He enters another combination, his fingers steady even though the tension shows in his shoulders, and the light stays red.
“Davis.”
“I know.” He scrolls through his phone again. “There’s one more. Old maintenance code from 2019 that IT was supposed to deactivate.”
He enters it, and each beep sounds impossibly loud in the concrete stairwell. The light stays red long enough for me to start calculating alternative routes. We could go back up and try to slip through another hallway. But then the light turns green, and the door clicks open.
“Thank fuck,” I mutter as we step into the service tunnel.
The door behind us seals with a heavythunk.
The darkness is broken by the red glow of the emergency lights hanging every twenty meters. The tunnel stretches ahead with pipes running along the ceiling. Water pools in the low spots. The air smells like mold and rust, and the humidity seeps through my shirt and clings to my skin.
“Four hundred meters,” Davis says. “Keep up.”
We move fast, and he keeps glancing behind us, like he’s expecting the door to burst open.
At the next junction, we take another tunnel. Voices drift toward us, faint, but they’re getting closer.
“It’s the maintenance crew,” he mutters. “They shouldn’t be down here tonight.”
Flashlight beams start to bounce off the walls ahead of us.
He points. “That way loops to the same exit but adds two hundred meters.”
The voices get louder as two men complain about a water main and a weekend shift.
“Hide,” I say.
We duck into the side tunnel and press ourselves against the concrete as the maintenance crew passes us. Their voices become murmurs and then silence.
Davis checks his watch. “We need to move faster.”
The side tunnel is darker, with puddles so deep that they soak through my shoes. There are places I have to duck, but I still don’t miss the cobwebs that brush against my face. Something scurries ahead, and a metallic taste coats my tongue from the stale recycled air.
After what feels like an eternity, the tunnel ends at a ladder leading up to a metal hatch. Davis climbs first and pushes it open, and cool night air floods down, along with the smell of grass and fertilizer. I follow him up and out, and then we’re standing in a garden shed, filled with rusted tools and bags of soil.
“I can’t believe that worked.”
“Actually, I can’t either,” he says.
Through the grimy window of the shed, the groundskeeper’s cottage sits dark about thirty meters away. Beyond it, the tree line marks the edge of the palace grounds.
“Once we’re in the trees, we’re off palace property,” Davis says. “Two kilometers through the woods, there’s an access road, where a car is waiting.”
I grin and pat his shoulder. “Damn, I’m so glad we met.”
He shakes his head. “If this were a different century, I’d get beheaded for this shit.”
“True,” I tell him as we slip out of the shed and into the night.
The warm, salty air fills my lungs. We sprint across the open grass toward the trees. Each step we take forward only exposes us more.
A light clicks on in the cottage, and we freeze, caught in the open with nowhere to hide.
Someone moves past the window inside—a shadow, followed by muffled footsteps—and then a door opens on the far side of the cottage. A man’s voice calls out into the night, and a dog barks in the distance.
“Don’t move,” Davis states.
