Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  I went back to the fragile connection half-broken in the back of my head, and it turned on like a lightbulb. I backed away, and it disappeared, then approached, and it begged for attention. This was strange. This was so strange. I could feel his fear, and a desire to talk to me or anyone who could help, and more important, those emotions came with a sense of direction.

  “Where is he?” Loyola asked me, his disapproval loud and clear between us.

  “I don’t know,” I said, eyes still closed. “But I can tell you direction. Let’s play a little game of hot-cold.” I pointed in the direction I was feeling.

  The driver asked, “How far?”

  I thought about it. “He’s moving, but not fast. Keenan’s buddy said they were going to move by foot at one point. It’s . . . up. They’re above our level, maybe on one of those ramps down.”

  Loyola had an affirmative feeling, like he was nodding. “On foot, then.”

  * * *

  River Street was a long street squeezed in between a muddy river and a wall of ancient buildings with the occasional covered tunnel; its ground-level shops saw little sunlight in the wake of the height of the buildings on top of them. On the ground floor, boarded-up and abandoned buildings rubbed shoulders with stately restaurants and tawdry tourist shops. A tattoo shop on the ground floor under an overhang advertised bioluminescents in the window, but its door was a supermaterial advertised to be break-in proof. A small stream of tourists dressed brightly walked past a homeless man half in an alley full of cobblestones and trash.

  Above, a man leaned out over a metal railing of a hotel balcony, the intricate shapes of the metal nearly lost in the coating of old rust. He smoked a cigarette and looked down on the dark street below. In another window high up, a woman stood in profile wearing very little. In another, a sign advertised accountant services. River Street smelled, of mud and perfume and old sweat, of bright dreams and dead hopelessness, of mold and mildew mixed with the freshly cooling pralines from the candy store at the street’s end.

  I felt overwhelmed. This was an old place, a place that advertised ghosts for ghost tours, and I could feel them, not spirits left behind—so far as I knew there were no spirits left behind—the debris and remaining emotions of hundreds of years of continuous human habitation, of death and danger and hope and love all baked together like the layers of a lasagna Cherabino’s grandmother served at Sunday dinner, layers and layers of one thing after another until they baked into one messy, settled whole. Mindspace was dense here, and full of echoes upon echoes. It was also full near to bursting with people’s minds in every direction, which made it hard to keep Tommy’s fear in front of me. Years of Guild training made it possible—but only just, like the half-heard memory of a song from two years ago.

  Worse, Tommy’s fear-sense was getting quieter. He was tired, and there would eventually come a time in which even Guild training wouldn’t let me pick up the signal. I kept myself very, very still, straining to hear that signal.

  I kept following that sense to a ramp intended for cars, winding up to the street level above, cobblestones threatening to turn my ankles with every step. Loyola followed behind, like a shadow of disapproval. A restaurant was to our right, a cloud of fried smells hitting me as a door opened to their back alley, part of the main cobblestone riser here. A man in a dirty apron emptied a trash can into a dumpster with a clang.

  The feeling ended here for a moment, but when I stopped and concentrated . . .

  “Where is he?” Loyola rumbled.

  “You’re not helping,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said, but he wasn’t. He wanted this over with. He wanted something to shoot, and it didn’t have to not be me.

  My brain didn’t want to focus. I didn’t want to focus. I felt like crap. But there was a kid’s life at stake, and I’d already had the strongest warning the universe was capable of giving me. I pulled on brutal training to force myself to do it. And the answer didn’t make sense.

  Tommy was ahead, directly ahead, on the other side of the dumpster a hundred feet or more. The restaurant ended to the right; there was literally nothing on the other side of the wall. And yet that was where his fear was coming from. I’d better move; it was getting even dimmer as I waited.

  I walked forward, holding on to the signal with mental hands turned white from pressure. I walked forward, forward and to the left, up the curved sloping surface of the alleyway. And there—there it was, on the other side of the dumpster. A grate.

