by K. Gorman
He swallowed and didn’t look at her. When he spoke, his voice had that old hoarseness in it.
“Dinner’s in the kitchen.”
She fetched it in the dark. They ate in silence.
Chapter 15
Mieshka leaned her head against the shelf inside her locker, closing her eyes as she relaxed into the relatively dark interior. She hadn’t slept much last night, even by her standards, and her entire body felt worn, as if she’d dragged it behind one of the snow plows she’d seen from the bus this morning.
But this wasn’t the first morning she’d felt like this. And she suspected it wouldn’t be the last.
Learning magic, at least, would provide a good distraction for her.
Too bad Dad was putting a veto on that.
Which was, in her estimation, entirely stupid. If she became a Fire Elemental and absorbed the Phoenix like Aiden said she could, she doubted any gang member would be stupid enough to mess with her. And if they did, they’d have almost-instant regret.
She shuddered.
Okay, maybe thinking about actually burning people wasn’t the best thing. Not when she’d seen this morning’s bomb run smoking up the sky.
“Are you okay?”
The locker rattled as she jerked at the voice, whacking her forehead against the shelf with a cut-off swear. She turned to find Chris taking a step back, his hands lifting at her reaction.
“Whoa, sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
She shook her head.
“No, no. I was just thinking about things.” She eyed him for a minute. “Do you live Underground?”
Yeah, that was probably racist of her—Jo had said the Chinese were the first to start settling down there. He hadn’t said that he lived Underground, but, running back over their conversation, he’d heavily implied it.
“I thought you didn’t know about the Underground?”
“I was introduced yesterday. Met Roger, too. Funny, though—he seemed to already know about me being an apprentice.”
She waited, watching his face. Under the shock, she thought she saw a bit of guilt.
“I might have mentioned something to a few people,” he said. “I didn’t think it was a big secret.”
“It wasn’t, really. Anyway. About that date—”
“Look, if you don’t want to go, that’s fine. I know you were pressured, and—”
“I want you to take me Underground,” she said.
“—What?”
“I want you to take me Underground. You can show me around.” She paused. “That can be our date.”
As he hesitated again, she turned back to her locker, shrugging her backpack off and yanking the zipper up. Her biology textbook—a mess of papers coming out of a tattered, spiral-bound spine—slipped through her fingers. She banged her head and shoulder against the locker door as she lunged to catch it, her fingernails scraping against its cover before it flopped to the floor.
Last night’s anger resurfaced in a flash. She snarled and gave the locker a savage kick. “Fuck!”
“Are you all right?” Chris asked.
She let out a breath and closed her eyes. Well, that wasn’t very cheery and graceful of me. “Yeah. Just tired.”
“Bad night?”
“Something like that.” She gave herself a little shake. “Sorry. I’m not usually like this. I…” She broke off, running the tip of her tongue along the underside of her front teeth as she met his gaze. “I dunno. You ever get the feeling like you just don’t want to go to school? I feel like I want to skip and do some self-study at the library or something.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Self-study at the library? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of skipping class?”
“I guess.” She shrugged. “I just don’t want to be here, if you know what I mean?”
“We could go Underground,” he said.
Now, it was her turn to raise he eyebrows. “We?”
“Yes.”
She blew out a breath and closed her eyes, tilting her head back on her neck. “Either I am a terrible influence, or you are. You really want to skip?”
“Yeah, sure. It’s not like it’s hard to catch up.”
Which was true. And, a lot of the time, they were left on their own to figure it out, anyway. Westran hadn’t been paying a whole lot of attention to the decline in its schools. The war had been more important.
So now, I’m about to skip school with a guy I met yesterday and go to a place Dad says is riddled with gangs.
This sounded like a great plan.
“Hey, what’s up?” Robin gave her a friendly bump as she joined them, turning her attention to Chris in a skeptical once-over. “Planning your date?”
“We’re skipping school to go run around in an underground city beneath Ryarne,” she said.
Robin opened her mouth, then closed it again. She waited a few seconds before turning her narrowed gaze to Mieshka. “Well, I can’t say I expected that. Can I come?”
Mieshka hesitated—three people didn’t really make it date, but she’d feel a lot more comfortable if Robin came along.
After a moment, she reached out and touched Chris’ upper arm. “Let’s get coffee another time. Alone. I’ll buy.”
When he nodded, she bent to retrieve the fallen textbook, shoveled it into the bottom of her locker, then began to do the same with the other three books she’d taken home.
“We’ll split up,” she said. “Meet at Linden and 54th at nine-fifteen.”
*
They met at nine-fifteen and were on the subway by nine twenty-five, beeping their student cards through the gates and hopping onto the next train to Uptown.
“There’s a few things you should know,” Chris started. “Rule number one is that you don’t tell anyone about the Underground.”
Mieshka gave Robin a guilty look. “Oops.”
“Wait, why?” Robin frowned. “It sounds like a terribly cool place.”
“I could get expelled if people found out I lived there,” he said.
“Unregistered housing?” Mieshka guessed.
“Something like that.”
