ARC: The Buried Life

by Carrie Patel

  CARRIE PATEL

  The Buried Life

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  PROLOGUE

  In a firelit study half a mile underground, Professor Werner Thomas Cahill sweated and reddened under a councilor’s beady stare.

  “It’s a wonder,” Cahill said, “bigger than we ever expected.” His hands rested, palms down, on the massive cherry wood desk in front of him, and he licked his lips, searching for words to convey scale. Towering walls crowded around him and disappeared in the darkness above. He felt like a rodent in a viper pit.

  The owner of the desk drummed long, slender fingers across it, and Cahill marveled at how clean it was. A councilor of his standing should have a lot more clutter.

  Councilor Ruthers leaned forward. “Professor Cahill, you are aware of what this means?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I trust that you’ve been discreet?”

  “You’re the first person I’ve told, sir.” Perspiration condensed on the polished wood under his hands.

  “Then you know the complications that would arise if this were to surface.” The words came out like the first sigh of snow in the autumn air, unexpected and chilling. Cahill took the councilor’s meaning and shivered.

  “Of course, sir.”

  Ruthers paused, waving a hand in the air. “That isn’t all I’m talking about.” What frightened Cahill most was not that Ruthers would threaten his life, but that this was, apparently, least among their shared concerns. “This is your life’s work – your dream. It’s the same for an odd three dozen as well.”

  “Actually, sir, it’s about twice that if you count–”

  “I don’t.”

  Cahill swallowed. Working with other people was hard enough. But conniving and backstabbing? This was why he tried to avoid collaborative efforts. And politics.

  The chair beneath him whispered as he shifted on the velour upholstery. Councilor Ruthers smiled in what he must have thought was a reassuring manner.

  “Werner, don’t worry about this. Your job is research – let me handle the politics. Agreed?”

  Cahill nodded. That was all you could do when Councilor Ruthers asked if you agreed.

  “Excellent. I want you to begin taking inventory. Prepare a preliminary report for Dr Hask, including an estimation of time and manpower. We’ll start next week.”

  “Next week, sir?”

  “Phase two.” Councilor Ruthers pulled an inch-thick, bound folder from under his desk and slid it to Cahill. It seemed out of place on the otherwise immaculate surface. Cahill took the folder, feeling slick leather under his thumbs. The cover bore one word.

  Prometheus.

  Chapter 1

  The Inspector and the Laundress

  The smugglers fled to the surface. Sooner or later, they always did. An underground city only offered so many places to run.

  Liesl Malone’s feet pounded a rapid tattoo on the cobblestones, an up-tempo echo of the two sets of footsteps half a block ahead. The smugglers had been faster at the start of the chase, but now they were tiring. And, from the sounds of their clipped grunts and curses, panicking.

  Malone’s long breaths filled her with the odors of soot, sweat, and desperation. She hadn’t wanted to move before next month’s clandestine cordite shipment, but the smugglers had recognized her. Someone had tipped them off. If they got away, the contacts she’d spent months grooming wouldn’t just be useless, they’d be dead.

  The chase had started in the subterranean labyrinths of the city’s factory districts, where torch smoke choked the tunnels and obscured the murals and carvings left by thief gangs, rowdy youths, and immigrant factions. The factory districts bred criminals the same way sewers bred rats, and she’d spotted the smugglers in a knot around a jewelry fence’s stall. She could just see the whites of their eyes in the flickering torchlight as they squeezed between laborers from the nearby rubber mill. But when a murmur rippled through the crowd about the ghost-pale woman in the black overcoat, the smugglers had noticed her and bolted.

  Unfortunately for these two, Malone’s feet were just as sure in the tumbling, jagged passages as theirs were, and her sharp elbows parted crowds as quickly as their girth. The smugglers had drawn their weapons, but she knew they wouldn’t dare fire. Most of the passages in the factory districts were as tight as they were twisted, leaving little open ground for a clear shot. Only the most desperate of fugitives would open fire in the melting pot of gangs and ruffians there. Even the lowest newcomers made allies, and everyone had a long memory.

  Above the crowded tunnels and warrens of the underground city, the moonlight and shadows must have promised concealment, and the midnight chill must have tasted like escape. For whatever reason, a fugitive on the last leg of flight almost always made for the surface the way a wounded rabbit crawls to the bushes to die.

  And now Malone pursued them through the stone forest of verandas, entrances great and small to the city below. These crumbling shacks listed toward one another, throwing sweeps of ancient brick and concrete into the street. The ones that still stood in this part of the city were especially small, barely big enough for three or four people to stand in. She would not have trusted the rusting chain-winch lifts and staircases within most of them for a seat on Recoletta’s ruling Council.

  Just ahead, one of the smugglers stumbled and nearly tripped on the cracked cobblestones. Deep trenches from years of carriage and wagon travel gouged the streets in this neighborhood. The air stank with factory smoke, which billowed into the night sky from outlets above the mills and foundries. Malone hoped that a stray wind wouldn’t send the chemical-blackened fumes their way to add to the darkness.

