by Rose Francis
“Holy—” Ilsa said. Christine held the limp rodent out to her, but she couldn’t bring herself to reach for it.
“You need to drink while there’s still enough pressure for it to flow out,” she said, trying her best to pinch the wound closed. “Clean water is tough to come by in the Lower Levels.” She offered it again, and this time Ilsa took it from her and daintily put it to her lips.
* * *
Ilsa tried to think of anything else as the rat's blood poured down her throat. Concessions from the theater, drinks, but this was too warm. Popcorn, then, the one time they were able to afford popcorn with real, melted goat-milk butter, as warm as the sun on her skin. But it didn’t taste like butter, and the tickle of its whiskers on her face dragged her back to reality. She started to heave at the thought of the rat’s blood in her stomach.
Christine took the rat from her. “It takes getting used to,” she said. “I hope you don’t have have to.” Ilsa choked back bile rising in her throat.
“I’ll be okay,” she said.
“Still, you might want to look away for this part.” Christine had set aside a thin metal rod from their scavenging. She fed it down the rat’s throat. It met with resistance. She backed it up and shoved again, and this time it went deeper.
Ilsa felt the rat’s blood rising again up her throat, the inverse of the rod going down its gullet,. She turned away, fighting the urge to spatter her hard-swallowed liquid where they slept. Christine grunted. “Sometimes you have to force it along. And always,” she gave one last yank, and there was a tearing sound that nearly put Ilsa over the edge again, “you hit a point where the road dead-ends. But there,” she held out the skewered animal. “Rat-kebab.”
Christine turned away from her and began to work more furiously. “Sometime,” she said, “when your stomach is a little more solid, I’ll show you how to field-dress it, and how to separate out the heart, liver and kidneys, too.”
Ilsa couldn’t see Christine working on the rat, but the crunches, the wet sound as she pulled off the skin and extracted the innards, told her everything. She heard quiet little snaps as Christine broke the right bones.
Christine wiped a hand on her leg and tapped Ilsa’s shoulder. “You can look now. Mmm-mmm. Poor man’s rabbit. Isn’t it a beauty?”
Ilsa swallowed. It did look a lot better now, though she avoided looking at the rat’s dead eyes in its pink, exposed skull. “It sure is.”
Humming, Christine stuck it on the fire. While the rat cooked, she checked the area near the broken window for exposed pipes or gutters that might collect rainwater. She and Ilsa cupped their hands to pull grimy handfuls to drink from a length of tubing that was full to the brim. Ilsa pulled a face at the taste, and Christine said a silent prayer that it wasn’t too contaminated. The stringy flesh of the rat between her teeth had a tinny aftertaste that reminded Christine of every time she had ever thrown up.
* * *
“We should move deeper before they come back,” Christine said. “This area is so open, they’ll see us long before we can hide.” Ilsa sighed and stood. She felt even less rested than Christine because of the fabric around her mouth. She had never been able to sleep with so much as a blanket over her head, so sleeping with the mask on felt suffocating. Christine didn’t seem to mind her quiet, though, so she followed her restlessly, and was relieved when Christine bit her lip every time she stepped on a pile of rubbish while she yawned. She didn’t think she could put up with any fits of temper right now, and she didn’t want to reignite any resentment over her lack of survival awareness.
* * *
Christine sighed. She started seeing black clouds at the corners of her vision when she woke. It was only going to get worse, and more persistent, as they got deeper.
“Listen,” she began. “Have you ever seen someone on a Hal, or been on one yourself?”
“No,” Ilsa said, her brows pulling together nervously.
“Well, I’m already starting, and we’re as deep as a lot of people ever get before starting back up. It’s only a matter of time before you’re on your own,” Ilsa gasped, and she hastily added, “for most purposes.” She pressed one of her precious blades into Ilsa’s hand. “You might need that for hunting and such. I'm likely to pass out and sleep a lot more than normal. And…we’re down here long enough, it’s not a question of if you have to move forward alone, but when. So keep the knife with you at all times, and the pack, too. It has rat traps, and some odds and ends that may help.” Christine shoved the pack into Ilsa’s stomach, a little harder than she intended. It felt like letting go of an old friend; it was all that remained of her life.
