by M. G. Herron
“Is she cute?” he asked.
“Oh, definitely,” Po said. “You didn’t see her at the police station?”
Nando shook his head. “Too busy trying to slip my wrist out of those cuffs.”
Teasingly, remembering a part of her past that seemed so far away that it could be mistaken for someone else’s life, Po said, “Last I heard she had two boyfriends at school.”
Nando puffed himself up. “I could kick both their butts.”
“I bet you could.”
Nando really started paying attention and watching her face when she got to the part of her story about meeting the rebels and being taken prisoner.
He wanted to know everything. Who the insurgents were. What they looked like. How many people they’d killed. Where their hideout was.
“That’s what the police wanted to know, too—where Citizen is hiding, so they can arrest them all. But they blindfolded me before they took me down there, so I don’t remember the way.” She didn’t mention that she had been so preoccupied with what had become of her parents that she barely paid attention to where they had been taking her. “When Ari and I escaped we were running so fast and I was so scared that I don’t think I could find my way back even if I tried.”
“You said it was underground though, right?”
She nodded.
“In the sewers?”
“Yeah.”
“Were there train tracks?”
“Not that I saw. But maybe. Why?”
Nando chest puffed up again, but his posture had none of the swagger it held when Po told him about Jia. He exuded the calm confidence of someone who knew something the other person didn’t. And, she could see from how he looked at her sideways, he was dying to tell her.
“Out with it!”
“There’s a rumor going around T. Square that the rebels are hiding in the old subway lines. One time, my friend Mohinder told me about a place where if you follow the right sewer lines, you’ll end up in a big room where they used to do repairs. His grandfather was an engineer, and used to work there repairing the old tunnels so they wouldn’t collapse when new parts of the city developed on top of the old parts. They sealed most of it off years ago, but apparently there’s a way in.”
Po stopped breathing for a long moment. She lowered her voice to a whisper “Can he show me?”
“You can ask him yourself.”
They had reached the bridge. Po pushed the motorcycle behind some sparse brush so it was hidden by shade and leaves below the level of the road. She fluffed the leaves over the handlebars then followed Nando’s lead and slid-stepped down the steep cement embankment until they landed on the dry bottom of the storm drain. The floor was dusty dry, with just a thin trickle of stagnant water running down the middle.
A hovel made of corrugated tin and cardboard and plywood had been arranged under the bridge near the far wall, so it was all but hidden unless you peered down at an obtuse angle. Windows had been made in the shanty, with clear tarp and duct tape in gaps in the makeshift walls. After a minute trying to make sense of it, Po realized it wasn’t a hovel or a shanty at all. It was more like a fort.
“What is this place?” Po asked.
“Home.” Nando let out a distinctive whistle with three notes, and a pack of dirty boys and girls, all about Po’s age, scurried out of the fort.
Po felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for these orphan kids, and lost the ability to use her voice for several minutes. Fortunately, Nando took center stage, spinning the story about how he and Po had bested the coppers and escaped from the police station. He exaggerated every detail, but Po didn’t mind. The wide eyes of the kids lit up and gazed at Po with admiration as he talked.
One thin little girl with arms so tiny Po could have encircled both wrists with a thumb and forefinger, strode bravely up to Po and pulled on her shirt.
“I know you,” the girl said. “You’re the woman from the TV. You’re the running girl.”
Po stepped back in surprise. “What?” Po asked. “What do you mean?”
“You ran in front of the robots! It was amazing!”
Po swallowed. “Nando, what is she talking about?”
“How should I know?”
Po asked the girl to repeat what she had just said. Looks of recognition lit the faces of the young children, and they all started talking at once. It took Nando a few minutes to sort out the details.
“There’s an electronics store that got ransacked in the riots,” he explained, translating the mumbling street dialect of the younger ones Po had trouble understanding. “It has a working TV in the office at the back. The younger kids go there sometimes, when it’s cold or raining, to stay warm. That’s where they saw you, on the news, I guess. They didn’t say your name, so they started calling you the running girl.”
The girl piped up again. “The news lady said you might be working with the rebels.”
“No,” Po said. “Absolutely not.”
“Shoot,” the girl said, obviously disappointed.
Po swallowed hard. Ari was still out there. She was running out of time.
“Nando, you were going to introduce me to your friend. Is he here?”
“Right!” he said, wiping his palm on his forehead and smearing the dirt around. “He keeps to himself. Come with me.”
They parted ways with the children and Nando showed her around back of the fort, where they ducked under a tarp that had been pinned up to let the heat out of the place.
The boy Mohinder turned out to be a small, dark-skinned, shy child. He had his own tiny room tucked away in a corner of the fort. Mohinder poked at a tiny circuit board with a soldering iron. Wires led from the circuit board to an automatic handheld fan.
When Nando introduced her, Mohinder peered at her cautiously, silently. He said nothing, just waved, and returned to the circuit board.
Nando cleared his throat.
“What?” Po asked.
“You said you were hungry…”
“Oh, yes,” Po handed him the currency card she had in her front pocket. “There’s more than you need on there, so you better bring it back.”
