“Okay.” Morgan shuffled around the kitchen, sifting through items on the counter and purse swinging with the motion. “I’ll be gone until at least four. I’ll pick up Cheryl from school, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Because I was so worried,” Laura grumbled, pouring herself another cup of tea. Okane smiled warily, unsure if this was a joke, while Morgan ignored her.
“Without office hours you have a whole day ahead of you. Heaven forbid, I wonder if you’re planning to do me favors.”
She’d taken Laura’s return surprisingly well, considering she’d been gone a week and a half with no warning. It helped that Laura arrived with a full escort: priest, Ranger, investigator, and multiple policemen. The police and Byron assured her that she’d talked with Albright and the police planned immediate action in regard to Juliana; Cherry shared that Laura had been under her wing most of this time and therefore safe in the wilds; and Mateo offered the softer reassurance of everything will be just fine. Cheryl had gained bragging rights, because none of her classmates had Rangers over for dinner, did they? Morgan still remembered Okane as “that nice boy who doesn’t know how to celebrate Underyear,” so it didn’t take much convincing to let him stay the night. He’d spent the morning following her around the kitchen and handing her ingredients; Morgan had jokingly asked if he wanted a job at the catering office.
“There’s not much to do here otherwise,” Morgan said now, plucking up a notebook to stow in her bag. “I think Charlie will be back from school around noon, though, so I’d suggest going out. That boy’s become such a gossip! He was talking about those articles from the papers and implying things about you to all the neighbors. Well! I caught him in the act and gave him a piece of my mind.”
Laura sucked in a horrified, excited breath. “Oh, no. You didn’t!”
“I did!” Morgan brandished her keys like a weapon. “And he won’t forget it anytime soon. He’s out of my good books permanently. I’ll miss having someone to clean out the plumbing, but apparently there wasn’t much else to lose. Although, one of those policemen yesterday was young and handsome. Maybe today you should drop by and see if he’s available?”
Laura forced a grimace. “Morgan.”
“I had to try! Oh, and Okane, you’ll be with us for dinner again tonight, right? How do you feel about chicken à la king?”
“Chick—What?”
“It’s good,” Laura chuckled.
“Then I’m sure I’d like it.”
“Wonderful! I’ll make that, then. Maybe I can convince my boss to let me host another tasting party,” said Morgan, rubbing her hands together. “That’s twice in three months, but I’d love your input. We’re always working on next season’s cookbooks. I’ll let you know about it later!”
Once she’d left, Okane leaned forward. “I like - - -r aunt.”
“So do I,” said Laura, unable to quash her smile anymore. “I was worried for a while that she’d never stop pushing Charlie on me, but she keeps surprising me. We really should leave before he comes back, though. I’d rather jump off the First Quarter wall than talk to him.”
“Well, I do have an idea of where to go.”
Laura’s eyes narrowed. “You say that as if it’s something to hide.”
“Maybe? I’m not entirely sure it’s legal.” He laced his fingers together and took a deep breath. “I want to check the sunk Pits.”
It took a moment for Laura to remember what he meant. When she did, she leaned back in her chair, already tired. “Juliana was really interested in them. She wanted to reallocate the Gin there into our kin production, didn’t she?”
“Exactly. Doing that would leave the Pit itself vulnerable to infestations.” He frowned. “Not just vulnerable, but perfect. It could become a breeding ground the likes of which we’ve never seen.”
No one would agree to help her with that, Laura wanted to argue, but she couldn’t know for sure. Basil’s letter had implied the Council approved many things they hadn’t understood.
“We could ask the Council for a list of approved items,” she said, tapping her fingers on the tabletop. “No, that wouldn’t work. Even if they agreed to get it to us, it would take forever to issue the list; it would be too late to do anything by then. I don’t think they’d agree to give us anything in the first place. We’re not on their payroll anymore. Technically we have no right to the information.”
“The sunk Pits are my property,” said Okane. “I have every right to that information. I’ll bring the estate administrator into this if I have to.”
“It would still take a ridiculously long time to get the information. Do you know where to find those Pits?”
“They’re located in spurs along the outer Quarter walls,” he replied. “They’ll be very distinctive locations, and I’m told those areas of the mines have good signage. If we can get down there, it’ll be easy to track them down.”
“We can get down there,” said Laura, standing. “We may not be official anymore, but the Council hasn’t revoked our IDs yet. We have enough stars on those to get anywhere we need to go in Amicae.”
“So long as the person checking IDs doesn’t know about our situation,” said Okane, but he stood too.
“Stars are stars,” said Laura. “Let’s do this.”
