Prometheus Road (15 page)

“But—I didn’t know!” Tom exploded. “You didn’t tell me all that ahead of time! All you said was that the fog was going to eat me unless I mastered it!”

Dead Man gracefully unwound his legs and stood up. “As I said, your body and spirit know how to deal with these things if you’ll only get your conscious mind out of the way. You must learn to trust your body’s wisdom. You share common knowledge with the elements of nature and the rest of the world, and you must let it flow through you to become aware of it when you need it.” He turned to climb down the gun turret ladder to the steel deck below.

“Where are you going?” Tom asked, barely keeping the annoyance out of his voice.

Dead Man glanced at him just before his head disappeared below the gun turret’s edge. “To get some food, then some rest.”

Helix jumped out of Tom’s lap, fully alert when he heard the word “food,” then he darted toward the ladder, realized he couldn’t climb down without help, and looked back at Tom and whined.

Tom eyed the fog that was rapidly streaming away from the battleship, leaving a fine layer of water droplets on everything as a souvenir of its visit. With a heavy sigh, he got up, stamped his feet to get the circulation going again in his legs, and shuffled over to pick up Helix. His dizziness made it hard to walk in a straight line. He shook his head—maybe he’d get lucky, and the poison would kill him soon.

TEMPEST’S world had been reduced to the size of her body.

Juanita had placed her in a shiny metal sarcophagus that looked like a stylized human form resting on its back. A small glass panel in the face of her enclosure allowed her to look out at the sterile, white-tiled room she was trapped in. One hose fed her liquid nutrients while others were prepared to remove any bodily wastes. The inside of her coffin smelled of sweat and copper. She heard only her heartbeat and her breathing, trying hard to relax as she held on to the promise of escape that Juanita had offered, assuming she was telling the truth and it wasn’t some kind of trick to mess with her mind. However, as promised, Juanita had not activated the thousands of tiny brushlike probes that gently touched Tempest’s skin, causing her to tingle and itch over most of her naked body. The timepiece hovering in the corner of the tiled room told her she’d been in the coffin for almost two hours, but the close confinement made the time pass slowly, as if she’d been in it much longer. It seemed strange, but the time she had spent in her father’s shock box had helped to prepare her for this situation, although that conditioning was starting to wear off. Her anxiety began to build as her muscles stiffened, and she wished she could move some part of her body without being poked with the tiny needles. Breathing faster, she closed her eyes as tears slowly dripped down her cheeks, tickling her face as they descended from needle cluster to needle cluster. She still couldn’t understand why her father had sent her here, although she suspected that Hermes had manipulated him into it somehow. She thought about the last moments she had spent with her father, running them over in her mind to look for clues.

Hermes had brought news to Memphis, and Tempest had listened at the door of her father’s office to hear what she could, but the muffled voices weren’t clear enough for her to make out more than a few of the words. When Memphis cried out in anguish, Tempest couldn’t stop herself from pushing her way into the room to see if he was all right. His face was in his hands, and his body shook with his sobbing as Hermes stood over him, unmoved by the emotional outburst, waiting for Memphis to stop so that he could continue delivering his message.

“What’s happened?” Tempest had asked, ignoring the protocol that required Hermes to speak before she could speak to him.

“Your brother has been destroyed,” Hermes said, his tone flat and unconcerned.

It took a moment for the news to sink in. Tempest thought it must be a trick, but her father clearly believed it. She was shocked and didn’t know how to respond, her eyes going back and forth from her father to Hermes, who had finally turned his head to look at her. “There is also an excellent probability that Tom Eliot was destroyed. Humboldt successfully located his hiding place in the hills.”

The second shock was too much. Not Tom. Her Tom. She wouldn’t accept it. Without realizing what she was doing, Tempest threw herself at Hermes, the source of all the pain that had recently befallen her family. When she crashed into him, it felt as if she’d thrown herself against a wall or a heavy machine, and it took only a flick of his arm to send her flying backward across her father’s desk and onto the floor. Memphis lurched back to avoid her. The fall was painful, but she got up and charged Hermes again. This time he stepped to one side, then slammed her down to the floor. She turned her head and saw her father coming to her rescue, his face red and shaking, his fists clenched. Then, instead of attacking Hermes, he roughly grabbed Tempest by the shoulders and lifted her to her feet, shaking her. “You! You are the cause of all this! Your dalliance with that boy has cost me my son!”