  The grate was maybe two and a half feet high, old iron bars like the ones you saw in jails in old Westerns, three up and down and one side to side. It was low, but behind the bars the sunlight fell on a dirty few inches of cobblestones even lower, and extended deeper in an impression of darkness, darkness that extended several feet. There was a tunnel there, and by the looks of it, it was a tunnel big enough for a man to stand up in, perhaps hunched over, perhaps not. Three feet wide at least, and maybe five up and down. Who would have put such a tunnel system there?

  “You’re looking at the grate,” Loyola said.

  “Yes,” I said, and leaned down. I pushed back on the bars, but they didn’t budge. Low on the ground were scratch marks, though, scratch marks like someone had put some iron thing down to pry open the bars and then set them back in the stone. I leaned forward farther, and there on the ground was a crowbar. But it was on the other side of the bars.

  I’d put on some weight since I’d gone clean. I’d lifted a few weights—normally under protest, in the police gym. But I was still thin, thinner than I’d been as a professor. You burned up a lot of calories with Ability, more with Satin that hit that part of the brain over and over, and it took a long time to add weight back.

  I bent over and grabbed one of the bars with one hand, reaching through with the other as far as my hand would go. Still shy of that crowbar.

  “What are you doing?” Loyola asked me.

  I’m finding where they went. Give me a minute, I said into his head, so nothing would echo down the tunnel I suspected Sibley and the others were walking down even as we spoke. I sighed, pushed up, and took off the long coat. It was chilly out here, and colder at the grate, but nothing was as cold as the knowledge that Tommy’s fear—that fear I’d been following for the last hour—wasn’t here anymore. The coat hit the ground with a plop I could feel.

  Then I squeezed my shoulders through the two central bars. It hurt. The dress shirt wasn’t any padding to speak of, and the old iron pulled, a jittery rusty scraping that hurt. I pushed—and the widest part of my shoulders was through. I held my breath, and pushed again, and found myself caught. My fingertips were one inch from the crowbar, one small inch from my goal, and the bars kept me from moving any farther.

  Then it happened. The bars moved. With a low errrie, then a squee, and I was falling forward, chest caught in the bars.

  A hand caught my foot. I stopped falling, catching myself on my hand in a ridiculous wheelbarrow position from field day at the Guild’s school.

  The bars were still attached to the top of the tunnel, bowing out now, while my body slid slowly down, the gravity pulling at my shirt until it tore, and the rust abraded my skin, and then I was mostly free—and would be, if I let myself down on the dirt-mold floor.

  “You sure they’re down there?” Loyola yelled in, his voice echoing.

  Shut up, I sent, but it was probably too late. I pulled at my foot, and he let it go, and I tumbled down, getting a faceful of the nasty slime-dirt over old cobblestones. Hard cobblestones. The whole right side of my body hurt. But I pulled myself up to a crouched standing position and looked back.

  “Come on,” I said in a voice pitched not to carry. “I can’t feel them anymore and they’ve got to be moving fast.”

  “Get reinforcements,” Loyola told the driver. “See if you can cut them off.”

  I lifted the grate—which, apparently, w
as on a set of rusty hinges—enough for him to get through. He cursed, low, not liking the nastiness, not liking to crouch. He liked even less having to get so close, only inches away in the shadows as we pushed the grate closed again.

  He leaned down and grabbed the crowbar to offer me. “Here.” He had a gun, he thought. “Don’t hit me with it.”

  I looked at it. “What do you want me to do with a crowbar?”

  “Take it and move,” Loyola said. “We’re not getting all the way down here just to lose them.”

  I took the crowbar, its ancient iron heaviness an ominous weight in my hands. I thought I heard, at the edge of my hearing, a distant scream of a kid. Even if it was just my imagination, it made me move.

