Lifers

by M. A. Griffin

  But even as he considered it, the thought turned cold in his mind. He had no right to criticize them, because he’d done this too. Go get dead, he’d typed. He hadn’t meant to start something bad. He’d hoped for something better. But it was done now, and when something’s done, the only way is forward.

  “The only way is forward,” he said quietly.

  Esther drew in a breath and Preston could hear it tremble. “Yes,” she said. “After tonight, I guess that’s right.”

  “I need to get Alice out. Just tell me now. Can you get me through?”

  Shade nodded slowly. The nightwarden looked shattered.

  Esther shook her head. “It’s dangerous, Preston. You shouldn’t do it. Really.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Esther blinked, looked at her hands, and picked her words carefully. “It’s like a cave.”

  Preston and Mace waited. But that was it. That was BTV: a cave. And that was where Alice had gone. And Ryan.

  “If I want to go into the valve,” Preston said, “how long have I got before Armstrong runs shutdown?”

  “Try this on,” said Shade. He held out a curious folded object. It looked like one of those Velcro arm straps used to take blood pressure. The ones that doctors inflate with a little rubber balloon—the ones that grip your arm until each pulse of blood feels like the thud of current in an electric fence. “Careful. It’s got a microchip in it.”

  “What is it?”

  “A databand. Now listen, kid.” Shade gripped his shoulders. He’d gone serious as they climbed the stairs up from the warehouse to a stockroom on the floor above. There were stacks of blister packs, plastic-wrapped goggles, and other equipment. It all looked medical: first aid kits, bags of fluid and drips, and the weird armbands—dozens upon dozens of them. Mace had fallen silent as Shade had gathered what he wanted together. “You cannot get back again without these,” he said, his voice slow and firm. “If you try coming back without a databand, you’ll be just like the boy you saw fitting to death in the parking lot.”

  “How come?” This was Mace, his voice quiet.

  Shade was unpacking a collection of these databands, breaking open their plastic seals and loosening them so they were ready to wear. “Think of it like deep-sea diving,” he said. “When divers go deep—I mean really deep—levels of nitrogen in the blood rise dangerously high. If they come up too quickly, they could die. Now. Where you’re going—think of it as seriously damn deep, boys. You try coming back to Manchester in a hurry, you’ll arrive in a mess. And you’ll go into seizure.” He held up the band, turning it partially inside out. “See here? The chip reads your blood pressure and hormone levels. And there’s a couple of pouches inside the lining. And these little needles”—he was indicating a little bristle of metal, like teeth, on the inside of the band—“will pierce your skin and pump you full of the good stuff. You come back feeling nothing more than a bit of jet lag. Maybe a touch of a headache and a fierce hunger. But when you’re BTV and you want to come home, you tighten the armband like this”—he was holding it up, demonstrating—“and you pull this until you feel the needles bite you. That’s the key, right, boys? Feel it bite you and you’ll be okay. Now. You’ll need a few. One for your friend, one for each of you.” He handed over three.

  Preston packed them carefully into a shoulder bag borrowed from the stockroom and they made their way back downstairs and across the warehouse floor to the entrance. Outside, the predawn air was chill. There was the beginning of morning in the sky. Across Back Half Moon was the fire door and beyond it, the valve. Preston felt so scared he could almost breathe it in.

  Shade cleared his throat, looking at the advancing day. “If Armstrong runs shutdown,” he said, “you’ve got maybe twenty-four hours at most. After that, this valve will deactivate, then, bit by bit, all the others too. Drag your feet down there, kids, and you won’t be able to come back.”

  “We’ll be trapped in the pipes,” Preston said, remembering the phrase Shade had used earlier.

  The nightwarden nodded. “Unless there’s a valve still open elsewhere. In which case you’ll turn up somewhere unexpected. Twenty-four hours, kids. No time for sleeping or hanging around. You get in, you get what you need, you get out again. We have to try to cover our tracks as much as possible before Armstrong’s men run shutdown. We’ll have to leave you to make your own way to the basement—you’ll figure out how to use the valve.”

  Preston wiped his eyes and nodded. “How do we get through the door?”

  Shade flashed a set of keys. “Use this one. And the code for the interior keypad is here. Now—next thing is the goggles.” Shade unwrapped the ones he’d brought down from the stockroom and passed them over. They were big and heavy—ugly rubbery things. “Try them on.”

