A grinding sound pulled her out of her paralyzed thought. Down the corridor, towards the entrance from the street. They were coming.
“Come on, baby. Quiet as you can.”
Cass noted the piles of supplies on the floor, hastily scraped them into a backpack. Wren remained motionless, unblinking. Staring into nothingness. Or seeing something beyond sight.
Cass slung the backpack over her shoulders, took Wren’s hand, and gently pulled him towards the back corner of the supply room. She searched the wall, found the signpost cracks, felt for the pressure plates. The instant before she pressed into them, Wren’s hand tightened on hers, unnaturally strong, painful. She flinched, but his eyes stopped her dead.
Terror.
“Not that way, Mama.”
He was with her now. Frightened, but lucid. She nodded, understanding. They were coming from both sides. Cass bent down, nose to nose with her son. Whispering.
“The other way, the secret you found. Can you open it again?”
“I’m not sure… I… I don’t think so.”
“Let’s just try.”
Cass swung Wren up in her arms. He felt so much heavier than she remembered. Her legs trembled at the extra weight. A few steps outside the supply room, she placed him on his own feet. The grinding continued, faint but relentless.
“Go ahead, baby. Just see what you can do.”
Wren nodded, uncertain, shoulders sagging with a lack of confidence. He closed his eyes, stretched out a hand, touched the wall.
The grinding continued. Cass thought she caught the trace of a deep rumbling voice floating from the supply room, muffled through the concrete.
Wren raised his head, opened his eyes. Crying.
“I’m sorry, Mama, I can’t.”
“Yes you can, sweetheart, you’ve done this same thing a hundred times. You can do it.”
“No, it’s different. They’re always different, Mama.”
“Try again, Wren. Just try.”
Wren lowered his head, stared at his feet. Defeated. He shook his head. He was just a child, Cass thought. A child with a gift he didn’t understand, frustrated by his own incapability to control it. What more could she ask of him?
“Just try, baby, OK? For me?”
“I can’t,” he murmured. “I can’t feel this one, I can’t.”
It was the recent near-death experience, perhaps, or maybe the sheer anger at the circumstance, the futility, or the helplessness she felt; whatever the reason, Cass did something she had never done in her entire life.
She slapped her son.
Wren’s little face snapped to one side, and in an instant he looked back to her, wild-eyed, shocked, bewildered, tears at the verge. His cheek flushed hot purple. Cass’s heart shattered at the raw pain in her precious child’s eyes. But she couldn’t stop. Their lives were at stake.
“They are here, Wren. Asher is here. And he is going to take us away, and separate us. And we will never be together again, not ever. Not unless you open this door and get us out of here. So you find a way, and you make it happen. Right. Now.”
She snatched his arm and whipped him to face the wall. It was a dangerous game, and for long seconds Cass thought she had played it wrong. Wren just stood there, chin trembling, hand on his cheek, not daring to look at his mother, but not daring to let her out of his peripheral vision either.
Then, the grinding sound stopped. And Wren set his jaw. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, and slammed his palm against the wall. Brow furrowed in intense focus, lip curled in the slightest hint of a snarl. He looked very much like his mother.
Finally, his face softened, the timid boy returned, and he let his hand fall from the wall. Down the corridor, there was a hiss; the magnetic seal unlocking.
“Sorry, Mama.”
Cass ran her fingers through his hair, kissed the top of his head.
“It’s OK, baby.”
A thunk from the supply room signaled the activation of the stairs. Back there, in the darkness, the floor panel was sliding open. And without any sound at all, a small hole appeared in the wall where Cass and Wren stood.
A half-moment of shock was all Cass could spare before she grabbed Wren by the arm and shoved him inside. She bent double and followed him in, shuffling sideways as quickly as she could with one eye on the opening.
“It’s OK, Mama,” Wren said. “I see it now.”
He sounded much older. And with that, the opening disappeared, and the two of them were plunged into complete darkness.
After a neck-breaking crawl down a pitch-black tunnel, and several painful collisions with abrupt turns in the walls, Cass and Wren finally found themselves at a gentle upward slope, where the ceiling suddenly gave way in a matching curve. Cass stood at full height, and managed to scramble higher onto the smooth metal surface. The top was covered by a smooth steel mesh, more like a drain than a grate, and with one solid push outward, Cass was disheartened to discover that’s exactly what it was. An exit convincingly concealed in some sort of waste recycling reservoir.
It appeared that the levels never actually rose high enough to enter the pipe, but that was small comfort. There was no obvious route from this exit to the next, except through the filth and refuse. Cass swung her backpack around to the front, and had Wren climb up on her back. Then the two set out, scrambling out of their secret tunnel and into a pool of stinking sludge, thigh-deep for Cass. She struggled her way to the nearest edge, where it was shallowest. Following the curving concrete around the outside, they eventually came to a small iron hatch: a maintenance access.
“Once we get outside,” Cass whispered to Wren. “We’ll have to be very, very careful.”
Wren just nodded.
Cass grabbed hold of the access release, and slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, applied strength to it. She could feel the flexing metal, feel the parts that had been unused for untold years reawakening. Her great fear was that the hatch would spring open with some horrible shriek, instantly alerting anyone who might be outside. As she felt the hatch release and begin its automatic opening, she realized she had no idea whether it was day or night.
Her first look at the outside world in six days turned out to be dark. Wren constricted around her neck, and she heard him hiss involuntarily. But a closer look revealed that their limited view was just in heavy shadow. Cass poked her head through the hatch timidly, and saw the bright gray horizon to the east that signaled a new dawn fast approaching. For once, things were going her way. Light enough for the Weir not to be about. Dark enough to conceal their escape.
Cass swung Wren off her shoulders, and lifted him through the hatch to the ground outside. She quickly followed, and readjusted the backpack once she had joined him. As quietly as she was able, she closed the hatch. It thunked dully when it sealed.
“OK, baby,” she said, taking Wren’s hand firmly. “Stay right with me, no matter what.”
Wren just nodded. He knew what they were up against.
Together, the pair slipped cautiously from the concrete recycler to a nearby building. Its bottom floor had been gutted by vandals, or fire, or both, but there was ample concealment there. Though everything in Cass’s body told her to run, she forced a creeping pace, using every ounce of her will to search out danger. She was especially glad to have Wren now, knowing he would warn her before her own eyes could.
Ten minutes stretched to twenty, then thirty. Still they picked their way from building to building, alley to alley. Spending no more than a fleeting moment in the open, no less than a few minutes observing from each new position.