by Barry Lyga
No guts, no glory, her dad used to say.
“And no digestion,” young, stupid Cassie would say. It never failed to draw a big belly laugh from Harlon.
Dad, why the hell did you leave me? she thought, then went feet-first into the hole.
*
Bryce didn’t so much catch her as guide her fall, his hands finding her body in the dark and pushing her a bit so she didn’t come down too hard or collide with a wall on her way down. One hand brushed her butt and the other touched a breast. He didn’t apologize. She wasn’t sure if she liked that or not.
“You OK?” he whispered hoarsely.
She was. The fall had been short — seven or eight feet, maybe. For Bryce, at six foot and lots of change, it was nothing. Cassie was tall, but not Viking tall. There’d been a moment of vertiginous terror, then Bryce’s hands, then the ground.
And safety. Safety most of all. Dark. Underground. Hidden.
A sound made her look up. Somewhere nearby, a cry had gone up, and all the safety of the subterranean black went away. The mob had grown, from the sound of it, and it was close. If she could make out the leaves of the elm through the moon-crescent opening of the grate, then they would be able to find her. Easily.
Bryce gently moved her aside and stood beneath the opening. From a dark corner, he had produced a long pole that looked something like a shepherd’s crook, but stouter and with a strange sort of three-pronged gripping fork at the end of it. He poked this gadget straight up and the prongs slid into grooves on the underside of the cover.
“Gonna need some help this time,” he said, utterly without shame or worry.
Good. The sooner they got it closed, the safer Cassie would feel, and hopefully the more her racing heart and sweaty palms would get the message. Bryce had one hand above the other on the pole, spaced apart by a foot or so. Facing him, Cassie gripped it between his hands and followed his lead. When he pulled back, she pushed forward. After a moment of absolutely nothing, her arms began to tremble and weaken, but then there was movement. Above, the moon crescent waned, going blacker, and she redoubled her effort, grinding her teeth, digging in her heels. She directed every morsel of strength in her body to her arms and her hands.
The cover slid farther and farther. The tiny slice of lighter darkness shrank and shrank and then, with a thunk that sounded too loud, it disappeared entirely.
They waited a moment, both of them breathing hard in the pitch-black. The air down here was too thick, cold and humid and stale. It tasted metallic, like unfiltered water from the tap.
The place was also completely still. Unnaturally so. She didn’t like it, but she would take it if it meant a minute to regroup.
After a few moments, Bryce blew out a long breath. “I think we’re OK. The concrete and iron rebar will block most of your signal,” he said, “but they’ll still be able to peg your last location down to a few meters. They’ll find the cover eventually.”
“How did you even know about this place?” she asked, and then held her hand up to shield her eyes as Bryce activated the flashlight in his phone.
He shrugged as if embarrassed by his knowledge. “We used to use the tunnels for LARPing freshman year.”
She stifled a sudden giggle. The thought of Bryce, dressed in medieval armor, stomping through the tunnels under the university, swinging a sword, his red dreadlocks flailing …
On second thought, that wasn’t so funny. “Well, anyway. I’m glad you know about them.”
He nodded very seriously and held out his hand, palm up. “Let me see your phone.”
She handed it over to him. He studied it for a moment. “Do you know how to stop the proximity alerts?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” he said, and dropped the phone to the ground and stomped on it with his ridiculously big foot.
“Hey!” Cassie yelped.
He shushed her, annoyed, then stomped on the phone again. The screen was a spiderweb of fissures now, chunks of glass missing. The frame was bent and she could make out the gray hunk of battery under the screen.
“That phone is my life!” she protested.
“Right now, it’s your death.”
Cassie paused. He wasn’t wrong. But … “That’s illegal.” Discarding or disabling your phone when on Hive Alert was an analog crime that carried some hefty penalties.
Bryce snorted. “Are you really worried about that?”
It took her a moment to process his question, then she realized: no. No, she wasn’t worried about it. She was more worried about running like hell.
“Probably should have done that from the start,” she muttered.
He said nothing for a moment, then regarded her with kind eyes. “Hard thing to do. We’ve all become so accustomed to them — it’s like having a second brain. Hard to ditch your phone, even if you know it’s for the best. That’s what they rely on.” He pointed to his ear, and she realized: her earbud. That had Bluetooth, too. It could be tracked.
She popped it out and did the honors herself this time, crushing the little pod under her foot.
Maybe it was hypocritical or just convenient, but she didn’t care any longer that Hive Justice was the law of the land. She remembered her dad once railing against people who thought the law didn’t apply to them — people who parked in handicapped spots or gunned through red lights. And he was right because the law was for everyone, so it applied to everyone.
But all she’d done was tell a joke. A tasteless joke, sure. Offensive and crass? Yeah, OK, she’d cop to that. But the idea that she could be sent to Level 5 and have to go on the run for a year just to avoid being stoned to death … for a joke …
The outrage of what was happening, combined with what was left in the wake of her dissipating adrenaline — exhaustion, nausea, a grim sort of numbness — caused a fresh flood of tears. Cassie tried to stifle them but Bryce must have noticed, because he awkwardly put a hand on her shoulder — it felt like a weight — before shuffling a few steps away in some sweet but misguided attempt to give her some privacy.