  Just ahead, the first smuggler dashed behind a sawtoothed brick wall. His redheaded partner wasn’t as nimble. He smashed into the opposite structure, his pistol clattering into a nest of rubble, before he pivoted and dashed away. She rounded the corner just in time to see him speed ahead. Malone tracked the smugglers’ flickering movements in the moonlight as they wove between half-standing walls.

  Reaching a jumble of tumbledown construction that looked more like a ruin than a city block, the smugglers predictably split up. Malone followed the man who had dropped his gun as he peeled off to the right and into a rubble-strewn alley. The smuggler glanced over his shoulder long enough to see her and bent to pull something out of his boot as he loped ahead. She ducked into a scarred crevice between two walls before he could turn again.

  She scaled the weathered sandstone building in front of her, digging her hands and boots into jagged pockmarks. She crouched atop it and watched the smuggler five feet below back further into the alley, his eyes scanning for the black-clad inspector. Her polished black boots made nary a sound as she squatted and side-stepped just over the smuggler’s head. He continued to squint int
o the alley, but when a bank of clouds slid away from the moon, Malone’s shadow appeared at his feet, and he stiffened.

  As the smuggler whirled, derringer raised, Malone kicked a foot out and sent a spray of loose sandstone and grit into his face. He clawed at his eyes and fired high, and Malone slid from the veranda in a rain of debris to land behind him. He turned, blinking frantically as her foot sailed toward his outstretched arm and sent his gun spinning to the ground. He grasped at his hip with a shaking hand, drew a knife, and rushed at her.

  She retreated to the end of the alley and into the cross-street behind it, hoping that he would notice her revolver and reconsider. He hurled the knife instead. As Malone dodged left, the knife wheeled past her elbow and a bullet whistled by her nose. She saw the other smuggler out of the corner of her eye and heard a click as he thumbed back the hammer on his revolver. A quick release of sweat cooled her scalp. Malone dove back into the alley, knocking the redhead off his feet. She drove her elbow into his stomach and rolled past him, kneeling between him and his fallen derringer as he gasped for air. She pocketed it while he struggled to his feet.

  “Back out of the alley. Hands behind your head,” she said, making sure he saw the grinning “O” of her revolver’s muzzle.

  He coughed, rising slowly. “He’ll shoot me.”

  “So will I.” Malone pointed her gun at his right kneecap.

  The smuggler’s face went white. “You can’t do that!”

  “I never miss at this distance.”

  “But I’m unarmed!”

  Malone flicked her revolver at him. “Hands up. Slowly.” He took shuffling steps backwards, his lips working wordlessly and his face flushing in alternating shades of rage and panic. “You two must not be close,” she said.

  The smuggler glanced up from his feet. “Anjoli thinks with his gun, that’s all.”

  “He’s still armed. What’s that say about you?”

  He glared at her. “Says I got other skills.”

  “Like knife-throwing?”

  The smuggler’s nostrils flared and his jaw clenched, but it was the sudden flicker in his eyes that Malone was watching for. She spun, rolling to the side as a muzzle flashed at the other end of the alley. The redheaded smuggler howled behind her. Malone squeezed her trigger twice, and the figure standing thirty yards away collapsed. She turned back to her recent acquaintance on the ground, hunched over his thigh.

  “I’m bleeding,” he said, looking up at her.

  She tossed him a pair of handcuffs. “Use these.”

  The man winced, taking a sharp breath through his teeth. “What are those supposed to do?”

  “Keep me from using this,” Malone said, wagging her gun. She turned back into the alley, pointing her revolver into the dimness. At the other end, Anjoli slumped against a bank of fallen masonry, pawing for his fallen pistol with a mangled hand. Blood poured from two stumps on his right hand and onto the gun’s slickened grip. More pooled under his leg, painting the jagged paving stones a shiny black in the moonlight. Anjoli looked up at Malone with dull eyes and slid the blood-wet gun to her feet.

  A shadow fell across the alley from the crooked avenue beyond Anjoli. “That was a problem built for two, Inspector Malone.”

  She holstered her revolver and patted a derringer snuggled against her thigh. “I’ve got my own pair.”

  Inspector Richards stepped over the rubble, circling around to Anjoli. He snapped a white handkerchief out of his pocket and grasped the smuggler’s hand in it, examining the stumps. Anjoli groaned, and Richards left the bloodied rag in his hand. “Pinch it here and hold tight.” Richards straightened and turned back to Malone. “Surgical shot, Malone. Dare I ask the what-ifs?”

  “When a contract is eight months old, one less smuggler is the least of our worries. If prisoner transport doesn’t show up soon, though…”

  Richards glanced over his shoulder. “The welcome wagon’s a few blocks back. The driver doesn’t know what to do on the surface roads here, if you can call them that, and never mind the subterranean routes. Plenty of time to get these guys patched up and taken to the station.”

  Malone buttoned her long black overcoat against the night air. “You got here fast.”