Beside her, Robin’s jaw had dropped. “You live there?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Can you tell me what you know? I think I’ll be spending a lot of time down there soon if I’m going to be training with Aiden.”
“Most likely, yeah,” he agreed.
“Wait, wait—whoa.” Robin spread her arms out to silence them. “This has to do with the Fire Mage stuff, too?”
“Yep.”
“What the hell’s happened since I last saw you?” Robin stared at her. “You know I have a computer, right? With a little thing called eTalki? Specifically for messaging on? Murphy might have taken my phone, but I’m not incommunicado.”
Mieshka knew. She had it, too, on both her phone and computer.
She just hadn’t felt like talking last night.
“Sorry.”
“Next time, call me.” Robin rounded on Chris. “Now you—tell her what you know.”
As he led them off at the next stop and up into the Uptown business center, he began to talk. Information came in bits and pieces, short bursts as things came to him, but, after a while, she began to thread together a picture.
Roger was the Water Mage’s right-hand man. He ran a policing arrangement with the people who lived there, based on a mix of governmental taxation and mafia business practice. It kept the crime rate down, since no one wanted him chasing after them. Especially not when rumors of his Water magic had spread.
Chris wasn’t sure Roger could actually move people like puppets. Rumors tended to grow larger than their source.
If there were gangs, Chris and his parents had heard the same rumors that Mieshka’s father had—but he’d never crossed one. If they existed, they may live in a sector that he was unfamiliar with. There were rough-looking people around, sure, but most either kept to themselves, were known to the community,
or were harmless.
“Wait a minute,” Robin said. “Just how big is this place?”
He paused, an eyebrow twitching up, first to Mieshka, then to Robin.
“Big. About the size of Uptown and Merkitts combined, except maybe smooshed together and spread out a bit. About ten thousand people, but all split into different levels and areas.”
“I guess you can do that kind of thing underground,” Mieshka said.
The conversation halted as he stepped off the sidewalk in front of an old apartment building. There was a rezoning permit sign outside, edged with graffiti. As they’d walked, the houses and apartments had grown less and less impressive, the Uptown luxury five blocks behind them by this point. Now, they were completely surrounded by pre-Chromatix architecture. Mieshka thought back to Aiden’s shabby office. Maybe there was a connection with old buildings and Underground access.
But then, she remembered that most people down there were refugees. She and her dad were the lucky ones. Lucky enough to get housing. Lucky enough to get out of the fray. Lucky enough to get a dead soldier’s pension.
It was a bitter trade. Money was no replacement for her mother. But Mieshka didn’t have any choice in the matter, did she? A bullet had taken care of that. One bullet in the billion that this war had shot. When you looked at the numbers, her mom had been cheating death, staying alive all those years.
That was war. That was life. Sometimes, a stray bullet just hit you in the head. No goodbye.
Chris led them up the path, unlocked the front door with a key, and held it open for them. She was glad when the interior heat flooded over her. He led her down the short hall and to the stairwell. She glanced at him, wondering if he’d lost something.
She wouldn’t ask. As she’d learned from Robin’s questions, it felt wrong. Everyone had lost something. Some things just left bigger holes.
Losing her mom had meant losing her dad, too. But at least, he was starting to come back.
A man sat guard in a nook at the bottom of the stairs set up with a table, chair, laptop, and space heater. He stretched out, socked feet up on the table, a zombie flick on the screen. He didn’t look much at Chris, but gave Mieshka and Robin a second glance. She waved. He smiled. They continued on to another set of stairs.
Mieshka noticed when they changed buildings. Patched, cream-colored drywall turned to naked cinderblocks, which in turn, as they moved down, turned to painted concrete. Unlike Aiden’s Underground entrance, this was very well lit. They had tapped into the old fluorescents of what appeared to be an office building and maintained the bulbs better than her school did. None of them flickered. They followed the stairwell down, passing floors marked with large blue numbers.
The first number said twenty-seven.
“Holy shit,” Robin said. “I don’t suppose there’s an elevator, is there?”
Chris’s laugh suggested there was not. Mieshka smiled, following his staccato beat of footsteps down. After they’d descended a few floors, someone else entered above them. Mieshka paused to listen. Chris noticed.
“This is one of the main entrances. You’ll see more people.”
She did. They passed one man going up, wearing a suit and tie. He ignored them as they crossed. She’d bet everyone down here was fit as hell, taking the stairs all the time. She didn’t even take the stairs to her apartment.
Several floors had tags under the painted floor numbers. She glanced at a couple.
Bio-tech—X-Ray, Mass Spectrometry, Phlebotomy
Okay, so this place had been a hospital, not an office building like she’d thought.
Burn Unit
She tried not to think of ghosts just then.
A large ‘M’ marked the first floor, painted in the same, clean-cut way as the rest had been, with no sign of wear. They walked through the lobby. The stairwell’s fluorescents turned to recessed lights tucked into the ceiling, shining down on a very well-kept receiving area. The tile was worn but swept of debris. There were benches to the sides, with potted plants that were doing much better than the ones at her apartment—which said something about the sunlight at her place, that underground plants did better.