Cassie didn’t want privacy. She wanted to know what the hell this guy was doing with her. For her. But she was also, suddenly and deeply, afraid to ask.
“What now?” she asked, her voice husky and thick. Normally, she didn’t let people lead her around. But Bryce had shown up at the right time and gotten her this far, so it made sense to give him the wheel for now.
“This way,” he told her, pointing the beam of his phone behind her. She looked. The darkness opened into a tunnel, its walls dripping with condensation and mold.
“Then what?”
He shrugged. “At some point, we turn. Don’t worry. Let’s go before my battery dies. Grab your broken phone — we don’t want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.” He strode off, leaving her in encroaching dark.
The idea of being stranded when the phone battery died did not appeal to her. She picked up the pieces of her phone — her old life — and raced after Bryce.
*
It was easy to lose track of time in the tunnel. They were silent as they went along, Bryce a half step ahead, guiding them at every four-way intersection or T. He seemed to know the way intuitively, and she wondered exactly how much time he’d spent down here. His knowledge seemed too in-depth to have come from some innocent live-action role-playing.
The pain in her head had ebbed to a dull, persistent ache that occasionally flared into a sharp stab when she moved her neck too quickly. After a few minutes, she’d risked probing the area with cautious fingers. She needed to know how bad it was.
The bleeding had stopped. Her hair was matted and encrusted with blood, the stuff flaking away and sticking to her hands as she investigated. A large, almost tumorous lump of sensitive flesh had bloomed at the impact site. Touching it sent sparks of pain radiating out, so she avoided it. She couldn’t tell if her skull had been breach
ed or not, but nothing seemed to be spilling out of her, so she figured she would live.
At a four-way intersection, Bryce paused for a moment, as though thinking or remembering. Then he put his hand on the wall nearest them, wiped some mold away and nodded to himself. He rubbed his hand on his jeans leg to clean it, then indicated a right turn with a tilt of his head.
Cassie lagged as he headed into the right-hand tunnel. She peered at the wall where he’d put his hand and glanced. In the receding light of Bryce’s phone, she made out a symbol, etched into the concrete:
Ω
Omega. Greek letter. The final Greek letter, actually. The Greeks had no Z — their alphabet went from alpha to omega. Hence the bit from the Bible where God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” I’m everything, he was saying. I’m all of it. Ain’t nothing but me.
Having a classics professor for a mother helped in times like this. She could recite, if need be, all sorts of classical allusions and references to omega. But she was still baffled as to why it was carved into a wall down in the old steam tunnels, and that confusion offered a momentary break from the thudding fear that followed her down the tunnels with every step.
It was getting dark; Bryce hadn’t slowed down. Cassie raced to catch up to him.
“Where exactly are we going?” she asked him, breaking their silence. “And what’s the deal with the omega on the wall?”
“It’s not an omega,” he told her, neatly sidestepping the more important question.
“Of course it is. I’m not an idiot.”
“No one said you were.” He stopped and frowned at her. “I don’t think you’re an idiot,” he said a bit too earnestly.
“Great. Then treat me like I’m smart,” she shot back. She’d allowed her fear to turn into a tether to Bryce. But at some point, she had to clear it from her mind and think for herself. “Where are we going?”
Bryce sighed. “I have some friends. They might be able to help you.” Cassie’s face lit up. “Might,” Bryce cautioned her. “I can’t be sure.”
“Where are they? Are they the ones who carved that symbol into the wall?” Something occurred to her. “There were symbols carved into all of the walls at all of the intersections, right? I just didn’t notice them. That’s the only way you could know how to navigate this place.”
He nodded. “We use the tunnels to move around when we need to go undetected. Emergencies only.”
“So that LARP stuff was bullshit.”
Bryce blushed. “Uh, no. That’s how we discovered the tunnels.”
Cassie found herself grinning again. “Were you Sir Bryce of the Round Table?”
“No, I … ” His blush grew furiously redder. “Never mind.”
“Tell me!” she said, almost giddy. The pain in her head had subsided to almost nothing by now, and she was safe for the first time in hours and there was the promise of help. A lightness filled her.
“I’m not telling you,” he said. “Not happening.”
She begged some more, but nothing would move him. They walked several yards down the tunnel, then Bryce brought them up short. There was a door set into the wall to their right, recessed half a foot or so from the tunnel. Bryce looked it up and down. Cassie did, too. She spotted the omega just before he did, pointing to the small etching slightly below the top of the doorjamb. She ran her fingers over it; the cold wall and the rough edges reminded her that this wasn’t a game. People, real people, had resorted to carving lines into the walls of underground tunnels to find … what? Safety? Escape? Whatever it was, it meant something aboveground wasn’t working out well for them.
She could relate.
“OK, good,” Bryce said, clearly relieved. “Good.”
“This is where we go?” she asked.
Bryce nodded absently but made no move to open the door. It was barricaded with a hefty-looking two-inch-thick wooden bar that she figured she could lift on her own, if need be.