While Nando was gone, Po knelt at Mohinder’s side and watched him work for a minute. The electronic fan’s old circuit board had been ripped out and rewired to the new circuit board he was working on. He’d already soldered on a new bracket to hold the batteries in place, and was now working carefully as he tried to repair the connections on the circuit board. But when he flipped it on, the fan still didn’t spin.
Mohinder frowned, obviously frustrated.
“These two solder joints look loose,” Po said.
“I fixed those,” he said.
“Try it again.”
Mohinder spooled out another inch of solder and held it under the iron near the board.
“There you go. See how they don’t wiggle? Try now.” He flipped the switch, but the fan remained motionless.
“What about the batteries?”
He glanced up at her. “They’re brand new.”
“Can I see?”
Mohinder handed over the device. Po popped the batteries out with the ease that comes with long practice. The battery terminal contacts were calcified with acid. “Do you have a brush? And some rubbing alcohol?”
Mohinder retrieved a plastic toothbrush with frayed bristles, and some kind of grain alcohol. She used it to clean the contact springs, and then walked outside and held the circuit board in the sun for a long minute. Mohinder watched her intently the whole time. Finally, she went back inside, replaced the batteries, hooked the circuit board back up to the fan, and handed it back to Mohinder. “Try now.”
This time, when switch flipped, the fan began to hum and spin.
Mohinder grinned and fanned himself with the stream of moving air produced by the fan.
“Can I ask you something, Mo?” Po smiled. “That’s like my name, Po. Do you like Mo?”
He nodded.
“Okay, Mo. Nando say
s you know a lot about trains. Do you know where we can find one?”
He looked away from her. “It’s not safe right now.”
“I know. I’m not asking you to go down there,” Po said. “But if you could show me how to get there, it would be a great help.”
The boy seemed to consider this. After a long moment, he nodded and walked out of the fort without another word.
They found Nando, who handed over a hunk of stale bread, two scrawny apples, and a block of hard, bitter cheese. She wiggled her fingers, and Nando sighed as he handed her card back.
“How much is left?”
“About a thousand,” he said.
Might as well be pennies, Po thought.
Po split the food between the three of them as they followed Mohinder through the drainage ditch for a couple miles. It seemed to lead out to the river on the lower east side, and Po expected they would go all the way there. But at a bend in the ditch, Mo turned and climbed up the steep cement side again, using the cracked cement like a ladder.
He stopped next to a sheet of flat metal with a simple handle in the center. It was practically hidden by overgrown grass and weeds, and the metal had a rusted star and a crescent moon stamped into it—a symbol of the old country that existed here long before Enshi.
Mohinder used the inset handle to open the metal door on rusty, squealing hinges, and gave them detailed instructions about where to turn—third left, second right, down a long hall, and you’re there.
After taking a long moment to master her claustrophobic fear of going back underground, Po lowered herself into the darkness, finding the ladder by feel.
CHAPTER 45
DONE RUNNING
Nando was in front of her in the tunnel now, but she couldn’t see a thing. They had neglected to bring a lantern or flashlight of any kind with them. She cursed the darkness and her own lack of foresight.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” Po asked. “It’s so damned dark in here.”
“You heard him,” Nando said. “Mohinder told us to go to the end of the long hall.”
But in the pitch black of the sewer maintenance shaft, where Po couldn’t see Nando in front of her let alone the ends of her own fingers, she began to doubt him.
After what seemed like an eternity of crawling, a faint orange light cast Nando’s form in silhouette, and then the maintenance shaft dropped down through the busted ceiling of a tunnel, straight onto a rubble-strewn train track. It was lit, every twenty-five yards, by a pair of glowing orange safety lights.
“He was right,” Po whispered.
“Of course he was,” Nando said.
They picked their way through the tunnel. Po was lucky she was slight and that Nando was small, because at one point they actually had to get down on their stomachs and crawl. The sharp edges of stone rubbed against her low back as she edged beneath a roof that had caved in.
On the other side of the rubble, they stood and gazed down more dark tunnel that curved around to the right.
“Do you need to rest?” Po asked.
Nando shrugged, indifferent. Po had to wonder if she would have been holding up as well as he was if she were in his situation. Sure, she was down here crawling through the dirt with him, but she had her aunt and sister waiting for her back home—or freaking out about her going missing again, more likely. Nando had no such safety net.
After an hour of pushing through the broken tunnel, it opened up, and they emerged into a cavernous room with train cars at its center. It was still dark here, but there was a light at the center that filtered out and lined the edges of the big trains, the soaring beams holding up a vaulted ceiling, and the criss-crossing tracks set into the floor.
“Whoa!” Nando said. His low voice carried into the open space. “I had no idea this place was here.”
“That makes two of us,” Po said.
As they wandered toward the center of the room, Po stumbled and tripped in the dim light and fell. A burning sensation caused her to inhale sharply as she skinned her right palm and knee on the rough gravel between the train tracks. Steel rebar skittered across the gravel. A metallic echo bounced around the stone chamber.
