26
JEREMIAH TOOK most of the guards with him, leaving only two to escort Leo “somewhere safe.” Leo was relatively sure that Jeremiah wasn’t concerned with his safety as much as his containment. The two guards each had a hand on one of Leo’s shoulders, and they pushed him through the dark hallways at a light jog, directing him here, there. They climbed stairs and ducked through an alley.
The two were strong, and they kept their faces turned away from him as much as they could, as if they didn’t want to be identified. They ran down dark corridors without hesitating, and it seemed like they could see in the dark. He tried to start a conversation with them, hoping there was something human hidden behind their robotic obedience, but they never replied.
One moment they pushed him faster, faster, and the next moment they stopped, motionless. He looked over his shoulder at one of them, and the guard lifted a finger to his lips.
“Shh.”
The three of them stood in almost complete darkness in the bowels of a building. That’s when Leo heard scurrying sounds, the lightest whisper of feet, of people trying not to be heard, not to be seen. He thought everyone was with Jeremiah, preparing to fight a war. The room’s ceiling was low, and he couldn’t see any walls.
Leo didn’t know exactly what happened, but in a blink the guards were gone. The weight of their hands on his shoulders slid away. The sound of people wrestling, fighting wordlessly, was followed by the shushing sound of people being dragged over a floor, their clothes scratching at the carpet. Still, Leo didn’t move. Maybe the attackers had forgotten about him. Maybe they hadn’t seen him. Maybe they had seen him but didn’t care.
“Come on,” a familiar voice whispered, and a soft hand gripped his shoulder, pulled him farther along. He followed. They moved quickly, quietly, for a few minutes before finding a patch of light. Five figures emerged from the shadows.
Sandra and her friends. They moved like ghosts.
“Why?” Leo asked, hugging each of them fiercely.
Sandra looked around at the others. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She started talking again, but her voice trailed off, and she mumbled again, “I don’t know.”
“How did you get away?” Leo asked. “What about the other guards?”
“They have their hands full,” Mary said in her gentle voice. “It turns out a lot of people don’t want to fight a war.”
“So, the war isn’t going to happen?” Leo asked.
“It’s going to happen,” Sandra said. “But it’s not as organized as Jeremiah wants it to be. A lot of people deserted. We’re getting out of here. We think we might be country folk, maybe try living in the forest for a time.”
“I have to find my sister,” Leo said.
Sandra stared at him. “This city is going down,” she said in a serious voice. “Once Jeremiah starts what he wants to start, nothing will get out alive. Probably not even him. They’re not called Frenzies for nothing.”
“I can’t leave now,” Leo said.
“You really think the gate is still open?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. But I have to try, right? She’s my sister.”
Sandra stood there quietly for what felt like a long time, but darkness has a way of magnifying time, stretching it.
“Follow me,” she finally said, walking through the long room and out a door. Leo followed her as they descended. Five flights down, six flights down, seven flights down. He hadn’t realized the guards had taken him up that high. Sandra kept going down.
It was pitch-black, and they made their way by holding to a handrail. Leo followed the gentle sound of Sandra’s footsteps, and there was nothing but the sound of their feet and the rail slipping through his hands, that line of cold metal. It was the sound of loss, the sound of movement, the sound of losing everything. If he somehow misplaced that rail, he thought he might float away into the nothingness around him.
At the bottom, Sandra gathered them all together and struck a match. The light flared up, and everyone’s faces looked orange, flickering in the shadows.
“Here is the door,” Sandra said, pointing. Her match went out, and all the light in the world fled with it, but she kept talking in the dark.
“That door leads to an underground passageway. Tunnels, maybe. I’m not sure what they were for at first. But at each intersection of tunnels you’ll see arrows in different colors. Follow the red arrows and they will bring you to the basement of a house in the heart of the city. You said you wanted to get to the middle, close to the tall building. I think you’re crazy. I think you’re going in the wrong direction. If I were you, I would go to the trees and hide until this madness passes. Or leave. Head back to the doorway.”
“Why don’t you come with me?” Leo asked in an excited voice. “Come with me! We’ll find my sister. We’ll get out of here. You can come back through the doorway with us.”
When Sandra spoke, he knew she was speaking for all of them.
“We can’t go back,” she said. “None of us. I’ve thought about it, believe me. But there’s nothing for us, not there.”
“But . . .” Leo tried to interrupt.