“I’ll be tripping balls; I might even lay down and refuse to move. You'll need to decide when to leave me behind.” It felt mean to say, and Ilsa’s face crumpled with guilt, but Christine knew it was a truth Ilsa had to hear.
“You mean if,” Ilsa protested weakly.
“You’re going to have to hide out until they give up, and then probably squat in the Lower Levels, if you can sneak back up to the City. You remember the way back?”
Ilsa nodded hesitantly. “I think—”
A sudden gurgling noise jerked Christine’s attention to the side, but there was nothing there. Certainly nothing that might growl at her. Ilsa followed her gaze with a look of confusion.
Christine shook her head in frustration, and started forward again. The conversation had been depressing for her as well, and the more she thought about it, the more she felt she deserved the truth. “So, there's no distractions down here, no Engineers to flee from. I want the truth. What did you steal from Aureum?”
Ilsa sighed, but she realized she truly owed Christine that, at least. “My baby.”
“Your baby?”
“It belongs to—an Aureum is the father.”
“I don’t know if that warrants congratulations, or condolences—but since you’re not currently basking in the lap of luxury, I’d guess the latter.”
“Basically.”
Eleven
They heard voices above them in the stairwell leading to the next floor down. Something had smashed into one of the windows, leaving a smattering of rotten leaves and a section of wall toppled mostly over. Christine and Ilsa crawled under the wall and pulled rubble forward to cover themselves before another patrol went past. This time, there were four men. Obviously, someone had decided they were too deadly to hunt in pairs. There was no way Christine dared take them or to try to fight for a second mask, particularly not fucked up as she was.
The gravity of her options sank into Ilsa. She shook, crying silently. Christine sighed, and let them stay there until the guards finished, and were safely on the floor above them. They crawled out, and brushed the residue of rot off themselves. Christine peered out the gap in the exterior wall, but this wall had nothing that might have collected water.
Christine’s midsection ached and her throat itched. A soft touch of something fluttered across her skin, under her clothes. She shivered. Ten minutes later, the soft tickle faded, and was replaced with stinging pain, like the delayed onset of sensation after a severe burn. A sharp stab echoed through her spinal cord, starting at the back of her neck. She slapped at it, mistaking it for a bug bite. Ilsa looked at her, and she shook her head before starting to walk again. No point in whining.
As they got deeper into the building, they noticed little puddles forming where condensed moisture from the clouds had dripped onto the ground. Christine and Ilsa sipped what they could of the putrid water, but Christine cautioned Ilsa that meant they were in the worst of the Cloud—it could well be their last drink, if it had been contaminated too much more severely than the air.
A scurrying noise sent Christine into her defensive crouch. This time, Ilsa heard it, too. They both pulled out their knives, and Christine gripped the baton in her dominant hand. A rat lumbered out of a partially enclosed structure, but it was larger than the rats they’d hunted, and even larger than the rats that the City bred fo
r food. Its eyes were about level with Christine’s chest, and its fur had fallen away in patches. What remained was covered in sores, lesions, and something that looked suspiciously like a knife wound.
Christine swore. It lumbered forward to sniff at Ilsa. She had seen the wounds these massive creatures left behind. The rat's front teeth were longer than her knives, and met in the center of a wound, like two pickaxes from opposite directions. And they always festered, because the rats were steeped in the poisons on this level. They were scavengers, eating the rats and birds that gave in to the toxins, and the occasional human who got lost on a Hal and couldn't find their way to fresh air.
