by Teresa Rook
So the kid wasn’t trying to get our attention, wasn’t spying on us. Maybe he or she was just trying to get home. I shudder at the memory of the withered food in the Yural cellar. If this is home, it’s not a safe one.
The discomfort of being underground in the cellars can’t hold a candle to what I feel when I stick my head and shoulders inside. I’m grateful for the soft light of the runes or this entire place would be pure black. But it’s tough to gauge distance here, navigating by the glowing runes that surround me. It takes a few seconds to psych myself up, and then I begin worming my way forward, slowly at first, but faster as the claustrophobia mounts. For Ennis, I remind myself, over and over. There could be a doctor here.
There are two close calls where I hear the entire mountain groaning above me. I become convinced it will bury me alive, but the path remains clean and open. I’ve been crawling for what feels like hours when the path takes a sudden dip. It widens out so I can almost stand upright, and as the floor continues to descend, dirt takes the place of tech above my head. I try to understand my surroundings. Another tunnel, a real one, buried beneath the witch tech? Wooden slats prop up the reinforced dirt of the ceiling.
I consider grabbing a piece of tech to carry with me into the darkness, where runes no longer lead the way. But I’m terrified that dislodging one tiny piece might trap me in here forever, so I go without, feeling my way down the tunnel with my fingertips against the cool, dense dirt walls. My sense of dread mounts in proportion to how deep I descend, and I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. What if this tribe isn’t friendly?
I’m struck by a deeper chill. If these are witches, my Chiral clothing probably won’t endear me to them. I consider removing my tunic, but they’ve likely been watching us this whole time. If they’ve decided I’m a Chiral, ditching the red fabric now won’t fool anyone.
The floor begins to level out beneath my feet. I reach my hands above my head and find the ceiling is no longer within reach.
“You made it.”
twenty
"Sorry if I scared you."
The voice, young and high, stops me dead.
The sound of flint on stone, and then a spark that grows to a small flare. I wince against the sudden torchlight, shrinking back from the fire even though I know this tiny bit won't hurt me. At least not on its own.
"Who are you?" I ask, my eyes still adjusting.
The kid brings the torch closer to my face. "I'm Aubin. Who are you?"
I lean away from it and press my eyes shut, trying to quell the lights that have bloomed inside my eyelids. "I'm Darga."
"Are you a witch?"
"No, but you’re not the first to ask.”
He brings the torch closer still and leans right into my personal space. He's streaked with soot, but I think he has pale skin under it all, and his hair might not actually be black. It sticks up at odd angles, greasy and slept on.
He leans away abruptly, and I find myself nearly falling forward, so intently was I focused on his little face. He's ten, maybe, absolute max. And his face is as hollow as I expected.
"Lions. How long have you been in Akisir?"
"Are you a witch?" he asks again.
"No! I'm not going to hurt you."
"I didn't say you were."
"So why did you ask if I were a Witch, if you weren't afraid of me?"
"You’re afraid, not me.”
He’s waiting for something, though I’m not sure what. I look around. The tunnel’s roof goes to twice my height, but the walls are still close enough together that I can reach out and touch them on either side. Drops of water have condensed on the packed dirt. We must be deep. “Can you take me to your tribe?”
He glances at me sideways. "No, but I’ll take you to something else. Come on."
He starts to walk, and I follow him warily, keeping my distance as though he might be rabid. How differently I treat people now, after just a few days. How wary I’ve become.
Aubin’s torch plays upon the walls. I see visions of apple crates hurtling towards me, feel the memory of the bruises they left on my skin. I wrap my bare arms around myself and try to huddle smaller. The air, though absolutely still, has an eerie chill. I am so sick of being underground.
Aubin looks back at me a few times, trying to be stealthy about it. Doesn’t want me to know he’s watching.
