So we could start hunting for someones or somethings we knew nothing about. That didn’t sound like my brightest idea, but Rita clasped her hands together like a kid given a gift, and struck off down the street at a healthy clip. “There are sections of the Underground nobody goes because—”
“They’re haunted?” I guessed when she hesitated, and she nodded with embarrassment. “At this point in my life I can safely say less likely things have happened. All right. I’m game for exploring the haunted Underground if you are. Billy?”
“I’m starting to like the idea that your bad guy is in a high-rise instead of mine about him being down in the—”
“Slums,” Rita supplied when he broke off, and it was his turn to look abashed. Rita, though, shrugged it off. “It’s not like we don’t know we’re on the fringe, Detective. And I’m sorry about your suit. Most of where we live isn’t very clean.”
Billy looked down at himself, dismayed. “Maybe I can write off the drycleaning bill.”
“Maybe I’ll pay for it, in thanks for you trudging around on one of my weird cases.”
“I’d be trudging around on it anyway, if it was in our jurisdiction. I’ll take you up on that anyway.” He followed Rita into an alley where the overwhelming scent of soy sauce and old rice informed us the neighboring building housed a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. My stomach rumbled despite the hint of decay, but I wasn’t quite desperate enough to go Dumpster-diving. Then I wondered if Rita ever had to, and got caught up in a whirlwind of first-world entitlement and guilt that lasted down the length of the alley all the way into a tiny concrete back lot. Boards and fencing made an unfriendly barricade between it and another brick building, but Rita walked up to the fence, twitched aside a section of chain-link laced with green fencing stuff—I didn’t know what it was called—and revealed a hole almost big enough to let a rabbit through. “This way.”
“Are you serious?” It wasn’t even that I objected to crawling into the backsides of buildings. It just didn’t look big enough for anybody to fit in. Rita, however, gave me a sour look and crawled into it backward. I exchanged glances with Billy, shrugged, and followed her.
It was bigger than it looked, chain-links willing to flex and let me through. There was maybe four inches’ clearance between the fence and the building I clambered into. An enterprising kid might find the hole from the building side, but anybody short of a contortionist would have to come the long way around, down the alley and into the back lot, to actually gain entrance to the Underground. It wasn’t bad, as far as secret hideaway doors went. I’d have never noticed it, had Rita not shown me the way.
I backed through a couple feet of wall space before my feet hit dead air. Rita reported, “Ladder,” from below me, and I lay on my stomach to kick my feet and find the rungs. The iron gleamed from years of use, reminding me of how many homeless my city held, before I emerged into an unexpectedly well-kept stretch of Underground.
Amber streetlights shone through glass blocks above my head, making streaky shadows on old brick walls. Pipes ran below the blocks, supporting their own miniature ecosystems of moss and rust, and even with amber lights, I could see that stretches of the brick ceiling were greened-over with algae or moss, too. The air was fresh, though, the occasional broken block letting in a breeze.
Someone—not the City of Seattle, I was pretty sure— had filled a ten-foot stretch of floor with an elaborate tile mosaic of Persephone entering the underworld. Billy and I both hopped across it, trying not to put our feet down, and Rita took a stiff-brushed broom from the shadows and gave the mosaic a few brisk, efficient sweeps once we’d all moved away.
“There are things like this all over the place down here,” she said before I asked. She sounded proprietary and proud, which seemed totally appropriate, and tucked the broom back into its shadowy space while she lectured us. “Artists come down and make them off the tour path. The more fragile ones get destroyed fast, but this and some of the others are really sturdy. The floor’s sunk a little, so it’s cracked, but we try to keep it clean.”
“It’s amazing.” I studied the mural in its soft light a few more seconds, then looked both ways down the bricked-off city tunnel. It plummeted to my left, eventually heading north toward Pike Place Market, which I thought of as the most visible part of the Underground. It wasn’t exactly, but its multiple crooked levels certainly reflected how the city had been rebuilt. I edged that direction.
Rita pointed the other. “There’s a lot more Underground this way. Down there is the tourist area, off the Square.”
“Oh. Sure.” I wrote off trying to be clever and followed the expert. She gave Billy and his suit another apologetic look when she led us through a three-foot-high section of tunnel, but said nothing. We crawled through on hands-and-knees tracks visibly worn into the grime, and came out on the other side with stains I didn’t want to think too deeply about.
“Some people are too itchy about tight spaces to go through there,” Rita reported when we’d gotten back on our feet. “Makes this a good place to sleep and camp out.”
“This” was a stretch of tall walls with distant overhead light grottos, and of broken-into rooms which had once upon a time been storefronts and alleyways. It didn’t smell as good here. In fact, it verged on stinking, but it wasn’t nice to go into someone’s home and comment on the stench, so I kept my mouth shut. Water dripped from an ancient wooden water main, and as Rita led us down the narrow old street, I saw one or two places where somebody had hauled wiring down into the Underground. There might be enough electricity to boil water, and it wasn’t cold, which made the stretch of lost city seem pretty habitable.
Most of the people we slipped past were sleeping, though one group was gathered around a small barrel fire set up beneath broken-out glass cubes twenty feet above them. I’d seen steam rising up from grates and manholes dozens of times. It’d never occurred to me that once in a while that steam might be smoke from a fire keeping people warm thirty feet below me. That revelation made the under-city streets seem just a little more lonesome and dangerous.
The suspicious looks we garnered didn’t alleviate that feeling, either. Rita’s presence kept anybody from getting in our faces, but as we approached the barrel fire, a couple of big guys stood up, bristling with caution. Rita reassured them with conciliatory gestures. “They’re friends. They’re going to help me look for Rick and Gonzo and the others. Can we borrow a couple flashlights?”
Exasperation slid across one of the men’s face, though he dug into his bulky coat and came out with one of the requested lights, then snapped his fingers for somebody else to ante up, too. “Better bring these back. What are you, a goddamned den mother, Rita? Nobody’s missing, they just took off…’sides, how’re they gonna find somebody you can’t? Not like topsiders know the tunnels better than you do.”
Rita gave him a perfectly sunny smile. “Magic.”
The big guy rolled his eyes in an excellent teenage whatever! approximation and went back to the fire. Rita’s comment, though, shook my brain loose enough to hit on the idea of using the Sight, which, aside from making a good lie detector, was also handy for noticing people hidden behind doors and walls.
Just not for noticing people hiding off-property, waiting to do something stupid enough to get shot for.
I dropped my chin to my chest, eyes closed as I worked my way through not berating myself. It didn’t seem to matter, though, that I knew very well I’d shoot Patty Raleigh again, and that I’d made the right real-world choice for saving my partner’s life. But the memories of that bat swinging toward Billy’s head, of my finger squeezing the trigger and of Raleigh collapsing backward in shock, were going to haunt me whether I’d made the right choice or not. I was going to have to live with it, just like I’d had to live with a million other unexpected things over the past fifteen months.