6

 

FOR THE NEXT hour we’re left to explore on our own. But it’s all the same dreary, monotonous repetition: brightly lit narrow corridors, glaring light reflecting off the floor and walls. Only the recessed, shadowed enclaves offer a break from this garish sameness. The boys in the catacombs, their eyes vacant and dark, stare ghoulishly at us, but when we meet their gaze they flick their eyes away. They walk away from our questions, ignore our greetings.

We discover two large spaces—both about the size of a large lecture hall—at opposite points of the catacombs. One space is the dining room, although that’s too fancy a term. It is really little more than a feeding area for animals. Troughs run from one end of the room to the other, filled with slop-like porridge. The boys (and a sprinkling of girls) mill into the room, and eat quickly with their hands, cupping the food into their mouths. Another trough is filled with water, and it is there we head first. The water is brackish and lukewarm, with a metallic tinge to it. Other boys—giving us little more than a curious look—slip in and out of the dining hall, spending only about a minute at most. I realize this is how they dine: in small doses and quickly, only enough to quell hunger pangs.

Nauseating as that realization is, nothing prepares my stomach for what awaits in the other large room. We smell it long before we reach it. It’s the communal restroom, but again, that’s too grandiose a term. It’s really just an open cesspool of raw sewage. We stand at the cusp, none of us daring to go in.

A young boy walks out, shows only faint surprise on seeing us. “Don’t urinate or defecate anywhere but here. We don’t have many rules down here, but this is one of the few ironclad regulations. Do your business in here and nowhere else. Or else.” He walks away, hitching up his pants.

Eventually, we’ll have to walk in, bear with the smells and sights inside. But not now. We walk away, the stink of sewage following us down this empty corridor. Farther away, where the smell fades (it never entirely dissipates), we gather around one of the recessed enclaves.

“This is bad,” David says. “What are we going to do, Sissy?”

Sissy doesn’t answer. She examines the top edge of the enclave, pokes her finger into a thin groove. “I feel glass. This is where the glass door comes down.” After a second, she climbs into the enclave itself, starts banging on the back wall. A hollow echo sounds back. She bites her lower lip, deep in thought.

“What is it?” Epap asks.

“It’s empty space behind this wall. Remember what Matthew told us? There’s a whole transportation grid back there. Probably a network of tracks or rails to shuttle these enclaves back and forth.” She climbs back out with a look of disgust. “Feels like a coffin in there.”

We slump against the walls, preferring to sit on the floor rather than inside the enclaves. Although we’ve been in the catacombs for only about an hour, I already feel the fingers of claustrophobia entombing me. The bright light unrelenting, the smells unbearable, the air morose and bleak. We will, eventually, have to eat the slop from the trough, use the bathroom. Fall into a routine like everyone else here. And eventually, the alarm will sound and we will join the mad rush to find an empty enclave. This same dreary existence, repeated in indistinguishable cycles until, inevitably, one day, enclosed within an enclave, we will be shuttled away. Into their kitchen, into the Ruler’s Suite, into his mouth, passing in half-digested chunks through his organs.

An unwanted thought flits through my head, one that catches me by surprise: life in the Mission, governed by Krugman and his predecessors, now seems in comparison not so unconscionable. I shudder at the thought.

A determination sets in my bones. I look at Sissy and David and Epap. “We’re going to get out of here.”

“How?” David asks.

“I don’t know. But one thing I do know: we’ll escape or die trying. Because I’m not going to … simply waste away in this horrid place.” I put my hand on David’s, pat it hard. “I promise you, David. We’re not going to become like these people here. Because their existence … it’s not living. It’s not even surviving. It’s…” I shake my head. “It’s not for me. It’s not for us. I think I speak for all of us: I’d rather be dead tomorrow than alive for a year in here.”

Sissy’s eyes, withdrawn for the past hour, spark. I place my other hand over hers, and she grips it back tightly.

“Matthew told us the siren went off yesterday. That gives us six days to find a way out of here. Six days. That’s plenty of time. And we’ll spend every minute of that time examining every nook and cranny of this place. We use all our wiles and cunning and smarts. We’ll find a way out.”

“But Matthew said—” David starts to say.

“Matthew isn’t us. Matthew hasn’t survived a mass Heper Hunt, hasn’t escaped a horde of thousands. We have. Matthew hasn’t survived a journey down the Nede River, a plummet down a waterfall. We have. Matthew hasn’t survived swarms of duskers in the mountains. Matthew didn’t just survive mass carnage in the station below.” I grip Sissy’s hand tighter, grab David’s arm tightly now. “But we have. We are awesome together. We are formidable. I really believe that. There’s something about the four of us together. The duskers—thousands of them, armies of them, armadas of them—have never defeated us. At the dome, on the riverbanks, in the mountains. Not once. We’ve stared them down each and every time.”

Next to me, Epap is nodding. “Gene’s right. We’ll leave nothing unturned in this place. And we stay together over the next six days. Let’s not separate at all.”

The smallest smile breaks across David’s face. “Okay.”

“Then let’s do this,” I say. “Let’s start exploring and studying the structure, talk to people. Because I have a feeling that six days is going to fly by—”

And that’s when I’m cut off.

By the sound of a siren.