The lobby doors ran on motion sensors that opened at their approach. A stylized serpent-entwined Asclepius staff was frosted into one side. On the other, the Ryarnese coat of arms: a winged sword over a shield, flanked by two lions. Maybe this had been the government hospital.
An overhang covered the outer sidewalk, extending to include a circular driveway with painted squares on it marked ‘AMBULANCE.’ A draft blew in close to her neck, mimicking wind. It raised goosebumps as she looked beyond the shelter and into the Underground. An avenue of lights spread out on either side, stretching off into the distance. In fact, as she continued to look, she saw all kinds of light—neon, fluorescent, mercury, LED… probably even some candles.
“Holy fucking shit.” Robin’s eyes bugged out of her face, staring around as she turned in a slow revolution. “Holy shit!
“Where does the electricity come from?” Mieshka asked.
“We draw from the city’s power. So long as we pay, they don’t care.”
She didn’t recognize any of the shops. It made sense, if she thought about it. Jo had said there were several sections to the Underground. They hadn’t even covered the whole Core in last night’s exploration.
She glanced around for something familiar and spotted a utility pole lodged in the middle of the street. Looking up, she found the support beams. As before, the support network crossed overhead. Yesterday, all the businesses had taken place on the first and second floors. Here, she saw lit windows going higher. A concrete office building stretched into the heights, lit windows a beacon amidst the shadows of the beams.
She squinted into the rafters, finding only darkness. No stars. No sky.
Maybe that was why they had so much light on the bottom.
“And the air?” Robin asked, her attention never straying from the buildings around them. “I thought underground places had poison gas and shit.”
“Well, there’s plenty of shit,” Chris said, a semi-derisive tone bleeding into his voice. “But the most populated areas get the air pumped in. Everywhere else survives with cleaners.”
Mieshka snorted. Her apartment had an air cleaner, too, which said something about the state she and her dad lived in.
“Come on.” Chris took the lead. “I’ll show you around.”
*
They ended up at a café, sitting on mismatched chairs at a crooked table with three sets of drinks. Chris leaned back in his chair, arms relaxed across his chest. Mieshka leaned on her side of the table to anchor it down. Her hands cupped a mug of steaming tea, and she breathed deep as the heat rose into her face. Leaves wavered in the hot water. Robin sat beside her, quiet, still taking in the Underground.
On the street next to them, a row of streetlights had been rewired to work. The closest one beamed on the broken road, mixing its industrial yellow with the white light of the café where it struck the sidewalk. The window frame put a bar across Chris’s face. Mieshka felt a similar bar on her eyes.
Chris had been quiet for a while, which she appreciated. Too many thoughts ran through her head. He’d told her more about the city as they’d wandered, had allowed her to stop a million times to stare at the shops, the lights, the handiwork. Jo had been right—there were a lot of Chinese down here. When she had mentioned it, Chris had shrugged.
“We came here by referral. It’s not like the government can put you down here. There is no government here, except for the Water Mage. She kind of runs things. There are other sectors. Places with different people. Even some Russians, Mieshka. Some say blood will out, but I don’t think that’s true. We just want to live near friends, and a lot of my friends happen to be Asian. When we came to Ryarne, it was easier to just move in flocks. Help each other out.”
“So it’s not Communist or something?”
“What?”
“Well,
I heard China was a big Communist thing.”
They’d learned about Communism in school a few years back, but her teacher had kind of skimmed over it, focusing instead on the Westran political system—as if it mattered anymore. With the war going on, they hadn’t had an election in years.
“Uh, well, my family wasn’t really in China when that was going on. And this isn’t China. It’s not like political ideas are hardwired into DNA. I mean, look who’s talking, Miss Russian. If anything, you should be the Communist.”
Okay, point taken. She wasn’t Russian. Her mom had just happened to be third generation Russian descent or something. And she wouldn’t know what Communist Russian was even if it hit her with a two-by-four.
“Sorry.”
Two women in blouses and suit pants walked by, heels tapping against the old asphalt. There really wasn’t much difference between Ryarne and its Underground. They watched the same TV, browsed the same Internet, ate at similar cafés.
It really wasn’t so bad, whatever Dad might think.
She spotted two men across the street, loitering in front of a dry cleaner. They fled from her stare.
“They work for the Water Mage,” Chris said, following her gaze.
Perhaps rumor had made her into a minor celebrity. Her orange hair was less than subtle and easily connected to fire. Maybe she should dye it.
Of course, dying it wouldn’t matter. Rumors would change. If she became Aiden’s apprentice, she’d have to put up with gossip.
“Will you stay with Aiden, become his apprentice?”
Maybe Chris was the magic one, reading minds and all that. She scooted closer to the table, the metal legs of her chair rasping on the broken sidewalk.
“Probably. If my dad lets me. He doesn’t want me Underground, is the problem—but I should, shouldn’t I?”
“You should learn to shoot fire from your eyeballs?” Robin said, breaking her silence and directing her gaze back into the conversation. “Yes, you absolutely should. That would be sick.”
She wasn’t sure she would actually be shooting fire from her eyeballs—the feeling she got from Aiden was that an Element was a subtler, more all-encompassing thing, especially if she absorbed that Phoenix.
