There was no sign of Wolf.
She thought she’d seen him turn right. Her ship was parked to the left. Her pulse was racing, making it hard to breathe.
She couldn’t leave. She hadn’t gotten what she’d come for.
She told herself that she would be able to find him again. When she’d had time to gather her wits. After she talked to the detectives and persuaded them to track Wolf down and arrest him and find out where he’d taken her grandmother.
Tucking her hands into her pockets, she hurried around the building, toward her ship.
A sickening howl stopped her, sucking the air out of her lungs. The night’s chatter silenced, even the loitering city rats pausing to listen.
Scarlet had heard wild wolves before, prowling the countryside in search of easy prey on the farms.
But never had a wolf’s howl sent a chill down her spine like that.
Nine
“Argh, get it off, get it off!”
Cinder spun, steadying herself on the curved, slick concrete walls as she cast the flashlight behind her. Thorne was writhing and squirming in the cramped tunnel, swatting at his back and emitting an array of curses and unmanly shrieks.
She sent the beam of light to the ceiling and saw a thriving mass of cockroaches scuttling across it in all directions. She shuddered, but turned away and kept moving.
“It’s only a cockroach,” she called back to him. “It’s not going to kill you.”
“It’s in my uniform!”
“Would you keep quiet? There’s a manhole up ahead.”
“Please tell me we’ll be exiting through that manhole.”
She scoffed, more preoccupied with the map of the sewer system in her head than on her companion’s squeamishness. Even though the thought of a cockroach beneath her shirt did make her squirm, she figured it would still be preferable to walking through the ankle-deep sludge with one bare foot, and she wasn’t whining.
They passed beneath the manhole and Cinder detected the steady sound of water growing louder. “We’re almost to the combined main line,” she said, at first eager to reach it—it was hot as Mars in this cramped tunnel and her thighs were burning from the crouch-walk routine. But then a gut-turning stench wafted toward her, so strong she almost gagged.
No longer would it just be surface water runoff they were trekking through.
“Oh, aces,” said Thorne, groaning. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
Cinder wrinkled her nose and focused on taking shallow, burning breaths.
The smell grew nearly unbearable as they traipsed through the sludge and came to the sewer connection, finding themselves on the lip of a concrete wall.
Cinder’s imbedded flashlight searched the tunnel beneath them, darting up the slimy concrete walls. The main tunnel would be tall enough for them to stand in. The light bounced off a narrow metal grate that lined the far edge, stable enough for maintenance workers and covered in rat droppings. Between them and the grate, a river of sewage swelled and churned, at least two meters wide.
She fought off another bout of nausea as the pungent stink of the sewer clouded her nostrils, her throat, her lungs.
“Ready?” she said, inching forward.
“Wait—what are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
Thorne blinked at her, then down at the sewage he could barely make out in the darkness. “Don’t you have some tool in that fancy hand of yours that can get us across?”
Cinder glared, light-headed from her body’s instinctively short breaths. “Oh, wow, how could I have forgotten about my grappling hook?”
Spinning away, she gobbled down another rank breath and lowered herself into the muck. Something smooshed between her toes. The current pounded against her legs as she made her way across, the water up to her thighs. Writhing on the inside, Cinder crossed as quickly as she could, choking down her gag reflex. The weight of her metal foot keeping her grounded so the current didn’t knock her off balance and soon she was on the other side, pulling herself onto the grate. She flattened her back against the tunnel wall and peered back at the pretend captain.
He was staring at her legs with unbridled disgust.
Cinder looked down. The stark white jumper was now tinged greenish brown and clung, sopping, to her legs.
“Look,” she yelled, aiming the flashlight at Thorne, “you can either get over here or you can go back and serve the rest of your sentence in peace. But you have to make a decision now.”
After a stream of curses and spitting, Thorne inched his way into the sludge, holding his arms aloft. He was grimacing the whole time as he slinked his way to the grate and hauled himself up beside Cinder.
“This is what I get for complaining about the soap,” he muttered, pressing himself against the wall.
The grate was already digging into Cinder’s bare foot and she shifted her weight onto her cyborg leg. “All right, Cadet. Which way?”
“Captain.” He opened his eyes and peered down the tunnel in each direction, but beyond the pale light filtering in from the closest manhole, the sewers disappeared in blackness. Cinder adjusted the brightness of her flashlight, sending it darting over the frothy surface of the water and dripping concrete walls.
“It’s near the old Beihai Park,” Thorne said, scratching at his whiskered chin. “Which way is that?”
Cinder nodded and turned south.