The rat took another slow, deliberate step forward, and its paw shook. It stopped, and smelled at the air around Ilsa. Christine noticed its eyes were milky and gray. It was old, nearly blind, perhaps itself nearly dead. Ilsa let out a little gasp. Christine wanted to comfort her, or tell her it would be all right, but between the hallucinations and the blood pounding in her head, she couldn't do more than hold up her free hand.
The rat's whiskers brushed Ilsa's face, and she started taking breaths without letting the last escape. The rat swept its whiskers through the air, trying to figure out where she was.
Christine brought the baton down on the back of its neck, where its thick skull met its spine. It shrieked, hideously and loudly, but Christine didn’t hesitate to bash it again. This could feed them for a week if they could remove as much of the meat as possible before anyone heard the shrieks. Provided they could keep the other scavengers away from it, the other rats included, and provided it didn’t spoil.
Stars exploded in her vision, and Ilsa stared at her with horror. Christine was a fighter, and knew how to be ruthless when the situation called for it, but this was not the Christine she knew. This was her, stripped of her humanity and her forethought, thinking only of survival. Seeing that the rat’s movement had subsided to small twitches, she pressed a knee into the broken mush of its skull and severed its spinal cord with several fierce strokes of the tiny blade.
She heard a noise behind her and turned, bloody stiletto at the ready. Ilsa was kneeling in a corner, vomiting. She’d managed to yank her mask off before the worst of it, but the smell confused and excited Christine. She felt aware of every aspect of it, as though she could smell Ilsa’s very soul through the compost she fed her body. The thought sickened Christine.
Ilsa looked up to see Christine still waiting for a fight. Christine saw her face take on the cast of a rat’s, her nose stretching and whiskers bristling from her pretty cheeks. Christine’s hand shook and she closed her eyes.
“I’ll, uh, take that and clean it for you.” Ilsa gently opened Christine’s fingers and removed the knife. Christine glanced at the rat on the ground, hair spreading around its shoulders, then back at her rat-faced companion. She closed her eyes again and dug her nails into her own palms.
The pain cleared her mind a little. When she looked back at the rat, it didn’t have Ilsa’s cloud of hair, and Ilsa looked nothing like the rat. “Drink what blood you can, and we’ll carve up as much as we can carry. This might be your best meal for a while.” Then the stars came back, and she passed out.
A short time later, Ilsa shook her awake as they heard voices approach. They retreated deeper into the shadowy block. Christine lost track of the twists and turns, until they came upon another crumbling stairway, and hurried down, and back into the shelter of the dark. The room they were in had obviously been a kitchen, but they had no materials to build a fire in the burned-out oven hole. They ate raw rat meat and curled up for another anxious slumber. Christine woke up twice, hearing voices. She shook Ilsa awake both times, and Ilsa just gave her an annoyed and confused look before going back to sleep.
Christine felt insects crawling over her cheeks, and pulled her shirt over her face to try to convince herself they weren’t really on her. The ground seemed to sway around her, roll her along it. The motes of dust grew faces and yammered senselessly before settling on Ilsa’s prone form.
Restlessly, she waited for their conversation to quiet. She even tried listening. While the faces grew ever more energized and their voices rumbled with violence, they were speaking nonsense, or at least in no language she could comprehend.
Finally, she forced herself to get up. There was still more rat meat threatening to fester inside the carcass before they could finish it. She tried to remember where Ilsa had placed the knives she took from her, but her memories were crudely drawn comic panels that didn't connect in any logical way from one page to the next.
She knew Ilsa's dress; she had worn it once. It didn't have pockets, but it did have a drawstring around the waist. She sidled up behind Ilsa. The girl responded to the warmth and proximity and curled into her. She blushed at the contact, and for an instant, rested her hand on the other woman's hip. But it was a stolen moment. Christine knew she wasn't the one Ilsa imagined holding her. Her hand moved up Ilsa's side until she felt it, jabbing both of them in equal measure. She slid the blade out of the waistband, then stood up.
