11.20
Knocking doesn’t do much. I lean against the side of the door, glancing around in much too paranoid a way but still finding the tunnel empty and quiet save the occasional dripping.
I don’t want to go try every door. More chance someone will try to shoot me. Since they probably won’t call the authorities down here—or don’t even have a way to—I don’t think they’d mind disposing of a body and I’m not exactly in shape to not die if someone takes a shotgun to me.
Plus, walking hurts. I’m dizzy leaning against the door.
Something must be seriously wrong.
No use panicking about it unless I can get out of here.
Knocking again, I try to raise my voice enough the old man will be likely to hear it on the other side of the door. “Hello? I know I’m a stranger but I don’t want to hurt anyone. I fell down here and I’m trying to find my way back up to my friends. I just need to know if you have a radio or tablet or anything than can help me? Or if you can just tell me how to get to the city levels?”
Someone on the surface will have a tablet I can use, even if they lend me it because I look like death.
After a considerable silence, I sigh. I don’t have much pride left at the moment, so I try, “Please?”
I don’t think it’s going to work, but the door cracks open. An eye peeks out at me and a gravelly voice asks, “She didn’t tell you?”
I assume he means the crazy old lady who took me in. “No…she uh, she said there’s no way to the surface.”
“She’s right.”
I force myself not to get irritated—it’s rough when everything hurts this much.
“How do you get food down here?”
“We do.”
Not a single person down here is sane. These people make me look nearly normal.
“Do you know where the engines are?”
“To the city? Yes.”
“Can you show me?”
There’s the shadowed movement of him shaking his head even in the dark of the room. My glitching eyes give me enough heat blobs to pick it up.
“Will anyone here take me there?”
Another head shake. I tend to believe him. Obviously, he wants me gone, and the quickest way would be to point me in the direction of another person or the way out.
I close my eyes, trying not to faint. “Do you have another tablet or radio I can use?”
“No.”
“Does anyone?”
“No.”
I doubt that. This little community doesn’t exactly look self-sufficient. They’re contacting the outside world somehow, he just doesn’t want to tell me. If I felt a little less like I’m dying, I probably wouldn’t be able to blame him. As it is, I want to shake him and scream until someone gives me a straight answer.
“Could you draw it out?” I try. “One a piece of paper or something. Some little map so I can find my way there on my own?”
He regards me for a long moment, then asks, “Are you dying, kid?”
There’s an unexpected softness in his voice, and I don’t know how to respond. “Maybe…I don’t know.”
“What happened to you?”
At least he isn’t slamming the door in my face. “Someone tried to shoot me, then I fell. I don’t remember after that until I woke up in one of these tunnels…I suppose I fell all the way down.”
“That’s impossible. People have fallen before. Had to scrape them off the tunnels.”
I shudder and swallow with some difficulty. “I’m made pretty weird.”
It’s difficult to tell, but I think his eyebrow quirks. “You’ll get yourself killed if you try to go find those engines.”
I’d shrug if I wasn’t currently working on being as still and pain-free as possible. “I think if I stay down here I might die anyway.”
“Hrmf,” he grunts, then mumbles something to himself. “Just wait there. I’ll uh…try to draw something out for you.”
He closes the door as quick as possible, and I sit heavily on his front step, too exhausted not to. I’m not even sure he’s going to open the door back up, but I can’t wander off. I’ll wait a few minutes before I try to knock again. I lean my elbows on my knees, head hung down. Well, I don’t know how close to being healed those implants were in the side of my head, but now they’re completely wrecked. Sight on the right side is really and truly screwed up. Somehow, that’s the least part I’m worried about. Shouldn’t I be a little more stable by now? I’ve been in two ship crashes in the past few months, and I was still able to be up and around with relative ease.
Now, I feel like I’m going to keel over at any minute, and might just possibly do so. I don’t taste metal other than where I can tell I busted the inside of my cheek against my teeth at some point, so at least there isn’t any internal damage so bad I’m choking up blood. With the amount of pain, that isn’t as comforting as perhaps it would otherwise be.
I stare at my hands, one more swollen than the other from the broken bone, and watch them tremble.
I’m going to die down here.