“Before we go any farther,” he said, “we need to talk.”
“About assigning me a LARP name?” Her attempt at a joke landed flat at Bryce’s feet.
“Can you please take this seriously?” he asked, his voice and expression weary.
She crossed her arms over her chest. She didn’t need to be told how serious this was. The blood drying in her hair was a pretty solid indicator. She gave him the impatient OK, talk, I’m listening look she employed during Mom lectures.
“We have to tread lightly here,” he told her. “No one knows we’re coming. I’m still new to all of this, but I wanted to help and this is the only way I know how. Let me do the talking, all right?”
“Is this …” She picked her words carefully. “Is this like one of those things in the movies where there’s a bunch of people who once got Hive Mobbed who are now hiding out in the sewers and they’re, like, called the Underground and they’re trying to bring down the system?”
He scowled at her. “Absolutely not.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed. She thought maybe there was a group to hook up with.
“For one thing,” he said, “they don’t hang out in the sewers. Gross. They have the top floor of an abandoned building. Nice views. And it’s not called the Underground. It’s the Organized Human Mutiny.”
“But other than those two massive differences … it’s a yes?” Cassie scoffed. “I was kind of kidding.”
Bryce looked thoughtful. “Isn’t that what got you into this mess in the first place?”
Cassie trained her eyes on the ground, chastened. Bryce’s words were ricocheting through her brain and she tried to grab on to them. Organized. Human. Mutiny. She looked at the omega symbol again.
It’s not an omega, Bryce had said.
It all clicked for her. She almost smiled. Organized Human Mutiny.
OHM.
Ohm. An ohm was represented by an Ω.
It was a term from electronics. She knew it from soldering motherboards with her father.
An ohm was a unit of resistance.
*
There was a moment, right as Bryce lifted the door bar and fished a key from his pocket to unlock the door, when Cassie was still operating just as a girl on the run. Blameless? Nah. But still a victim. And still, she reminded herself, thinking of all the Hive Mobs she’d heard about over the years, and the two she’d participated in, a proponent of Hive Justice.
That all changed as she absorbed the meaning of OHM. Organized Human Mutiny.
Where Bryce was leading her, she realized, was a revolution.
A disruption.
They emerged into a dark, claustrophobic boiler room, the air filled with burps from the nearby furnace. Bryce closed the door behind them and used a thin metal hook to slip through the gap between the door and the wall to reset the door bar on the other side. Then he concealed the hook behind the furnace.
“OK, let’s go.”
He took her through another doorway into a darkened hall. They made their way to yet another door, this one opening into a stairwell. In silence, they climbed the switchback stairs, three or four stories, at which point a clot of old sofas and mattresses blocked them from going any further.
“Now what?” Cassie asked.
Bryce jimmied open the fire door on the landing just below the blockade and led her into a corridor lined with identical doors on either side. It was a hotel, she realized. An old, run-down, lightless hotel.
Halfway down the hall, Bryce paused. Cassie spotted the Ω before he did, subtly carved into the wood of a door, overlaying the number 3 in such a way as to be almost invisible. Bryce snorted, annoyed and impressed at the same time.
“Beginner’s luck?” Cassie said, shrugging as Bryce opened the door.
Cassie hesitated for a moment. Slipping into a hotel room with a guy she’d just met didn’t seem like the smartest move
. Then again, her options were few and becoming fewer with almost every moment that passed. Reluctantly, she followed Bryce into the room.
It was nearly empty, save for an ancient, enormous CRT television turned on one side, its screen kicked in and gaping wide like a glass-toothed mouth desperate for food. Maybe it was just the hour, the lack of sleep, the adrenaline rush, but that TV looked outright evil to her, something from one of the millions of low-budget horror movies she’d streamed, the ones she wasn’t supposed to watch but did anyway. Perfectly normal, perfectly harmless everyday items — dolls, game boards, phones, microwave ovens — suddenly became possessed and dangerous. The TV seemed to be one of them, but in the real world now, and she realized that her mother had been right all along — she shouldn’t have watched those movies.
Her mother. Ugh. A wave of grief so powerful that it seemed almost tangible hit her, rocked her back on her heels. In true Cassie/Rachel fashion, they’d parted on a sour note. Cassie hadn’t meant to imply that her mother’s escape plan was bad, but she knew she’d done just that. She’d basically said, You did a lousy job protecting me, Mom. An epically shitty way to leave things. Especially since …
Would she ever see her mother again? What would happen to Rachel if she was identified as helping a Hive fugitive? Bad enough that Cassie had ruined her own life; did she have to crush her mother’s, too?
“You all right?” Bryce asked.
She’d almost forgotten he was there. He stood across the room, by the narrow closet door, one hand on the knob.
“Is this where we hide out?” she asked. Other than the TV from hell, the room was empty. The idea of holing up here didn’t exactly thrill her …
“No,” he said. “Come on.”
He opened the closet door and she saw a ladder inside. Bryce climbed up quickly, bidding her to follow him. “Close the door before you come up,” he said.