  Preston looped a pair over his head and straightened them over his eyes and face. They swallowed him up. “Why do we even need these?” he asked. “Couldn’t we just close our eyes?”

  Shade shook his head. “These are safer.”

  Mace raised a hand, pushing his back. “Listen. I’m not going.”

  Preston searched his friend’s eyes. “What?”

  Mace bit his lip. “I’m not going. This Alice thing is crazy, man. Your plan is crazy. You’ll be 404 in minutes. You heard what Esther said. It’s a cave full of psychos. You’ve got to be mad. I’m not coming.”

  “Jesus!” Preston said. “What sort of backbone have you got, Mace?” He felt the heat rise in his face, his heart hammering. He clenched his fists. This was typical, this was. Every time it came to the crunch, Mace would be the guy to go missing. All through school—Mace was the one lining up in the cafeteria while Preston got hammered on the backfield; Mace was the one doing an after-school detention the night there was a rumble on the bus; the guy who played hooky when a showdown was due. “What about Alice?”

  Mace looked at his friend. “She loves Ryan. She doesn’t give a damn about you, Press.”

  Preston took a swing at him then. He connected pretty well: a blow just below the eye. Mace gave as good as he got, thumping him on the bridge of the nose so hard all Preston could do was lean against the van shaking stars from his head while Shade shouted and separated them.

  “Big-time unnecessary,” Preston said as his vision cleared, wiping the blood from his top lip.

  “Major-league unnecessary,” Mace spat, feeling his cheek. “I’m not coming and that’s that.”

  “Lads,” Shade said, cold and firm. He had a hand on each of their shoulders, like a father talking to his sons. “I lost my job. I don’t give a damn about your argument. If you want to see the valve, let’s do it now. But if you’re going to go all soap opera on me, I’ll just Sleeptight the shit out of you both and drop you home.”

  There was a silence. The sun was coming up and the air was starting to mist.

  “I’ll go as far as the valve,” Mace said.

  The last time Preston had seen the Kepler valve, it had changed him; just the sight of it had tangled his guts. It made you stand up straighter, blink more; it made your back go cold and your skin clammy.

  “Jesus,” Mace said as he saw it.

  The servers blinked, their fans churning the hot, stale subterranean air. They began the walk toward the raised metal box.

  Being near it didn’t make things any easier. It was braced by industrial-looking iron girders, raised on a platform of odd rubberized plates, plugged into service pipes in the ceiling and strapped to a workstation to the left of its gaping mouth. The boys halted their inspection there: a functional little desk on wheels, a white tablet, two pens and a shut laptop, three pairs of those saucer-eyed goggles, and two books.

  Preston stepped forward. His throat clammed up.

  Two books. There was a novel. And a little notebook.

  The Count of Monte Cristo, battered and rammed with Post-its. And Alice’s notebook.

  For a second, neither of them spoke. Then Mace was talking in a low voice. “We’re in a bi
g underground space beneath the M.I.S.T. building. And we have confirmation that one Alice Wilde has also been here. Item one, a notebook full of crazy maps … ”

  Preston swore. “C’mon, man. Give it a damn rest.”

  Mace looked indignant, touched the bruise on his cheek and winced, and raised the phone to his lips. “My colleague Preston Faulkner is also present. And for the record, earlier he hit me. Twice.”

  Preston ignored him. Instead, he flicked through the book. Some of the pages were caught and lifted a little—a breath of cold night air. He looked over his shoulder. A high small window at the far end of the room was open. She’d squeezed through. She’d texted him. She’d dumped the notebook—it was a marker, a trail of bread crumbs through a dangerous wood—then she’d climbed into the mouth of the big metal monster. Preston swallowed back a hot lump in his throat, thumbing the pages. Then the valve breathed again—a low vibrating stutter that rose in pitch, then dropped.

  “That is horrible,” Mace said. He wiped the sweat from his top lip, his face pale, and stepped back. “Tell me you’re not going in.”

  Preston looked up. Two steps led up to a recessed area with a door. He swallowed a mouthful of terror and mounted the stairs. At the top, he turned to Mace. His friend was a wide-eyed statue. Preston felt his fear start to thicken into panic.

  Sorry. Going in.