In the train car immediately in front of them, a door slid open. Two shadows crossed the source of the light—figures. Men.
Po froze.
Nando turned and bolted like a frightened rabbit.
“Nando, wait!” she whispered. But he didn’t hear her or didn’t care. He sprinted straight back down the tunnel through which they’d come. One of the figures ran straight past where Po ducked in the darkness—not noticing her at all—and chased Nando down the dark tunnel.
The other figure stood calmly, quietly, listening. His silhouette in the light showed her that he was a large man. Po reached out and gathered the piece of rebar she had kicked with her toe into her throbbing hand. The cold, rusty metal met the raw skin of her palm.
Po crawled over behind a push cart that must to have been used to haul supplies around the switchyard at one point in the distant past. It was rusted out at the bottom now.
The man came nearer and nearer to her spot with the soft crunch of boots on gravel. When he was nearly upon her, Po stepped out and swung the rebar with all her might. The man had no time to dodge, didn’t even seem to see the metal coming. She slammed the steel into his knees. His legs buckled, he cried out in pain, and fell.
Taking a page from Nando’s playbook, Po turned and bolted—but down a different tunnel.
Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the man had staggered to his feet quicker than she expected. He hobbled after her with remarkable speed for someone in so much pain.
She turned down the tunnel…and in twenty yards came face to face with what looked like hard foam filling the mouth of the tunnel. Just as she spotted a spot that had been dug out on one side, and began to squeeze herself into it, the man’s hands yanked her out and threw her to the ground.
Cold fingers closed around Po’s throat and began to squeeze.
Po cranked her neck around painfully to look at the face of the attacker. If this was to be her end, she wanted to look the bastard in the eyes…eye?
As her eyes adjusted, between the bright black and red spots that dotted her vision, she began to make out the man’s features. One eye, and half his face was covered with a bumpy, uneven, shiny surface, some kind of synthetics—
“Ari?” Po croaked. “Ari stop, you’re ch—”
At least that’s what she tried to say. It came out more like a gurgle. She gagged, heaving from the stomach, lurching for air and finding nothing—and coughed when the breath came surging back into her esophagus.
“Po?” Ari yanked back his hands as if Po’s skin had suddenly burst into flame. “Oh god. Oh god, are you okay? I didn’t know it was you! Are you all right?”
His hands were gentle now. He held her shoulders and cradled her head in his hands. He lifted her to a seated position, where she huffed as she caught her breath.
“How the hell did you find me?” Ari asked. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You have to get out of here. As fast as you can. Run like hell. Squeeze through this little hole where you were about to go. The fourth platform you reach, go up, it should take you to the street.”
“No.” Po’s voice came out hoarse. She rubbed her throat.
“What do you mean no?”
“I’m done running. I ran when my father told me to run, and the rebels killed him. I’m not running anymore.”
“They’ll kill you.”
Her body went cold all over at that flat statement.
“Ming came to the police station looking for you.”
“He did?” Ari said with bated breath. He seemed surprised and excited by this news.
“If you turn yourself in, I know he’ll help you. He cares for you deeply.”
Ari glanced back at the mouth of the tunnel. “I can’t. If I go know, they’ll know I betrayed them. I have to stay. You go to Ming. Tell him y
ou spoke to me…tell him…I’m sorry. And tell him the rebels are planning another attack. I don’t know where yet, but they’re planning something bad. Real bad. Felix and Khan are probably talking about it right now. They sent me out here to investigate the noise, but I suspect that Felix still doesn’t trust me and took the excuse to get me out of the room.”
“Talking about what? Wait, did you say Khan? As in Senator Khan?”
When he nodded, she saw the naked fear in his face for the first time.
“I don’t know what they’re planning yet, but something awful is going to happen. People are going to get hurt if I don’t do something. I’m going to try to stop them, but I don’t know if I can.”
She hadn’t seen him truly scared before. Not in the underground prison, not when they were hiding from patrols, not even under the heel of a mech. Danger seemed to bring him alive, somehow, rather than shut him down. Ari was a soldier, a fighter, even if he didn’t remember becoming one. It had been drilled into his subconscious so deeply that even though his mind had forgotten, his body remembered.
But right now he looked absolutely petrified. And this scared her more than anything.
“Come with me,” Po said. “We can get help but you have to turn yourself in now and tell them everything. About Felix and Khan, about this place, everything. If you just come clean they can help you.”
“I can’t do that. If there’s any chance I can stop Felix from hurting more people, then I need to stay and convince them I’m here to help.” He shook his head, scoffed at himself in disgust. “Maybe this is what I needed to find out. I’m one of them, Po. But I don’t want to be.”
“The police are still looking for you,” Po said.
“I know. They sent drones. Killed Bishop. Sasha got shot. I don’t know if she’ll make it. The drones didn’t seem to want to shoot me for some reason.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re still in the system as a magistrate’s bodyguard,” Po said.
He snapped his fingers. “That could be.”
Po swallowed. She didn’t know who Bishop was, and she had spent many days and nights handcuffed to a table dreaming about killing Sasha for what she’d done. But Po would never wish that fate on anyone.