Skills belong to the spirit or semblance, not the body they occupy.
—Florence Marryat,
Spirit and Matter: The Logic of Colocation
The darknessof the stairs into the Strata folded its silky touch around me. I dug my Zippo out and flicked it alight. The walls were lined with puke-green tile, the grout brown with mold. The air hung thick and humid like a pool locker room. Carefully, we descended the concrete steps as they wound laterally and down. Soon, the black turned to grey, and the grey to hazy white.
My head began to feel as if someone had taken a bat to my skull. My vision blurred and memory returned . . .
. . . I stare at my brother Dan lying in his casket. I could reach out and touch him, but I know he’s not really here. Not the alive part. A rival gang had killed him. But I need to talk to him. He was the only one who would listen to me . . .In my shadow, from the large occlusion—the dark, lake-like scar—another wound snaked away like a tributary river. Just now, it was
glowing bright amber and felt raw as an exposed nerve.
I snapped my hair ties. No help.
I hummed a finished line from my song, but it was more aspirins for migraines. A moment later, our footsteps rang against a steel spiral staircase.
I clutched the iron stair railing to steady myself. “Are you all right?” Cassius asked.
I wasn’t, but we needed to hurry. “They have to be close.”
We got moving and soon entered the Modern Stratum inside an octagon at the center of a sewage pumping station. London had built these elaborate utilities in the nineteenth century to deal with the immense sewage problem known as the Great Stink. Topside, they were defunct. I’d visited a few of them on a tour sponsored by the British Library.
Around the octagon, several bright sconce lamps shone, lighting up intricate ironwork, brickwork, panels, and columns in red, green, ivory, and gold. The colors seemed more vibrant than they were in the world above, as if the vestigial memories creating the place lent it some romance. The stench was gone, leaving a cathedral of detailed Romanesque architecture that stretched up and out in radiant glory.
Unlike the world above, the four hallways that led away from the octagon each flowed with a small canal—two in and two out—running beneath the floor of the octagon itself. Cobbled walkways lined the canals, which stretched beyond the octagon into a station the size of a school gymnasium before disappearing into brick culverts. The water smelled surprisingly fresh, nothing like sewage.
Wrought into the ironwork that fronted the four walled sides of the octagon was the Shiguan mark.
Cassius scanned the octagon. “I do not see them.”
We started down one of the four short hallways away from the octagonal platform. Before we reached the end, Cassius stopped short, and I almost walked into him.
He turned, placing a hand on my chest. “It might be best if you let me go on alone. I can search the rest of the station without you.”
“What don’t you want me to see?”
“Even for me, it is an unholy sight.” Cassius lowered his hand. “I do not think you are ready?—”
“We’re wasting time.” I pushed past him.
Set into the floors of the broader station were hundreds of tiled rectangular tubs. The canals of river water fed the system of pools through dozens of small tributary channels. And in nearly every pool lay a submerged body.
I could hardly breathe. “Holy . . .”
Beyond the watery graveyard, enormous pumping engines hulked in the gloom, their pistons rising and falling in slow mechanical rhythm, pushing the water across the bodies.
“Suffer the gods,” muttered Cassius.
I finally caught my breath. “Why would anybody be storing so many bodies?” But I had a guess. When you go to war, you need an army.
Cassius bowed his head as if in prayer and said nothing.
I bent over, hands on my knees, to steady myself and take a few deep breaths. “Didn’t plan on looking for a body in a watery graveyard today.”
I lit my Zippo again, and we spread out on opposite sides of the canal. We wove past dozens of pools, stepping carefully over ice that had formed at their edges. Following a small tributary channel, I looked into one pale face after another. A few were familiar—Leinad Ke, founder of Banner music streaming; Morris Williams, London’s ranking ministerfor creative industries, media, and arts. There were others, too. Then, in the third row of pools, I found Angela DuFresne.
Feeling sucker punched, I knelt down, needing to catch my breath but also wanting to say something to her. In the flickering light of my Zippo I saw the puffy white scars on her forearms. She’d survived her own demons only to wind up here.