  Preston ran his fingers around the edges of the door. The metal was smooth and strong, the gaps in the skin of the machine big enough only for his fingernails. Then it hissed softly, like a sigh. He’d touched something.

  The door opened. It was heavy and cold. The interior smelled—weird how associations and memories leapt suddenly to mind—like the inside of a showroom car; new plastic, bleach, a stuffy closeness that somehow calmed him.

  Preston could make out a pair of wall-mounted lights behind heavy plastic globes, the sort you might see on rain-swept harbors or on the decks of boats. Preston took a shaky step forward, balling his hands and trying to stay calm. Esther’s words suddenly came to him—Kepler valves are bigger on the inside.

  Well, this one sure as hell wasn’t.

  There was a modest space, a room the size of a small office. But it struck Preston as being more like a decompression chamber: the walls punched and riveted metal sheets, the floor a metal grille. There was space for—what?—thirty people, Preston figured. Thirty at most, standing shoulder to shoulder as if they were squeezing into a large elevator. The place was bitterly cold—strange, considering the heat powering it outside. His breath came out in clouds.

  Preston put the goggles on and lowered them over his eyes. The lenses blurred and curved things. He made his way slowly inside, testing the floor uneasily. Those odd creaks and groans—they were coming from somewhere deeper inside its stomach.

  The roof was low. The lights flickered just a little. There was a wall-mounted lever, he noticed, with a plastic grip, just beside the door. Preston moved toward it.

  “How does it work?” he heard Mace ask from somewhere out in the basement. He sounded a long way away.

  “I don’t know. Do we switch on the laptop?”

  Preston heard Mace lift the laptop screen up and punch a button or two. Preston looked at the door, still standing open—at the basement beyond. He looked at the lever. He held a breath, then let it out. He laced his fingers together to stop his hands shaking. And he made his decision.

  Preston pulled the valve door shut hard until he heard it click.

  Then he pulled the lever downward, once, hard. He waited, feeling the pitiful warmth from the wall-mounted safety lights, watching his breath cloud.

  For a moment—just seconds—there was the tug of gravity at his bones and he felt as if he were falling. He took a small step backward, swayed, steadied himself, as if he’d just stepped off a roundabout. Then there was a sharp stuttering flash—supernova bright even in the goggles—that strobed madly for a split second before flickering into blackness. The room became slightly warmer.

  It hadn’t worked. Of course it hadn’t.

  “Dammit,” said Preston, turning. “Mace!” he began. “It’s 404. Open up!” He put his weight on the lever and pushed it back upward; he heard it release. “Mace!” he said again, and opened the door.

  It was the light that was different at first. When he lifted his goggles up and perched them on his forehead, it wasn’t as dark. And it was the sound that he noticed second, the groaning echo as the door creaked open. For a moment or two, Preston stood inside the open valve, looking out. This wasn’t a basement.

  “Mace?” He felt foolish just standing there, so he took a couple of uncertain steps forward—small ones in case he was about to plunge out of the valve like a skydiver. Then he was out, and his throat was dry, and his stomach had knotted and dropped.

  He was in some sort of huge cavern—big enough to bury a pair of long-haul airplanes if it wasn’t so cluttered with valves. There were thirty, maybe forty of them, all in lines, as if they’d been laid out for a game of checkers.

  “Mace?” he said pointlessly. His voice sounded feeble, its echo even more so. This wasn’t the M.I.S.T. building. He was underneath it, maybe. He’d felt dizzy and weird in the valve, right? That’s because he’d been dropping at such a speed. And now he was in a chamber under the city.

  Except there wasn’t an elevator shaft.

  And the valve he’d just stepped out of, he realized, looking along the rows, wasn’t the same one he’d climbed into. It was smaller than its Manchester cousin, maybe only half the size. And it was considerably older. It had a military-looking blistered exterior. If he’d just ridden an elevator, the valve would look the same at the other end, wouldn’t it? But he’d emerged from a different valve. The other end was still a box in a Manchester basement. So there were two valves connecting two places, like stations on a train line. And they—what?—shuttled things between them? Transferred or swapped them?

