Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (5 page)

“Hmm?” he looks at me as if I just walked in the door. “We” – I use my thumb to point between Sabetha and me – “are going to check on some other contacts.”

“Oh, okay.”  He adjusts his thick rimmed glasses.  “I’ll go look in the records then.”

“Good man.”

Sabetha giggles and Nigel, aloof to her amusement, smiles before heading downstairs.  We show ourselves out.

The rest of our first night involves driving all over Central Gothica and letting an assortment of grungy looking individuals know the finer points.  Some disregard us – they’re young and living in their own horror stories.  Frankly, they don’t give a shit about
me or my problems.  But the ones older than an ilk’s lifespan understand why this is so important.  People don’t mess with sentiners unless provoked, and our laws try to keep us from provoking people.  For someone to attack me, the Captain of Central Gothica, is a case worthy of the network.  We’ll see what they turn up.

“
N
ot a very pretty bunch, are you?” Sabetha notes as we head back home.

Defensively, I turn my whole body to look at her with a raised eyebrow.

“You, Cassandra, maybe even Corbin with in a new wardrobe… but the prettiness stops there, my brother.  The rest of you are bums with cameras and note pads; AV club
rejects
.”

“Uh, Miquel?”  I’m grasping.  “He’s good looking, in a brooding, regal kind of way.”

“Do you really wanna go there?”

I recall their brief affair.  “I suppose not.”

Sabetha sinks into her seat like a kid nestling under some warm blankets, “us auxilias on the other hand…” she smiles.  There’s no official document in the Hyperion that names the auxilias, but even before I came on, it was understood that sentinership is a depressing job.  Perhaps the
most
depressing job. 
Ever
.  Our life expectancies – that is the age the majority of us live to before offing ourselves – were greatly increased by immortal companionship.  Thus the auxilias. Not a few ilk were half-initiated into the Hyperion to grant them immortality, though without any of the other rights, privileges, and powers of the sentiners.  The relationships range from brother and sister, like Sabetha and me, to husband and wife like Cassandra, captain of South Gothica, and her late husband Marley, to a comedic duo in the case of Corbin, captain of North Gothica and Roger one of the aforementioned immortal ilk. 

I think about them all for a moment.  It’s so easy to lose contact over the years.  I know to the minute how long it’s been since I’ve seen Corbin and Roger but the distance is nevertheless foggy.  “You don’t think they’re in trouble do you?” I ask out of the blue.

“Who?”

“Never mind.  Let’s get home.  Sun’s almost up.”

T
he following night, Sabetha whips the car around a corner, not knowing where we’re headed yet but in a damn-needless rush to get there.  “So I was thinking.”

“About?”

“Charity.”

I cock an eye brow.  “Are you sure?”

“At first it was about some new diamond earrings, but then charity.  I’m sure of it.”

“For whom?”

“The ilk… who else?  Anyway, why don’t they ever get blown up by the city?”

“The
y’re too ineffectual to be targets of cycle,” I explain.

“Compared to what?  A single person just thinking about
calling
a lawyer to protest something?”

“They’re
a release valve.  They ameliorate certain ills, like an ice cube in a hot tub, but more importantly, they provide an outlet for that pesky human empathy and longing for social justice.”

“Huh… So then why do you tithe half you’re earnings to them?”

Zing.
  She’s hasn’t caught me off guard like this in seventy-nine years.  “How did you come across that little tidbit?”

“Which tidbit exactly?  The Youth Centers of Gothica?  The Rehabilitation Answer Project?”

“Okay, enough.”

“The Animal Society of Gothica?”

“C’mon.”

“Oh, those cute wittle puppies-wuppies!”   

“Stop.”

She beams for a
moment in her rarely-won victory, then adds, “You’re an ice cube in a hot tub.”

“Certainly feels that way some-days.”

With renewed excitement, Sabetha asks, “So who’s next?”

I pause, knowing Sabetha’s not gonna like my choice.  “Lezar,” I half ask, half state.

She nods a couple times.  “Going straight to the bottom?”

“I figure if there’s anyone we can trust who still lives in the tunnels,
its Lezar.”

“You won’t have trouble finding him?  Last I knew he had the best crafters in the region making his latest rat’s nest invisible.”

“We have all night.”

“You should have told me at home, I would have worn something more...
durable
.”

Sabetha and Lezar don’t hate each other, but they don’t get along.  It’s a cordial rivalry regarding chyld and gazer pride.  Both find the other to be the epitome of what is wrong with their respective species.  Sabetha is self-centered, narcissistic and elitist.  Lezar is dirty, paranoid, and without an understanding of the world above his sewers.  I just have to make sure I do all the talking when we see him, and pray they can keep their bickering to a minimum.  “You’ll be fine; we’ll just take the subway till one of his scouts picks us up.”

Sabetha throws the car into a power slide, skidding to a stop inches from the curb and nudges the shifter into park.  “So we just ride the tunnels till something happens?”

We exit the car and I sigh.  “That’s the plan.”

On the wide sidewalk nearby is a stairway leading underground with a wooden banner over the entrance.  It reads
Licorice Line
.  Other lines include Candy, Mint, and Caramel. Darkened rumor has it the subways received their designations from a chyld named Nicolai who was around when the subways were being built, but just about every darkened myth or Hyperion apocrypha can be traced back to rumors about Nicolai.  I’m not sure if he deserves half of it, or if the urban legends just snowballed, but either way, I hope to never meet him.

As we descend the cement stairs, the sound of our boots echoing in the hollow tunnel below, our demeanor quickly alters.  We’re heading into hostile territory – a filthy, dangerous place.  Urine and pine-scented solvents do battle in the misty smog that gathers in the trenches.  Lights in the white and brown tiled ceiling flicker on and off as trains echo in the distance.  Water drips from pipes into rust-lined puddles and rats scurry in and out of drains between the tracks.  As we were above, so we find ourselves below, alone.  I think.

