by K. Gorman
“You got housing?”
“Yes?” People didn’t get housing?
Jo turned around and leaned against one of the wooden joints. Mieshka tried not to look at her guns.
“Well, some cities are built on top of themselves. London, Rome—all built on their old counterparts. Same goes for Lyarne.”
“Why?” Lyarne wasn’t as old as the other two.
“Flooding problems, so I’m told. Building up made the problems go away. They could afford to do that, then.” Jo tapped her toe on the floor. “This is an old house.”
Mieshka had been right. This was someone’s attic. Nerves rushed through her. How old was this place? She looked again at the wooden beams. They didn’t seem so sturdy now that she knew they were buried.
“How does it stay up?”
“Good architecture.”
Jo pulled on the rope. Except for an initial creak, the staircase unfolded soundlessly down. It left a dark hole in the floor.
Jo, not soundless, stepped into it. Boots were heavy on the ancient-looking wood.
Mieshka approached the hole. A small forest of flashlights stood next to the path.
Convenient.
Grabbing one, she followed at a slower pace. The stairs creaked beneath her, leading her down into a hallway. White-painted walls lined both sides, with lighter squares in places where pictures must have hung. Jo disappeared around a corner. Mieshka rushed to catch up, her light bouncing off a hardwood floor. She turned down a carpeted stairwell, one hand trailing on a smooth, carved banister.
“Upper Lyarne was built on the old city before Chromatix B was discovered.” In the stairwell, Jo’s voice had a hollow echo. “Lots of refugees dug out homes here when the government started refusing housing.”
“People live down here?”
They passed a boarded window, the wall cracking at the corner of its frame. Jo’s light bobbed ahead, flashing over the dead screen of a TV. Old porcelain gleamed behind a cabinet's dirty glass. Shadows closed in behind her. Every haunted house movie she’d watched came back to dog her steps.
They entered a foyer, where a crystal chandelier glittered overhead like a thousand dusty eyes.
“Rich people,” Mieshka remarked.
“Dead people,” said Jo, and turned out the front door.
Through a grimy window, Mieshka saw Jo’s flashlight illuminate a concrete tunnel. It was a stark contrast to the house’s finely finished wood.
Mieshka stepped out into the tunnel and closed the door behind her. It did not make a sound.
Somehow, that was worse than the obligatory haunted house creak. She caught her reflection in the dark, dusty glass as she followed Jo. Her breath misted up in front of her.
“It’s better in the Core. There’s enough people and electricity to keep the place warm. Ish.”
“What keeps the air safe?” she said, trying to remember what she’d read about mines.
“Here? Nothing. Farther in, where there’s more people, there’s ventilation. Need to go deeper for poison gas, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Good. Mieshka hadn’t signed up to be a canary.
Jo turned left at the first split. The house ended, and brickwork swallowed up both sides. On they went, with nothing but their footsteps for company. And echoes. Mieshka looked at everything for the first few minutes, swinging her light around.
Graffiti cropped up on the walls. Some might have been directional signs; others had a ruder nature. Several renegade paintings cropped up, bright as the day they were painted. Without sun, she guessed that the paint wouldn’t fade.
They went through an office building, where Jo directed her down three floors before they left through a hole in the wall. She heard scurrying. Rats? She tried not to think of it.
Eventually, the tunnel opened onto a street, complete with chipped road markings. Light spilled from a building to their left, its heavy stone walls still holding after decades of burial. The windows were barred, and a fluorescent white filled the inside, illuminating racks full of guns.
Mieshka froze, staring at the guns. In one window, a pink neon sign read ‘Mo’s’.
Jo clicked her flashlight off and stepped up to the shop. A bell tinkled as she pushed the door open.
Mieshka lingered on the sidewalk, gripping her flashlight hard. She stared at the guns through the window. The old glass panes made the inside waver if she moved.
She forced herself to relax. Hadn’t she decided to face her problems?
The bell tinkled again as she pushed the door open and held it as a shield while she peered around its edge.