“Forget it, Leo,” she said. “Forget it.”
Leo heard sadness in her voice, and regret, and he realized that in those few short days Sandra had become his friend.
“The red arrows will lead you to the basement of a house, very close to the tall building. If that’s what you want to do, if you think that’s where your sister is, follow those arrows.”
“Who mapped them out? That must have taken forever,” Leo said.
“Yeah. I don’t know. But whoever did it was organized, and they knew the city. Blue arrows go all the way to the river. Yellow ones lead to the tall building—I wouldn’t go straight there if I were you. Too many guards. Too many people.” She paused. “There are green arrows too, but we’re not sure about them. We never followed green to the end. Our investigation was interrupted.”
“You’ve seen the water? You’ve been to the tall building?” Leo asked, surprised.
“We’ve been close enough to hear the water, but never climbed out onto the street. We’ve been under the tall building but never inside of it.”
“No,” Sandra said, pressing a small box into his hands. “That’s most of our matches. Walk with your hand against the wall. When you come to a turn or an intersection, light a match, follow the red arrow. Don’t use them all the time or you’ll run out. It’s not far, but there are a lot of turns. A lot.”
Leo could hear their breath, he could smell it as it mingled with his own, there in the darkness under the city. He wanted to say a lot of things to Sandra.
“Thank you” was all he said.
He walked over to where he thought the door had been, but it wasn’t there. He felt around for the doorknob but couldn’t find it. He struck a match, and light burned an image in his eyes. He reached for the door handle and looked over his shoulder.
“Good-bye, Sandra. Thank you.”
They were already gone.
There are a lot of things to think about when you’re walking almost silently through pitch-black tunnels beneath a city about to go to war. You’ll find you have a lot of questions about life, about yourself, about where you’re going and where you might go back to. Leo did. He wondered all of those things and more. As he walked, step-by-step, his hand sliding along the rough walls of the tunnel, he wondered about his father. He wondered about his sister. He wondered about what this city was, how it had gotten there, and what would happen once it was destroyed.
Most of all, he wondered about Abra. He wondered if she had found the Tree, if she had already left and locked the Passageway behind her. He didn’t think he could live with that if it was him. He didn’t think he could lock people out of the world for the rest of their lives. But he didn’t know Abra, not really. He didn’t know what she would do or what was at stake.
He hurried forward, one hand on the wall, the other hand waving in front of him in case something blocked his path. At first, he didn’t trust the darkness and he walked slowly, but the farther he went, the faster he allowed himself to walk. The passageways seemed clear—every time he lit a match, he noticed there was nothing there except more empty passages. Most of the intersections were four-way crossings.
There was the blue arrow, and it had consistently been the one pointing to his right for quite some time. The green arrow always seemed to be pointing to the left. The red and yellow arrows both pointed straight ahead. He walked forward, one hand guarding the flame, keeping the light as long as he could. It sizzled out, and he dropped the match and kept walking forward into the darkness.
Sometimes he sloshed through shallow puddles, sometimes he even heard water trickling down the sides of the gray cement walls. When he struck a match at the intersections, he saw naked light bulbs in the ceiling, broken or burned-out long ago. Or maybe they had never worked. That was the thing about the city—you never could tell if anything was old or new.
At some intersections, all the arrows pointed down the same passage, which made him think there must be multiple ways of getting somewhere, which in turn made him wonder if they weren’t set out in a grid like streets, with multiple crossings, multiple meanderings. But the red and yellow arrows ran together almost every time.
His hand swept off the wall and into midair. Another intersection. His matches were getting low. A surge of panic overwhelmed him as he thought about running out of matches and wandering this endless underground maze for the rest of his life. He imagined trying to chart it all in his mind—the grids, the paths, the darkness. Trying to find his way without light. Counting steps. Counting breaths.
He pulled out one of his last matches and struck it against the cement wall. It hissed and scratched, bringing light out of nothing, light out of emptiness, light out of death. To his left, a narrower passageway with the green arrow. To his right, also a narrower passageway with the blue arrow. In front of him a door with two large circles drawn on it: one red, one yellow.
A door.
Leo turned the doorknob. It was locked. His match went lower and lower. He held it, staring at the lock until the flame burned his fingers.
“Ouch!” he said, throwing the matchstick to the ground.
