by Oisin McGann
“Sol, wait!” she cried, pulling on his sleeve.
“We can’t wait,” he said. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
The elevators were at the T-junction at the other end of the magnolia-colored corridor: two sets of doors, flanked by fake giant rubber plants. As they reached them, Sol pressed the up button and watched the displays to see which was going to be first to arrive. Maslow had his eyes trained on the door to the stairs.
“No, listen!” Cleo insisted frantically. “We have to go back. That doctor’s a goddamned Clockworker! Sol!” She started to drag him back. “She was doing something to Ana!”
Sol’s face dropped. He hesitated, frozen by indecision. The left elevator opened with a chiming sound, just as the door to the stairs swung open. Maslow’s gun was out of his pocket, coming level as the first person out of the stairwell saw him and started to raise his own gun.
Maslow’s silenced shot took the man in the shoulder, and he fell back against the woman behind him. Cleo let out a shrieking gasp and swiveled to leap into the elevator for cover. She stopped short when she saw the face of the white-haired man in front of her, an instant of recognition between them. It was the man who had chased her in the sub-levels after she had seen them dumping the body. One of the Clockworkers. For one absurd moment she felt relief that he was alive, but that was erased by fright.
Sol, his hands stuck in the pockets of his jacket, saw the expression on her face and turned in time to face a punch curling toward his head. With no time to block it, he met the fist with his forehead, the pale man’s knuckles cracking against it with a satisfying crunch. Sol’s reflexes took over; pulling his hands free, he laid into the man with two hooks and a cross, sending the Clockworker crashing back into the elevator. The other two men in there were drawing their weapons. Sol’s right hand was back in his pocket, but as he pulled out the gun, one of the other men grabbed his wrist and dragged him into the elevator. Sol squeezed off a shot, but it went straight into the wall. The gun was knocked from his hand, and a fist hit him across the face. But the small space put him at an advantage: they couldn’t all get at him. He ducked his head and spun up with a barrage of jabs, elbows, and knees. It gave him the split second he needed to get back out through the door, slapping the close button on his way out.
Cleo seized Sol’s fallen gun and fired three shots into the ceiling of the elevator, flinching with each report. It was enough to keep the Clockworkers’ heads down. Maslow put four more bullets through the stairs door, which was jammed open on the fallen man’s body. Then he spun and fired two more into the elevator before the doors slid closed.
“Get out of here!” he bellowed as he took up a position on the corner of the corridor, gun aimed at the stairs door.
Grabbing Cleo’s arm, Sol sprinted away from the stairs along the perpendicular hallway.
“We have to help Ana!” Cleo cried.
He didn’t reply, but his face was set in stony resolve.
“Sol!”
“We can’t!” he said with despair. “Don’t you think I want to? They’ll kill us if we go back.”
They turned another corner, slamming through a set of double doors. “Where’s the fire escape?” he barked at her. He and Maslow had come in from the roof.
“Over…the other side,” she said, panting. “Left, and left.”
Barging past an orderly pushing a trolley of laundry, they heard more muffled shots behind them. The corridor branched off to the left, and they careered down it, Sol still holding on to Cleo’s arm. Racing past a row of recycling chutes, they dodged a wheeled medical apparatus left standing in the hallway and took another left. The corridor ended in a solid wall. Cleo stared at it in disbelief.
“I came out from a different floor.” She wheezed. “I thought they were all the same….”
Sol swore under his breath, looking around for another way out. They didn’t dare go back the way they’d come. Stepping out cautiously into the previous corridor, he quickly checked one door after another. Rooms without windows; dialysis machines, ultrasound scanners. Surprised patients looking up from their beds, nurses asking his business, windows with no fire escapes. His gun was back in his pocket, his palm sweaty against the grip.
“Sol.” Cleo put a hand on his arm. “We can use this.”
She was indicating the six recycling chutes in the corridor wall. “The one for fabric, it’s big enough.”
