by Ren Warom
“About time you checked in.”
She shrugs. “What can I say? It’s been difficult.”
Spaz slides up, resting on his pillows. His sinewy torso and arms crawl with the same liquid tattoos that cover his face and neck. Even here, in the quiet comfort of his room, he looks dangerous. It makes her feel a little safer. “How’ve you been?”
She folds to crossed legs on the polished real-wood floor; Spaz does enjoy his little luxuries. So does she. It’s just a side effect of where they’ve come from. “Honestly?”
“As always.”
She shrugs, now that she’s here, she can let go just a little, just enough to clue him in. “Not good.”
The air in the room draws in. “You’ve not been harmed?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Yet,” he repeats flatly. “You’re my best freelancer. We’re going to need you. I can’t countenance the proximity of threat to your person.”
“And I can’t just throw a job because I might get hurt. I’d have quit a fuck ton of jobs by now, if I thought like that.” Lever raises her left hand. “You remember why I got these?”
Spaz nods, murky anger flickering across his eyes. “I do.”
She nods back, determined, and holds his gaze as she says, “If you see these on a corpse, you know not to fucking mourn me because I’m aware of what I’m risking, and I accept the risk. You know I won’t go down lightly, I won’t make it easy, and I’ll take action to channel any danger that comes for me, make sure it’s of use to you.”
“What manner of action would that be in this case, Lever?” he asks, almost through his teeth. “It’s not a game.”
She conceals the clench of her gut, the rise of nausea. “I’m not sure yet.”
Spaz frowns. “You’re not usually so vague.”
“No, but I’m not usually involved in something so bloody well complicated.” She raises her chin. “Bone’s in a lot more danger than you thought, and I know you anticipated a shit ton. This is no lunatic we’ve unleashed, for all it does a good impression. A number of our actions have been clocked. We’re lagging these days, by one or two paces.”
Spaz rubs his face. He looks exhausted. “I was worried about that.”
Reining in hard on any worry for him, because he wouldn’t welcome it, Lever presses her wrist and glances at the fading glow of numerals on her sub-dermal clock. “Time’s up.” She rises from the floor and says mulishly, “I won’t pull out.”
“I’m not asking you to.” He leans forwards. The wolfish glow of his eyes disappears as he moves into the light proper. “You get word to me if you need me. I don’t care how. Don’t take him on single-handed. And run, if you have to. No one is asking you to risk as much as your life. Not yet.”
“Okay.”
It’s not a promise, not even close. She and Spaz are alike. They take chances fearlessly and generally succeed. That’s why he hired her, and why he gives her the toughest jobs to run in spite of her age, her history. But he worries about her like a father. It irritates and comforts in equal measure. She doesn’t need a father, doesn’t even remember the one she must’ve had, but it’s nice to know someone gives a shit. She needed to know that tonight. She takes one last look at him, sitting there in the warm, the closest thing to family she has. He smiles at her and the light blinks out. She climbs out the window and begins to scale the wall. As she does, she hears his soft reply. It makes her grin because he knows her so well.
“Fucking liar.”
Chapter 15
Bone’s curled over, groaning. His entire body’s a welter of grievances, having spent the last hour or so bent into the sort of shape it’s not attempted since leaving the womb. He thinks he might just be crippled for life. Stark’s not suffering at all, he’s one of those incredibly annoying people who seem to take discomfort in their stride and shake it off without effort. There’s something indomitable about him, something dependable, despite the unsettling edge of unpredictability.
When the pain in his limbs and spine begins to settle down, Bone stands slowly and says without enthusiasm, “Let’s do this.”
Stark gestures downwards with his torch, switched off in deference to the illumination of the lights above. “There’s some old maintenance stairs down there. They’re a touch rusty, so don’t fucking attack them. I doubt anything in this atmosphere stays stable long.” He re-adjusts the mask to ensure none of the sulphuric reek can insinuate past, leaps off his makeshift seat and sets off boldly down the side of the cavern, stepping fast from rock to rock, ungainly but limber.