He pulled out his lock-picking set and flipped out the correct wire. He didn’t even bother to light another match, simply inserted the pick and nudged it here, twitched it there, and tried the knob again. It turned, and the door eased its way open, not making a sound. He walked into a room. Dim light entered through short basement windows that lined the top of the walls.
He looked around. He thought he was in a cellar of some sort—the walls were stone with white plaster sealing the joints, the ceiling was bare crossbeams and wires and pipes, and there was a stairway at the far end. He walked over and around the contents of the basement, which were numerous and strange: aluminum pails, tools in a plastic container, a pink bicycle, three long, flat boards, a pile of nails, a pile of stones. He would have classified every single thing as junk except the contents were so well organized that it seemed someone must have cared about what was there. He got to the stairs and walked up, through another door.
He was no longer looking for the arrows. The rooms on the main level were normal rooms, although the house looked abandoned. There was a back door, locked, so he went toward the front of the house, cutting through a kitchen, a dining room, and into a front room. Everything was dusty, and his shoes left tracks as if he was walking through dirty snow or ash. He looked through the front window, out onto the street.
That’s when he saw her.
Ruby.
She was much older, but he’d recognize that soft nose anywhere. Her eyes.
“Ruby,” he whispered, tears forming in his eyes.
She ran up the street, and she was fast, but she was only growing into her body, and there was something clumsy about the way she moved. There is a striving in the way a young person runs at that age, as if their uncertain emotional journey is reflected in their physical movement. Her feet slid on the street as she changed direction. She pumped her arms. She kept looking over her shoulder as if she expected a tidal wave to crash around the corner at any moment. Leo waved to her through the dim glass, tapped on the window, anything to get her attention. He ran to the door, pushed it open, and shouted for her.
She glanced up at him and for a second he thought she would run past. He prepared to chase after her, but at that very moment she veered in the street and ran for the abandoned house where he stood. She came up the steps and ran past, through the doorway, without even stopping to look at him. He followed her inside and pulled the door closed behind them. Immediately everything felt still. The empty house around them was like a bubble.
“Who are you?” she asked, breathing hard.
“There isn’t time,” he heard himself saying, but it all seemed like it was happening in some far-off place. “Come on.”
They snuck back into the dark house. She paused in the front room.
“Don’t stop now,” he hissed, going back farther into the house, into the darkness. The only thought in his mind was of Abra and the key. He wondered if she had already found the Tree and left them behind. He pictured walking into the darkness only to find that the darkness was all there was—no door outlined in light, no way out.
“Who are you?” she whispered, and her voice was precisely as he had always imagined it would be. The words were muffled in the empty house, like sand through a sieve. In the flash of a moment he remembered singing her to sleep or sitting beside her bed or feeling her forehead when she was sick, feeling the heat.
“There isn’t time,” he repeated. Tears rose in his eyes again. He pushed them back with the palms of his hands. He wanted to hug her. He wanted to hold her face. “You need to come with me.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Are you Ruby Jardine?” he asked, wanting to hear her say it.
“Who are you?” she asked again, but now there was a hint of recognition on her face, as if she had seen him in a dream long ago.
“Are you Ruby Jardine?” Leo insisted.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m Ruby.”
They got to the back of the house.
“Ruby,” he said in a quiet voice, “you’re not going to believe me.”
He paused.
“I’m your brother. I’m Leo.”
Suddenly, pain surged from the top of his head and traveled down the core of his being. He fell to the ground, grabbing behind him to try to ward off his attacker, but another blow dropped him further. A group of hands lifted him, and a voice that he thought he recognized said, “Take him up with the other spy. Level 27. I’ll come up later.”
Strange sounds. The same voice said, in a suddenly gentle tone, “Ruby, Ruby, are you okay?”
The darkness he traveled through in those moments was darker than the underground passageways, a kind of darkness that swirled with loose pieces of light, and for a time he thought he might be lost forever in it, the shifting shadows and the piercing moments of pain like a match being struck. They carried him, and he bounced up and down and sometimes caught the corners of walls as they passed by. Up and up and up, stairs and stairs and into the sky, until he lost count of the floors and the men who carried him puffed hard breaths of weariness. Finally, through a door, and oh how his head hurt, and they opened a side door and went down a long hall and through another door, and they threw him inside.
Pain surged when he hit the ground and he nearly gave in to the darkness again, but he didn’t, because he heard a voice. And he realized it wasn’t his imagination. The voice was coming from right there in the corner, in the shadows of a windowless room.
“Leo, is that you?”