I blinked a few times and could only see a vague light making the walls glisten. My hands hurt where I was holding on to the bar.
“Open it,” I yelled. “I want to come up. I don’t like it down here.”
“Just look around,” Miranda said. “Do you see anything? Is he down there?”
I started thinking fast. Would they be mad if I went down there and didn’t see anything? They were going to make me wait for a while unless I saw something. So, the sooner the better, right? But if I said something right away, they might suspect I was lying.
“I can’t see,” I said, finally. “Maybe if you took off the cover again, I’d do better?”
“We don’t know if Sobek likes light,” Paulo said. His voice sounded strained, weird.
“Sobek is supposed to be a god. You think he’s afraid of sunlight?”
“It might not be Sobek,” Miranda said. “Your mother’s visions hint that it may be one of his sacred crocodiles. One that’s still growing.”
“Honey, we’re going to leave you alone now,” Mom said. She sounded just like a concerned mother should sound, except she wasn’t. “We’ll come back tomorrow and you can tell us what you saw. You’re going to meet a god, baby. You’re so lucky.”
Cold terror knotted my stomach. I shouted and begged and threatened, but no one said anything else to me and finally I realized I was alone. They’d gone and my only hope was that they really would come back tomorrow.
By then my hands were cramped so badly from gripping the metal bar that I was afraid they wouldn’t hold anything else. I took an unsteady step down, slid my shaking hand onto the next rung. Then, I put my left foot wrong and my hold wasn’t nearly good enough to keep me on the ladder.
I fell into the wet, stinking refuse. The breath was knocked out of me. My knees pulsed with pain and my hands felt scraped raw.
In the darkness, something moved, sounding like the scrape of claws along the walls. The water rippled.
Sobek the Destroyer. He didn’t seem so funny now.
I scrambled to my feet and started on a stumbling run, hands in front of me. I ran and ran, my heartbeat sounding like footsteps behind me, until the passageway curved and I had to stop long enough to figure out where to go next. I leaned against a slimy wall and realized that I was being silly.
There were no alligators in this sewer. What I’d heard were probably rats. Or, like, a billion cockroaches.
I shook my head and pressed my fingers to my eyes. Then I told myself—out loud—there was no crocodile god.
“Sobek isn’t real,” I said. “He’s like Santa Claus. He’s like the closet monster.”
I waited a long moment, to hear if blasphemy got me struck down, but nothing happened. I let out my breath.
I had to find a dry place—or at least a less disgusting place—to wait out the night. There was no way to tell time—my watch didn’t glow or anything—but morning would come eventually. Then Mom would let me out and I would never, ever trust any of them again.
That started me shuffling again, trying to discern if the waterline rose or fell and feeling along the disgusting walls for some kind of ridge or ramp. If I could just find a place to hole up until then, I’d be fine. Cold and scraped up and totally covered in grossness, but fine.
Then I thought about what my mother and Miranda said about me before they shoved me in the hole. That whole weird thing about me being a virgin. There’s only one thing I could think of that you did with virgins in ceremonies—sacrifice them.
My heart started beating as fast as when I was running, so fast that my hand automatically went to my chest, like I could stop my heart from leaping out of my skin.
My mother might not be coming back. She might have dropped me down here to die.
The more I thought about it, the more scared I got, because even if she came back, she really might not let me out of here.
The thing about living with my Mom is that I knew there was a rational, calculating part of her. A part that knew she’d get in trouble for locking her underage daughter in a sewer overnight and that my not being around to tell anyone was her best chance of making it seem like she did nothing wrong.
So I figured that if she did come tomorrow, she’d ask me if Sobek spoke to me. No answer would be the right one. If I said I saw Sobek, she’d send me back to give him another message. If I said I didn’t, she’d say I just needed more time.
I’m never getting out of here.
The thought sunk into me like the filthy water seeped into my clothes. I tried to shake it off, to tell myself that there had to be other ways out, but it was hard as I moved deeper and deeper into the tunnels. Hard as my legs ached with the strain of moving through water. Each step made my muscles burn. My sneakers were soaked and heavy with mud, my socks swollen with it.
I kept going, walking for what felt like miles.
My fingers finally brushed the edge of a wide pipe halfway up the wall. It seemed dry inside. If I could get up there, then I could at least rest for a little while.
It took me three tries, leaping up and trying to brace my stomach on the edge like it was a balance beam, then scrabbling with my fingers. On my second try, I fell, knocking my jaw against the metal and falling on my ass in the water. For a moment, I thought I would just start sobbing.
The third try landed me on my belly in the pipe. I heard an echo of my thump down the metal and then the sound of scrabbling claws. Rats, I told myself. I was too tired to care. It wasn’t wet or covered in foulness. For right then, I didn’t have to move. Leaning my head against the curve of the pipe I closed my eyes.
I thought I would just rest for a moment, but despite my surroundings I fell asleep. I must have been exhausted.
My dreams were restless. In one, I saw this guy I liked who sat near me in English class. He was standing over a grate, looking down at me. I was flushed, but really pretty. Like Sleeping Beauty.
He spat on me.