Jo leaned over a nearby counter, chatting with the man behind it. He was almost as big as Buck, with a black handlebar moustache and a shaved head. His hands gestured over the counter as he spoke, fingers thick and calloused. Mieshka stepped around the door, and it closed behind her with another jingle.
Guns were everywhere. All kinds of guns. Even some she recognized, racked under a small sign in the back corner that read ‘Military Issue’. Her mom had shown her those. Showed her how to take them apart and clean them.
She’d never shown her how to shoot.
Repressing the thought, Mieshka joined Jo at the counter.
“People are getting antsy down here,” the man said with a heavy accent.
“Water people?” Jo shifted a shoulder from the counter to include Mieshka in the conversation.
“All people. Worried about the shield. More and more holing up, getting crazier. Business as usual.”
It took a moment for his words to sink in. When they did, her attention slid from the guns. Was there something wrong with the shield?
Jo’s comment was light: “Cabin fever?”
“Guess you’d call it tunnel fever down here. It takes slower if you have places to run.”
Jo leaned back, jaw working. Her brown gaze slid to Mieshka.
“So, you’re Aiden’s new apprentice,” the man said. His eyes flicked to the transfer mark on her hand.
She nodded. It took her a moment to unclench her jaw. She felt the guns all around her.
“I’m Mieshka.” She held out a hand.
His hand nearly engulfed hers as they shook. “Nice name.” He smiled, a gap between his front teeth. “I’m Maury. People just call me Mo.”
“Nice to meet you.” She smiled again, letting go. “Some people call me Meese.”
“Meese?” Jo slurred, jaw still working. Something clicked in her teeth. Mieshka spotted a bowl of mints next to Jo’s elbow. The dark woman cocked a smile. It looked like she had something planned.
“Anyway. Jo—here’s the new model. Just over the border last week.”
In the second she’d looked away, Maury had filled his arms with a large, silver and black assault rifle. Mieshka flinched back from the counter, snatching her hands to her side.
They stared at her.
“S-sorry,” she stammered. “I have a… small problem… with guns.” The flashlight shook in her hand. Conscious of their stares, she forced herself to take a breath.
Jo turned to Maury.
“How about I come back for this later. We need to be heading, anyway.”
Jo pushed away from the counter, the mint clicking against her teeth. They exchanged a nod, and Mieshka flattened to a gun rack as Jo moved past. After a meek glance at Mo, she followed in Jo’s wake.
The door jingled open. Mo stopped her before she left.
“Meese—wait a sec.”
He sidled from behind the counter. The rifle was gone. There was something in his hand, which he held out to her as he came near.
It was a business card. It had a gun graphic on one side, with the shop’s name underneath. On the back was a phone number and an e-mail address.
“In case you run into trouble.”
She looked up at him. With the fluorescents backing him, his face was in shadow. His bare arms had no defined muscle, only bulk. There was a tattoo on one shoulder. She recognized
the Lyarnese military’s winged thunderclap.
“Thanks.” She gave him a smile as she backed out the door.
Jo waited for her. She hadn’t turned on her light. As Mieshka soon found out, she didn’t need to. The rest of the way was lit.
***
“Guns, huh?”
She’d wondered when Jo would bring that up. Dusty naked bulbs strung along a bundle of wire at the top left corner of the brick-and-concrete tunnel. Two pipes ran along the floor, also to the left. A leaking joint in the smaller one had resolved any unasked questions about Underground plumbing. Mieshka tried not to think about the larger one.
“Yeah. Guns.” Except for the tread of their boots and the click of Jo’s mint, the tunnel was quiet. “I don’t know why. My mom was shot, but…”
Her throat clenched around the sore topic. She’d read somewhere that muscles clenched up around injuries. She suspected something similar happened in the mind.
The mint stopped clicking. Jo stared ahead, eyes unreadable. Her jaw muscles tensed.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Mieshka heard that a lot.
Silence thickened, each carefully not looking at the other. The tunnel was full of echoes. Some lights hummed in their sockets.