Bone bends to rub his joints for a stubborn moment longer, checks his own mask and follows, moving with a great deal more circumspection. The way down is steep and crusted with stalagmites both small and monstrous in size. Their sides gleam sickly in the dim light, as if rotting, an oily mixture of limes and quartz riddled with mineral deposits. Between them, huge spiders wearing carapaces tough as crab shells scuttle in close packs, leviathans built of limbs. The articulated click of their passing plays savage music on mottled stone and Bone rears away at his first sight of them, panting hard.
Their path down becomes a sheer track on slippery rock, and Bone keeps seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. Not spiders, or apparitions: it’s the walls themselves. Sometimes, in the periphery of vision, they’re smooth as glass, free of entrance or egress, but when he looks again, they’re cragged steeps covered in lichens, minerals, and punctured with outlets. Stark said something about that in the Boreholes. It could be anything, from hallucinations caused by the gasses rising from the lake to fear working on his senses, but it feels real. Inarguable. Leaves him steeped in anxiety.
He can’t help but think of the city that lies way below them, what it would’ve been like to live that deep down, lightless and trapped. He can’t imagine. He’s already longing for sunlight. Bone looks down the incline and, seeing Stark much further ahead than he thought, hurries to catch up as they enter the first wisps of mist. It’s cold, clinging like dusty spider webs, curling reluctantly off them to trail behind, turning their progress into a dance of the veils.
“You call this a minor recce?” Bone whispers, trying to keep his voice from echoing.
Stark cocks a shoulder and replies softly, “I like to know where I am.” He halts then, holding out an arm. “Careful here, there’s a drop. I almost tumbled in head first. Damn thing’s easier to climb up than get down. We gotta jump.”
“My knees’ll never forgive me for this,” Bone grumbles, hopping down after Stark, his legs all but collapsing out from under him as he lands. “Why didn’t you bring climbing gear?”
Stark stares, bemused. “What climbing gear? I have none, and there’s none to find in the whole of City. I could try and steal from the Buzz Boys, but Faran would haul me up on a complaint. They have the same budget issues we have.” He rolls his shoulders and stretches. “Your knees’ll forgive you. Besides,” he grins, wolfish, too many teeth showing against stubbled cheeks, “you chose to come, so quit bitching.”
Bone makes a strangled noise, throws Stark a look of pure disgust, and scrabbles down the slope, steeper now and even more slippery. The sound of spider limbs clicking in the shadows drives him to move too fast, and his feet skid and slide on the rock, fumbling for purchase. At this speed, it doesn’t take long to reach the place where the stairs rise out of the mist, slick with dew. Bone slows his descent on a small outcrop and slithers to a halt, raising both brows at the skeletal collection of metal attached to the cavern wall.
“A touch rusty?”
Confidently skiing down on boot soles behind, Stark stops at the same outcrop and replies with dispassion, “Give or take a tonne.”
Bone makes his way to the frankly dangerous looking platform, stepping on with exaggerated care and heading for the stippled brown rail that might once have been clean steel to peer over the side, careful to withhold his body weight. Down through the mist, clinging by some precarious will to the sides of the cav
ern, the stairs wind away, swallowed at the bottom by layered pipes and thick vapour.
He throws Stark a disbelieving stare. “Down there? All the way down there?”
“All the way down,” Stark confirms, his face set. “That’s his territory. That’s where we have to go.”
Bone raises his eyes to the cavern roof in disbelief and says, “I am losing it. Entirely.”
Stark steps onto the platform, his footing steady and assured, and gestures for Bone to continue ahead. He does so in tentative steps that, for some reason, amuse Stark to no end. Bone peers with narrowed eyes at the moist black bolts holding rusted steel to rotten stone.
“You can pray, if you like,” Stark reassures from behind him.
“You can fuck yourself, if you like,” Bone mutters by way of response, and doesn’t imagine the soft snort he earns in reply.