I jerked my head, knocking my cheek against the curved side of the pipe. I woke to the reek of rot and with it, the realization of where I was.
I was shaking with chills, even though I remembered the tunnels as being warm.
You have a fever, I told myself. Was I getting sick? It was hard to concentrate. My mind was racing—flitting from imagining I was in my own bed to slipping into another dream of claws and something huge crawling toward me down the tunnel in the dark.
I heard a long hiss.
I jumped in terror. My sneakers squeaked against metal as I tried to climb backward.
“Sobek?” I whispered. My mouth began to move over the words of stupid sweat prayer automatically.
I felt the weight of body, scaled and warm, as though live coals burned within it, against my shoulder. A long tongue pushed at my hair. Alligators don’t have tongues like that. Neither do crocodiles.
I thought of all the cuts I’d gotten falling off the metal railing and all the filthy water I’d waded through. I was sure the cuts were infected. I was feverish. Dreaming.
I held as still as I could, shivering with cold and terror as the long body slid over mine, claws digging lightly into my skin, tail dragging behind it. Then it was gone and my relief was so profound that it wore me out.
When I woke up, there was a soft light coming through a grating far above me, too far to hope that if I screamed, I’d be heard. Occasionally a shadow strobed past, in a way that I thought might suggest traffic.
Sweat slicked my face and plastered curls of my damp hair to my skin. The fever must have broken while I slept.
Crazy is hereditary. Everyone knows that. Whatever made my mother the way she was also must be crawling around in my brain, just waiting for the chance to bloom like mold.
Trauma was a good trigger.
That’s why I liked engineering. Electronics. Things that worked the way they were supposed to. If they broke, you could fix them again.
I was lying on a collection of burlap bags that smelled pleasantly of
coffee beans. All around me were broken things—iron wheels from factory carts, bent candlesticks, dented microwave ovens, glittering shards of cracked Christmas balls piled together in a deflated tire, mannequins missing body parts, stacks of broken televisions. There wasn’t enough light for me to see the edges of the room, but I was sure there was even more junk hidden in the dark.
Beside me was a half-eaten bagel on a paper plate. Beside it was a metal thermos. I opened the top and inhaled. It didn’t smell like anything, but there seemed to be some liquid inside. My stomach growled.
“You’re awake,” said a voice from the dark.
I started to get up and realized that under the burlap sacks, I was undressed. I looked around frantically for my clothes.
A boy came out of the dark, moving cautiously toward me like he was afraid I was going to startle. His face was smudged with dirt, his pale hair sticking up at odd angles.
“Are you okay?” he said, voice sounded raspy. He coughed. “You were really sick.”
“Where’s my stuff?” I shouted. Wrapping one of the coffee bean bags around myself, I started toward the edges of the room that I couldn’t see.
He held both his hands up, palms toward me in surrender. “Calm down. You had a fever and you were really scraped up. Your clothes were rubbing dirt into your wounds. I cleaned pus off you, so do not even think of yelling at me.”
I took a long look at him. His face was partially shadowed, but he didn’t look like he was lying. He was wearing a T-shirt that hung on him, like he’d lost weight. It made him seem even taller than he was.
“What’s your name?” I asked. I wished it was even darker right then so that he couldn’t see how embarrassed I was. No boy had ever seen me naked before. I felt conscious of myself in a way I wasn’t used to—aware of my body, its curves and flaws.
“Hank,” he said. “I’ve been down here two weeks.” He laughed a little in an odd manic way. “I was going kind of crazy. When I found you in the tunnels, I thought you were dead. I nearly tripped over you.”
“Two weeks?” I asked. My voice shook.
He sat down on the remains of a television and pushed back greasy hair with one hand. “This crazy woman who’s obsessed with my dad used to come by my house and watch the place from across the street. One night, I’m coming home from a friend’s and she and these two other people just grabbed me. I don’t know if they planned on it or what, but here I am. I thought they were going to kill me.”
“They grabbed me too,” I said. His name rang in my head. Hank. Lots of people were named after their dads.
“How come?” he asked.
“That crazy woman? She’s my mother.”
For a moment, he just stared at me in astonishment. “Oh,” he said and frowned as though he was trying to figure something out. “So you know about the dragon?”
I swallowed hard. “Dragon?”
Apparently my own inner crazy isn’t the only thing I should be worried about.
“I don’t think I heard you right. You mean their crazy made-up religion?”
“No,” he said. “I mean the dragon in the tunnels. It’s the reason we can’t leave—it sleeps near the only way out. Didn’t you hear it?”
I thought about the thing sliding over me in the dark. “I guess not.”
“It’s real,” he said.
I nodded, because I knew agreeing was what he wanted me to do. “Okay.”
“Look, I know where there’s a pipe of fresh water. I’m going to go there and fill up some more bottles for us. And there’s a grate outside a deli where trash gets dropped. People are careless with the dumpster or something. That’s what I’ve been eating and that’s what I feed to the dragon. I’m going to go and—”
“You feed it?”
He nodded. “Yeah, otherwise it might attack. I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re here for—to be that thing’s dinner.”
“Ah,” I said.