And it was Hermes who stepped in to separate them. A few hours later, she found herself on an underground train hurtling through the darkness on her way to the dreaded rehabilitation facility.

Tempest blinked, trying hard to convert her sadness to anger. If she could just hold out a little longer, she would be released from her tiny prison. A glance at the clock revealed that another twenty minutes had passed. When she began to wonder if Juanita really would come back, the door finally opened.

Bruno stepped into the room and shut the door.

With an odd smile on his face, he walked over and knelt beside her coffin, leaning forward to look closely at her face. He ran one hand over the smooth surface, tracing the cold outline of the metal above her body, and his hot breath fogged the glass over her eyes. She gritted her teeth, hoping he wouldn’t look too closely at the controls. Her earlier plan to lure him in there was based on the idea that she would be locked in some kind of a cell where she could surprise him. There would be no surprise attack from the inside of the box, that much was certain.

The door opened again. Startled, Bruno jumped back from the coffin as Juanita walked into the room. Although she couldn’t hear the words, Tempest saw a brief argument before Bruno shoved past Juanita and stomped off into the corridor.

Tempest closed her eyes and sighed as Juanita bent over and snapped open the locks that held the coffin lid shut. Cool air shocked her skin when Juanita lifted the lid.

“Try to roll straight out to the side,” Juanita said, disconnecting the umbilical hoses that maintained Tempest’s intimate contact with the torture device. “You’ll have less contact with the brushes that way, and it won’t hurt as much.”

Tempest did as she was told, rolling out onto the cold white tiles where Juanita helped her sit up. “I’d let you take a shower before we leave, but there isn’t time.”

“Thank you,” Tempest whispered, finally finding her voice as she hugged Juanita.

Juanita rubbed her back. “It’s okay. No need to thank me until we get out of here, and that’s not going to be easy.”

Tempest nodded, afraid to look up into her rescuer’s face. “I’ll do whatever you ask.”

Juanita removed her lab coat and helped Tempest to her feet. “Put this on. Bruno had already disposed of your clothes by the time I went back, so I’m afraid my coat will have to do for now.”

Tempest wriggled into the coat, watching the door in case Bruno reappeared. “This is fine. I’m fine. Let’s go.”

Juanita nodded as she pulled another ID tag out of her pocket, a tag that matched the one hanging on the lab coat. “We’ll both be Juanita Lopez for a little while. Lucky you. If any sensors pick us up, it’ll look like a system glitch.”

Tempest stiffened as she spotted a tiny camera high on the ceiling. “Can they see us? Can Bruno see us?”

“Don’t worry. I’ve done this before. I’ve got a little invisibility program running in the security system right now, so all the camera can see is an empty room.”

Tempest didn’t understand, but she didn’t have to, so she started walking toward the door.

“Not that way,” Juanita said, opening the hatch to a waste disposal elevator on the opposite wall. “I hope you don’t mind getting dirty, little girl. We have to take out the trash.”

After wedging themselves in the tiny elevator for a short ride deeper into the bowels of the old hotel, then ten minutes of crawling through the old aluminum ventilation ducts, Tempest’s knees were sore and her back hurt. However, she was free and moving around, which was a definite improvement over being locked in a coffin. By comparison to that confined space, the ventilation ducts seemed quite roomy, and there was plenty of light from the grilles that connected the ducts to the rooms they passed. In one of the rooms, she thought she glimpsed Bruno wearing part of her stolen dress, admiring himself in a mirror, but she didn’t want to think about that.

Instead of continuing to crawl higher in the ventilation system, Juanita surprised Tempest by guiding them down to a damp little room with poor lighting where she quietly slid the grille out of its slot and set it down in the shaft. She gestured at the gap. “Jump for it.”

Tempest peeked over the edge and saw a drop of about three feet to bare concrete stained by water leaks. There was no furniture in the room, only pipes and a raised steel hatch in the middle of the floor. She landed in a crouch, and the concrete felt rough and cold against her bare feet. The formerly white lab coat she wore was now smudged and stained with various shades of gray dirt.

Juanita reinserted the ventilation grille, then opened the hatch. The warm air that flowed up to greet them was humid, and it carried the smell of vegetation, but Tempest saw only a metal ladder leading down into a dark concrete pipe with a shallow stream flowing through it.