“So, Meese, huh?”
“Yep.”
The tunnel shifted, angled down, and ended in a dim doorway. A draft drifted past her cheek.
“City’s getting close,” Jo said.
They entered an old shopping mall. The lights and wire stretched along the right wall. They disappeared into the distance, gleaming off empty display windows. It was cavernous. The lights only lit a very small portion. The rest of the space was lost in darkness.
Mieshka clicked on her flashlight and flicked it left. Their path was edged by a grimy guard rail. Across a shadowy chasm, a second path hugged the opposite side. Escalators descended into the gap, dusty, dark, and dead. On the floor below, a vacant concierge advertised a long expired sale.
Mieshka and Jo followed the string of lights to the right. The occasional mannequin loomed inside shop displays, their clothes long stripped. The quiet was palpable, and smothered Mieshka’s senses like a pillow.
She tried not to think of how far down they were.
They began to hear things. Sounds. Echoes. Mieshka gripped her flashlight hard again, wide eyes trying to pierce the dark. Jo noticed.
“Spooked? It’s just the city. Weird acoustics in here.”
Mieshka nodded. Still, she didn’t linger.
Eventually, the middle chasm ended, and the two opposing paths angled together into a foyer. Four large doors were boarded with plywood. There was nowhere else to go.
Jo held one open for her, revealing a sidewalk on the other side. Mieshka stepped out into the city under the city.
It was a normal, night-time street. An eclectic mix of buildings crowded either side; the oldest were made with brick and wore decorated trims; the mall they had left was an anachronism amongst the century-old community. Bright storefront displays cast squares of light onto the sidewalk, mixing with the diffused glow of streetlights.
A displaced hydro pole stood in the middle of the street, the concrete around its base newer than the road. Mieshka looked up, and her mouth went slack.
Much like the spaceship’s underground hangar, this underground city had a framework to support its roof. It was a hybrid of steel and timber beams, crossing the street midway between the second and third floors of the buildings. The beams rose into shadow. Mieshka couldn’t see the ceiling.
She turned to Jo. “How far—”
“Ten storeys in some places. Here it’s more like five, ground to ceiling.”
Jo’s face was shadowed by the overhang of the mall. Mieshka toed the curb, her eyes following the line of hydro poles down the street.
“Do people drive down here?”
“No. Carbon monoxide isn’t so good. Lots of bikes, though.”
Shops lined the street: groceries, DVDs, clothes. Across was a café, its brickwork a black and red checkerboard pattern. People moved inside. She smelled fresh baking and coffee.
If it weren’t for the ceiling and the antiquated buildings, Mieshka could easily have believed she was in a less-populated section of Lyarne. There was even a draft.
“How big is it?”
“If you include all the outlying tunnels? Big. It’s quite elongated, but the Core itself is roughly seven square blocks. There are other sections—residential, mainly—around the Core: Eastside, Westside, and Southside. We entered near Westside.”
Before the mall, the tunnel had branched several times. Most of those arms had looked rather well-used.
Jo stepped onto the street. “There’s about half a million people down here.”
Mieshka followed. The street curved away from them to the right. The mall’s exterior ended with the city block. Shops had moved into its prime retail space. Farther down, she spotted a cathedral. A light burned outside its door. Supports encircled its spire.
“Let’s eat. This petty cash is burning my pocket.”
They drifted more than walked, Jo quietly letting Mieshka take the lead. A number of people greeted Jo, giving Mieshka curious looks as they passed. Mieshka intuited that she must be well-known down here. After a few blocks, Jo turned her down a cobbled side street. The support beams swooped lower, hung with naked bulbs. The brickwork on either side was black with age. How old had this place been before it was buried?
Jo led her into a café parked on the corner of an intersecting alley. Soon, Mieshka found herself staring out from a lace-curtained window, her shoulder pressed to the glass. Jo sat across from her. A pot of green tea sat between them, with promises of cake to come.
“You’ve been quieter than I expected,” Jo said.