“It’s a long drop into a locked bin.” He shook his head, his eyes warily watching the end of the corridor. They heard the dull thumps of five more shots.
“Not to go down. To go up,” she prompted him.
She went first. The chute was less than a meter square, but by climbing in backward, she was able to stand on the lip of the hatch, push her back against the far wall, and wedge her hands and then her feet against the opposite corners. Jammed in like this, she worked her way up the vertical shaft, her body straining with the tension. She had once been a keen gymnast, but she’d quit a couple of years back—she was too busy being cool to be competitive—and Cleo wondered if she’d bitten off more than she could chew here. She guessed it must be at least three meters up to the next hatch…assuming the floor above had one.
Sol climbed in behind her, and as he took his feet off the lip, the hatch swung shut, cutting off the light. But Sol had anticipated this, and strapped to his head was a bright but tiny flashlight. Cleo was reminded of the man who had come after her along the ventilation duct in the sub-levels—the man who had just shown up in the elevator. He had used exactly the same kind of light. Sol had started to act like a Clockworker, and now it seemed he was equipped like one too. She wondered where the transformation would stop.
She was careful not to look down. There was just enough of the chute visible below her to send her heart into her throat, and Sol’s light dazzled her eyes. Instead, she edged her way slowly upward, conscious that if she relaxed her hold, it was a long fall, and she would take Sol with her. They could only hope that they didn’t get hit by a bundle of bedsheets or a load of soiled underwear on its way down to the laundry room. Her breathing was loud in the plastex chute, and she imagined the Clockworkers passing the hatches and hearing their breathing, the scraping of their hands and feet against the corridor wall. Her calves started to cramp, and her shoulders and neck ached with tension.
“Can you go any faster?” Sol whispered up to her through gritted teeth.
The tops of her thighs started to knot up now as well. Cleo’s fingers touched the edge of the next floor’s hatch just as her legs began to shake uncontrollably. Thankfully, the hospital did not have latches on their hatches and she pushed it open, peering out. The way was clear. Straightening her legs to shove herself out of the chute, she moaned and crumpled to the floor as the cramps screamed pain at her. Lying there, she tried to stretch out her knotting muscles. Moments later, Sol followed, his face twisted in discomfort, but he was still able to stand up once he was out. Cleo swore that if she lived through this, she was going to stay in better shape. She swallowed the pain and let him help her to her feet.
They turned to find a stunned doctor gazing at them with his mouth open.
“Hi,” Cleo told him as she wiped sweat from her forehead. “Just…just, eh, checking for blockages.”
This floor had access to the fire escape. Once on the roof, Sol led her across a utility frame full of cables and pipes to the roof of the salt refinery. From there, there were numerous routes of escape across the rooftops.
“How will you find Maslow?” she asked him.
“If he makes it out, there’s a place we arranged to meet if we got separated,” he replied. “But that won’t be until tomorrow. We need to find somewhere to hide out until then.”
“That woman was giving Ana an injection of something. What do you think it was?”
“I don’t know,” Sol said, shaking his head.
He didn’t want to think about it; there was nothing they could do now, anyway. He felt e
mpty, hollowed out. They had failed Ana and lost Maslow. But there was no time for recriminations. For now, he had to concentrate on keeping them alive.
Cleo looked out across the tops of the buildings before them. So the Clockworkers had come for Ana. And now they would be looking for her too. The city had taken on a different air; stretching out in front of them, it was a crazed warren of mechanical works, architecture, and anonymous faces, a million dark paths and shadowy corners. Too many places to conceal watching eyes, or waiting killers. She shivered in the chilly evening air.
Sol grinned sheepishly at her. “Welcome to the other side.”
Sol led Cleo across the deserted floor of a textile mill. Rolls of patterned fabric were stacked all around them; huge sheets hung on racks, their dyes drying, or on machines, waiting to be printed or embroidered. There was a stale, chemistry-set smell from the dyes and, from a bin at the end of the design workshop, the scent of rotting vegetable matter used to make some of the colors.
