The Dark and Hollow Places (40 page)

Just then I stumble into an alcove and find a large metal door with rust spots bubbling up through flaked white paint. I throw all my weight against it. I shout at it as if it were human, as if it can grant me mercy and let me in.

With a loud protest of rusted hinges, the door pops open. I’m greeted with a gust of cold musty air. The darkness is deeper here, older, and my lantern fights to illuminate it. There’s a set of stairs leading down, and just as I’m about to follow them I hear a loud crack. A cascade of shattering follows.

I hesitate, trying to locate the noise, and then I hear men shouting. Moans filter through, no longer muffled by the hasty barriers over the windows and doors. A deep voice booms, “Run! They’ve breached.”

My throat closes. They’re here. The Unconsecrated and the Recruiters, both catching up. I have to push forward, it’s my only hope. I throw myself into the dark, forcing the door closed behind me. I practically fall down the steps and stumble into a smaller room. As I turn the corner a figure clutching
a lantern lunges at me from behind a long gleaming slab of wood.

I cry out, stumbling over a broken table as I wave my machete wildly.

The figure falls back as well, disappearing, and I blink several times before I realize there’s a mirror. I clutch my chest, trying to ease the terror-fueled pain. When I stand back up I see my reflection, hunched and small, my hair spiked short and wild around the bright band of the hat Catcher gave me.

My eyes are fierce and determined. Almost feral. And in the mirror I see another door behind me, intricately carved, with raised paneling. I spin around and race to it. This one opens smoothly, easily, to another stairwell. My heart pounds with each step and the air grows thicker as I descend.

Shouts and the sound of feet hammering against stairs chase me. I propel myself faster, stumbling and sliding over the steps until I hit the landing and slam into another door. I’m panting, not even caring that the sound of my choked breathing echoes loudly, giving me away.

I’m trapped.

My heart screams as I wrap sweaty fingers around the knob, the metal of the door freezing cold. It rattles uselessly and I jerk at it, trying to force the lock to catch, and finally it clicks. The door swings open. A blast of frozen air hits me in the face along with a darkness so pure it seems as if it’s never known light.

Taking a deep breath, I push the lantern through the opening and am greeted with the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen: blackness that goes on forever.

Escape.

I jump out onto the subway platform, the chasm of two
long black tunnels stretching out to either side. The desire to cry with relief is so strong that I have to swallow again and again, pushing the stinging fear back into my stomach.

I feel rather than hear the footsteps of someone chasing after me and I throw the door closed, banging at the knob with my machete, hoping to bend it out of place. Someone slams against it from the other side and I leap back.

He pounds and screams for me, shouting my name over and over again like a howl and I recognize the fury of Ox’s voice.

For a moment I’m still, my breath clouding around me. Of course it would be Ox coming to claim me and drag me back to the Sanctuary to lure Catcher. He would never let me go that easily. Which makes my escape that much more desperate.

In ten steps I’m at the edge of the platform and I shimmy over, dropping to the tracks below. The darkness spreads to either side of me and I don’t know which way to go.

I close my eyes, trying to concentrate. Trying to think. Softly, I feel the trace of dank air along the left side of my body, skimming over my scars. The draft has to be from somewhere—there has to be an opening in that direction.

My muscles shout that I have to go. Now. I have to run run run. Behind me the pounding grows louder and then I hear a different noise. I look up to see fingers reach through a grate in the wall next to the door. My lantern glistens off eyes and I stumble back.

Out of time, I turn to my left and start running.

It’s freezing down here, each breath searing my lungs with what feels like ice-cold fire. My body protests as I struggle to go faster, my feet stumbling along the rotted wood spaced along the tracks.

Usually the worst thing you can do when you’re being chased by Unconsecrated is run. It wears you out fast, and any distance you might gain is only lost while you recover and they keep coming.

But that’s the problem. I’m not being chased by Unconsecrated. At least, not
just
them. And the living can move much faster than the dead.

Shouts echo after me, bounding from the walls so that it’s almost impossible to tell which direction they’re coming from. I ignore the pain in my legs and lungs and try to run faster. I fall and skin my knee but I get up and go on.

Time in the darkness is meaningless, measured in gasping breaths and pumping heart. The sound of men shouting morphs into the noise of the dead: moans of every timbre combining into an almost-choir.

Sweat rolls down my face; I don’t know how long I can push. But I also don’t know what else to do.

The walls holding me in splay open, the ceiling soaring as I scramble into another station. The platform stretches along next to me and I slow my steps. If I climb up, can I hide?

But then what? I’m still faced with the same impossible scenario: I can hide from the Recruiters, but no one can hide from the dead.

So I keep running, the tunnel beginning to curve to the right. My lantern swings with each step, the light bobbing almost like a boat on water as I race past marks on the wall—some of them official-looking stamps designating locations and emergency exits, others bright puffy scrawls and pictures.

An emergency exit sounds like the perfect thing right now. Climb a ladder, find a hole, escape from this life.

The reality is that I’d just end up in the streets facing the
horde. They’d find me. So many would devour me I wouldn’t even get a chance to Return.

The moaning becomes like a tidal wave behind me, a wall of water pressing me forward. I just have to let it push me, not get dragged under. The cold numbs my ears, radiating down my neck and trailing under my clothes.

Something catches my foot and I fall, dropping the lantern. I stare at it as it rolls to a stop, cursing my stupidity for not being more careful. “Come on,” I grumble, watching the flame choke and sputter.

It flickers out, dousing me in nothingness that is so absolute I’m not sure air exists. The darkness amplifies every sound—the scrape of breath up my throat, the whisper of my fingers as I fumble in my coat pocket for the flint, the wheeze of air drifting along forgotten walls.

