“Did you find something?” Nina came to kneel next to me, the torch flickering.
“I’ve seen this somewhere before,” I murmured. “Parker, can I see the journal?”
He handed it to me, still open to the page with the map. But that wasn’t what I was interested in. I flipped back toward the beginning until I found one of Basil’s sketches of the landscape. I scanned it, then stabbed my finger at a cluster of markings over one of the mountains.
“There.”
When I’d first seen the drawing, which was subtly and artistically done, I hadn’t even noticed what was there that shouldn’t have been: birds. They were distant in the picture, lacking detail—nothing more than lines, curved V’s to give the impression of flight. But there were no birds out there; at least, none that I’d seen outside of the Iron Wood. And I noticed, now that I stared at them, that the shade of ink they were drawn in was subtly different. As though they’d been added to the picture much later.
“Shit, she’s right.” That was Marco, who’d given up being doubtful and was leaning in over my shoulder.
I handed the journal back and reached for the stone, giving it a sharp shove. It was loose, and it gave a little with a teeth-aching screech of stone on stone. I pushed again, and this time it slid all the way through, clattering down onto the stone on the other side.
I’d been expecting some sort of secret panel to open and tried to conceal the stab of nervous disappointment as I leaned down to put my eye to the hole. There was nothing to see there except darkness, and the hole was too narrow to fit the torch through.
“Now what?” Nina asked.
I couldn’t afford to look like I was as lost as they were—they were counting on me to know my brother, to think the way he thought. I dropped down onto my side and put my hand through the hole.
“Lark—wait!” Parker’s voice rang out. “Don’t just stick your arm in there, you don’t know what’s . . . it could be a trap, you could hurt yourself.”
I shook my head. “Basil wouldn’t put a trap here. He left this trail to be followed.” I hoped I sounded more sure than I felt.
I kept easing my arm through until I was shoulder-deep in the hole. It was a little wider than my arm was—which made sense, because Basil’s arm would’ve been thicker than mine. I groped around blind, my hands encountering slimy stone and little else. My skin crawled as my hand passed through a cobweb and something large and skittery dropped onto my hand—I stifled a gasp and gave my arm an abrupt shake, and whatever it was flew off.
Nina must’ve noticed my flinching, and she silently put a hand on my arm. Her touch was warm, steadying. She was not a large woman, and not strong like Olivia, but there was strength in her reassurance regardless. I took a deep breath and kept feeling around for some clue to what to do next.
It wasn’t until I bent my elbow up and started groping at the wall itself that my scrabbling fingers encountered something different. Metal, not stone. A long, rough spar about as big around as my finger. I wrapped my fingers around it, ignoring the way rust flaked off at my touch, and gave it a downward yank.
For a long, heart-pounding moment, nothing happened. Then there was a solid thunk, and then the clanking of an invisible gear somewhere under the stone floor. The wall itself shifted with a shower of dust and mortar, making me choke. A pair of hands dragged me backward abruptly, and I was grateful for the leather jacket—my arm would’ve been shredded without it. Nina hauled me to my feet as the wall—the entire wall—swung a foot inward.
Marco thumped me on the back while I stood there hacking and coughing up dust and then strode cheerfully past me. “Now that’s more like it.”
We pressed on, into the dark. Every now and then we could hear voices and knew we were passing within earshot of the known tunnels honeycombing the underground. We kept mostly silent, whispering only when we hit intersections and other doors, searching for the telltale marks that would lead the way. The further we got, the more my heart sang—it really was my brother’s passageway. I could almost feel him here, like I could feel his ghost in the unused sewer system of my own city. It was as close as I was ever going to get to him again.
I was almost disappointed when Parker pointed out that we were heading upward, suggesting that we really were heading for the surface. The tunnel floor was set at a barely imperceptible slant—so mild that it was only the slow burning in our calves that alerted us to the fact that we were walking uphill.
The air grew fresher as we walked, and drier—and colder. The leather jacket was good protection against cuts and scrapes, but it didn’t offer much warmth. We picked up our pace, as much to warm ourselves as to hurry toward the destination.
Eventually we reached another of Basil’s hidden doors, but when Nina knelt down beside me to offer more light, the torch flickered abruptly, the flames licking backward.
“There’s air coming through here,” she murmured, nudging me aside so she could press her cheek to the nearly invisible seam in the stone. “Dry air. Outside air.”
The surface.
Our eyes met briefly, and then she jerked her head to the side and moved away so I could get at the latch to open the door. This time when the door swung open, it opened on the cold night air of the outside. A rush of wind howled past, throwing our hair back and plastering our clothes to our bodies.
“You’ve done it,” shouted Parker over the air, stepping forward and gripping my shoulder.
“We should shut the door again,” I shouted back. “This air is going somewhere—if it starts howling out of the pipe, someone’s going to notice and come looking for this exit.”
“Let’s go,” Marco said, pushing past us.
“Wait—we don’t know what’s up there—”
He put his face close to mine so I could hear better. “We’ve got to know where this comes out before we send people up here. We’ve got to scout.”
I thought of the hungry shadows that could be waiting up here—and of Wesley’s assurances that they’d all be out hunting and not in the city. I gritted my teeth and nodded.
We stepped forward, pushing against the door until the air pressure sucked it back against the rock with a slam. It was going to take all our strength, on the return trip, to pry it open against the force of the wind.
Gasping, lungs protesting the sudden shift in air temperature, I turned and got my first look at where we’d ended up. We were in the skeleton of a ruined building, something that had been hit far harder than the abandoned hotel where Trina and Brandon lived with their children. The windows were all gone, open to the outside, and parts of the wall had caved into rubble as well. We’d emerged from some sort of cellar entrance, half-sunk into the floor of the building.
The others climbed the few steps up to ground level, looking around, clapping each other on the shoulders. It must’ve been years since any of them had seen the outside, if they’d ever even come from the outside. Nina had an accent, and I assumed she must have come from somewhere else—but for all I knew, Parker and Marco had lived underground their whole lives. All three of them were drinking in the moonlight and the crisp wintery air.
I followed them up, saying quietly, “We should go back now. We know this comes out to the surface, we accomplished our mission.”
“Are you kidding?” Marco grinned at me. “This is my first jaunt Above since I ended up on the run from Prometheus’s goons. I’m staying put for a while.”
“We do need to figure out where we are in relation to the farms, the occupied houses,” Parker added, more sensibly. “When we send raiding parties up here they’re going to need to know exactly where to go to cut down on the potential for incidents.”