“I need to call my parents,” Cleo was saying. Her jacket was too thin for this environment, and hunger was making her colder.
“They’ll expect that,” he responded, shaking his head.
“If you call the hospital, they’ll trace the call. The same goes if you contact anybody who’s known to be friends with you or your parents.”
“I can’t just disappear on them! They have to know I’m okay.”
“We’ll get a message to them somehow…but later, all right?”
He stopped at a grate in the floor and pulled it open. Underneath, metal rungs set into the ferro-concrete formed a ladder that led down a dark vertical shaft. He strapped on the flashlight and led the way.
“Pull the grate closed after you,” he said from beneath her feet.
Sol had explained to her that Maslow had been a Clockworker, that he knew what they could do. He had shown her how she had to avoid streets with surveillance cameras and stay clear of public places and how to read the grid system that allowed them to find their way through the sub-levels, far from the more inhabited parts of the city.
In the under-city, among the enormous engineering works that supported Ash Harbor’s structure, most of the space was taken up by factories or the cheapest, most cramped tenement housing. Gray-skinned homeless and some delirious drunks huddled under blankets, hoping for handouts. The noise of the city was louder, more thunderous down here, carried through the walls and along the twisting streets and narrow alleyways. They passed factories where human bodies labored over clanking machines, oblivious to the time of day, struggling to make quotas and finish their long, punishing shifts.
This place gave Cleo the creeps; every face she saw was an imagined assassin or an informant who would wait for them to pass and then report them. But Sol was savoring his new role as guide and mentor. On his own, he would have been nervous down here without Maslow; having to look after Cleo, though, gave him a renewed confidence. He felt more at home now that he didn’t have Maslow babysitting him.
At the bottom of the shaft, beneath the textile mill, there was a huge room being used for storage; it had two other exits, which he knew led out to a sewer on one side and a utility tunnel on the other. With three escape routes, it was a good place to hide. During the day, the factory staff only ever came down to dump reject rolls of material for storage until they were recycled. He climbed a stack of rolls and walked along the top to a grille in a ventilation duct. Cleo watched as he pulled out the grille, reached in, and dragged out a holdall. In it were two blankets, some packs of food, and a large flask of water.
“Maslow has a few stashes like this around,” he said softly. “We can hole up here until morning; the factory’s shift starts at nine. They can’t see us here from down on the floor, anyway.”
Cleo was trembling with the cold, and she quickly took one of the blankets and wrapped it around herself.
“What’ve you got to eat?” she asked.
“Dried stuff,” Sol said. “Not sure what it is. It’s supposed to be full of vitamins and all that. Tastes like salted carpet.”
“It’ll do.” Cleo grabbed a packet and unwrapped the waxed rice paper.
Munching it, she made a face but persevered.
“Told you.” He shrugged as he sat down beside her.
Cleo watched him as she ate. She could see he was enjoying this…this adventure. All she could think about was that her family would be going out of their minds with worry. She was uncomfortable and cold; Sol was hardly a fountain of entertaining conversation, and she had no music and, most importantly, no stem. The craving for a smoke was made worse by anxiety and boredom. And she needed something to help get her mind off Ana and what might have happened to her. Cleo’s thoughts went back to the hospital, to her family and all the other people she had left behind. She remembered the doctors’ vain attempts to resuscitate Faisal, and she felt a dull pain in her chest. The food was little comfort: it quelled her hunger but left her thirsty. Taking a drink from the flask of water, she began to contrive ways of getting hold of some stem.
“I could really do with talking to Ube,” she said. “He could help us—his uncle’s a cop. Maybe find out who we can trust in the police—”
“You’re here because I got you mixed up in this,” Sol replied. “You want to do the same to Ube?”
“We need help…. What about going to Cortez? He’s this Pinoy mob boss—”
“I know who he is. He won’t do anything for free, and we don’t have any money. He might even be working with them.”