On my knees, I strike at the flint, my fingers shaking now with urgency. Each failed try is the Recruiters growing closer; every spark that dies, them gaining on me. They can’t be that far back, not anymore. The ground vibrates, traces of the pursuing footsteps thumping like summer rain.

With the lantern finally relit I notice that the tunnel is partially caved in ahead, boulders, rocks and twisted steel beams strewn every which way. I groan in frustration for a moment before I pull myself together. Almost madly I attack the debris, pulling at the smaller stones, wrenching free broken metal rods and digging as hard as I can, knowing that I’m losing time.

Steps volley behind me, any sense of distance lost to the echoes. Moans meld with the Recruiters’ voices calling for me, all lost in the growing thunder of noise.

Finally I’ve dug a narrow path and I shove the lantern
through, crawling after it. It’s a tight squeeze in some places, and I have to wriggle, cringing as icy rocks grate over my ribs. At least this will hold back the dead, I reassure myself with each scratch.

Just as I make it through, I catch sight of movement chasing behind me at the edge of my lantern light. I kick at the hole I’ve created, shifting debris until it falls back in on itself, blocking my pursuers.

“Annah,” the man calls out, and it’s Ox. He stops on the other side of the web of broken beams, woven tightly enough to keep him from coming after me but loose enough that we’re standing almost face to face.

“Leave me alone,” I growl, picking up a rock and flinging it at him. He dodges but it hits the Recruiter behind him in the face, scratching his cheek. In the weak light of my lantern I can see there’s already blood dripping from the man’s mangled fingers.

I cough and choke on the frigid air, wondering if any of them got infected when they landed in the sea of dead that is what’s left of the Dark City. I step back once and then again, putting more distance between us.

Ox wraps a massive hand around one of the beams, his knuckles bruised and raw. “You don’t understand, Annah. We need you! The Sanctuary will fail without you and Catcher. They’ll all die.” He tugs at the metal, picking apart the debris, and I kick at the pile again, shifting the rocks to narrow the gaps he’s creating.

Behind them shapes flicker, deeper grays in the black darkness. The dead. My heart stutters and then races. I step back again, the light cast over the Recruiters growing weaker.

“You should have thought of that before,” I shout at him.
The two other men start pulling at the boulders, and they’re so much stronger than I am that it won’t be long before they’ve dug a way through.

Not that they have much time before the Unconsecrated will overwhelm them.

I start running. “I know these tunnels,” I yell back at him, following the curve of the tracks as they meet with another set. I stumble over the metal rails but manage to catch myself. “You won’t find me!” It’s a lie but he doesn’t have to know.

My muscles have already cooled and they pull and strain as I run harder, gasping for air. I don’t care about the pain. I can live with that if I can get distance. I need to lose them.

I know the smartest thing would be for me to drop the lantern, that it must be easy for them to follow the light, but then I’d be blind. Every time I tripped they’d draw closer. Every time I had to hesitate over my footing, they’d gain on me.

Besides, I’m not that desperate. Yet.

I lose sense of everything in the almost-darkness: who I am, where I’ve been, how much time I’ve been down here. I just run: one step illuminated, then the next, and always the moans and Ox’s shouting behind, constant, grating.

I think about pressing myself into a crack in the wall and holding my machete tight, waiting for Ox to thunder past and then striking. I’d slice along the back of his leg first, nicking the tendons and hobbling him. Then I’d kick him onto his face and make the final blow against the back of his neck.

My own vicious thoughts make me shudder. Could I really do that? Take his life?

He deserves it, of that I’m sure. But as I run I think about the sound of Catcher’s blade slicing through Conall’s spine.

It was murder. A brutality that still weakens me. Because where do I go when I cross that line? I’m not ready to make such a decision, and so instead I keep careening into the darkness, since as long as I’m moving I’m still safe.

Or at least, that’s the illusion I promise myself.

Eventually, the feel of the air in the tunnel shifts and I notice a glow around the bend ahead that looks almost like daylight. My heart pounds faster. A point of desperate hope spreads through me—it could be a way out.

And then reality crashes down, pulling me to a standstill. If there’s an opening, it will be filled with Unconsecrated. There could be a swarm of them just ahead. Moans already fill the tunnel, making it impossible to figure out whether they’re in front of me or behind.

I hold the machete in one hand and the lantern in the other as I scurry forward, ready for anything. After a dozen more steps the ceiling arches away from me, soaring up in a graceful curve over my head, and the walls swing wide, revealing a short looping platform dusted with snow.

It’s like walking into someplace sacred, the way the ice crystals shimmer in the air. Recessed in the ceiling, windows with intricate patterns gaze down on me, most of them blocked by thick leaden grids but a few still full of colored glass. There’s a hallowed stillness to the station, to the joining and breaking of vaulted domes that collect the sound of my pursuers and dissipate them into a meaningless chorus.

To run feels profane but I have no choice. I press my back against the inner curved wall and shuffle my way along it, my gaze sliding over the brown and green tiles interlocked along the arches and then fixing on the windows above.

Already I see them straining. See the cracks. Who knows
how many hands pound against them? Ahead of me another tunnel looms, a black abyss ready to swallow me, but before I step into it Ox calls my name.

It’s not that he’s there that surprises me. What surprises me is that he’s alone, one hand pressed to the edge of the platform and the other to his chest. He just stands there as if he’s sure that I won’t run.

Or that even if I do, he’ll catch me.

“G
o away!” I scream as I keep walking backward from him. Drifts of snow shimmer in piles around the platform and along the tracks, fallen through the broken windows above.