Paradigm (9781909490406) (21 page)

‘She told me it had just happened to her, the night I got released. How could you know about it if it only just happened to her?'

Lily laughed.

‘Don't you get it? She's a liar, a dissident, a fraud. You can't believe everything she says. I'll bet she's said some terrible things about you that you can't even remember happening? She's using the effects of the drugs against you. And who knows what sort of trouble she's got your daughter into. The Industry have been taking the best care of her that they could without committing her to underground storage, but it had to happen sometime. She's had the inhibitor for months now.'

Carter thought about the scar—it had looked new but he couldn't be sure. His words came out as fractured sentences, but slowly he pieced everything together.

‘Let's try and find the tunnel and at least prove for a start how much truth there was in that. She talked about unrest—about people wanting to leave.' He thought about what Morton had whispered to him. He hadn't seemed that insane. ‘Either way, I need to know.'

T
hey inched
around the clearing on their hands and knees, tapping the floor as they went. It was Carter who found the entrance first, between two flat rocks, just as Isabella had said. The moss that covered them was thick and warm, tiny tendrils of growth inching up to meet his hands as he pushed down gently. On one side of the entrance there was a gap, loosely covered by ferns that had been dragged over the top from below, concealing the opening.

‘Someone has been down there,' whispered Lily.

Sitting on one rock, Carter used his feet to kick apart the branches that covered the rest of the entrance, then got down on his knees and separated the twig-work. Lily pulled back the last of the base logs and less than an hour after they had started the search, they were sitting alongside a square-shaped opening in the ground, wide enough for both of them to squeeze through.

As Carter lowered his body down by the wooden handholds that had been forced into the wall, a damp earthy smell filled his nostrils. There was something acrid and decaying and the warm air was stuffy. Lily came behind him, pulling a cover of sticks over the entrance to the hole as best she could. When Carter reached the ground he stumbled over something both soft and hard at the same time. He kicked the lump towards the entrance to the tunnel and let out an involuntary yell.

Above him, Lily called down.

‘Are you all right?' Her voice echoed and boomed in the tight space of the hole and shook him even further. Carter realised he was shaking and felt stupid.

‘Yes, I think so. Lily, there's something here. I think it's…'

‘Wait until I get there.' She scrambled down after him and they stood there in the almost pitch blackness. The shape didn't move.

‘Do you think it's her?' Lily's whisper capitulated Carter's worst fears.

‘I don't know.' They stood there, the sound of a solitary owl crooning above them, out into the blackness. Slowly, half-crouched, Lily inched herself forwards, feeling the way with her hands. Carter held his breath and could feel his heart smashing inside his chest. There was a gulp and then the weak halo of moonlight that had been filtering through the hole disappeared. He lost sight of Lily completely.

‘Lily!' His whisper echoed around the cramped space and out into the tunnel. Nothing came back. ‘Hey!' he shouted. ‘Come back,'

Still, there was nothing.

‘Lily!' Carter rushed forward into the space of the tunnel, crashing into Lily who was on her hands and knees just a few feet ahead of him. He tumbled over her crouched body and landed face down in the pile of rags on the floor.

‘It's okay,' said Lily, her voice sounding alien and over loud in the darkness. ‘It's just supplies—look. This is where Isabella must have stored some of her things.'

The sack had been made from old clothing, well-worn but firm. Feeling his way inside, Carter pulled out an almost full bottle of fire fuel, flint lights and thick, chunky stumps of wood.

‘At least someone was prepared,' said Lily. ‘I'm guessing you didn't bring anything like this.'

Carter shook his head and wrapped a rag around one of the sticks then dripped fuel around it. Striking the flints together with a haphazard zing, the torch flew into life, blinding them momentarily, and bled a bright orange glow the colour of an autumn sunrise into the blackness. A family of tiny beetles scurried across the wall and under one of the makeshift struts.

