It wasn’t long before someone else noticed the lights and panic swept through them, people at first spouting defiant words against the police, before rushing for the door and scattering across the abandoned farm.
Scarlet was shaking as she pulled her hood up and fled with them. Not everyone was running—someone behind her was trying to call order. There was a gunshot and mad laughter. Up ahead, the girl with the zebra hair was standing on a storage crate, pointing and laughing at the cowards who would flee from the police.
Scarlet escaped into the midnight air and the noise faded without the warehouse’s echo around her. She could hear the sirens now, mixing with the thrum of crickets. On the dirt road outside the building, she spun in a full circle as the crowd jostled around her.
There was no sign of Wolf.
She thought she’d seen him turn right. Her ship was parked to the left. Her pulse was racing, making it hard to breathe.
She couldn’t leave. She hadn’t gotten what she’d come for.
She told herself that she would be able to find him again. When she’d had time to gather her wits. After she talked to the detectives and persuaded them to track Wolf down and arrest him and find out where he’d taken her grandmother.
Tucking her hands into her pockets, she hurried around the building, toward her ship.
A sickening howl stopped her, sucking the air out of her lungs. The night’s chatter silenced, even the loitering city rats pausing to listen.
Scarlet had heard wild wolves before, prowling the countryside in search of easy prey on the farms.
But never had a wolf’s howl sent a chill down her spine like that.
Nine
“Argh, get it off, get it off!”
Cinder spun, steadying herself on the curved, slick concrete walls as she cast the flashlight behind her. Thorne was writhing and squirming in the cramped tunnel, swatting at his back and emitting an array of curses and unmanly shrieks.
She sent the beam of light to the ceiling and saw a thriving mass of cockroaches scuttling across it in all directions. She shuddered, but turned away and kept moving.
“It’s only a cockroach,” she called back to him. “It’s not going to kill you.”
“It’s in my uniform!”
“Would you keep quiet? There’s a manhole up ahead.”
“Please tell me we’ll be exiting through that manhole.”
She scoffed, more preoccupied with the map of the sewer system in her head than on her companion’s squeamishness. Even though the thought of a cockroach beneath her shirt did make her squirm, she figured it would still be preferable to walking through the ankle-deep sludge with one bare foot, and she wasn’t whining.
They passed beneath the manhole and Cinder detected the steady sound of water growing louder. “We’re almost to the combined main line,” she said, at first eager to reach it—it was hot as Mars in this cramped tunnel and her thighs were burning from the crouch-walk routine. But then a gut-turning stench wafted toward her, so strong she almost gagged.
No longer would it just be surface water runoff they were trekking through.
“Oh, aces,” said Thorne, groaning. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
Cinder wrinkled her nose and focused on taking shallow, burning breaths.
The smell grew nearly unbearable as they traipsed through the sludge and came to the sewer connection, finding themselves on the lip of a concrete wall.
Cinder’s imbedded flashlight searched the tunnel beneath them, darting up the slimy concrete walls. The main tunnel would be tall enough for them to stand in. The light bounced off a narrow metal grate that lined the far edge, stable enough for maintenance workers and covered in rat droppings. Between them and the grate, a river of sewage swelled and churned, at least two meters wide.
She fought off another bout of nausea as the pungent stink of the sewer clouded her nostrils, her throat, her lungs.
“Ready?” she said, inching forward.
“Wait—what are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
Thorne blinked at her, then down at the sewage he could barely make out in the darkness. “Don’t you have some tool in that fancy hand of yours that can get us across?”
Cinder glared, light-headed from her body’s instinctively short breaths. “Oh, wow, how could I have forgotten about my grappling hook?”
Spinning away, she gobbled down another rank breath and lowered herself into the muck. Something smooshed between her toes. The current pounded against her legs as she made her way across, the water up to her thighs. Writhing on the inside, Cinder crossed as quickly as she could, choking down her gag reflex. The weight of her metal foot keeping her grounded so the current didn’t knock her off balance and soon she was on the other side, pulling herself onto the grate. She flattened her back against the tunnel wall and peered back at the pretend captain.
He was staring at her legs with unbridled disgust.
Cinder looked down. The stark white jumper was now tinged greenish brown and clung, sopping, to her legs.
“Look,” she yelled, aiming the flashlight at Thorne, “you can either get over here or you can go back and serve the rest of your sentence in peace. But you have to make a decision now.”
After a stream of curses and spitting, Thorne inched his way into the sludge, holding his arms aloft. He was grimacing the whole time as he slinked his way to the grate and hauled himself up beside Cinder.
“This is what I get for complaining about the soap,” he muttered, pressing himself against the wall.
The grate was already digging into Cinder’s bare foot and she shifted her weight onto her cyborg leg. “All right, Cadet. Which way?”
“Captain.” He opened his eyes and peered down the tunnel in each direction, but beyond the pale light filtering in from the closest manhole, the sewers disappeared in blackness. Cinder adjusted the brightness of her flashlight, sending it darting over the frothy surface of the water and dripping concrete walls.
“It’s near the old Beihai Park,” Thorne said, scratching at his whiskered chin. “Which way is that?”
Cinder nodded and turned south.
Her internal clock told her they’d been walking for only twelve minutes, but it seemed like hours. The grate dug into her foot with each step. Her wet pants were plastered to her calves and sweat dripped down the back of her neck, sometimes tricking her into thinking it was a spider fallen down her jumpsuit and making her feel guilty for giving Thorne a hard time before. Though they didn’t see any rats, she could hear them scurrying away from her light, down countless tunnels that fanned out beneath the city.
Thorne talked to himself as they walked, working through his clogged memory. His ship was definitely near Beihai Park. In the industrial district. Not six blocks south of the maglev tracks … well, maybe eight blocks.
“We’re about a block away from the park,” Cinder said, pausing at a metal ladder. A spot of light drifted down toward them. “This goes up to West Yunxin.”
“Yunxin sounds familiar. Sort of.”
She pleaded for patience and started to climb.
The ladder rungs bit into her foot, but the air was blissfully fresh as she neared the top. The sound of the rushing water was replaced with the hum of maglev tracks. Reaching the manhole cover, Cinder paused to listen for signs of humanity, before pushing the cover off to the side.
A hover glided overhead.
Cinder ducked, heart racing. Daring to inch her head up, she spotted silent lights atop the white vehicle. It was an emergency hover. Visions of androids armed with brain-interface-overriding tasers sent a shudder through her, before the hover turned a corner and she saw a red cross on one side. It was a medical hover, not law enforcement. Cinder nearly collapsed from relief.