“I don’t think he’d turn us in,” Cleo tried again. “He…he likes me.”
“How do you know him?”
“I get my guitar strings from him. And stem, sometimes.”
“Ah.” Sol finished his food and took a swig of water.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. You were saying something with that ‘Ah.’”
“I was just saying ‘Ah,’ that’s all.” Sol rolled his eyes.
“Don’t read into it. I’m turning off the flashlight—the light could attract attention.”
“Don’t,” she said quickly. “There’s no windows, and nobody’s in the factory, right? I don’t want to be in the dark.”
Sol left it on. The diodes ran off electricity drawn from his own body and would not run down. They huddled under the blankets, neither speaking for a time.
“We need help,” Cleo said again. “What if they killed Maslow?”
“They didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
Sol didn’t answer, staying quiet for a time. Then: “So what kind of a name is Cleopatra Matsumura, anyway?”
“Cleopatra’s Egyptian, like the pyramids. You know, the big triangular stone things we learned about in history? Matsumura is Japanese Asian. Samurai warriors. Karaoke.”
“Oh.”
“So what kind of a name is Sol Wheat?”
“Solomon was an old Jewish king. Famous for being really smart. Wheat…That’s not our original name; it used to be Wiescowski, or Wiekovski or something. Eastern European Jews weren’t too popular when everybody started moving south in the big freeze, so my great-great-great-great-something-something grandfather changed it to ‘Wheat’ so he could get work. It’s from a place called the Ukraine. Cossacks. That Chernobyl disaster. It was one of the first places to freeze over.”
“Oh.”
Cleo looked at the patterns of leaves and flowers on the fabric beneath them. It was rough to the touch, and there was little give in the barrel-sized rolls, but she snuggled in the furrow between two of them, tucking her arm under her head as a pillow. She was exhausted, and in no time at all she was asleep.
Cleo awoke, cold to the bone, in pitch blackness. Her befuddled brain was still recovering from a nightmare about faceless figures with syringes, and it took her some moments to remember where she was. Her hands explored the strange, humped shapes around her.
&
nbsp; “Sol?” she whispered. “Sol? Are you there?”
“Yeah,” he muttered back from less than a meter away.
“Can’t you sleep?”
“One of us needs to stay awake while the other sleeps,” he said. “To keep watch.”
She crawled over to him, shivering. Throwing her blanket over him, she crept in under his, huddling close to him. He tensed at first, but then relaxed, shifting his body slightly to accommodate her. His skin felt much warmer than hers. Putting her arm over his chest, she pushed her face into the crook of his neck. Her body gradually stopped shivering, and she wriggled up closer to make the most of his warmth, letting him slip his arm under her head.
“Don’t get the wrong idea here,” she murmured in his ear. “You’re not my type. But I’m cold, I’m scared, and I’m strung out. I just need something to get me through the night.”
Her lips started on his neck, kissing him under his ear, and then on his jaw, and his cheek, before finally opening over his mouth. Sol pulled the blankets over them and wrapped her in his arms. It had been so long since he had held anyone close, and opening up to her thrilled and frightened him in equal measure. He was no longer on his own…and he no longer had just himself to worry about.
Section 19/24: HUNTED
SOL WOKE WITH a jolt. He had not meant to fall asleep—at least not until he was sure Cleo was awake to keep watch. A faint light filtered down from the shaft above. Cleo had a wristwatch, charged from the static on her skin. He checked it: half-past eight. They’d slept longer than he’d intended, but seeing as they weren’t dead or being dragged off to some secret sub-level prison, he had to assume they had not been discovered.
Cleo moved under the blanket beside him, and he cradled her head against his shoulder. He turned onto his side and stroked her face. “Hey, we have to get up.”
She opened her eyes and blinked. “It’s still dark,” she muttered sleepily.
“It doesn’t get any brighter down here.”
She groaned, and tucked herself into him. “Tch. Don’t wanna go,” she moped in a baby’s voice.