“It’s this way,” he says, needlessly, because the path doesn’t fork. It’s one narrow tunnel, and we go blindly into the darkness with just Aubin’s torch to light up a small circle around us. There aren’t even any rats down here with us, because nothing can live in these cities. Nothing, it seems, except for a young boy.
I still hear the thunder rolling above us, muted and smudged through the dirt ceiling and the mountain of tech above us. “Do you live down here?”
“I live with my mama.”
The guard that was slowly lowering rears back up, and I plant my heels in the dirt. “It’s not just you here?”
“It’s just me.” He kicks distractedly, kid-happily, at a rock in his path. “Me and mama.”
“Does she know you’re down here?”
“She knows everything.”
I’ve lost all context for how far we’ve walked when Aubin leans his torch against the wall. He raises his hands up for a rope, the presence of which is jarring. It disappears into the darkness above us. “Do you want to go first?” he asks me, earnest and polite. I shake my head, so he bends his knees and springs up, his hands latching on to the thick, rough woven fibers. He slides down the smallest bit, and I hear him grunting as he struggles to get his hold, but once he’s steady, he knows how to keep going. He clambers up like a monkey, and I realize the ceiling has gotten so tall as to disappear. He climbs up and up until the torchlight can’t find him anymore, the end of the rope swaying with his efforts. When it finally stops moving, he calls down from what sounds like very far away. “Come up. It’s easy.”
I try to spot him in the darkness, but there’s no way. “What’s up there? Is this how we get out?”
But Aubin doesn’t answer me. I go still and try to listen, but all I hear is the distant crackle of fire. “Aubin?”
Nothing. I look uneasily behind me and reach for Aubin’s torch, then draw my hand back. I don’t know these tunnels? Where else could I go? Back out through the mountain of tech, without learning a single thing? No. I climb.
It takes me a long time to reach the top and pull myself onto the new floor. When I’ve caught my breath, I sit up and look for Aubin.
Look.
There’s light here, faint, coming from nearby. A window? A sudden claustrophobia breaks out in me, and I stumble towards the source of the light, but the closer I get, the stranger it seems. It fazes in and out, blurry and shimmering and— Oh.
They’re all around me. Like stars shimmering in the night sky, wall to wall. They cover this dome we’re under like a canvas.
Runes.
“Where did you bring me?” I ask, slack-jawed. They’re everywhere I look, an entire universe of them covering every surface. They give me a sense of weightlessness, like I’m standing on stars.
Aubin appears beside me. “Meet my mama,” he says. I feel dizzy with awe and consider letting him take my hand, but I don’t know if that’s going too far. He instantly reminds me of Abadiah. My whole mind feels fuzzy, overwhelmed.
Aubin leads me around the central object, something that stretches from the ground all the way up as far as I can see. There, it merges with the starry dome. I touch it, the same way I touched the barrier in Yural, and again, the runes don’t respond to my fingers. But that feels okay. I wasn’t trying to make them dance at my touch. I just wanted to press against them to know they’re real.
My fingers trace the grooves in the cylinder, parallel lines that twist up and around to the ceiling. It’s made from the same witch steel as the towers up top. The runes written onto it look odd to me, though I can’t put a finger on why. I’ve seen plenty of runes
before, but none like this, and certainly never so dense.
A sour smell makes me wrinkle my nose. The scent of decay. I wonder if Aubin dragged a small desert animal down here to eat and left it too long.
“You’re going to get sick if you keep meat around to rot,” I say. Aubin just continues to lead me around the metal cylinder in the center of the room. It’s tough to judge distance in this strange light, but the cylinder is thick at the base, thinning out halfway up. If I were to climb it, I could probably wrap my arms around it in the center. It opens above us and seems to grow right into the ceiling. I notice Aubin’s hand never leaves the cylinder. “You can’t see them, can you?” I ask.
We arrive at the source of the smell. Aubin stills and stares at the shape in front of us, propped up against the cylinder, a black silhouette blotting out the shimmers.