  Loyola took point, his overly prepared belt already bearing a flashlight. Unfortunately the flashlight’s organic-cell battery hadn’t been charged in over a year and was probably already degrading; the light flickered dully in the space and looked a little green, literally. That was the only light we could see, as the tunnel grew narrower and I bent over deeper, feeling like the ceiling was literally caving in on top of me. And still we kept moving. Still we moved, the only sounds we heard the beating of my heart and the squeak of my now-wet dress shoes on the nasty tunnel floor.

  I hadn’t had claustrophobia going into this tunnel, but the deeper we went, the more I thought I’d have it when we came out. Mindspace was dead and cold here, still like a century of stillness with one group of focused minds—and a line of terror—leaving a thin, already-fading trail for me to follow. And above, ten feet of dirt at least like a heavy weight ready to drop at any moment. I could hear water running, close and far, and it terrified me. The water table was low here, and tunnels liable to collapse at any moment. They must have scooped these out during the Tech Wars for them to have lasted this long. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t collapse today.

  I heard Tommy’s fear again, in the inside of my head, for one split second before it faded again.

  “Why in hell would somebody run this way?” I asked, apparently out loud.

  “Thought we’d never find them,” Loyola said, annoyed. “Not for you or a bloodhound, we wouldn’t have.” He wasn’t happy about this fact. He also didn’t know what the hell we were going to do if we caught up to the bad guys, in this small space with limited visibility. Radios wouldn’t work. We’d be on our own.

  “Which way?” Loyola hissed.

  I squinted and looked ahead, my back bent nearly double trying to keep my face out of the ceiling. There were two tunnels ahead, equally big, both of which smelled of mold and old air.

  “The one on the right,” I said, after a bare moment’s contemplation, most of which was spent getting my mind to focus past the pain. The rapidly fading Mindspace signatures went in that direction.

  Loyola kept going but took out his gun now, flashlight set on top of gun, both pointing in the direction of the tunnel we were headed down. The gun barrel blocked half of the already-dim and flickering light so that I saw a bright spot at the barrel and the rest of the world got even dimmer in contrast. The air seemed to haze as we went down this new tunnel, and the ceiling opened up another foot. Loyola moved faster.

  I followed and worried, dully, about the quality of the air. This was an old, old tunnel, and there were worse things to be found in tunnels than broken sewers and tainted water. I wanted a canary, artificial sensor or real bird. I wanted to know if I was going to die well in advance. I wanted not to be here at all, to be honest, and wouldn’t be, except for one important thing: Tommy had been here before me, and I could think of no hell so bad I wouldn’t still go after him.

  My old brain injury started to act up, in the darkness, tried to make light where there was none. I started to see halos ahead, halos and artifacts of moving air and light and who knows what else. Mindspace and reality lost their clear edges as my brain tried desperately to build a picture of the world; it was disorienting and worse, because I felt my precog, my stupid stubborn future-sense, try to get in on the act too.

  The Guild told you to get lots of sleep and eat well. The Guild told you to scout out your surroundings and plan ahead, and know reality. At worst, they told you to build a steady sense of reality in stolen glimpses of other people’s vision. There were blind men at the Guild who saw just fine like that, through others’ eyes, through Mindspace and overlapping views of the world. But this—this was everything the Guild told you not to do. This was like Satin, like my days on the street, like the days when my senses took over for one another and the world bled joy and pain as two sides of the same coin.

  It scared me, and it scared me deeply. I’d spent years—years—trying to get away from this feeling, from this merging. And if there was any way to surface away from this and still save Tommy, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

  “You okay?” Loyola asked. He shone the light directly in my eyes.

  I winced and shut my eyes hurriedly.

  “You can’t just stop here. How much farther are they?” How much farther did the tunnel have to go? his mind asked me. He was scared too, under this much dirt. Scared and depending on me to have the answers.

  * * *

  I saw the flashlight clearly then, and realized it was still being held as a unit with the gun. Now pointed at my head.

  “Point that thing elsewhere,” I hissed. He did.