The door to the interior yawned wide open, ready to admit any workers. They slipped in with no trouble. The usual din of the interior had dimmed somewhat. In the wake of the Falling Infestation many of the machines and factories had been trashed. While some were fixed up quickly, others remained ruined. Some damaged equipment had been removed entirely—one of the elevator shafts was conspicuously blocked off—and scaffolds for repairmen had been erected along walls and walkways. Nevertheless, spirits remained undaunted and production went on, evident by the smoke, lights, and noise. They made a beeline for one of the elevators and waited by a crowd of miners.
“Excuse me.” Laura approached one and waved for his attention. “Which level are you going to?”
“Fifth,” the man replied.
Laura glanced back at Okane. “Where’s our destination?”
“Seventh level,” he replied.
The man frowned at one, then the other. “Seventh? That’s—Hang on, have I seen you before? Aren’t you Sweepers? Don’t you usually go up?”
“We have reason to believe that some of our equipment down there could be damaged,” said Laura. “I’d like to check its status, and arrange for repairs if necessary.”
“Are you even allowed to go down?” said the man, suspicious.
“We can’t waste time when it comes to infestations,” said Laura. “We have the credentials if you need them. Want to see our IDs?”
“No, no, that’s fine. Just let me talk to the operator.”
The man hurried away, clearly happy to escape them. They followed him to the operator. Laura didn’t catch most of the conversation, but the operator squinted up at her.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make sure you get down there. Just get on the lift with the rest of them.”
As the elevator clattered up and open, the crowd moved forward and the pair moved with them. They stood close to the grilles as it rattled closed again.
“Going to the fifth level,” announced the operator, dull and tired.
“Wait! Stop that elevator!”
The operator jolted to full awareness and looked around. The miners stood on tiptoe to squint at the disturbance. Okane made a choking noise.
“Is that Cherry?”
Cherry ran across one of the walkways, with Mateo dashing behind her.
“Hold it! You’re not getting away without giving me a goddamn answer, you absolute idiot! Stop that elevator!”
“This one?” the operator called, gesturing at the elevator.
“No, the other one! You with the bandana, stop the—Augh!”
She gestured violently at the next mine shaft, where the elevator had already begun its descent.
The operator shook his head, obviously not willing to question it. He hit the button and the floor jerked beneath Laura’s feet. She pressed harder against the grille.
“Cherry?” she called. “Cherry, what’s going on?”
Mateo turned to her first, abnormally pale and holding some kind of shroud. “Risen!” he yelped. “Ra—risen! He’s walking! It’s impossible, but he’s walking!”
“Be careful!” Cherry shouted. “Something’s down there! I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s not good!”
“What do you mean?” said Laura.
“I said, it’s not—”
A nearby pipe shot out a burst of hissing steam. The sound covered up Cherry’s voice. The Ranger cupped hands around her mouth and shouted, but Laura couldn’t make out any words over the noise.
“Not good? What kind of ‘not good’ are they talking about? Infestations?” she whispered.
“Cherry can’t sense them,” said Okane. “I don’t know what else she could mean, though.”
Cherry couldn’t sense infestations, but she could spot people. Bad people in the mines? The Rexian Sweepers had fled the city without looking back, and Juliana had no ready sidekicks. That only left the mobs. If the Mad Dogs had planted the Falling Infestation for some convoluted reason, would they set up a secondary infestation to push this hidden agenda? Without knowing their goal Laura couldn’t predict their moves, but she knew one thing for sure: if they did plan another catastrophe, she’d stop it before it grew. She’d keep it from eating anyone.
“Keep an eye out in the tunnels,” she said. “This smells like dog.”
The elevator took them down into the dark. They went for long stretches of blackness, only kept from blindness by a single bulb in the elevator ceiling and the glimpses of light as they passed level after lit level. When they reached the fifth, the grilles opened to expel the passengers. Laura and Okane stood aside as miners flooded out. Once the last man left, the grilles closed and they rattled down again. The farther they went, the sharper the chill in the air.
The grilles opened again to the seventh level and they stepped out. Laura wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see in a mine, but a completely wood-paneled space hadn’t occurred to her at all. Thick wooden beams supported both the roof and a wooden ceiling, and it seemed the builders had been determined to block out any hint of rocky wall with the same wood slats. Electrical cords looped overhead, traveling out of sight in most cases while a thicker cable connected lights in a line along the ceiling. The floor was so dark it looked black, but the shine of metal tracks glinted through the grime. These tracks forked off, a set for each of the four branching paths.
Directly in front of them, a map hung nailed to the wall. The circle patterns could easily be interpreted as the city’s walls, but the map sprawled far beyond these, and Laura couldn’t make out what all the color-coding meant. Okane seemed to understand it perfectly, because he stepped up to it and ran a finger over the Third Quarter line.
