We step into the darkness, and a flame illuminates the void. The man is holding a gold object between his fingers. A small flame rises up from the wick inside it. “Never seen one of these before, have you?”
I shake my head and take a step back. No one produces fire intentionally in Burn 3. The risk of starting a fire is too great when there is so little water to extinguish one.
I picture the flame catching his skin again and wonder if that’s how he got the burn on his hand.
“It’s called a lighter. You fill this part with oil.” He taps on the bottom half of the rectangular object. “Then you turn this dial and it strikes the flint.”
I nod as if I understand, and he seems satisfied.
We move deeper into the sewage tunnel, the device he calls a lighter illuminating barely a few feet in front of us. “Kids started disappearing down here first. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
I remember the photos from his walls. Were they missing children from the Abyss?
“The vid screens don’t broadcast news outside of Burn 3.”
He shakes his head at my ignorance. “We aren’t outside of Burn 3.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
He waves me off. “Forget it. Children who live aboveground with hair the color of the sun will always be more valuable than ours.”
“But the boy in the picture on your wall had blond hair.”
His body tenses and I realize I’ve made a mistake mentioning it. “Don’t worry about the kids down here. Your sister’s the one you care about.”
Heat creeps up my neck, and shame settles in the pit of my empty stomach. The Abyss—the underground sewers I’m walking through—were the only safe place to live for years. Now people don’t venture down here unless they want to buy something on the black market. He’s right. No one cares if kids in the Abyss go missing.
Yet I expect this stranger to care about my sister. A little blond girl from a world that treats the people in his like rats. “I just meant—”
He cuts me off again. “I know what you meant. Now shut up. We’re getting closer.”
Closer to what?
The cement cylinder stretches out in front of us, murky water splashing under our boots. The stench of mold turns to something more nauseating, one even worse than flesh burning.
I try not to gag. “What is that?”
“The smell of bodies rotting.”
“Where is it coming from?” I whisper.
He nods into the darkness. “The old labs where the scientists worked before they built the Dome. The place where they figured out how people could walk in the sun again.” His tone is sarcastic. We both know no one can walk in the sun. Everyone in Burn 3 is hiding, above and belowground. “The labs are abandoned now. At least, they’re supposed to be.”
The hair rises on the back of my neck. “Who’s in there?”
He stops, the edges of his coat floating in the ankle-deep water. “You really don’t know what they’re doing down here, do you?” His expression is a twisted mixture of terror and wonder, as if he can’t fathom the idea.
I shake my head, afraid to answer.
“They’re stealing kids so they can sell them for parts.”
I couldn’t have heard him right. I want to run and pretend this guy inhaled too much burning plastic—that everything he’s told me is the delusion of a rotted mind. Anything to avoid asking the next question I know I have to ask. “What kind of parts?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Why do you think they call them Skinners?”
The ground slides out from under me, and I stagger.
My sister…
He reaches out and grabs my elbow to steady me. “If they have your sister and she looks the way you say, we have to hurry.”
The words turn over in my mind, but I can’t make sense of them. There is only one word caught in the tangled threads of my thoughts.
Skinner.
I push past it, forcing myself to hear what this stranger is saying. “If she looks what way?”
“Light-haired,” he says. “It’s rare. I haven’t seen someone with light hair since—” He stops, his expression defeated. “Rare things are always worth more money to the people doing the selling. And the ones buying.”
He is talking about Sky like she is a bottle of clean water or a book—an object to be bought and sold at one of the stalls in the underground market. He doesn’t know how kind she is—the way she shares her food packets with the poorer children in the domicile, though she never has enough to eat herself. The way she pretends the life we have now is equal to the one we had when my father was alive to protect us. The way she never doubts me, even when I doubt myself.
I look at the man I’m following blindly. “What’s your name?”
Suddenly, I want to know. I am trusting him with my sister’s life, which is worth much more to me than my own.
He strikes the flint on the lighter again, and the flame casts a strange glow over his face. “A name is a way to make a claim. No one can claim me.”
I watch the familiar paranoia creep into his features. He reminds me of my father again. “A name is also the way you claim your friends.”
He turns his back on me and disappears into the darkness. “I don’t need any friends.”
I follow the echo of his footsteps in silence, hoping with each step that we are getting closer to Sky. I try to ignore the grim reality—that if I find her and this man is telling the truth, she won’t be alone.
I need to know more about the Skinners—these monsters kidnapping children to sell their skin. For what? I didn’t even know.
“What—” I almost can’t ask. “What are they doing with their skin?”
He grabs my arm and pulls me against the wall. There are voices in the distance, but they’re too far away to make out anything intelligible. “Shh. The tunnels echo.”
My heart bangs against my ribs, and I try not to make a sound while he stares down the black hole.
He pushes his long, greasy hair out of his face. “They sell the good skin for grafts.”
“Grafts?” I’ve never heard the word before.
He rubs his good eye, and I notice how thin his arm is under the long coat. I wonder when he ate last. My father forgot to eat sometimes. He said he lost his sense of taste and smell after the Evacuation, and everything tasted like cardboard—whatever that was.
“You can replace burned skin with new skin. At least a doctor can. They call it a skin graft. Works better than those expensive salves,” he says. “And people say it looks almost as good as the skin you were born with.”
It sounds barbaric and painful. “Who would do something like that?”
He laughs, the sound laced with bitterness. “Wealthy people who don’t want to look like they’ve been burned like the rest of us.”
“They’re willing to kill kids to get rid of their burns?” The Skinners aren’t the only monsters.
“Maybe they don’t ask questions about where it comes from. Or maybe they do. People are capable of all kinds of evil.” He peers down the tunnel again.
“Why doesn’t someone stop them?” I realize how accusatory it sounds, but I don’t care.
“The Skinners run things down in the Abyss. People that question them end up dead—along with their friends, their families, in some cases whole tunnels full of their neighbors. There’s no Protectorate down here. The Skinners are the law. No one can touch them.”
I can see the shame hiding in his eyes.
He swallows hard. “Time to go.”
We follow the muffled sounds until we reach the mouth of the tunnel. The passage in front of us looks more like a cavern than a sewage tunnel. A gray metal building stands a few yards away, artificial light illuminating the barred windows. This place looks more like a prison than a laboratory.