  Then I considered. I was back in reality—for the moment—and he was clearly needing some touchstone to the world right now.

  There’s a time to tell the truth, and there’s a time to lie. When you’re in the middle of a horrible tunnel and you can’t see and your mind is busily trying to take your senses apart one by one—and you’re with a cop of whatever stripe—this is not the time for the truth. Even less so when he’s faltering.

  It hurt, but I’d been in the interrogation rooms long enough to know when believing in something—even falsely—mattered.

  “They’re a couple hundred feet ahead around a bend,” I said quietly. Totally made up, but details would sell it. I added mind-to-mind, Only luck they haven’t heard us already. How do you want to handle this?

  His heart sped up, but he settled then, in that total-focus mental place I’d seen in nearly every cop I’d ever worked with under pressure. “You get Tommy out of the way somehow—floor, wall, whatever—and I return fire,” he said. His face looked like a ghost’s in the half-light, features coming in and out of focus.

  You return fire? I asked incredulously.

  “Do you really think they’re going to come all this way and not fight to get away?” Loyola said.

  Do you really think the bullets won’t ricochet and kill us all? I asked.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Then I felt the weight of that crowbar I’d been carrying all over again. I’d been using it as a walking stick, on and off, something to help me bend deeply enough not to hit my head. But it would work just fine for a weapon, wouldn’t it? If I could see enough in the dark to do any good with it.

  You get a good shot, you take it, I told him, but you don’t fire wildly. I’ll do my best to take out the others. I hoped I could live up to that. It all came down to what Sibley was carrying. I hadn’t seen the evidence, but then again I hadn’t believed that he had really been here until it was too late. It was my guilt, mine, that drove all of this, and I would do everything in my power to stop it.

  “The others?” he asked.

  “No matter what you do, you aim for and take out the bald one,” I said. “No matter what.” If we both tried, maybe one of us could do it. “Tommy is our priority, but unless Sibley is out of the way there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Do you know something I don’t know?”

  Down the tunnel, I heard a slam, echoed several times over but close. Wait. Did my brain guess at the right answer without me getting involved? Were they really, truly only a few hu
ndred feet away?

  Then there was a spot of light, ahead, ahead, and it was gone. Had someone just exited the tunnels? Had they been there all along? I felt like I was losing track, like the world was running faster than I could keep up.

  Loyola was already moving ahead, and I followed, crowbar a heavy weight in my hand, knowledge a heavy weight against my conscience. Should I stop and try the complicated mental blocks Kara had given me, just in case? I pulled together the ones I could do quickly, without preparation, as best I could while moving. But that was B5, C4, B8, a bank of the A’s. Nothing specific enough and extreme enough to carry it. Anything more on no notice, under this much stress, and I risked putting myself in that half- or total-blind-and-deaf state. I would do no one any good there, as bad as I was already. I might get worse, much worse.

  I buttoned up what I could, as close to the prescribed pattern as I could manage on no notice, running after Loyola, praying I wouldn’t hit my head in the dark. And then I prayed—literally prayed—that it would be enough.

  Loyola stopped and I hit a corner. Pain—pain!—across my head and neck. Mold smell as I backed away, mold and brick. “What?”

  “Damn,” Loyola said, and kept cursing under his breath. “They’ve blocked it off.”

  “Where are we?” I asked, moving around the corner, hand out to make sure I didn’t run into anything else, crowbar still dragging behind me.

  “How should I know?”

  He’d put his gun in its holster and his flashlight in his teeth. I got a good look at a door of some kind, a bar over it, dull light coming through the seams, before the flashlight finally died.

  “Hold up—I have a crowbar,” I said, and he moved—at least I thought he moved; his mind seemed to move away, at least with what telepathy was hanging around through the block-sets.

  I stumbled, caught myself on the wall. The crowbar got stuck, scrabbled. My heart beat all too fast in the space. Finally I got the head of the crowbar into the vertical slit where the door was, and pulled.