I look up into the tiles overhead where people are walking above us fretting or laughing. All completely unaware we are down here standing in a city beneath the city where anything could be hiding.
“I love it down here,” Cadence whispers, eyes fixated on the soft, colored light above us. “It’s so quiet and dark. Sometimes, when Arla lets me, I stand here for hours and watch the people walk overhead.” She looks down at me suddenly. “It’s haunted as fuck, by the way. So watch yourself.”
Arla holds her lantern higher. “Some say by more than just ghosts.”
My eyes travel up to the tiles again, a quilt of lilac daylight, the collision of old world and modern day, the liminal edge where history meets the future. What misfortunes happened here? What cataclysms were birthed in places like this where one world ends and another begins? It reminds me of the cliffs at Solidago, the threshold of earth and sky and sea. The intersection of past, present, and future. I shiver involuntarily.
“Why are you showing me this?” I ask. It’s a cool slice of Seattle’s history, but why come down here at all? Arla, I know without being told, never does anything without good reason. If she brought me here, it’s on purpose.
When I look back down, her smile widens, the lantern light reflecting off the whites of her teeth and eyes. The others are gone, tiptoed away into the darkness.
“Why not?” she asks me in return. “Did I ever tell you about Twig’s gift, by the way? About the special power she had when she came to me?”
I nod slowly, anxiety building. “You called her a night bearer, said something about shadows, but you didn’t explain what her power was.”
“I bet you can guess,” she says with a smile. And with that, her lantern winks out, plunging us both into the pall of the underground.
I reach for her, but my hand meets only the damp, chill breath of the corridor.
For a moment, I am a sixteen-year-old girl again, standing at one end of a long hallway, seeing what waits for me at the other end in my grandfather’s greedy eyes before the light is ripped from the bulbs.
Suddenly, I understand. She is gone; they all are. It’s another test—I am left beneath the city, standing alone in Seattle’s lost purple haze, with no way out.
My breath runs thin, coursing down my throat in a trickle. I look up. At least I have this scrap of light to hold on to. This small comfort in a maze of black.
And then I hear a laugh echo back to me from farther down the corridor, rich with irony. I recognize Twig’s elvish pitch, the savage bite of her humor. The sunlight from above blinks out as surely as clicking off a lamp. The streaming purple tiles vanish.
I am devoured, confined in the bowels of the city, a captive of the dark and the Fathom.
14SWALLOW THE STARS
The darkness is suffocating, unnatural. I feel it pressing in, a presence rather than an absence. Inside it, something squirms, touching me everywhere. Did the others feel it too, the consciousness of the void, the vitality in the nothing? It quickens my fear to a fever pitch, every breath drawn more ragged than the last. Even when I knocked out all the power at Solidago as a teenager and plunged the city’s icon into the night last week, I didn’t know darkness like this.
I hear a scuttling sound behind me followed by a clang, an old pipe shifting.
“Who’s there?” I call out, my voice twisted with fright as I spin around blindly.
What else is down here with a heartbeat? Plague rats, according to Arla. Even scarier, the things without a heartbeat. Ghosts of angry civilians, their lives cut off too soon by misfortune, their heads gaping in the darkness as they wait for a fool like me, the enviable living, and hope to steal their breath.
No one answers.
I’m afraid to leave this spot where a connection to the world above—my world,Levi’sworld—existed only a moment ago. Afraid to step into the underground’s fray. Afraid that it will consume me. I didn’t count the steps that brought me here, the timesI had to shift left or right to avoid a hazard, the piles of detritus in the way. I believed Arla when she said I was one of them now. I wonder if Cadence walked this path before me. If Brennan stood here alone, waiting for Arla to return. Is it just another test, or do they intend to keep me down here, to let me become a thing of the past?
Do they want me to disappear?
I recall Cadence’s last words—It’s haunted as fuck, by the way. So watch yourself.Now I understand why she uttered them. She knew this was coming; she was trying to warn me. Or scare me. Or both. It’s becoming increasingly clear how much was said for my benefit this morning. They were planning this all along, probably since before last night.Why?
“Come on, Judeth,” I tell myself. What did Arla say earlier?One step at a time, kitten. That’s how any road is traveled.
A fist squeezes my heart, and adrenaline gushes out over its knuckles, but my limbs are frozen, my legs stuck like two pins in a cushion. And in the disorienting premature night, I’m not sure which way to go. I’ve spun in too many circles to direct myself back toward Medusa’s basement, and I curse the sound I heard moments ago.
With a shuddered breath, I slide one foot forward, more like a dance move than a step, and leave the real world behind. Again and again, I graze the floor as I inch along, arms out, hands groping for purchase, eyes desperate to create form. But in only a few moments I manage to smack into a barrier. My fingers feel along its rough surface, and I don’t recognize the orderly shape and mortar of brick. It must be the side where they filled in the street. Turning behind me, I take a few steps until I meet the opposite wall, the Lego masonry of Pioneer Square greeting me. I inch along this wall until my hands find an opening, a shaft through the brick, not as large as Arla’s gated doorway but big enough to pass through. Maybe it was a window once, a single door. Slipping into it, I hope for the best but am greeted by haphazard stacks of boxes and crates, a jumble of other things I can’t make out. It’s anarduous slog through the densely packed maze, around one abandoned item or another, until I finally reach another wall, which I scoot along until I find myself at another portal, still brick lined but taller than the last.
Moving through into the next space, I veer right when met with a wooden post and a line of crooked shelves, my fingers gliding over their dust-coated levels and the thick curves of old glass bottles. It’s here that I realize I must be inside another building’s basement, connected to the one before by a shared doorway. My progress is achingly slow because I don’t want to hurt myself or break something, to be responsible for damaging someone else’s property. Before long, I find myself at a third wall and pass along it until my hand grips a slick knob. This door is closed, but with some effort it wrenches open. On the other side, I try to stick to the wall, the grit guiding me like braille until I meet a blockade of what feels like old beams and worktables. Forced to go around them, I finally make contact with brick—another wall or the same one?—but am soon pushed off it by a mountain of debris. When I at last catch the wall again, I come quickly to an open door, its knob cold and hard. For a second, I register victory, and then it sinks like silt. I’ve made a circle, the shape of this knob the very same I turned before to come in here.
My heart grows stone heavy, dropping as if kicked off a cliff. This can’t be more than a city block, but that’s still over an acre of square footage. And if I have to sift through the out-of-sight, out-of-mind refuse of the last two hundred years to navigate it, who knows how long I could get lost in circles like the one I just made? Especially in this impossible dark.
Unlike at night, my vision isn’t adjusting to Twig’s little trick in this subterranean space, slowly gripping the edges of my surroundings, even if it can’t be sure of finer details. Everything remains a viscous, satiny black like it is in the deepest part of the ocean, miles beneath the surface where unfathomable creatures live in an alien world. My hearing, however, isn’t compromised, and I recognize the beat of something small, a fluttering hope inthe echoey silence. It draws near, a feathery whisper followed by a deep-chested coo.