Her internal clock told her they’d been walking for only twelve minutes, but it seemed like hours. The grate dug into her foot with each step. Her wet pants were plastered to her calves and sweat dripped down the back of her neck, sometimes tricking her into thinking it was a spider fallen down her jumpsuit and making her feel guilty for giving Thorne a hard time before. Though they didn’t see any rats, she could hear them scurrying away from her light, down countless tunnels that fanned out beneath the city.
Thorne talked to himself as they walked, working through his clogged memory. His ship was definitely near Beihai Park. In the industrial district. Not six blocks south of the maglev tracks … well, maybe eight blocks.
“We’re about a block away from the park,” Cinder said, pausing at a metal ladder. A spot of light drifted down toward them. “This goes up to West Yunxin.”
“Yunxin sounds familiar. Sort of.”
She pleaded for patience and started to climb.
The ladder rungs bit into her foot, but the air was blissfully fresh as she neared the top. The sound of the rushing water was replaced with the hum of maglev tracks. Reaching the manhole cover, Cinder paused to listen for signs of humanity, before pushing the cover off to the side.
A hover glided overhead.
Cinder ducked, heart racing. Daring to inch her head up, she spotted silent lights atop the white vehicle. It was an emergency hover. Visions of androids armed with brain-interface-overriding tasers sent a shudder through her, before the hover turned a corner and she saw a red cross on one side. It was a medical hover, not law enforcement. Cinder nearly collapsed from relief.
They were in the old warehouse district, near the plague quarantines. Medical hovers were to be expected.
She glanced both ways down the deserted street. Though it was still early, the day was already hot and whimsical mirages were rising from the pavement, having forgotten the drenching summer storm from two nights before.
“Clear.” She hauled herself up onto the road and sucked in a deep breath of the city’s humidity. Thorne followed, his uniform glaringly bright in the sun, except for the legs, which were still murky green and smelled of sewage. “Which way?”
Shielding his eyes with his forearm, Thorne squinted at the concrete buildings and rotated in a full circle. Faced north. Scratched his neck.
Cinder’s optimism crumbled. “Tell me you recognize something.”
“Yeah, yeah, I do,” he said, waving her away. “I just haven’t been here in a while.”
“Think faster. We aren’t exactly blending in with our surroundings out here.”
With a nod, Thorne started down the street. “This way.”
Five steps later he paused, pondered, turned around. “No, no, this way.”
“We’re dead.”
“No, I’ve got it now. It’s this way.”
“Don’t you have an address?”
“A captain always knows where his ship is. It’s like a psychic bond.”
“If only we had a captain here.”
He ignored her, marching down the street with spectacular confidence. Cinder followed three steps behind him, jumping at each sound—trash skidding across the road, a hover crossing an intersection two streets away. The sun glistened off the dusty warehouse windows.
Three empty blocks later, Thorne slowed his pace and peered up at the facade of each building they passed, rubbing his chin.
Cinder began desperately searching her brain for Plan B.
“There!” Thorne jotted across the street to a warehouse that was identical to every other warehouse, with giant rolling doors and years of colorful graffiti. Rounding the building’s corner, he tested the main door. “Locked.”
Spotting the ID scanner beside the door, Cinder cursed. “Figures.” Kneeling down, she pried the plastic face off the scanner. “I might be able to disable it. Do you think there’s an alarm?”
“There’d better be. I haven’t been paying rent all this time for my darling to sit in an unprotected warehouse.”
Cinder had just downloaded the programming manual for the scanner’s product number when the door beside them swung open and a plump man with a thin black goatee stepped out into the sunlight. Cinder froze.
“Carswell!” the man barked. “Just saw the news! I thought you might be showing up here.”
“Alak, how are you?” A grin broke across Thorne’s face. “Am I really on the news? How do I look?”
Without answering, Alak swerved his attention toward Cinder. His friendliness froze over, buried beneath a trace of discomfort. Gulping, Cinder shut the scanner’s panel and stood. Her netlink was already connecting to the newsfeed she’d abandoned during their escape, and sure enough, there was a stream of warnings flashing across her own picture, the one they’d taken when she’d been admitted into the prison. ESCAPED CONVICT. CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. IF SEEN, COMM THIS LINK IMMEDIATELY.
“Seen you on the news too,” Alak said, glancing at her steel foot.
“Alak, I’m here to pick up my ship. We’re in a bit of a hurry.”
As sympathetic wrinkles creased the corners of Alak’s mouth, he shook his head. “I can’t help you, Carswell. The feds watch me close enough as it is. Storing a stolen ship is one thing, I can always claim ignorance to that. But assisting a convicted felon … and assisting … one of them.” His nose wrinkled at Cinder, but he simultaneously took a step back as if afraid of her retaliation. “If they track you here and find out I helped, it’s more trouble than even I can risk. You’d better just hang low for a time. I won’t tell I saw you. But I won’t let you take your ship. Not now. Not until all this blows over. You understand, right?”