He must have realized how freaked out I was getting, because he suddenly shifted tone. “But we’re going to be fine. We’re going to find a way out of here. God, you must think I sound totally insane.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what to think.” I didn’t. My mind was going over possibilities. The thing that moved over me had a head too small for an alligator—plus it felt warm. But it had to be something real, something rational.
“Just stay here. I know my way by now—I’ll see if I can find us some food. You should rest or something.” He stood up and looked at me, like he was trying to decide something. Then he left.
I listened as he rattled down a pipe, waiting for his steps to stop echoing.
As soon as he was gone, I crawled back over to the coffee sacks and stuffed the bagel in my mouth, chewing it greedily. I washed it down with gulps of water from the thermos. Then I ripped arm holes in one of the sacks so I could wear it like a dress.
After tripping over some tin cans and sliding on some boxes, I discovered that, as far as I could tell, we were in a nexus of pipes. They snaked off downward in several directions.
Looking around at the room, I wondered where all the stuff in it had come from. I doubted he’d had time to collect all of it. Had there been someone here before us? Had there been other sacrifices? The thought chilled me.
I needed to see better.
After my parents’ divorce, the judge said that I was supposed to spend weekends with my dad. At first that was what happened, before my mom stopped being able to handle the scheduling and dad stopped demanding visits. But back when I did see my dad, he’d take me to science museums and we’d buy kits for home.
That’s where I learned how to make a flashlight out of regular household items.
First you need batteries. I found those after pulling apart a couple of ancient tape decks. I had no idea whether the batteries had any charge left, but I kept hoping. You’re supposed to tape them together, but the best I could do was tie them together tightly with one of the strings from the coffee sack—luckily Dad and I had also gone to a special exhibit on sailing knots.
Then there’s supposed to be aluminum foil, to stabilize. I skipped that part, since I couldn’t find any. But I did manage to get the batteries attached to two long pieces of wood before I heard a movement in one of the pipes.
“Hank?” I called, climbing back on my nest of burlap and tucking my makeshift part of a flashlight under one side.
He limped in, tripping over several of the boxes, and fell. I jumped up. Blood was running down his leg.
“What happened?”
He looked up at me from the floor. His voice was steady, but slow. Distant. “You never told me your name.”
“I’m Amaya,” I said as I leaned over him.
“Amaya,” he repeated. He was sweating and his eyes looked weird.
“You’re in shock,” I said. I wasn’t sure or anything, but that’s what people said on cop shows.
“I fell,” he said. “I went to feed the dragon and it wasn’t by the grate. I thought maybe I could climb up high enough to stick my fingers through. Maybe someone would notice. But I saw it unwinding from the dark and I panicked.” He laughed. “I forgot I was still holding food. The dragon must have smelled it.”
“Come on, let me look at your leg,” I said. All I knew about was fixing machines; I had no idea what to do with people.
I pushed up the cuff of his jeans and tried to wash out a shallow scrape with what was left of the water in the thermos. His ankle had already swollen up. Just touching it made him flinch. I helped him get over to the burlap sacks.
“I think I twisted it,” he said faintly. “I’m going to die down here. I’m glad at least one person will know what happened to me, but it sucks. It really sucks. I don’t want to—”
“We’re getting out,” I said. “Honest. I promise.”
He snorted. “You promise? Like I promised you things were going to be fine? Before you got here I was thinking of just going down and letting that thing eat m
e. What was the point of delaying it? But then you’re here and I want to show off. Look at me, I can get us out. And I wind up like this.”
“I think we should elevate your leg,” I told him, purposefully ignoring everything he’d said.
“Okay,” he said, defeated, his words slurred. I had no idea if that was part of shock or if he was just tired. “Do you know how to splint a leg?”
I shook my head.
“I was in boy scouts and I got a badge for first-aid that included splints. Never did one for real though,” he said with a wince. “I’ll talk you through it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Go find me something stiff and long enough to go from my knee to my ankle. That and rope.” He was talking oddly.
I hunted among the junk. There wasn’t any rope, but I found enough long strips of string, parts of bags, and cloth to braid together into something pretty tough. He kept nodding off while I worked, though.
“Amaya,” he called muzzily.
“Yeah?” I said, pulling a plank of wood off a piece of fencing.
“What are you going to do when you get out of here? The very first thing?”
“When we get out of here,” I said.
“Sure,” Hank said. “We.”
“A burger,” I said. “A big fat one with cheese and mustard and pickles. Then a whole bag of Doritos. How about you?”
“Pizza,” said Hank. “With every topping from anchovies to pineapple. Heaped. And a gallon of orange soda.”
I made a face, but he couldn’t see me. Too bad, I’m sure it would have made him laugh. “Okay, other than food?”
“A hot bath,” he laughed. “When my mom died, we never cleaned out her stuff from the bathroom. There’s a whole shelf of half-empty bubble baths. I am going to use them all.”
“I’m sorry about your mother. I didn’t know she was dead.”
“Yeah,” said Hank. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“You don’t know anything about me either,” I said, picking up a strip of torn upholstery fabric and braiding it into my makeshift rope.
“I know about your mother. You know if we get out of here, they’re going to arrest her, right?”
Wings of Fire Page 6