I shove the thought somewhere in the back of my mind where it goes. I’m not dying down here and leaving Bat by himself. Not going to happen. If nothing else, I better find him so he doesn’t spend any time looking for me down here, around people who might want to scrap him for parts.
My ankle is killing me, so I lean back against the doorframe and take the pressure off my knees. I try to think of a better plan than the one I have, but I don’t know if I can’t think of one because my brain is too fuzzy or there simply isn’t anything better for someone in my position. I consider anything else that won’t let me concentrate on the pain, but that eventually leads my mind back to Zane and Lalia, and somehow that’s worse. What are they doing right now? Did they take a transport vessel off the city? Head back home? I suppose it’s possible they’re helping Bat look for me, but I don’t know why they’d risk coming down here now. It’s not as if they owe me anything. Not any longer.
Yvonne, at least, is probably throwing a fit about all this.
Or she thinks the fall killed me, which is a little insulting but entirely reasonable. Actually, I’m a little surprised it didn’t.
What if Bat thinks it killed me?
Still, I don’t think he wouldn’t at least try to find my body.
Either way, even if he left the city as well, finding a tablet up on the surface someone will let me use will let me get in touch with him. He’ll turn right around and come back.
When the door cracks, I jump more than I should, glancing up but not having the wherewithal to actually get to my feet. The old man pauses, startled, then hands me a folded piece of gray paper, looking nervous to be sticking his hand anywhere near mine. I take it carefully, aware of the dried blood on my fingers, and blink at the markings he made, my eyes killing me while I try to focus on anything small that requires thinking.
“Can you read it?”
I nod, then regret it when my head pounds. Pointing at a section of the hand-drawn lines, I ask, “We’re here?”
“Yeah.”
I’ll give it to the old guy: he has this place memorized. He’s marked out all the little tunnels including the ones I shouldn’t go down. As many of them as there are, I can see a definite pattern, and it doesn’t look too complicated.
“How far do you think this is to where the engines are?”
He shrugs, leaning out the door a little more, seeming to figure out I’m not going to hurt him. “A few miles? Probably gonna take you a long time in your condition.”
Well, yeah. A few miles. I try to keep the disgust off my face, but I don’t have many other options. I could stay here, sure, but the chance anyone would find me doesn’t seem high in all these twisting tunnels, even if Bat and all the humans happened to both be following me and saw exactly where I fell through all the ships and distorting shields and chaos of the circumstances.
I doubt they’ll find me here. And something tells me I don’t have forever to wait around to find out.
I walked longer than that after the crash on Amerov and had plenty of fights with other numbers on that jungle planet after I crashed with Lalia. I should be fine. None of those were near as bad as this, but I’m stubborn enough I think I can make it out of here on my own two feet.
“You sure you want to try that?” the old man asks.
“Do you know of any other way I can get out of here?”
He observes me for a long moment, looking clueless, before saying, “Not unless you plan on climbing out of the tunnel you fell down.”
Yeah, I considered that one. I hold up my splinted arm and he nods.
“Thank you,” I say. “This is much better than nothing.”
“Is there anyone who’s going to come down here looking for you?” As he asks, he casts a furtive glance into both tunnels—they really don’t like strangers down here.
My type of people.
But the question makes me wince. “Umm, I don’t know. Even if they are, I’m not sure they’d even know where to come or make it through it through this section…if they do, they’re harmless. A little annoying maybe, but harmless.”
He doesn’t look too convinced, but I’m not lying. The worst that would happen if they make it down here—which is laughable—is Yvonne might yell a bit. But hey, I lived through her. These people are stubborn enough.
I suppose I have to get up off this man’s porch. Managing not to groan, I push myself to my feet and again say, “Thank you.”
With a quick nod, he has his door closed and bolted once again. I sigh and force myself to waste the few steps back across the street to knock on the old woman’s door and tell her I’m going to try to find my way out of there. I get nothing more than a quick peek out and a nod for my efforts, but I remind myself she was kind to me, and I might need to come back here. These people owe me no compassion, and I should accept what little of it I can manage to scrape up.
Glancing back at the tunnel I first came in from, I head past the row of little houses in the tunnel walls, out the opposite way.