Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  Till they enthrall themselves; I else must change

  Thir nature, and revoke the high decree

  Unchangeable, eternal, which ordain’d

  Thir freedom, they themselves ordain’d thir fall.

  PRESS THE NECESSARY KEY TO PROCEED.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw North’s eyes go wide with surprise. “These are lines from Paradise Lost. The ones your mom left you.” He looked over at me. “The Greek, that’s how you knew what it was?”

  I nodded. “Not what it said, just that it was a puzzle. The ones we had to answer during the evaluation process, they all started as red Greek text. But those were—” I was about to say timed, but right then my eyes caught the little clock at the bottom right corner of the screen, racing down from sixty. One minute. That’s all we had. “Hurry,” I said urgently. “We have only sixty seconds.”

  “Rory, there’s no way I can crack the code that fast.”

  “So we’ll solve it. ‘Press the necessary key to proceed.’ The answer has to be in the quotation. That’s why it’s there.”

  For several seconds we were quiet, both of us just staring at the screen. “Rory, there are one hundred and one keys on this keyboard,” North said finally, tugging on his Mohawk in frustration. “And we’ve got thirty-two seconds left. I don’t think—”

  “Could it be the letter e?” I asked. “There are a bunch of them missing. Formd, thir. Maybe we’re supposed to complete the words.”

  North shook his head. “I don’t think so. Milton wrote those words without the e’s. That’s how they look in the original.”

  “Okay, so it’s got to be something in the meaning, then. What does—?”

  With a start, North bolted upright in his chair. “Milton is talking about man’s imprisonment here,” he said excitedly. “So the ‘necessary’ key is the escape key.”

  I considered this. It made sense. And it was clever, which made me think it had to be right. North’s finger was hovering over the ESC key, waiting for my cue. There were only twenty seconds left. Heart racing, I squeezed my eyes shut. It was time to decide.

  Free they must remain. Suddenly I remembered what the serpent had said during initiation. The fool will always seek a master.

  “No,” I said abruptly, my eyes popping open. “There’s nothing to escape from. That was Milton’s whole point, right? ‘Till they enthrall themselves.’ It’s only a trap if we let it be. To proceed, all we need to do is enter.”

  North didn’t hesitate or question me. He hit the enter key and instantly, all the words disappeared. All but one.

  PROCEED.

  Almost immediately, a new window opened and the words COMMAND_COMPLETED appeared on screen.

  “Thank you,” I heard North murmur as his body went slack against the chair. He looked back at me. “I thought we were screwed.”

  “But we’re not?” I asked, just to make sure.

  “Not so far,” he said, laying his forehead on my stomach. “Now we wait.”

  I stared at the clock at the bottom of the screen as it ticked from 11:58 to 11:59 to 12:00. When nothing happened, I tapped North’s head.

  “It’s midnight,” I told him. “Nothing’s happening.”

  “It could take a couple of minutes,” North said, his voice muffled against my sweatshirt. “Someone at Gnosis has to initiate the reboot, and he’ll want to be sure everyone is logged out of the internal network before he does.”

  “And the new algorithm will go into effect when the servers come back on?” I asked him.

  “It should.” He sat back in his chair. “Although I’m not sure how the solar storm will affect Lux generally. But as long as the app is working, the algorithm should too.”

  “And what about us? Will we be okay?”

  “Oh, we’ll be fine,” he said, pulling me back down into his lap. “We’ll hole up in my apartment and play battery-operated electronics and eat cold SpaghettiOs from the can.”

  At 12:02, there was a wave of whew sounds as the rows and rows of machines around us began to power down. The terminal was the last to shut off, and when it did, the room was completely quiet. The emergency lights gave the room an eerie green glow.

  “What happens if someone comes down here?” I whispered.

  North didn’t look up. “We run.”

  But no one came. A few minutes later the servers turned back on again in a ripple of beeps and whirls. After the quiet, the noise was unnerving. I felt uneasy now.