For a silent moment they sat there transfixed in the silence: the beetles watching Carter; Carter watching the beetles. Now they had light. Now they were lucky.

T
he tunnel
that led westwards towards the Barricades wasn't quite large enough for either of them to stand upright but it wasn't so small that they had to crawl. The outer edges had been stepped up with a wooden structure, a ribcage of sturdy branches to stop the earth crumbling down around them and snuffing off the vein of a tunnel that curled forwards towards the outer edges of the Community. Carter held the torch out in front of him, letting it absorb the darkness and create an orb of light that was nothing but whiteness. As their eyes became accustomed to the gloom, Carter looked at the outline of Lily in the darkness and shivered at the thought of how much Isabella had changed.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘We need to go,'

T
here was
something about her boldness and the reminiscence of Isabella that excited him. Most of the girls who had shown him attention hadn't actually been interested in his ideas or the fact that he wanted to become Controller General—they had just been keen to make their own contribution to the Community by way of starting a family. Professor Mendoza had warned him of the dangers of settling down too early.

‘Love will ruin your chances,' she had said. ‘Look what it did to the old world. Love makes people blind.'

H
olding
the torch out in front, they moved onwards. Apart from the occasional fork in the passageway where one twist or the other led to a thick boulder blocking the way, the tunnel continued to aim to the west as its chosen direction until they neared the edge of the river bend, the tunnel curving against a red brick that had been smashed through into little more than a crawl space.

Carter went first, on his back and in reverse, watching the flickering of the torchlight reflect against the ceiling. He shivered as he watched Lily go through and, when they were on the other side, the tunnel widened out into a dank, semi-circular construction with a solid floor and dripping ceiling. This tunnel hadn't been hollowed out of the earth by hand. This was from the old days.

‘Subway' he said. ‘People used to walk under here because it was too dangerous above ground. But if this is water from the Black River seeping into the brickwork, it could be poisonous.'

Sticky dark shoeprints stood out in front of them on the smooth surface of the floor. Carter smiled.

‘But not that poisonous; someone's been through here before. We're going this way.'

Lily looked at him uncomfortably. ‘Who do you think that could be?' she said.

‘I know who I
hope
it is.'

C
overing
their heads and holding the torch in front of them they pelted through the tunnel, their speed helped by the relative evenness of the tiling and their desperation not to catch any of the droplets on their skin. A sheer wall of dark grey trophene rose up to meet them as they raced, breathless, towards the other end. Carter banged his fists against the wall.

There was no way through.

‘This can't be it,' he said. ‘Check the side walls. Isabella said something about another side tunnel.' He shone the light against the damp walls as they padded back and forth, tapping the edges until they finally hit the alcove set back into the brickwork. Lily went first, ducking through the low side tunnel leading west as they crawled back into the dark, hand-dug shaft.

‘We're past the river now,' said Lily, ‘we're in the Deadlands.'

Carter shrugged.

‘Technically, the Deadlands is only really the land above ground. The Industry Headquarters extends out underground beyond the perimeters of the Community Barricades; it has to. The Catacombs and the Plants are pretty far into the Deadlands, it's just that they're underground.'

A
s the tunnel
eked out into the underbelly of the Deadlands, Carter felt the air becoming clearer and softer on the throat. He breathed in deeply and then exhaled.

‘The air here is better,' he said. ‘It's like there's a current running through the tunnel. It must meet the surface somewhere, or at least have some sort of channel that's feeding it.'

‘I think we should rest,' said Lily. ‘Gather our strength before we get out there. I've been on shift all day and I'm hungry.'

Carter looked at her. She seemed exhausted and let out a long sigh.

‘We should go on; who knows what's on the other side—and we don't have much time.'

Her face cracked. ‘Please, Carter,'

Carter squared on her. ‘If we can't get out or it's completely unsafe, then we'll go back,' he said. ‘Depending on how far they've dug through here, there can't be more than an hour each way. We'll be back at Unity Square by sunrise.'

