I cleared my throat, feeling my cheeks beginning to burn. “I’m sorry. I was exploring. I didn’t mean to—”
She gave a dismissive wave of her hand and got to her feet. Massaging her knuckles, she turned toward me. “What’s the matter?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It wasn’t that I didn’t know, but the opposite: there were so many things the matter that I didn’t know where to start. But none of these things make their way out of my mouth. Instead, I muttered, “I’m not used to there being no nighttime.”
Olivia blinked at me, surprised. “Is that all? You must have arrived in the morning, Lethe time.”
“Lethe time?”
“As opposed to the time Above, in the ruins outside. When it’s day here, it’s night there. Here, I’ll show you.”
“I don’t mean to keep you up,” I protested. It’d been hours since the halls had gone quiet, and everyone else—I’d assumed—had gone to sleep.
She shook her head, lips curving in something a little sadder than a smile. “It’s okay. I don’t sleep too well these days, anyway. I’m not used to sleeping alone.”
Olivia had mentioned losing a brother, but she hadn’t mentioned losing anyone else. A husband? It was hard to tell how old she was, but she didn’t seem that much older than me. Maybe her boyfriend? But she was already past me, leading the way down the corridor. If she didn’t want to volunteer, I wasn’t going to ask.
I soon lost track of all the turns, but Olivia moved with absolute certainty. She knew this place like the back of her hand. She’d called herself a lifer—I tried to imagine spending all my time inside the walls, always living on the edges of the real city.
If I stay, I realized, this will be my life too.
This was how Basil had lived, before he vanished. Before he challenged Prometheus and lost, or before Prometheus found him. I tried to imagine his presence here, the way I always could in the sewer tunnels at home, but I couldn’t.
Eventually Olivia and I reached the end of a particular narrow tunnel that terminated in a metal door. She unlocked it with a twist of its handle. I braced for the shriek of rusty hinges, but this one opened as silently as a sigh. And as soon as it swung open, I realized why.
The door opened onto a wide, slightly rounded platform that was open to the outer city. If the hinges made noise, it’d give away this entrance to the walls. They must keep them carefully oiled.
And Olivia was right—outside, Lethe was shrouded in night.
The sky above, which during the day was lit by thousands of magic lights fractured into rainbows by the mist, was dark. The only hints of light up above were nebulas of pale blue and green, so faint I wasn’t sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. The effect was like nothing I’d ever seen before—nothing like the stars or the moon, or the faint violet sheen of my home city’s Wall when the sun disc set.
Olivia led the way out onto the platform, which I soon realized was the roof of a building. Though the surface was rounded, giving the unsettling impression that I could slide off at any moment, it was actually broad enough that it was as easy to walk on as the flat ground.
She took a seat on the roof, stretching her legs out and leaning back on her hands.
“This is incredible,” I said, staring.
She quickly raised a hand to stop me, then held a finger to her lips. When she spoke, her voice was merely a murmur. “Most people are asleep right now, but on the off chance someone nearby’s awake, we try to keep quiet up here. The door’s pretty well hidden, but we don’t want anyone getting curious about voices coming from up here.”
I bit my lip. But she patted the ground beside her in a clear invitation, so I sat down cross-legged next to her.
“What happened to all the lights?” I whispered.
“They’re still there,” Olivia replied. “They’re just not shining. At night there’s no magic coming through to light them up. That glow is just from the fungus that grows on the cavern ceiling. Phosphorescence, completely natural and magic-free.”
I thought of Oren, my pulse quickening a little. “What about all the people who aren’t Renewables, who can’t survive without the magic?”
“Enough comes through during the day to keep us going at night.” Olivia tilted her head back, eyes on the ceiling. “Those lights are designed that way. They’re imperfect vessels—they leak. The magic comes into the air through the mist formed when the hot air down here hits the colder air up near the surface.”
“Designed? By whom?”
“Prometheus. He saved us.”
“But—I thought you were all fighting him, that he was the bad guy.”
Olivia sighed. “It’s not really that simple. For a long time, since the Renewable wars, this place was a haven. Huge reserves of magic kept the city running, kept its people human despite the chaos above. The idea was always that by keeping one bastion of sanity in the chaos, at whatever cost, people could survive the fallout from the wars and find a way to restore the land.”
“Dorian—that is, a man I met while traveling—mentioned that this place was experimenting with fixing what the Renewables broke.”
Olivia nodded. “The Star—the giant crystal tower, you would’ve seen it in the ruins Above—was one of those experiments. But it was put up so long ago that by the time the energy reserves in the city began to run out, no one was alive who knew how to shut it down. It takes a huge amount of magic to light that Star and keep the land around it saturated with magic. There’s no insulation there, just open air that lets all the power just dissipate out into nothing.”
“So people moved down here.” I remembered the muffling doors and airlocks and rooms lined with iron that we’d passed through in order to enter the city below.
“Exactly. It lets us keep the magic in. But even that wasn’t enough. The city was dying, bit by bit. They shut down all the machines except the ones that bring us air and water. People were leaving in droves. That was when Prometheus showed up.”
“Who was he? Where did he come from?”
Olivia shrugged. “No one knows. He just walked into the courtyard one day and started talking, and people listened. He laid out an entire framework for how to save the city. He recruited teams to help him, and together they built the crystal lights on the cavern ceiling. So by day Above, the Star keeps the shadows there human. But by night, Prometheus’s inventions siphon the Star’s magic into the lights, and we have our daytime down here. And we have enough magic to live by.”
“He stole fire from the gods,” I murmured, staring at the ceiling, where the crystals lay dormant, waiting for magic.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Something I read.” I swallowed. “So why not funnel all the magic down here? Aren’t you still losing a lot of power by letting the Star shine during the day?”
“If you haven’t noticed,” Olivia said wryly, “there’s not a lot of room down here to grow crops. We need the Empty Ones above to work the farms.”
Horror crept over me. “You—keep them human long enough to grow you food? And let them turn into monsters at night?”
Olivia didn’t look at me, gazing out toward the far wall of the cavern, lost in the darkness. “They only think they’re human,” she said softly. “It’s an illusion brought by the presence of magic. Without them, we’d all starve. Would you rather they stay Empty all the time, without even the echo of the people they once were?”
I had no answer for that. But I felt sure Oren would.
“Not everyone agrees with Prometheus. But after he saved us, he became the uncontested leader of the city. Renamed it Lethe, citing something about a new start.” Olivia eased back until she was lying on the roof, her blonde curls splayed out against the rusty surface. “Most of us have lived here long enough to know what life was like before Prometheus showed up five years ago. We know we’d all be dead without him, later if not sooner.”