  A loud clang behind me made me jerk so violently, North’s head snapped back. “What was that?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” North said, sounding as concerned as I felt. He spun in his chair and we both saw it. A wall where the society’s secret door had been.

  “It must be programmed to close on restart,” North said, sounding sick.

  I didn’t respond. We’re trapped, I told myself, because clearly my brain wasn’t grasping it. If it were, I’d be freaking out, and I was just sitting there, completely still, staring at the wall. You couldn’t tell there’d ever been a door there.

  “Rory?” I heard North say.

  “There has to be a way to get aboveground from here,” I said calmly. So calmly, it caught me by surprise. But my mom hadn’t let me down yet, and she’d sewn two orange Xs on my blanket. There had to be another way out.

  “All I see are elevators,” North replied. “Two Gnosis elevators that require key card access. But the door we came through, it has to open from the inside, right?” His voice sounded tight. Panicky.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’m not sure the Few would risk someone discovering a way to open it. But I don’t think we’re stuck. I think there’s a way to get from this room all the way outside.” I pointed at the terminal screen. “You finish what you need to do. I’ll get us out of here.”

  North looked skeptical, but he nodded and brought his eyes back to his screen, which was now lit up with the Gnosis login box.

  I jogged around the periphery of the room first. The two elevators North saw and an alarmed door marked EMERGENCY EXIT were the only visible ways out. There wasn’t even a bathroom down here. I scanned the ceiling next, but it was ridiculously high up, so even if there’d been an opening, we never could’ve reached it. If there was a way out of here, it had to be in the floor. Starting at the opposite corner of the room, at least a football field from where North was sitting, I went row by row, combing the cement beneath the mesh grating. All I saw was smooth concrete. My stomach twisted in knots. Had I been wrong?

  I waited for words of comfort, some assurance from the voice that there was a way out. But I didn’t get any. I hadn’t gotten any, not since we hatched this plan. Not once had the voice promised me that we’d get away with this.

  I looked up again, and this time my eyes caught the security camera mounted on the wall to my left. I froze.

  Oh, my God. The cameras. If the reboot reset the door, it probably turned the cameras back on too. I opened my mouth to scream North’s name but quickly shut it and went sprinting toward him with my head down instead.

  I was halfway there when the toe of my shoe caught the grating and I went flying. My hands hit the ground first, hard, metal digging into flesh, and my knees banged down right after. My eyes smarted with the pain, but I quickly forgot it when I saw what was beneath me. A round manhole cover in the concrete with the letters έξοδος engraved into its face. I didn’t know what the letters meant, but I was pretty sure manhole covers didn’t come standard with Greek engraving. My eyes swept the floor, looking for a way to get beneath the grating. It was lined up against the bottom edge of a nearby server bank, so I almost missed it. A latch.

  I scrambled to my feet and went running toward North. Without saying anything, I pulled his hoodie up over his head. “The cameras,” I whispered in his ears. His whole body went rigid. At that exact moment, the speakers above and around us began to scream with a shrill, piercing sound. We’d been seen.

&nbs
p; “I found a way out,” I said, my lips pressed to North’s ear, and tugged on his arm.

  “Wait,” he said. “I can delete the footage. I need to delete the footage.”

  My nails dug into his forearm. “There’s no time.”

  “The Gnosis complex is six miles away,” he said, already typing. A flurry of windows opened and closed as he flew through the network. “Even if there’s an underground train between here and there, it’ll take them at least five minutes to get here. I can do this in sixty seconds. I saw the feed earlier. I know where it is.” The sweat on his brow was back, but he was determined. I stared at the two elevator doors, my heart pounding so hard my ribs ached. “Done,” North said finally, pushing back his chair so hard it went flying.

  I took off toward the manhole, North right on my heels. The latch did exactly what I thought it would, freeing a portion of the grate, which lifted like a cellar door. Once beneath it, we relatched the grate and, on our hands and knees, started twisting the manhole with our fingers in the pick holes. It turned easily. Moving it was harder. It must’ve weighed fifty pounds, and on all fours it was difficult to get enough leverage to lift it, especially with the alarm screaming in our ears.

