even if the others didn’t.
One of the tunnel-dwellers, a man with thick salt-andpepper stubble spreading across his jaw, reached out for a leverlike handle and hauled back on it. The doors slid open to either side, vanishing into the walls. Inside was a grate, which he slid open as well. He and the other two stepped into what appeared to be an empty room and turned around as one. It looked hauntingly familiar. The man who’d opened the doors reached out as if to close them and then spotted Oren and me.
“Well?” he said, one hand on the grate.
“E-Excuse me?” I stammered.
“Are you going down?”
Oren’s hand tightened on my elbow as he took a step back. Suddenly, my memory clicked into place. I knew what this was—I’d been in one before.
“Yes,” I blurted, reaching out for Oren’s hand and then heading for the box. For the elevator.
I could hear Oren gasp a quick, anguished breath as we squeezed into the elevator. For someone who didn’t like being underground, this must be torture. I wound my fingers through his, putting my body between him and the elevator’s other occupants. Though my mind recoiled at his touch, knowing what he really was under the veneer of humanity, the rest of me tingled, goose bumps rising along my arms despite the warm air. I turned my head away, not looking at Oren’s face.
The grate screeched as the man with the stubble slammed it closed behind us. Then he opened the lid of a box that stood on a post in one corner and banged his fist into a round, flat button. The elevator gave a lurch— Oren’s fingers went rigid in mine—and then with a surge of magic that sang through my head, the whole thing went dropping down.
I was glad it had been so long since the last time I’d eaten a proper meal. My stomach felt like it climbed into my throat, and my feet tingled, desperate to make it known that they were still in contact with the floor.
I looked up and saw that Oren’s eyes were closed and his face almost serene, far calmer than I’d ever seen him. Only the tightness of his grip and the glint of sweat in the hair at his temples betrayed his terror. Here he was no monster—he was just a boy trying to trust that I knew what I was doing. I leaned against him and felt the tension in his body relax just a fraction.
For a moment, it was like none of the past few weeks had happened. It was just me and Oren—there was no sickening tang of blood in the air or hunger inside me. The walls between us vanished for a few precious seconds.
Then the box stopped with a shudder and a screech of protesting gears, and I stepped away. I took a deep, quiet breath. We had to act like we made this trip all the time. I kept an eye on the man with the stubble, watching everything he did in case we needed to get back up the same way we’d come down. All we needed was to figure out the quickest way out of this place.
The man shut the lid on the box with the button and then reached for the grate, shoving it aside. I tensed, waiting to see what was on the other side of the outer doors. A base, holding the people who’d captured us; more tunnels, as endless and confusing as the last; even the outdoors. I was so turned around that I couldn’t dismiss that as a possibility, though it was now so warm that I could feel sweat starting to form between my shoulder blades.
The stubble man jerked at the handle, sending the outer doors sliding open with a rusty screech. He and the others got out, and Oren went stumbling after them, eager to leave the confines of the box. His hand was still clenched around mine, and he tugged me with him. I staggered, trying to catch my feet, eyes on the ground. We were on some sort of ledge overlooking a space so vast I could feel it sucking at me.
Then I looked up, and stared.
This was no base—it was a city.
Metal buildings of every imaginable shape and design grew out of the rock like mushrooms, roofed with rustyred iron and corroded copper green. Some were polished, gleaming turrets and towers. Others were rough and pockmarked by time and abuse, looking no better than debris from the ruined city above. Even here there were signs of the wars, as though people simply grabbed what they could and went underground. The buildings were connected by an insane network of stairs and walkways, cobbled together from pieces of salvage—I saw the leg of a giant mechanical walker stretched between two balconies and bolted into place, and just below us, a roof made out of a series of overlapping gears hammered thin and broad.
High above, fog shrouded the ceiling where the warm, moist underground air hit the cold stone overhead. Water dripped in a constant but sparse drizzle. The cavern was so large that there was even a breeze, fitful and changeable, stirred by the convection of the hot air below and the cold above. Overall the air was thick and humid, vastly different from the wintry cold outside.
Above the fog, the ceiling was studded with a series of what looked like the same glass and crystal lights we’d seen in the corridors, but on a far grander scale. They scattered the white-gold light of magic through the fog, which caught it and sent it dancing into a thousand colors that lit the city. It was as though the sky was paved with rainbows.
We stood on a ledge overlooking most of the city, although some of the walkways led upward to buildings higher than us. These were smaller, less rusted, clearly newer. At the very bottom of the huge cavern, on the floor, was a building in the shape of a semicircle, parabolic. In the courtyard before it were multicolored squares of fabric and a throng of people moving around and beneath them.
The size of the place was staggering. There were people everywhere—hundreds, thousands more inside the buildings maybe, more than I could count or guess. In circumference the cavern was not much bigger than my own city, but it went down and down and down, enough to fit my city many times over, stacked on top of itself. The far side was lost in the haze of distance, fitful rain, and fog.
Hope sputtered to life inside me. Perhaps my brother had made it here after all. Maybe they’d captured him the way they’d captured us. Maybe even now this Prometheus was using him the way he—or she, for that matter—was using Tansy.
A memory of the Machine the Institute had used to experiment on me bubbled up in my mind, and I tried to push it away. Tansy made her choice.
“We should go,” Oren whispered, although there was no one around and the cavern was alive with the sounds of people and machines, a distant roar of life and chaos. “Try our luck with the tunnels.”
“But someone here might be able to tell us how to get out.”
“And how would we ask them without giving away that we’re outsiders? I’d rather be lost in the tunnels than back in that cage.”
“We’ll find a way. We could wander in those tunnels up there for a week and never find our way out.” I looked at him, his squared jaw and fierce scowl, and added gently, “We don’t have that long.”
Oren sucked in a deep breath through his nose. I could see him trying to scent the fitful breeze, make sense of it, orient himself in the chaos of light and sound and people. His blue eyes darted this way and that, tracking a dozen different movements, the muscles in his jaw working. Out of his element, he was every inch the animal I’d thought he was when we first met. Cornered. Anxious. Poised to fight or flee.
He turned away from me, but I knew him well enough to sense his fear. Fear of losing himself, fear of hurting me. Fear of dying underground, away from the sun, breathing recycled air.
He was right to say we should go. Part of me knew it. But my feet wouldn’t move, rooted to the stone beneath them. My eyes followed the people going about their business below, oblivious to the two strangers watching it all from above.
How could we hope to infiltrate this city as complete outsiders without being caught? And all just to ask for directions?
I sucked in a deep breath, for in that moment I realized that wasn’t why I had to stay.
Somehow, as it often did, Nix knew what I was going to say before I said it.
I shook my head and then lifted Oren’s hand, pressing it between both of mine. “I’ll come with you back to the tunnels, keep you human as long as I can, until we reach the surface.”
He looked up, eyes fixing on mine, but the relief that flashed through his features vanished the moment he saw my face.