  “You’re easy to find,” Richards said. “I just follow the gunfire. Or the curses. You have an effect on people.” Anjoli moaned again.

  Malone leaned against the crumbling wall behind her. “Is that why you always show up after I’ve passed around the cuffs?”

  Richards smiled, a glint of white in the moonlight. “Oh, leave it. I know you wouldn't have it any other way. Besides, Recolettans need to know who keeps their city clean.”

  She shrugged, looking back down the alley. The hunkered shadow at the other end raised his arms, showing her a pair of glimmering handcuffs.

  Richards followed her gaze. “Is that the better half?” Malone nodded. “How’d you know?” he asked.

  It was Malone’s turn to grin. “He told me.” The only reason that Anjoli would have come back for his partner was if he knew about their networks and safehouses. Anjoli would never be safe with his partner in the hands of the Municipal Police, which meant that the other man either had to escape with him or die. The redhead’s fear of his partner told Malone that he knew this, too.

  A wooden carriage pulled up outside the alley with a clopping of hooves and the groan of wheels. Heavy bars crossed the narrow windows along the sides of the carriage, and the team inside traded muffled orders as they prepared to bind the smugglers’ wounds and load them up. “Since you’ve got it from here, I’ll walk back to the station,” Malone said. “I can finish my report in a few hours.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Richards turned back down the alley as four uniformed officers jogged from the carriage. “The Chief has other plans for you,” he said, his voice lowered. She followed, silent. “Break-in at 421 East Eton. One casualty.” Malone met Richards’s gaze, not bothering to ask why her, and why now, after an all-night manhunt.

  “Just outside the Vineyard,” he said. “Obviously, the Chief wants you to take a look at this as quickly and quietly as possible. It could be nothing.” The edge in his voice suggested this was too much to hope for. Little crime occurred near the Vineyard, and for a good reason. It was home to the whitenails, the most powerful men and women in the city, and the only thing more formidable than their wealth was their mercenary sense of justice. Any criminal in that neighborhood would only hope for the Municipals to catch him first.

  To Malone, the Vineyard was even worse than the factory districts. If something had gone wrong beneath those pristine marble verandas, it would in no way be a simple matter.

  As if reading her thoughts, Richards looked down at the patterns his boots had scraped into the grit. “There’s something else,” he said. “The victim is named Cahill. He’s a historian. Was a historian.”

  Malone stalked out of the alley, her coat swishing against her black slacks and knee-high boots. Within a quarter of an hour, she had left the factory districts for the straight, broad surface avenues that most Recolettans knew. As if aging in reverse, the crumbling ruins gave way to towering structures marking various residences and businesses, whole and austere and gleaming blue in the moonlight. It was a wonder they had been so carefully crafted, particularly when city-dwellers spent most of their time underground. Pressed against one another in the fashion of a crowded metropolis, the monuments took on the character of gruff, mustachioed old men, huddled together in their dress coats and frowning upon passers-by.

  Malone found a hansom cab at the corner and showed her inspector’s seal to the driver, giving him an address just beyond her destination. If discretion was imperative, it wouldn’t do to travel too close to the Vineyard in the wee hours with a chatty cabbie watching.

  As the carriage clattered from the less impressive zones toward the Vineyard, the old men lining the cobbled streets evolved, growing in stature and spreading their arms over tiled avenues. Whether
they opened their arms to welcome or to snatch depended entirely upon one’s relationship to them.

  Recoletta, like all modern cities, had been constructed around the two values that society prized most: security and privacy. Even hundreds of years after the Catastrophe, people still lived underground. Crude shelters had developed into shining palaces and rudimentary tunnels into yawning halls lit by fire and mirrors. Ornate verandas declared the locations and the prestige of their owners in the flashiest manner affordable. Even the larger structures, some of which could easily house several families, never functioned as actual living or workspaces. The real business went on below, hidden from common scrutiny.

  This observation became truer as one traveled from stone to marble.

  The hansom came to a halt, and Malone walked half a dozen blocks further to a neighborhood seemingly hewn from fine, veined stone. She found herself alone in the surface streets, grateful that the neighbors were too wealthy to be out at this hour. Malone stopped in front of a tall, narrow building of jet-black with a single elevator cage inside. Whereas the neighboring edifices were polished to a sheen that flashed in the moonlight, the one in front of Malone was worn rough and mottled with lichen. Three steps led to a rusty black gate. It was bowed outward, she noticed, and shards of glass and metal trickled from the upper steps to the perfectly aligned cobblestones below.

  Boots stomped in the street behind her with dull, crunchy thumps. She turned to the older man trudging toward her. He also wore Municipal black, but his coat was frayed at the edges and faded at his elbows and shoulders. Inspector Carlyle glowered up at her from beneath thick eyebrows.

  “I was wondering when our ghost inspector would appear,” he said through sagging cheeks.

  “Richards sent you,” Malone said. She wasn’t surprised that Richards had neglected to mention this.