  We’d just gotten it to the side when we heard the elevator doors whoosh open. Go, North mouthed, and pointed down the hole. I peered into the blackness. It was impossible to tell how far down it was, but since there was no ladder, I figured it couldn’t be that far. So I eased my legs into the opening then slid around onto my belly and lowered the rest of my body down until I was hanging just by my hands. When my face passed beneath the floor, I was hit with the stench of rotten eggs and a terrible fear that I’d made a mistake. “Please,” I murmured, kicking off my left shoe with my right foot. Please don’t let me break my neck, please let this work, please don’t let them find us. When I heard the shoe hit rock a second later, I let go.

  I kept my knees bent, so when my feet landed, the impact pitched me forward, onto my hands. The ground was rough and prickly beneath me, like coarse stone. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet down, but the light from above did little to illuminate the dank space. I heard shouting and running above me and a sliding sound as North tried to move the manhole cover back into place before he dropped down. He had his fingers through the pick holes and was trying to heave the metal disk over as he dangled from it, his feet just above my head. With a jarring clang it slipped into place, leaving us in complete darkness. North landed with a soft thud beside me.

  “Do you think they saw you?” I asked him.

  “Let’s not wait to find out,” North replied. His face lit up as he turned on his phone’s flashlight. He revolved slowly with his hand extended, the weak beam revealing the smallness of the space we were in. The stone walls shimmered in the light, as if they were flecked with gold and might have been beautiful had their presence not meant that we were trapped. I felt a pressing, suffocating weight pushing in on me. The opening we’d come through was now sealed with a heavy metal plate. Even if I stood on North’s shoulders, I wouldn’t be able to reach it, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to lift it enough to slide it over.

  “Rory,” I heard North say. “There’s an opening over there. It’s narrow, but it looks like it was made to pass through.” I followed his light and saw a slit carved in the rock behind me, almost hidden in a shadow. “Let’s go,” he said, and took my hand.

  The ground slanted down on the other side of the slit, taking us farther into the earth instead of toward the surface. The passageway was tight, the walls on either side grazing North’s shoulders as we walked, and the ceiling was too low to stand up straight. As we inched down the rocky slant, crouched so as not to bang our heads, I focused on my breath, refusing to panic again. If we really were stuck down there, there would be plenty of time to freak out once we were sure of it. The sulfur egg smell got worse as we descended. “What is that?” I asked, pulling my shirt up over my nose.

  “I don’t know,” North replied. “But I’m really glad we didn’t eat before this.”

  A few minutes later we reached flat surface again. A room, bigger than the first one, but with a lower ceiling. North could stand upright, but only barely. The walls around us were textured and uneven and looked bronze when North shone the light on them. There was only one way forward, another tunnel, this one rounder and more uneven, as if it’d been there longer. As we moved toward it, North’s light caught some writing on the wall. It was a drawing, crudely done, of a mine cart moving toward a tunnel. Seeing the image, it clicked. We were in the old pyrite mine. The shimmer in the walls wasn’t gold but its cheap impostor. It was ironic, or maybe just fitting, that the Few had commandeered this space for their empire. They’d built their castle on a foundation of fool’s gold.

  I followed North into the tunnel. This one sloped up and was even more slippery than the first, rock sliding on rock. More than once I lost my balance and landed on my hands. It was tempting to take off my shoes. Bare feet had to be better than no-traction Toms. But there was no way to know what I might step on, and so I left them on. When it got steep, North stopped to let me pass him, and somehow it was easier to stay balanced knowing that he was there to catch me if I fell.

  We’d been climbing for a while when North’s phone made the sound I’d been dreading. The low battery whimper. We didn’t acknowledge it between us. We just kept climbing, shoes and hands on rock the only sound in the silence. There was no use saying what we both were thinking. If this was a dead end, we were done.