Rather than pester Jo for answers, Mieshka had been figuring out the mechanics behind the place for herself. She stared at the writing on the café’s window.
“There’s a lot more Chinese writing than in Uptown.” She’d been noticing it for a while.
Jo also glanced at the window.
“There’s a lot more Chinese down here. Higher density, anyway. Bit of a racial thing.”
“Racial thing?”
Jo’s chair creaked as she tipped it back.
“The Chinese were the first to be refused housing. Other minorities followed. It makes sense that there’s a large group down here.”
“Why were they refused?”
Jo didn’t answer. Mieshka tried not to move under her stare.
“Your guess is as good as mine. I wouldn’t bring it up down here, though. Bit of a sore topic. Ah,” she said, her eyes lifting up to look behind Mieshka. “I was wondering if he’d show.”
Mieshka looked behind her. The man by the doorway was about as tall as Mieshka, dressed in black, and had a wide-brimmed hat that put shadows onto his face. He looked Chinese.
Mieshka hoped he hadn’t heard their conversation.
“Long time no see, Joanne.”
Joanne? Mieshka hid a smile. As the man drew closer, that smile faded. The back of her hand tingled. Mieshka tensed like she’d seen a gun.
“Not long enough.” Jo’s voice had teeth.
“You wound me.”
“As I recall, we were both wounded last time.”
“An accurate recollection.”
Mieshka felt she was missing part of the conversation. She didn’t have time to dwell on it: her attention was pulled to the edge of her senses, where she’d felt the fire before.
“Is that a transfer sigil?”
Mieshka blinked. He’d come closer while she’d looked away. He stared at the mark.
“It is.” Jo’s voice was vaguely triumphant. “And you can tell your boss that, too.”
“She’s new, isn’t she? What is your name?”
Mieshka didn’t want to tell him. The energy through the mark felt taut, like the spring of a trap. She forced herself to stay calm.
His expression was unreadable. After a moment, he held out his hand.
“Roger.”
“Mieshka.”
When they shook, it felt like a weight dropped into place.
“A pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Mind the tea.”
She looked back at her cup. The liquid spilled above the brim, floating in the air.
She let go of his hand. It fell back with a soft plop.
“Are you the Water Mage?”
Jo snorted into her drink.
Roger looked amused. “No. I’m her apprentice. I assume you are Aiden’s?”
Was he the water elemental Chris had talked about? Her jaw tensed. She found herself nodding. He seemed friendly enough now, but it was clear he and Jo had a history.
“That explains the rumours, then.”
Rumours? There were rumours about her?
“Word spreads awfully quick down here,” Jo commented dryly.
“It does.”
Mieshka tried not to look worried.
“I expect we will be seeing more of each other, Mieshka.” With a tip of his hat, he left. He waved through the window as he passed.
Jo and Mieshka watched the transfer mark. They did not speak until the glow had gone.
“So you’ve decided? You’ll be his apprentice?”
“Maybe. What did you mean by ‘wound’?”
Jo took a sip of her tea. “He likes to pick fights.”
Perhaps he wasn’t as amiable as he seemed. Mieshka rethought his last words to her. She decided that she didn’t particularly want to see more of him.
A moment later, the cake came.
CHAPTER 6
“Two calls in one day? To what do I owe this pleasure?”
Aiden sat in front of the screen and shoved the chair forward. Its wheels crackled over the concrete. The engine’s screen flickered orange in front of him, displaying the Water Mage’s name, a graph of her voice, and nothing else. Sophia had not deigned to share a video link, which suited him just fine. They were both tired. Likely, she’d spent the day staring at the same graph he had, albeit in a different colour.
The engine screens matched the elemental property of the power crystal. Sophia’s screen was blue, the Earth Mage’s green. Down in Terremain, Roderick had a violet-blue screen feeding off his electric element.
Colour-coded elements. Back home, they’d learned all the colours in grade school. It was only in university that they had learned how to change them.
Back home. He still called it home.
“You have an apprentice,” she said.