‘Then let's take ten minutes. I need to sit down for a while.'

‘Fine,' said Carter. ‘But only for a short while.'

T
hey sat
there in silence in the soft earth and Lily reached into her bag, handing Carter a flask of water.

‘Even a Controller General needs to drink,' she said. ‘Go on.' She looked around nervously.

Carter reached for the water, his mouth dry and parched.

‘Don't worry. I think whatever is out there will answer a lot of questions—for everybody.' In the cool darkness, his eyes felt soft and heavy.

Lily sat next to him and rested her head on his shoulder.

‘I'm tired,' she said. ‘Aren't you?'

Carter yawned and settled himself against the wall. There was a deadness in his legs and he let his body relax into Lily's.

‘You're going to make a great Controller General,' she whispered.

Nodding, Carter felt the corners of his mouth twitching and, within seconds, he was asleep.

A
lthough somewhere in
the crevices of his reverie he heard the violent crash of wood and earth, it was the sharpness of Lily's screaming that woke him. The sound was like icy, bony fingers dragging him through stony ground and it dragged him kicking from the deep sleep he had settled into on the floor. Rubbing cold sweat from his face, he leapt up, his head searing with pain.

‘What's going on?' he shouted and thrashed his arms around the edges of the tunnel until he found the torch and the bag containing the flints. As it flared into life, he could see Lily, arms and legs streaked with brown earth, scrabbling at the wall of the tunnel.

‘It's gone,' she screamed. ‘The tunnel has collapsed.' As Carter brought the torch around in a circle, he could see that Lily wasn't clawing at the wall but at a mound of earth that had fallen thick against the floor of the tunnel. The walls and roof had collapsed inwards, barring the way back from where they had come.

‘Go! Run
NOW
!'

‘We're going to be buried alive,' screeched Lily, stumbling to her feet. ‘We're going to die.'

‘We're not going to die,' he said pulling her along as they made their way through as quickly as they could. ‘There's air here, and a breeze. It's faint, but there's a breeze.' He waved the torch over the wall of rubble and earth. The struts had collapsed and were lying broken on the ground. Dust and splintered wood filled the tunnel all the way to the roof and Carter hurriedly rubbed the dust from his eyes. He pushed Lily forwards into the tunnel, stumbling behind her.

T
hey moved quickly in silence
, punctuated by the spitting of the torch and the occasional trickle of earth from the roof of the tunnel onto the floor. Having to crouch down low and half-crawl through the space, Carter could feel the gradient of the tunnel sloping upwards at a gradual incline towards the surface. His heavy legs ached and his muscles were sore.

‘Handmade tunnels like that are never safe, not at this depth,' he moaned, moving forwards. ‘We must have fallen asleep.'

‘You had a blackout,' said Lily. ‘It happens sometimes when you first come out of the Catacombs. You were out for about half an hour. I closed my eyes for a moment and the next thing I knew, the tunnel came crashing down.'

Carter rubbed his eyes and looked sideways through the darkness at Lily. ‘Well I can't afford to have another blackout. We need to keep moving—no more stopping until we get to the other side.'

T
hey trudged
through the almost blackness of the tunnel, saying very little to each other. Within about twenty minutes, Carter was almost certain he could see what he'd feared most of all. In front of them was a dirty red-brick foundation wall blocking the way ahead, with a small hole just large enough to squeeze through smashed into the blocks. A large log, its end covered in brick chips leaned casually against the wall. Beyond that, he could just about make out a tiny shard of grey-blue light creeping through dark, heavy floorboards, dripping out into the tunnel. There was a spent torch near the thick pole of wood, burned down to its last embers.

Carter moved forward, following the path of the torch as it slipped down through the crack and past the angle of the shattered wall. And then, seeing the terrible, horrific shape of Lucia, he screamed and then howled, his heart pounding and his legs shaking.