As if the dangers down here weren’t enough, I’m practically blind.  Due to Lezar’s paranoia, he has hired crafters to manipulate the kharma in this area of tunnels and make it thick and confusing.  To me, someone who senses and feels kharma, it’s like being caught in a sand storm.  My supernatural senses are severely blunted.  Down here I see and hear and smell what an ilk would and it puts me on a hair trigger.  Knowing better than to come to the subway unarmed, I’ve brought our gun-filled duffle bag. 

Sabetha and I lean against a wall that cuts the train platform in half lengthwise and posts the different lines for this section of Gothica.  We try to move as little as possible, not wanting to disturb a single inch of air more than we have to.  Several minutes pass, the chirps of insects and rats the only sound.  Behind us, the hexes and lines of the subway map frame our statuesque poses.  It’s six-hundred, fifty-four miles of city, north to south and the subways run for four hundred and eighty of it. 

The tunnel lets out a gasp and a train trembles somewhere in the abyss.  With a groan and rumble it comes to halt in front of us.  The doors open but no one exits for there is no one to exit.  The subway tunnels remind me of just how unreal a city Gothica is.  I get used to the top side, but down here it’s impossible to ignore. 

These flickering lights, for instance, haven’t been replaced by anyone for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  The service department is either too busy to get to them all or, more likely, doesn’t even exist.  Maybe it’s a single person answering phones in some forgotten cubicle, writing work orders that go nowhere.  Yet the lights somehow work.  There is no one driving or scheduling the trains.  They just come.  There are no repairs needed – tracks never break.  It is known as Cycle and it’s the mortar between the bricks of our reality. 

The city above functions in much the same way.  Sentiners know this.  We can almost prove it, the same way a theoretical physicist can almost prove string theory.  But no one else notices these things, and if they do, they never talk about it, and if they talk about it, they never live long.  Cycle weeds out anyone who tries to follow the path of an electron in the grid.  With that kind of person gone we’re left with a population that is very content to assume certain things just happen.  Thanks to Cycle, they do.

We board the train and I put my foot through the duffle bag’s handle so that it can’t slide away.  The train starts moving and we hold onto the rails overhead as the subway car shakes through the tunnels below the city.  As the train rumbles around corners, the lights continue to flicker on and off.  Sabetha and I look calm and stoic, like we’re in our element, but it’s an elaborate bluff.  Traveling underground at night is a roll of the dice.  We might keep riding and riding and never stop again.  We might crash.  We might come to a halt and
lose all power, or the next stop might contain fifty tunnel dwellers waiting to swarm onboard and devour anything not bolted down. 

At the next station, the train comes to a slow halt with the breaks making a horrific squeal.  A hunched-over figure dressed in tattered clothes, boards one car up.  Ilk, I think, but a guess at best.  Through the window of the car’s separator doors we spot the person take a seat and bunch up his collar against the cold.  The track bends, the car shifts and for a moment the figure is out of sight.  The lights flicker, then the corner ends, the cars align, this time empty. 

The lights go out completely and the mirror-like quality of the train windows becomes transparent, revealing the tunnels beyond.  To my left, in the absence of any illumination, I can see a person clinging to the side of the train, its face pressed against the window looking in at us, then the lights come back and it’s gone, replaced with our reflections.  It’s a startling image burned with a teal flame onto my eyeballs like the flash of a camera.  As I blink, the image shakes and drifts across my view.  A lookout.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

My ear drums detect a sudden change in air pressure and then I feel a suction of wind.  From behind us, a door has opened.  Sabetha and I whip around to look.  I know she saw the face outside too, but we hold back our initial violent inclination and look to identify the source. 

A man with a coarse, sparse beard is standing on the metal link that holds the two cars together.  He makes no effort to contest the swaying motion of the train, making him look like a part of the dirty, graffitied interior.  He’s wearing layers upon layers of mismatched clothing, his gloves are cut off at the fingertips and his jeans, while full of holes, do not show skin through the fraying, but rather, more fabric.

“What do you want?” he asks in rumbling voice.

“I am –” I begin, but he cuts me off.

“We know who you are.”

“We want to see Lezar.  It’s important.” I say.

He nods his head for us to follow.  I reach down and pull the duffle bag up to my side while Sabetha takes the lead and follows the gazer.  We travel between cars, each expanse unnerving me.  The wind rushes by and the blackness around us seems to have no bounds.  At the end of the train, on the last stoop, our guide sits on the
safety chain like a child on a swing and leans out sideways.  The wind blasts his hair back and he squints to look up the tunnel, careful, but not too careful, to keep his head from going much further out beyond the profile of the train.

He peers that way for a few seconds and then leans back in and stands upright.  He pulls out a road flare from his front left pocket and strikes the end against the igniter.  A green glow follows a spray of sparks and he tosses it onto the rushing ground behind.  It’s an artifact, an item imbued with kharma by the craft and it briefly grants me a portion of my senses, dispelling the kharmatic haze around us.   

In the expanding distance of the curving tunnel I can see a few figures scurry by the flare’s light where it landed.  But then it disappears in the bow of the corner and with it, my supernatural senses.  I try to hold onto their silhouettes but just as they go out of view, the darkness is replaced by headlights.  A pickup truck with no top is riding on the tracks.  Sparks come from under the chassis where the vehicle saps energy from the third rail.

The truck gains on the train and when it gets within a few feet, the headlights turn off, leaving only the yellow parking lights to guide us.  The scout gives a sly grin and then without looking, takes a step off the back of the train onto the hood of the truck.  He scrambles into a seat.