completely, so the whole journey was rather surreal.
As I was becoming lucid enough to worry about withdrawal if I was suddenly cut off from my med supply, I heard a group of footsteps approaching rapidly.
Bronn was on his feet instantly, somehow depositing me into my sister’s lap without jostling me painfully, and snarling. There was a yelp and then the familiar artificial light of a cell phone illuminating us.
“Krisjian!” Mickey said, recognizing the youngest oracle from where he stood by the flashlight holder. “You made it.”
He nodded. “Sokhanya found me and we managed to gather some people. Not a lot, but we’ve got some emergency supplies and the like. We were just trying to conserve our battery power since Sok here seemed to know exactly where she was going.”
As if she heard him, the oracle came over to me, her fingers traveling my face. It was almost a bit ironic. While it felt like I had faded away to almost nothing, she seemed more alive than ever. Her hair had filled out, with no more bald or thin patches. Someone had cut it, leaving it looking healthy where it rested in a bob against her sharp chin.
Her body had filled out, looking less like a walking skeleton and more like a young teen. Still not great since she was older than me, but it would take years for that part of her to recover. Her cheeks had filled out, however, and her eyes were bright and no longer sunken. Even her rash was gone. Sure, she was still recovering—especially mentally—but I wondered if she felt the same sort of sinking feeling while looking at me that I had used to feel while looking at her.
“I’m alright,” I said slowly when her fingers moved to my mouth. We’d been working even more on lip reading in the windows that I was awake. Sometimes concentrating on a task was the best thing to calm me down after one of my night terrors. “You okay?”
She nodded and I blinked, looking back at the crowd behind her. There weren’t a whole lot of people—just around seven or so, although it was still hard for me to count with my thoughts sliding away.
“Was it mass casualties?” I asked. Sokhanya gave me a curious look, no doubt confused by all the stumbling and stuttering that it took to get me through the query, but then a demi-familiar voice answered.
“As far as we can tell, almost everyone escaped or fled to safer parts of the underground network. We were just the last ones remaining, trying to grab supplies and all.”
I squinted in the dark, trying to wrack my brain as to who that was
. He was a dwarf, and I was pretty sure I’d seen him at the trials.
Ugh. Thinking about those made me think of Mallory, so I forced my mind to something else. It wasn’t hard, considering how soapy my brain was.
“Where’s Mal?” Krisjian asked with enough concern for even me to notice. Huh, that was interesting.
“She went off a bit ago,” Mickey answered. “Said she thought something was familiar and took my phone.”
“Mal, that the short one with the death glare?” Mr. Semi-familiar dwarf asked.
“That’s her,” I said, laughing before stopping abruptly because I was embarrassed at how loud my laugh was. “She worked real hard on that glare, prolly.”
“I see your friend is recovering.”
“Thassa word for it,” I said, once more trying to pull myself together and once more not quite sure if I pulled it off. Chances were leaning more toward the not-so-much.
“I think I hear her,” Bronn said, turning toward the direction that she’d bolted in. I peered into the darkness, the light of the new group’s cellphone not even reaching the edge of the room we were in. But sure enough, a couple of moments later, there was a glimmering light in the distance.
“Hey there,” Mal said as she jogged into view. “Krisjian, Sokhanya, glad to see you made it.”
The silent oracle nodded again, going over to offer her hand. Mal took it, and the two leaned toward each other until their foreheads touched. It was kind of a weird thing, and I hadn’t seen them do it before, but I didn’t ask. I was sure there were more pressing matters at hand.
“Alright,” Mal said when they parted, addressing the rest of the party. “I was right, I do recognize this place. Sure, it’s in a lot better shape than it was in my world, but I once found this same room while I was exploring from my little sewer hideout I took y’all to.”
“What, really?” Mickey asked. “I mean, I know I wasn’t there for the hideout, but you’re telling me that the old dwarf tunnels are the same between our two worlds?”
“Almost. There were little differences here and there, a couple of drops, some lefts that were rights, but I was able to find a way to somewhere we can hole up for a bit and try to regroup with the others. Sure, it hasn’t been decorated as nicely as my last place was, but it’ll do, and it’s far enough down that whatever magic stuff that the rotted guy is doing shouldn’t cause too much damage.”
