The inlet leading to the Sanatorium sewers is on the cliff side of the City. It isn’t that hard to slip past the guards, because they’re all concentrated in front of the City’s main gates, the few Seconds who notice us just nodding as we walk toward the thin path that curves around the back side of the mountain.
My stomach churns as I size up the single, icy board running out to the sewer outlet, a simple hole in the side of the cliff. There’s a chain bolted to the cliff wall above the board to aid the unfortunate Third who was required to unblock the sewer pipe. From here, the wind pushes up on my arms and face as if I’m a bird getting ready to take off over the terraced rice paddies, each strip of water reflecting the blue sky like a mirror from hundreds of feet down. Beyond that, mountains pop up from the ground, laden with robes of green as far as I can see. The City wall zigzags far above my head, gray stone following the lines of the mountain in a disorganized-looking sprawl, a square-shaped turret almost directly over us.
I swallow the dizzying height down, curling my fingers around the chain. I don’t have time to be scared. I don’t even have time to look down. Failure to get in means Tai-ge will die.
June grabs my hands before I can take a step, shaking her head. I try to smile to reassure her, but my face has forgotten how. “Don’t wait for me. A war is about to start.”
Her eyes don’t waver, a faint blush staining her cheeks as she pulls again. “Don’t leave me.” The first words between us in days. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Taking care of me when, only a few weeks ago, I thought I was taking care of her. I couldn’t save Aya, and now my new little sister is trying to save me. I don’t have the heart to tell her that there is no such thing as safe. Not Outside or In. But I nod. “Come. But this could be as messy as a gore’s dinner party.”
Inch by inch, June right behind me, we make our way to the outlet, a coating of brownish slime staining the rock underneath the opening. My heart sinks when we get close enough to see the ice-plastered grate covering the sewer, bars set so closely together I can’t even get my arm through. But, on the far side, two of them are cut.
I bite my lip. Does that mean Menghu are already here? Is Helix already inside, waiting for the right moment to open the City’s main gates?
Even with the cut bars, squeezing through leaves my ribs feeling bent. Dirty water pools around me, soaking my pants to the knees, the stench of rotting garbage curling in my nose. But the filth down here doesn’t scare me so much as what must be waiting for us up in the Sanatorium.
Parhat’s wild eyes; Mei’s bared teeth. My sister with her ax. The Sanatorium is full of men and women who are infected. I’ve had nightmares about ending up in the Sanatorium since the moment they set the first stone, since the first instance of infection trumping Mantis.
I don’t have to worry about Mantis not working for me anymore. I just have to get through the Sanatorium without being eaten. I remind myself that the infected aren’t monsters, they’re victims, and if I want to save my friends from the true monsters of this world—the City and the Menghu alike—I have to push forward.
My quicklight breaks, catching the slow ripples of water around me in an eerie glow. The water trough narrows as we walk along, cement walls closing in around us as the roar of rushing water down the channel finds my ears. There should be a cement wall, about fifty feet high, with sewage rushing over the side up ahead—the City’s insurance that Outsiders won’t sneak in this way, and City dwellers won’t use it to sneak out.
By the time we get to the wall, the sound of rushing water fills me up, echoing off the cold cement until it feels like the dirty water is inside of me, all around me, that there’s no reason I should still be able to breathe. Water careens over the side from above, leaving only a foot-wide section of cement clear of falling water. I slip on my gloves and pull out the rope and the two sets of metal disks that Sole stole for me when I ran from Howl. Part of the plan that wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t raided Zhuanjia storerooms for me, getting the materials Howl was supposed to bring when we escaped. Two attach to my boots, one strapped to each hand. The disks are magnetic, bonding with the iron reinforcement through the cement, sticking like glue with every move upward. I skate up the wall, concentrating on the dark above me to avoid thinking about what will happen if I fall, if I move too far to the side and the roaring water grabs me from my delicate perch to go crashing into the sewage channel.
Howl’s voice whispers in my mind, The sewers will take us straight up into the Sanatorium. There are no connections to the old City underground, but they will get us past the walls. My shoulders hunch up around my ears, and I stop for a moment to shake his warm touch from my head. I need to concentrate. It only takes a few more lung-wrenching minutes to pull myself up over the top, and I give myself a second to choke down breaths of sewage-infused air before turning the magnets off in the disks and carefully dropping them back down for June. The red of my quicklight flickers over her spider-like crawl up toward me, much faster and more sure of herself than I was.
After June scales the wall, we continue down the narrow walkway next to the channel until the next screaming fall of water. This one, however, has a ladder ascending into the darkness above us, the rungs slippery with muck. As I climb, my quicklight begins to wane, so I break another at the top to reveal a cavernous cement room, the water coming from a break in the wall across from us but confined to its channel running the length of the space. Ladders crawl up the blank faces of the room, and drains dot the floor every few yards, the cement shiny and damp.
We climb the ladder on the far wall, coming to a high-ceilinged hallway. The area is still unlit and unrelieved cement, but there are doors cut into the deep gray walls every ten feet. The first door I come to has three hand-size windows across the top. My footsteps draw a scuffling sound from inside, and reflective retinas peer out at me from the cell. “I’m not gone yet,” a voice scratches out, wobbling like an unbalanced top. “Not yet.”
The voice repeats itself over and over, rising into a scream that follows me all the way down the hall, past door after door of other frightened eyes blinking after my quicklight.
Flickering light ahead means people. Firsts?
June drags me into the inky blur of an alcove, grabbing my quicklight and stuffing it under her heavy leather jerkin. The deep murmur of voices penetrates my hood.
“. . . entire floor locked down. At least until the Watch comes back from Outside. They’ve spent the last two weeks pasted to the City gates like graffiti. Our security here cannot be set back in priority. One exposure . . .”
A voice interrupts, rasping through the mesh of a gas mask. “We understand the importance of what you are doing, but the Watch is spread thin at the moment. We’ve lost three farms already. My soldiers . . .”
The first man cuts back in, “This ridiculous experiment is ravaging the Wood Rats as we speak. We have no way to stop it! We can’t set foot Outside without risking exposure! We can’t even tell who is infected because the Sleep stage can’t be regulated anymore. A single night’s rest could be the first stages, or even less, and we have no way of knowing who is infected and who isn’t. Dr. Yang couldn’t have known. . . .”