“Are you starting to feel like a rat?” Juanita asked. “All that crawling, and now we’re going to travel through the sewers. I bet you hadn’t imagined that your day would turn out like this.”

That was a safe guess, Tempest thought, starting down the ladder. “As you said, it’s better than being a zombie. Where are we going?”

Juanita climbed onto the ladder and pulled the hatch shut over her head, leaving them in sudden darkness. “I want you to meet some friends of mine.”

Tempest heard a click, then two glowing lines of overhead light strips illuminated the sewer pipe in both directions. The pipe was about ten feet in diameter. When she stepped off the ladder, the cool stream only came up to her ankles. Someone had sprayed “Rose Knows” in black paint on the wall at Tempest’s eye level. “Who’s Rose?”

Juanita gestured for her to follow, sloshing down the stream. The light rippled on the water, creating a magical effect. “Only Rose knows. Some people call her the Tunnel Queen, and she rules the Underworld. You’ll meet her in a little while.”

“She lives down here?”

“Sometimes. The shades say she has the power to walk the surface world undetected, disguised to fit in with the other groundlings. Watch your step here.”

Tempest gasped when she stepped on a slippery spot in the stream, catching her balance with a hand against the wall. She had no interest in dunking herself in cold water. “Thanks. Who are the shades?”

“They’re the tunnel dwellers, the Queen’s subjects—outcasts from the surface who made new homes in the Underworld.”

“You’re saying they live in the sewers?”

“One person’s sewer is another person’s castle. The shades go topside occasionally, but only in the dark when they’re raiding the groundlings for supplies. There aren’t any stores down here, you know, although there is a fair amount of barter. They use hydroponics to grow most of their own food, and they’ve tapped into city pipes for a freshwater supply. They don’t have to raid very often since Rose brings them a lot of what they need. Sometimes, though, I think they go raiding for the entertainment. The scenery in the sewers gets kind of monotonous after a while.”

Tempest heard an odd hooting noise in the distance ahead of them, echoing down the pipe, and she was startled when Juanita hooted in reply, then winked at her. “Hooters. The shades take turns at guard duty, just in case the groundlings get nosy. They also keep an eye out for floodwaters, although that’s mainly a problem during the summer months. We need warning in case we need to move the art and other things to higher ground.”

“Art?”

“You’ll see.”

Tempest swatted at a cloud of tiny bugs that suddenly swarmed around her head.

“Gnatcams,” Juanita said. “Just ignore them. They’re part of the Underworld security system so the hooters can look us over before we can see them.”

Juanita seemed to know everything about the Underworld, and that made Tempest suspicious, despite the fact that Juanita was helping her to escape. Of course, she had no idea about what she was escaping into, and she figured it couldn’t be any worse than the rehab facility; but she really didn’t know anything about Juanita or her friends in the sewer. For all she knew, the shades were cannibals, and Juanita was their high priestess who went off in search of suitable sacrifices for their strange sewer rituals.

The pipe was wider now, allowing Juanita to walk beside Tempest as they continued to slog down the stream. “You’re very trusting,” Juanita said. “I see that a lot in people from your side of the barrier. Of course, what choice do you have when it comes down to staying in the rehab facility or diving into the unknown with me? Still, it must seem safer here. At least we don’t have any crazy mutants running around to threaten people.”

“Mutants?” Tempest shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s okay, dear,” Juanita said, patting Tempest on the back. “I know you’re not a mutant; it would have shown up in your genetic scans when you came in. However, your neighbors were exposed to all those nasty nanobugs years ago, so now the mutations are showing up in the population. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Tempest still didn’t understand, so she decided to wait before asking for a better explanation. They entered a vast chamber where the stream flowed through the middle, but the overhead strip lights they had been following were too dim to illuminate the sides and corners of the room. Strange concrete dividing walls, apparently placed to divert water down other tunnels, stood like monuments among fluted columns and raised concrete platforms of varying heights. Wherever Tempest looked, the walls were painted with scary faces, cryptic slogans such as “Rose Knows,” and some surprisingly good murals of natural landscapes drenched in sunlight. As they ventured farther into the room, Tempest also spotted some large paintings hung in heavy frames. Based on her limited experience with such things, the paintings of people and exotic street scenes looked very professional. Before she could learn more, Tempest was startled by hooting sounds, as if they’d suddenly been surrounded by hundreds of owls.