“Oh fuck,” I say. I freeze, ashamed of my outburst, my wide eyes glued to the back of Aubin’s bowed head. He stands perfectly still, and when he speaks, his words are so soft I have to crouch down beside him to hear.
“She knew a witch would come,” he says.
Unlike the skeletons built into the pile of tech, this woman is still decomposing. She’s not freshly dead, that’s for sure. The scent isn’t the pungent one of spilled blood, but the slow sourness of something well along the road to decay. She leans against the cylinder, and while I can’t make out her face, I can’t help but imagine big, kind eyes, a smile that would light up a kid like a candle.
I bite my lip, the stench making my eyes water. “Aubin,” I say, resisting the urge to stroke his hair. To comfort him in any way I know how. “You can’t stay here.”
“She knew you would come!”
“And I’m here. I’m here.” I’m not a witch, but if that’s what this boy needs to believe, maybe I can lie. Maybe I can make myself one for a moment.
The boy clings to my arm and cries. I rock him awkwardly, unsure of how I ended up in this situation. I want to ask him questions—why was he looking for me, what does he expect me to do, how can I help—but I’m not sure how. Abadiah never lost a mother. For all that I think of myself as good with kids, I don’t have any idea how to react to this one.
He continues to cry until he’s all cried out. His little body shakes with hiccups leftover from sobs, and he continues to hold on to me, but eventually silence returns to the star room.
“She couldn’t figure it out,” he whispers. “She tried, but she wasn’t a witch, so she couldn’t do it. But she knew that a witch would come. She left me to lead you here. She made me stay. She left but she made me stay.”
“I’m sorry she left,” I say quietly. “I’m sure she loved you very much.”
He nods and pulls away. “So, can you fix it?”
I look around, not sure what he’s referring to. He points to the cylinder propping up his mother’s body. “She said it glowed. But she didn’t know how to make it work.”
“It glowed? She could see the runes?”
He wipes the back of his arm across his nose. “She didn’t call them runes. She wasn’t a real witch. She could see, but she couldn’t move. She tried so hard, but she couldn’t make them move.”
Oh, Aubin. How long will he stay here once he realizes I can’t do whatever it is he wants? How long will he wait for a real witch to stumble into this city? The tech will kill him. It will suck him dry.
I try for an optimistic tone, but it sounds fake even to my own ears. “Hey. Why don’t you come with me and my friends? You can travel with us, and when we go home, you can come with us. I’m sure there’s a nice family in Salis who will be happy to have you.”
“Salis?”
“The city. Where Chirals come from.”
“Chirals?”
How much does this boy not know? How long has he been on his own? When was the last time he saw another person? I feel sick for him. “Chirals. They’re here to protect everyone. And they can protect you, too. Help you find a family.” I keep it simple. He can learn about their dark side later. Right now, I just need him to want to come with us.
“You want to take me away!”
His raised voice alarms me. He stomps away, and I follow cautiously. “You can’t stay here alone.”
“I won’t be alone. I found you. You’ll fix it, and then everything will be good again.”
“Aubin. I don’t even know what you want me to fix. This is a bad place, do you understand? You’ll be happier if you come to Salis with us. I promise.”
“I’m not leaving, and neither are you. You can’t make me.”
“I don’t want to make you. How about we go back outside, okay? You can meet my friends and everything will be a little clearer. I promise.”
“They didn’t look like your friends.”
My stomach twists. Ennis is. Ennis definitely is.
“Tell you what,” I say. “Maybe my friends can help me figure out how to fix it. Okay? We can all fix it together.”
“Are they witches?”
“No…” But neither am I.
“Then they can’t help!”
I take a deep breath. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to lead us back up top, we’re going to find my friends, and then we’re all going to help each other figure this out.” He tries to block my way as I head for the rope. “If you keep me here, it’s not going to get fixed. I can’t do anything until I find my friends. I need them to help me. Do you understand?”
“You’re just going to leave.”
