Sometimes it was incredibly hard.
My foot hit the bottom of the stairs as I passed outside the sphere of the last of the overhead lights. Darkness fell, surprisingly profound, especially considering how close I was to the stairway. Glancing upward, I could see the naked bulbs glittering like beckoning stars, offering an escape from the certain death that waited up ahead. That, too, was hidebehind work. They were good at all sorts of illusion, from visual to emotional, and they never missed a trick.
“Now where?”
“Walk forward, Priestess, and do not be afraid; the wall will not harm you.”
Being afraid of a wall was only common sense, considering I was walking blindly into the dark. The mice were good about not steering us wrong. I took a deep breath and kept going, taking three long steps into the black—
—and into the light. One second I was in the dark underground hall, and the next I was in another, much brighter hall. The overhead lights were equipped with small button shades that distributed their illumination smoothly over the entire area, putting the mold-speckled walls and linoleum floor on full display. It was clear no one had done any cleaning down here in quite some time.
It was equally clear that people had lived here, once. The linoleum was the sort usually installed in low-rent apartment buildings and public kitchens, places where mud might be tracked in from the outside, where children played and messes were made. It didn’t look industrial or cold. It looked like the front hall of a community center, one that had been inexplicably abandoned by its residents.
Or maybe not so inexplicably. The entry was hidebehind construction, and the hidebehinds had been a part of the original community. They must have left with the rest, either because they no longer felt safe, or because they couldn’t bring in the supplies they needed without passing through the human-controlled parts of the building. I looked up, following the exposed wiring between the lampshades. It vanished into the corner of the hall. I was willing to bet that this hallway, and any others like it, had been illicitly wired into the city power grid, providing a low drain so constant that no one had ever noticed it.
“This is where you left the other group, right?” I asked.
“Yes, Priestess,” squeaked the mouse. “They were to continue searching the rooms until their shift passed, or one came seeking them.”
“Okay, that’s good. That means we’re not totally alone down here.” I started walking forward. Either the hidebehinds hadn’t made any effort to conceal the doors on the other side of their clever gate, or there were more rooms down here than made sense, strictly speaking. It seemed like I passed a room every five or six feet. Most of the doors were closed, but the space between them and the floor was enough for a determined Aeslin mouse to squeeze through.
“Shall I call them for you, Priestess?”
“Yes, why don’t you d—” I stopped mid-word. “Wait.”
There were footsteps coming down the hall, sharp and quick and unmistakably bipedal. They were coming toward us from around a corner up ahead.
The hall was effectively featureless, leaving me nowhere to hide except the obvious. I whirled and tried the knob of the nearest door. Locked. I tiptoed as quickly as I could back down the hall, my heart hammering against my ribs. I wasn’t unarmed—I hadn’t voluntarily gone anywhere without a weapon since my eleventh birthday party—but if this came down to a fight, I couldn’t be sure that I was going to win. I didn’t know what was coming down that hall, and my parents didn’t raise me to charge in blind when there was any other option.
The second knob turned under my hand. I pushed the door open, not letting go of the knob, since I didn’t want it to bang against the wall, and ducked inside. The room was dark, but that didn’t matter as much as getting out of the hall.
Easing the door most of the way closed, I braced myself against it, ear to the wood, and listened.
The footsteps got louder. A female voice, muffled by the semi-closed door and distorted by the hallway, said, “I thought we’d be done by now.”
I couldn’t recognize the speaker, not with the way the environment was working against me, but I could pick up on her tone. She was pissed.
“I told you, this isn’t an exact science.” The second voice belonged to a man. Apart from that, I couldn’t say. “Sometimes it takes four, sometimes it takes fourteen. There’s a reason we brought back the last five seasons.”
“Yeah, ratings, and that arrogant bitch insisting we had to stick to the Top Twenty format even when we weren’t having auditions. Why does she have so much pull with the network?”