After the network of boiling pipes whose sulphur stench makes them wheeze despite their masks, the stairs end abruptly. In front of them lies the lake, vast and shadowed under the roiling curtain of a yellowish vapour, thicker and more tenacious than the mists above. Close up, the waters are remarkably clear, rendering the ripe, loathsome bubbles rising to the surface even more sinister. A thin lip of metal runs around the edge, barely twelve inches wide, and they shuffle along warily, backs welded to the cavern wall. At the opposite side, dozens of tunnels are sunk into submerged outlets, going off in three directions.
Bone stares at the array. “Please tell me you have some idea of which one of those to take.”
Stark points to a small selection of tunnels rearing off to the left. “His territory lies in that direction. We go that way. I say one of the middle tunnels, just for symmetry’s sake.”
Bone lets Stark lead. Inside the tunnel they encounter a twisting spaghetti of offshoots disguised by profound darkness, the overhead lights having long since been nibbled useless by rats the size of small dogs. These ugly rodents shadow them, too close, their paws thumping rather than scuttling in the gullies to the side and below. Bone begins trembling at the sight of them and can’t stop, nerves sparking like faulty wires, and when they start attacking, flying at them with wild leaps, needle teeth on display, he loses it, unable to do anything more than throw his arms over his head and hunker down. Stark keeps most away with vicious swings of the fist or torch, but neither man spots the rats climbing above. One of these, a sack of heavy fur with malicious eyes and teeth, drops onto Stark’s forearm, claws deep in cheap fabric. Stark lets out a primal yell and smashes his fist on the rat’s whip-strong body, dropping the torch into the stinking waters. The rat drops after it like a sodden stone, shakes itself just under the surface and swims away.
Stark watches it go, breathing hard. “Fuck me, that’s a goddamned monster. Don’t think I even stunned it.” He bends to retrieve the torch, guttering now like a burnt out candle. “Shit.”
Panic bubbles up from Bone’s toes to the itching top of his scalp. He grabs the torch and wipes it on the soft material of his shirt, gagging a little as the scent sneaks in under his mask. “Goddamn, it stinks.”
He manages to dry it almost completely, but his efforts are for nothing. The torch sputters and dies, plunging them into blinding darkness.
“Well that’s torn it,” Stark says in a resigned voice. “What do you want to do?”
Too busy trying to remember how to breathe, Bone can’t find a coherent thought to answer with. The darkness asphyxiates him, too much like the dreams he suffers every night. Something is after him in the dark. He wants to run, but his limbs are frozen, feet heavy as lead under the water, and he can’t remember which way is back. Can’t even see where he is to know where to run.
“Bone?” Stark’s voice in the darkness comes like a guiding rope, just as it did at Ballerina Girl’s scene, and Bone hangs on to it for dear life.
“I … I’m here … can we go back?”
Stark rumbles an embarrassed cough. “I’m not sure I could find the way we came in without the torch, but there’s hundreds of exits throughout the whole network. It may be a safer bet to go forwards and feel out one of those, and continue our search whilst we’re at it.”
A scream rises in Bone’s throat, but the rage beats it. “What the fuck, Stark? What the fuck? We’re just going to skip along in the goddamn dark until we happen upon a fucking exit? Is that what you think? Fucking marvellous!”
“Relax. I’ll get us out of here. I’ve seen the plans, there are exits.” Stark’s voice is filled with unshakeable calm. He’s not afraid. He knows what he’s capable of. Bone envies him that. The only two places Bone is anywhere near competent are in a mortuary and in a bar. Fortunate, then, that he’s not alone down here.
“Fine. Fine. You do that. You get us out. And when we come back to this shit hole, we bring guns, flamethrowers, fucking grenades.”
Stark snorts out a laugh. “I might stretch the budget to at least one of those things, and a couple of torches, though I suspect I’ll have to swipe them.”
“You fucking better.”
They move on cautiously, Bone trailing the splash of Stark’s gumboots in the disorienting pitch. The sound of distant water raging through pipes is his undoing. Beginning a soft rushing in the background, it gradually rises to a gutsy roar, blocking all other noise. It takes him a while, but soon he realises that what he imagined to be Stark’s footsteps splashing before him are in fact an aural hallucination.