“As I understand, no one actually mines in the seventh level anymore,” he said. His quiet voice echoed ever so slightly. “The real valuable stuff is deeper down or out, and they didn’t want to disturb the Gin.”
“Miners have gotten superstitious about Silverstones,” said Laura. “They’re scared of getting close to begin with.”
“The closest one is…” His finger followed the line, from the red dot of their location to a black “X” chamber. “Here. We’ll reach it if we go left.”
They took the left path, walking in the middle of the tracks. Laura hoped no coal car would come to mow them down, but the farther they went, the less she feared. Despite the lights, there was no movement, no sound apart from their own. The only muffled noise she could detect came from below. They were alone in the cold.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” she asked after a while.
“The Pits are in alcoves along the main circuit, following the walls.”
“Did I see more of those marks on other Quarter lines? We might have to go deeper to reach some.”
“There were more circuits originally. The outermost Pits were in the Third Quarter, so we should be on track.”
“We must’ve had a hell of a lot of Pits.”
“This was the Sweeper city, wasn’t it?”
“Point taken.”
“There were originally fifteen Pits in Amicae,” Okane explained. “The three in the First Quarter haven’t been touched, but others were sunk in smaller sets over the years. There were three more in the Second Quarter, and nine in the Third. I’m glad they’re not all active. We’d need a huge amount of Sweepers to maintain them.”
“At one point we had them. I wonder what those first Sinclairs would think if they could see the state of the Sweepers now: only one Sweeper, and she’s a murderous backstabber.”
“I think they might cry.”
“It makes me want to cry.”
“I guess that man in Rex was right,” Okane sighed. “The weakest don’t need much to undo them.”
Laura snorted. “We aren’t weak. Big operations like Puer couldn’t handle what we managed with just two or three of us, even Joseph Blair admitted it. If we had the people, we’d be amazing.”
“A moot point when there’s no people.”
“Maybe we should make that our job. Recruiting more people. Maybe even start up a separate, independent Sweeper business! You have all the equipment, so it’s not too far-fetched. The Council wouldn’t have any say if we’re a business apart from them. But then we’d have to renegotiate all the old agreements without their help. That would take some figuring out. We’d have to recruit anyway.”
“If Clae couldn’t recruit, what makes you think we can?”
“Clae didn’t have our flexibility,” she pointed out. “No one’s going to join a department they don’t believe exists, and with the wall policy gone, we don’t have that issue. We have notoriety. We can attract all the daredevils in the city if we play our cards right.”
Okane smiled at first, but the mirth slid quickly from his face. He stopped short of the corner, his eyes down, pondering. Laura stood next to him, suddenly concerned.
“Hey, we don’t have to take the daredevils. We can vet people as they come in. I’m sure we’ll find someone we’ll get along with.”
“Can - - -, um—” He raised one finger, brow furrowing.
Laura went quiet. The mine’s silence weighed heavily on her, but Okane tilted his head just slightly, as if straining to hear something. She stepped closer and whispered, “What are you hearing?”
“I don’t think we’re alone down here.”
Laura frowned, fighting the urge to peer around the corner. “Is it a miner?”
“No. Whoever it is, they’re broadcasting their intentions. They feel malevolent. They feel like—” He sucked in a breath and gave her a horrified look. “This is bad. It’s an enemy.”
If he was that certain, Laura wouldn’t question it.
They slinked close to the wall and ducked down. Okane pulled a spare kin gun from his belt, and Laura unearthed one of her few Eggs. She held her breath, straining her ears. Footsteps came from the next tunnel, slow and quiet. If she hadn’t been waiting for it she never would’ve noticed even in the silence of the mine. Whoever it was moved at a snail’s pace. Surely a miner would stride through as if he owned the place? As the quiet stretched out, this person gained speed, closer and closer. Does he think we’re gone? Laura wondered. Soon the slight crunch of dirt came from barely two feet away, and then stopped entirely. Laura gritted her teeth, grip tightening.
A face appeared. The stranger barely had time to peer around the corner before Laura lunged. She smashed the butt of her hand into the other’s nose, causing him to reel backward. Her hand stung but she ignored it, launching forward to overbalance him entirely; he hit the floor with a thud. Okane leapt out after her, kicking the stranger’s hand and causing the gun there to skitter out of his grip. The stranger thrashed, trying to regain his feet, but they pinned him, and Okane jabbed the gun into his temple.
“Stop moving!” he ordered.
The stranger stilled. He glared up at them with bright blue eyes, blood streaming from his nose. Despite the grime on his face, the number tattoo remained bold and legible. He bared his teeth in a grin. The blood bubbled as he gave a snort of laughter.
“Hello, paragon.”