  I slipped again, and this time the rock was wet beneath my hands. “There’s water on the rocks,” I said over my shoulder to North. I could feel him right on my heels. “It has to be coming from somewhere aboveground, right?”

  “You’d think,” North said, his voice laced with the hope I felt. We kept climbing.

  When the ground leveled out again, North caught my arm. “Wait,” he cautioned. “There could be a drop-off.” He shone his light on the floor and around us. My heart sank when I saw the solid walls. The tunnel we’d come through was the only way out.

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to curse the voice that had told me not to be afraid when it knew this is where we’d end up. But right behind my anger was the realization that this was exactly the moment that voice had been trying to prepare me for. Fear not for I am with you. Not as some amulet to protect me from all harm, but as a refuge when there was nowhere left to turn.

  You did what you came to do, whispered the voice. And instead of anger, instead of fear, I felt peace.

  North was at the wall, combing the surface with his light. “Hey, come look at this,” he called. It was another drawing, etched in black in the shimmery stone. It was simple, just a circle and three lines, but it was so clearly the shape of a dove. I reached out my hand to touch it, moved beyond words by its presence. What was it doing here? Why a dove? It felt like a sign. A gift.

  As I traced its simple shape with my fingertip, North’s phone finally went dead. Neither of us reacted. We’d been expecting it, after all. And for me, it was a relief not to be waiting anymore, dreading the moment the light would go out. Now that it had, we could get on with it.

  North reached for me in the darkness, pulling me to him. His hands slid up my arms to my face, and though I couldn’t see him at all, in a weird way, I could. Not with my eyes, but with my memory, which felt more real somehow. More true. When he kissed me, I forgot everything else. The darkness, the stench, my thirst. Our fate. All I could feel were his lips on my lips, his body pressed against mine. All I could smell were his skin and his citrusy shampoo. All I could hear was his breath, and mine, hot and fast as we clung to each other, each wanting more of the other.

  Then, out of nowhere, there was a cracking sound above us, so loud I thought the earth was breaking apart. We froze.

  “Was that—?”

  “Thunder,” North said.

  My hand flew to the place where the dove was. All at once I understood
why it was there.

  “The miners,” I said breathlessly. “The ones who were trapped in the mine. They were here.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “I saw it on Panopticon. The care packages the rescue workers sent down here, they were called doves. The hole they used was eventually widened to get the miners out.”

  The thunder boomed again, even louder this time.

  “The opening is above us,” I said. “We didn’t see it before because we never looked up.” I tilted my head back.

  A raindrop hit my cheek.

  I didn’t react, not right away. I waited for another one, and another, until the rain was spraying my face, and then I laughed.

  “What is it?” North asked.

  “It’s raining,” I said, pulling him into the icy spray.

  “It’s raining,” he said, astonished. Then he laughed too.

  It took us a couple of tries to get me up on his shoulders, but when we did, it was easy for me to feel the opening in the rock. It was a perfect, smooth circle, as wide as the manhole we’d come through. And a few inches into it, there was the frayed end of a rope.

  35

  “IT’S PRETTY EERIE, ISN’T IT?”

  I’d been sitting on the balcony outside his apartment—our apartment, North kept correcting me—for hours, staring out at the forest of dark buildings. The utility companies had turned off the power grid at three o’clock, as soon as something called a “coronal mass ejection” left the sun’s surface and started hurtling toward ours. The geostorm was officially under way. They were expecting the huge mass of solar plasma to slam into Earth’s atmosphere a little after one a.m. It was 12:30 now.

  The past twenty-two hours had been a total blur. The opening we found in the mine brought us up through a stone well and into the woods, about twenty yards from the electric fence around the Enfield Reservoir. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought it was as old as it was made to look. There wasn’t a sign commemorating the mine rescue that was accomplished there, or anything at all to suggest that the hole inside it led to anything. Which, I suppose, was the point. It was the Few’s escape route. Their secret way out.