The angry dust's voices rose, screaming at her. She wanted to yell back, to tell them to be quiet, but she knew it would do her no good. She left.
Twelve
Ilsa woke alone, her muscles all tensed. She reached for the knife she had confiscated from Christine, the one she was sure still had a giant rat's blood on the handle. It was gone. She let out a little gasp, then realized she was making it easier for someone else to find her.
She remembered she had a second blade, the one Christine gave her before the hallucinations started. She fumbled to get it out of the holster, nearly cutting herself.
She wondered what had happened. Did someone find them? Did they take Christine, intending to come back for her?
She remembered an old scouting manual in her master's home. She'd read it to the children. It had said if you were lost, you should wait for others to find you. But the only people looking for her were the last ones she would want to see—and they certainly wouldn't help her find Christine.
She tried to tell herself Christine was just in the kitchen. She had found some firewood, and cooked the slices of rat they had left from the night before. She delicately smelled at the air and imagined basil and a sprig of rosemary, not that Christine would have access to those—or even likely recognize them if she'd been sleeping on them. Still, the thought was comforting to Ilsa, and she inhaled deeply. But she smelled only the stale dankness of the Foundation.
She peeked around the corner. She wanted to call out, but if there was someone else about, the last thing she wanted was for them to know she was coming—at least before she greeted them with the knife. She gripped it and tried to imagine pushing it into another human being. It couldn't be terribly different from slicing through a loaf of bread.
Christine wasn't in the kitchen, and neither was anyone else. She looked around. She knew Christine well enough to know that she wouldn't have been taken without a struggle. Aside from by their cautious footprints the night before, the dust was largely undisturbed. She could see Christine's bare footpads had left little dents leading away from where they laid. At least that meant she had left on her own steam—even if it troubled Ilsa that she had apparently taken back her blade.
She wondered if Christine would want her to stay put. She imagined she would. But she was also tiring of how much Christine treated her like a child—no, worse, like an incompetent. Perhaps she hadn't grown up in the Lower Levels, but that didn't make her stupid.
She pondered what could have made Christine wander off. It didn't seem safe. Her heart beat a little faster as she wondered if another patrol had come by, and Christine had given chase, hoping to win another mask.
Regardless, she doubted Christine would have pressed deeper into the Foundation alone. She knew she wasn't well. Entering that rat's warren with so much potential to get lost, where Ilsa might never find her, just seemed foolish, even beyond what she was capable of in the grips of a Hal.
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Her stomach gargled. “Demanding little brat,” she said to the child in her belly. But that reminded her that there was still a large slab of rat meat. It was possible Christine had gone to cut off more meat. She resolved to go that far and no further; if Christine wasn't there, she could go back to the kitchen and wait for her to return.
She got about a third of the way when she saw Christine. She was stumbling towards her, clearly out of her mind. She was slicked in blood up to her biceps, and her shirt and thighs were caked in it, too. Ilsa ran towards her.
“Oh my—” Ilsa said, coming to a stop. But her breathing refused to slow; in fact, it quickened.
“No,” Christine said, “it's just the rat's. Been dressing it all night. Couldn't sleep, so I...” she swayed, and Ilsa caught her and propped her up. “If we can build a fire, we can smoke it; if we can smoke it, it'll keep.”
“Did you find wood?”
“Yup. But it was mouthy.” Ilsa frowned. “I stabbed it. In the face.”
“Was it really wood?” Ilsa asked.
“Think so,” Christine said. “Left my knife sticking in it.”
“Show me.”
They hurried down a corridor. Christine leaned heavily on her, so much so that at times they were barely moving. Ilsa knew the smart thing was for them to head back to the kitchen, to abandon the knife and whatever poor soul it was stuck in. But they might need it. And more to the point, she couldn't just leave some poor bastard to bleed out.
Then Christine started as she recognized a chalk mark above a door. “Here's the place,” she said.
Ilsa led them inside. She propped Christine against the doorway and proceeded alone.