“No.” I crouch so we’re eye-level. He has his arms spread out wide as though to herd me back towards the cylinder. “I won’t leave until we agree. I promise.”
twenty-one
The first thing I notice is that I’ve begun to sweat. The second thing, a few minutes later, is the smell of smoke.
My heart rate kicks up a few notches and dread pulses through my bloodstream. “Do you smell that?” I whisper to Aubin.
He seems to shrink a little. The torch droops in his hand. “Fire?” he says.
I inhale sharply and ignore the smell, grabbing Aubin’s wrist and pulling him with me through the tunnel. If Riksher has set fire to the witch tech above us, the ash will bury us alive. We have to get out of here.
When we reach the base of the tunnel, I go out first. The scent is stronger now that we’re above ground, and the heat is more intense, but there’s no fire in sight. Do I send Austin through the crawlspace ahead of me, or do I go first to make sure the way is clear? Austin saves me from deciding by starting in before I can protest. I’m so close on his heels he nearly kicks me in the face a few times. My knees and elbows are still bruised from my first time traversing this path, and every inch forward comes with a dull pain, but I power through. Anything’s better than the fire spreading to the tech that surrounds us on every side.
Aubin has stopped crawling. I try to see past him but the space is too narrow. “What’s wrong?” I yell. The cackling of fire has mixed with the roll of thunder overhead, and I’m afraid he won’t hear me.
“It’s blocked,” he says. “I can’t move it.” He tries to shimmy backwards but I’m too big to reverse. There’s no going back.
Sweat rolls into my eyes as I try to think. “Can you see through it? Is it just a little bit?”
But he’s started to cry, and he doesn’t answer me.
“Fuck,” I say. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I grab a metal pole and close my eyes to say an indistinct prayer that I’m not about to destabilize the entire tunnel. I yank on it and am surprised when it doesn’t even budge. I try again, but pulling it does nothing. This tech is wedged firmly into place. I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s had two decades to settle.
“Move it,” Aubin says. Seems a short cry does wonders for putting yourself back together. I should try it sometime. “Just push it away.”
“I’m trying,” I say. “It’s stuck.”
“Not with your hands,” he says. “Use the runes.”
I cringe. H
e thinks I have a magic power to get us out of this. Unless I can gather enough strength to dig us a whole new path, we’re not going anywhere.
I try kicking at the wall beside me. It hurts my foot but the tech just will not move.
Should we have stayed down in the tunnel? Maybe we would have had better luck trying to dig our way out through the warm ash. As least it wouldn’t have set us on fire. We will die here, because we’re out of options.
Unless.
A glow appears to the right, a faint red showing through the tech. The fire is real, and it is coming. We are not getting out of this.
Not unless Aubin is right. I’d rather be a witch than burn to death.
I frown and try my best to focus on the runes in front of my face, though the fear doesn’t recede far. I try to see patterns in their dance, try to read them the way I’d read my mother’s instructions for the day’s work, scrawled in charcoal with a perfect, steady hand. I try to recognize shapes, but the runes aren’t static, and they appear and reappear, diving in and out of the surface of the tech. “Come on,” I tell myself through gritted teeth. “Come on!”
It’s useless. I’ll never be able to read them, because I’m not a witch.
A loud snap comes from our right, and the tech shifts above our heads. Aubin whimpers.
The fire is upon us.
The tech groans and snaps around us. I grab the metal bar again, and the heat of it burns into my palm. I wait for the next big creak, and then I pull for all I’m worth, and it snaps loose. It catches me in the face, and I feel it tear a gash across my forehead. Blood mixes with the sweat running into my eyes, and I reach blindly for the tech around me, pulling everything I can. The fire cracks above us, and I scream as I stick my hands into the burning to tech to pull another piece loose. It lands on Aubin’s leg, and I swat with my bare hands to put out the flames that try to lick at his pants. Then I grab another piece of tech and pull, and the whole thing crashes down around us.