  Preston turned his attention to the others. Even a glance along each row revealed chambers of different types and ages; some crouched lower, some great hulking things with skins of rust. There were little banks of lights arranged above the faces of each valve, displays of lights that flickered and glowed to show these things were alive. The only one blinking, Preston estimated as he took another step down to the smooth concrete floor, was his. No, he corrected himself. There was a second one still going. That was it. The rest were lifeless and silent, as if they were hibernating. Or had already been shut down.

  His valve suddenly stopped its guttural breathing, which died to a fuzzy nothing. The silence was almost absolute, except somewhere in the distance—he couldn’t tell which direction—was a low, rhythmic rumble. It sounded like a faraway drum, or the thud of a huge heart buried somewhere in the rock around him. The air was dry, almost sandy, strangely warm. As Esther had said: a cave, a vast cavern. Yet he could see. Preston traced the source of the light—lift your eyes—fissures and splits in the rock way up high as the walls curved in to the roof dropped sharp slices of light into the hangar.

  “Mace?” he said again as he walked. “You’re somewhere miles above me and I’m in a big empty cave.”

  Except he wasn’t alone down here. He’d seen others go in. Those broken boys in the goggles and the handcuffs—they were down here somewhere as well, right? Fear stirred the contents of his stomach. What if there was no order down here; no governance, just chaos? And he was walking straight into it—the new kid at school watching the gates close behind him and the bus pull away? For a second, Preston thought he was going to lose it altogether. He wanted his dad. He wanted Mace. He wanted a gang of nightwardens.

  But it was just him and a shoulder bag and three databands.

  Grip it. The goggles made him look as if he’d just arrived. He pulled them off and bagged them. His jacket wasn’t needed down here in the odd dry warmth; he packed it away. Then he gave his jeans a couple of turn-ups, dug out his cap, checked his pockets, and shouldered his bag. Across the
other side of the cavern was an arched entrance and beyond, a darker corridor. Preston headed for it.

  When he drew closer to the archway, he saw it. A tag, sprayed at shoulder height like a sign. Pale gray spray paint, hurried and smudged, but recognizable. A single open-palmed hand with an eye in the center. The Jupiter Hand.

  It was dry. This had been done some time ago. Days, probably. But it meant hope. Preston couldn’t help but smile as he ran a forefinger across the design. Ryan had been here. And he’d left this for Alice. He was going to track the two of them. He was going to find them, pass over the databands, and then he was going to lead them both home.

  In the corridor, the roof was much lower, a kind of soft plaster over rock, as if the spaces had been blasted out and smoothed over. There was an archway to his right, and inside it, a room—smaller this time, but with the same huge space above his head. Preston moved in, treading carefully, and looked up. It was like standing at the bottom of a staircase; the ceiling was three, maybe four, floors above him. And at the top where the walls met the roof, a series of punched holes through which light dropped in broad strokes, illuminating the far wall of the room.

  And the far wall was covered in writing.

  Preston wiped his eyes. The writing was uneven, jumbled. Notes made in paint—some of it in Ryan’s spray paint by the look of it—others scrawled in a pale chalky hand; there were sections of plaster that had been pried away from the wall, Preston noticed, to make palm-size chunks. Different people had contributed, each with their own handwriting—but one person mostly, by the look of it.

  In the center of the wall, written in big, dark letters, was the word ARMSTRONG.

  And this word seemed to have a kind of gravity which pulled the other words around it. Lines linked words together. KEPLER VALVE, someone had written, and BTV. MIST appeared twice in two different hands. Madbox, someone had put, and underlined it. There were other words, cluttered in clouds or written in lines: Shutdown? one said. Jonathan Shade said another. Nightwardens. Conviction without trial. Salt mines? asked one. In one corner, a series of tally lines had been used to count something off; they stopped at fifty-five. Old man in the pipes said one cryptic note. Up through the trapdoor said another. There were names on a different section of the wall—Gedge, Lewison, Chowdhury, Ellwood, Hoyle. Then separately, Rabbit. And beyond that, hovering on the edge, the words LONGSIGHT LADS in a box, and beneath the box—24-7 watch. Elsewhere, one note read NO ACCIDENT. It had a line to ARMSTRONG. Halfmoon, someone had written. There were a couple of familiar place names too: Manchester, someone had put, and Bham, London. And, strangest of all, something that looked more like a plea: Robinson Cruso, someone had written—Preston was pretty sure that was the wrong spelling—then please get help. And underneath again, in chalk, Robinson Cruso please get help.