We veered off at an intersection, both silent, feeling our bellies exposed as we crawled as fast as we could because the air duct still ran above the corridor. One well-timed swipe from below and the ceiling would cave in and our entrails pour out in a cascade of blood.
We were both like blind, dumb things burrowing in a panic so absolute that it came down like a dark, deep wall and became something like a great calm. Our packs were abandoned down below. Our minds were down below, being feasted on by the bears. Only our bodies had escaped, kept churning through the tunnel of the air duct reflexively, must soon come to a halt but kept going anyway. Our only urge was to get away, to get away, to get away, and we pushed forward heedless of harm, bruising our shins, scraping off the skin on our knees, because our devotion to escape from the place we had spent so much time defending was so mindless and absolute that nothing else mattered, nothing else registered.
At first I was in front of Wick, kicking him in the face without meaning to, and then he was in front and I was eating his kicks and yet there was no pain, not then. That came later, along with the lingering ache across our bodies, as if we’d been fish thrashing in a net, half in and half out of the water, unable to drown and unable to live.
Finally, though, the hot, raw pain of my bloody palm against the grit of a shallow mound of gravel and jagged pebbles brought me back out of my animal self.
“Wick! Stop!” I hissed, but Wick didn’t hear me. “Wick!” But still he didn’t hear me.
I caught Wick’s foot, grappled with him, pulled him back into myself, pinned down his arms in that space and felt a shudder run through his body and with it a kind of resignation or surrender, and he went limp.
“Just listen,” I said in his ear.
We listened. We could hear the bears in the distance, delivered to us via the acoustics of the air duct as a kind of tinny droning roar. A dim thick digging sound also sounded far away.
“Where are we?” Wick asked.
“I have no idea.” If he didn’t know, I definitely didn’t know.
All I could see was air duct five feet ahead and air duct five feet behind.
“They destroyed it all. They’re destroying it all,” Wick whispered, thrust into a pain I knew wasn’t all physical.
The attack had sprung all our traps, destroyed our biotech, had come from so many points of the compass at once that the snapping of those lines, the ease of it, traumatized us almost more than the physicality of the invasion. An intricate map, burned, with no copy. It made it hard to think. It made it hard to breathe. We could not even frame the questions that would come hurtling toward us later, like why and how.
And we were still in danger, we both knew that.
“How do we get out? They’ll be watching all the exits.”
“There’s one way they might not know about. It leads out to the south.”
“What?” Wick looked at me as if I had said something in gibberish.
I smiled. He wasn’t the only one with secrets. “I had Borne make a tunnel through the old apartments when we were punching holes in the walls looking for extra supplies.”
A flicker of hope in Wick’s eyes, then a wince.
“But if Borne knows, they know.”
“Borne didn’t betray us,” I said. “The Magician or someone else, but not Borne.”
Wick wanted to protest that assumption, but another objection had occurred to him.
“But to the south?”
That was a problem. For more than a month we hadn’t used the southern exits. The shifting lines of the conflict between the Magician and Mord meant the south was Mord country. To exit south meant we would be behind enemy lines and have to find our way back north to some more neutral territory, or even one in flux. Which meant encountering more Mord proxies.
“What choice do we have, Wick? We have no choice.”
“We have no supplies,” Wick pointed out. “We could try to circle back, slip into my laboratory, grab a few things.”
“They’ll kill us. They’re not leaving. We’re dead if we don’t get out.”
The bear sounds had only come closer as we talked, and proliferated, as if every room, every pocket of air, were in the process of being occupied by the proxies.
Wick, adjusting: “There’s a safe place to the south. A hidden cistern. A little room next to a well.”
“Then that’s where we’ll head,” I said. “We have no choice.”
It sounded like a last stand, but so be it. Soon we would know for sure if Borne had betrayed us. I thought of the twelve-year-old girl. I thought of the biotech burning blissful in the flames.
I kissed Wick on the mouth, pinned him with my gaze. “We’re alive. We’re still alive.”
I didn’t know how to interpret the guarded look on Wick’s face. I didn’t realize that leaving the Balcony Cliffs might be a death sentence for him.
*
The way was clear. We managed to find the entrance to my secret exit without being seen, even as the sounds of pillage, the roars, and the “Drrk! Drrk!” echoed too loud for fear to leave us. But I didn’t want to lose that fear.
Saving our lives became about passing through a series of large holes Borne had punched in the walls of the homes of those long dead. The holes were big enough for a hunched-over person to crab-walk through, or to crawl through on all fours. Many were consecutive, so you could look down through a row of irregular holes in rooms and have time to wonder what waited in ambush. Others I’d hidden, to confuse any intruder. So sometimes we had to move a table or broken-down dresser out of the way first. To find the mousehole to the next place, which might double back or surge forward only to double back. A convoluted path because I had determined to only use areas of the Balcony Cliffs that were not part of Wick’s diagram.
The consecutive holes—their gaping emptiness, the frisson of unease—meant a commitment to scuttling through, putting our heads into a number of ragged guillotines and submitting to whatever evil might want to take us.
But the other rooms made us stop and realize what we were losing, what we were leaving, all under the weight of so much personal history, the remnants of so many old, dead lives. I had been in these rooms—despite their number, I still remembered what they held that I hadn’t scavenged. I was prepared to some extent. But it took a greater toll on Wick, to keep appearing in these rooms, to have to remain there, unable to escape other people’s memories as we patiently prepared our escape to the next room, and the next and the next.
We were caked in dust and grime. Our hands blistered. Our joints sore, knees ever more scraped.
*