'When I saw you I hated you a little,' Marisol said. 'It's not fair that Dekalb gets to have such a healthy and beautiful daughter. My little boy is what we used to call sickly.' She grunted a little in pain, but not the physical kind. 'He's got genetic problems, a heart murmur, the early signs of scoliosis and maybe even Lupus. Do you know about those? We can barely diagnose them'there's no treatment at all, not anymore.'
'Is he going to be okay?' Sarah asked, scared for the kid. Most sickly children in Africa died in their first couple of years.
'I won't let him slip away from me, not when he's all I have left of... of some old friends.' Marisol grew quiet then, very quiet. She lead Sarah along the edge of the water, along a concrete parapet lined with a steel railing that had fallen away in places. When she saw where they were headed Sarah felt her heart speeding up.
Marisol had lead her along a narrow causeway to the octagonal ventilation tower at the northern tip of the island. It rose over them in the dark like a giant robot out of science fiction, a clattering, enormous construction of fans that turned endlessly and vents that flicked open and shut in a pattern of willful randomness. A skeletal crown of exposed girders topped it, the stars showing through rusted gaps in the metal.
They threaded a simple maze of empty cargo containers and came to a set of three metal stairs leading to the tower's doorway. 'This place was nothing special, back in the day,' Marisol told Sarah. 'It's just a vent, a pipe stuck in the ground to provide air for the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel.'
'There's a tunnel under the bay?' Sarah asked. As usual the marvels of twentieth-century engineering fascinated her, even if her elders found them trivial and commonplace. 'How did they build it without all the water getting in?'
Marisol shook her head. She didn't know, or didn't care to answer. She took an enormous keyring from her belt and unlocked the tower's door. Then she stepped aside. Clearly Sarah was supposed to go in alone.
A little light illuminated the tower's guts, a wan little electric light that came from hundreds of weak bulbs, some mounted in cages on the walls, some dangling on wires draped across the vast open space. Sarah found herself on a gallery, a narrow enclosed walkway that ran around the edge of an open pit. She looked down and saw that the vast majority of the tower was just an empty shaft, an air shaft with one enormous fan at its bottom. Its vanes rotated with geological slowness but still it generated a vast wind that rushed up into her face and pushed the hood of her sweatshirt back. She imagined a generator must be hooked up to that fan to power all the lights.
The place was a miracle, in that it was still running. Yet discovering that hardly seemed worth all the suspense Marisol had created. What next? When Sarah finished staring into the blackness below the great fan she had no idea what to do. Was she supposed to climb down into the shaft, or ascend one of the tower's ladders towards the catwalks high above? She turned to look back at the doorway and found a mummy standing directly in front of her.
She screamed, of course, but cut it short. This one was far older than Ptolemy, yellow with antiquity and largely unadorned. His tattered wrappings hung on him like the flag of a forgotten nation. Obviously he was there to guide her. He started moving as soon as she quieted down, heading away from her at a brisk pace. She kept an eye on his dark energy'much easier to follow him that way in the dimness. It was like a perfect sphere of darkness, buzzing and complete. He didn't hunger the way ghouls did but he lacked the busy mind of a lich. Funny. She had never bothered to study Ptolemy's energy like that. She wondered what she would find if she did.