Bone calls Stark’s name. At first quiet, in respect of how they’ve tried to steer clear of announcing their presence to Burneo, and then with all the strength in his body, half-hysterical. He strains his ears for any responding cry as the echo dies in the throatier roar of rushing waters. No response. Frightened to be alone, too scared to move, Bone stands there in lightless, dripping entombment, hoping Stark will magically reappear. Then it occurs to him, Stark isn’t coming. He probably doesn’t even know Bone’s lost him. He’s up ahead somewhere, still moving, and if Bone doesn’t move, he’ll be trapped in this dark forever. The thought catalyses action and Bone lurches into a run, fast as he can against the drag of water.
Chapter 16
Reduced by sheer exhaustion to a haphazard, plunging walk, Bone stumbles on. Rank water sloshes in the bottoms of his boots, his legs are soaked through and freezing, his teeth chatter incessantly, and his mind races in a nightmarish loop through black tunnels to the moment he realised he was alone in the dark. The only thing keeping him from total meltdown is that loop, his absolute terror of being alone. If he keeps moving, he might find Stark, or light, or a way out. He has to keep moving. He has to get out.
The long wave comm Stark provided slaps against his breast bone. It hurts like hell, but he leaves it there; pain helps him retain the tiniest glimmer of rationality. He has no intention of taking the comm out, anyway. Not yet. Stark explained how to operate it before they came down here. Patiently. Thoroughly. It’s all gone. If Bone could think, he might be able to recall enough to try and call Stark, but he can’t think at all, not here. Not yet. When he finds light, then he’ll stop, then he’ll think. For now, he has to keep moving.
The tunnel flares to a wide passageway. There’s still no light, but the close grip of walls disappears and the muscles of his back ease a little in response. He forges ahead, one hand caressing the edges of his mask, checking the fit remains seamless, and the other hand curled about the slender comm, counting off buttons over and over. It’s reached the point where he can’t feel his fingers anymore, he can only sense, deep within, sensations of bones articulating. The notion scuttles across his mind that his hand, denuded of flesh, has escaped his control and transformed into a spider made of bones.
Yanking his hand from his pocket, Bone slams it against his face, hard enough to hurt. It’s a hand. Just a hand. He’s going crazy. He jams it back in his pocket, raises his eyes, and comes to an abrupt halt, breath freezing in his throat. A huge shadow dominates the tunnel ahead, a colossal man-shaped void of nullity within the gloom. It
can’t be real, he can’t even see his hand down here. How could he being seeing that? Has to be his imagination on overdrive. First ghostly marble walls in the cavern, then a bone hand-spider, and now a giant man-shaped black hole. Next, he’ll see the rats tapping veins in the shade, shooting up needles full of toxic water.
Bone giggles, he can’t seem to contain it, until the enormous shade takes a step forwards, sending a wave rolling into his knees. He yells alarm then and stumbles backwards, reeling, nearly losing his footing on the slick bottom of the tunnel.
“Be still, Bone-Man,” says a voice, rumbling with the thunder of water through pipes.
An urge to dart screaming in the opposite direction hits Bone, so intense he can taste its sour flavour in his mouth. The skin on his face pulls tight, as if his skull has risen to hackles, bristling hair. He knows who this is, who it must be. It can’t be anyone else. This is no faceless monster. It’s Burneo, the creature he and Stark have been hunting, and Burneo knows his name.
Heart beating in huge, deep cadences, Bone asks, “You know me?”
Burneo moves again, great rolling paces, hissing a symphony of strange sounds, bringing him to within mere inches of Bone. In the murk, all Bone sees are outcroppings of muscles worked to peaked perfection and unnerving shapes jutting at angles from long limbs. The gleam of a single eye.
“I know you.” That voice again, so deep it resounds in his ribcage, thrumming like bass guitar amped to the max.
