“You’re sure it says ‘Primary Control’? Absolutely certain?”
“If it doesn’t,” Laura said, her eyes still fixed on the wall map, “then we’ve been reading it wrong the entire time. That’s definitely the same name as on the other map.”
That changed everything. “Do you see a direct line from us to there? Tersine can’t possibly know about this, we could cut right underneath her forces direct to Primary Control!”
Laura shook her head. “I… damn it all, if I knew which stop this was, I could answer that. Looks like it might be this one but I can’t tell for sure. Could be this one, too.”
Suddenly, winning the battle didn’t matter nearly as much. Killing Tersine’s army was entirely besides the point if we could just slip right past them unseen and strike at the very goal she’d come here to achieve. Maybe we could fit an entire attack force down there; or maybe it just needed to be a few of us on our own, the Blueroser soldiers having served their purpose.
“We need to tell your mother about this,” I said.
Laura bit her lip, unable to tear her eyes away from the map. “Yeah, we do.”
“Listen, there’s only two stops that are specially marked out, and we’ll be able to figure out which one it is once we’re underground. The entire Cassandran army is breathing down our necks, if we’re going to do this it has to be now.”
There was a brief moment where I genuinely thought that I was going to have to leave her behind and tell Lady Halflance about it all myself. Then Laura shook herself out of her fugue, gave me an affirmative nod, and started for the door.
Of course, making it back to headquarters was far from easy. Even though only a couple of minutes had passed, the situation had gotten noticeably worse. We were moving through a war zone now, plain and simple: the battle lines had moved forward until they fully engulfed us. Every street, every building, and every block was shaped by battle in some way, whether that meant being a bunker for one side or the other, being reshaped in order to control lines of access, or being actively fought over.
In one sense that made it easier. Most soldiers were attuned to looking for numbers, so two humans moving through an area drew less attention than the squad on the opposite side. We caught a lot less direct attention than we had previously, though the danger was still quite present in the form of stray bullets and shrapnel. I ended up taking several hits for Laura.
But we did eventually make our way back to headquarters. Lady Halflance barely noticed our return: she was entirely too busy commanding the fight whilst being completely terrified out of her mind. That fear didn’t show, of course; but it hardly mattered. You could smell it coming off of her. It took a minute or two to even get her attention—not long in the scheme of things, but entirely too long in the moment—and explain what we had found.
I had expected that Lady Halflance’s reaction would be positive, a grin of cunning or a chuckle of triumph. No such luck. Her expression deepened in its bitterness, until I was afraid the sheer stress visible on her features was going to cause her to burst something.
“Absolutely not,” she said.
Laura clenched her fists. “What?”
“I… excuse me? We have a direct route to our main objective!”
“One which we absolutely cannot exploit. How wide was this staircase, hm?”
I shrugged. “Maybe… four people’s width?”
“Could you fit a halftrack down it?”
I was forced to shake my head “no”.
“Then it is useless to us,” Halflance said. “If we had the time to fully survey it and search for other exits, we might have been able to use it for maneuver, but as of right now? Useless.”
“Okay, fine, we can’t send the entire army down there,” I said. “They’d be able to follow us in, besides. But we can at least send down a small group, a strike force, enough to—”
“I’m not leaving,” said Halflance.
And suddenly she looked so… tired. So very tired. Lady Halflance sagged, leaning on her previously-decorative cane, and rubbed her forehead with her free hand. Would I have been able to coordinate a battle of this size for as long as she had?
“I have a duty to these women,” she continued. “Not to abandon them in this darkest of hours. I cannot leave the field.”
“Then bloody stay behind,” Laura said with a scowl. “Send me and Emma and… I don’t know, Charcharias?”
“She has a duty as well. The injured pile up with each passing minute.”
“Rook?”
Halflance shook her head. “She remains by my side, for safety’s sake.”
I grasped for anyone else who could come along with us. “What about… Anna and Unity?”
“I don’t know where they’ve gone off to. And I’m not spending the effort to look just for the sake of this fantasy.”
Which left just the two of us. On our own. I shivered, even though it was blisteringly hot.
“Do you think we’re going to be able to win this?” I said.
Lady Halflance stooped down and lowered her voice. “No, I don’t. But it is my duty to carry this through until I find out whether or not I am wrong.”
“Then let us go. Just the two of us. We can travel light, move fast, get to the center of this and finish Tersine off once and for all.”
“You’re mad,” Halflance hissed. “You’ll accomplish nothing but getting yourselves both killed. I will not allow my daughter to throw her life away recklessly.”
Laura, apparently, was able to hear us, despite our whispering.
“It won’t be throwing it away, mother,” she said, her voice a quiet growl. “If I die, it’ll be because I did everything I could to stop her, not because I sat in a foxhole until the machine rifles marched their way on top of me.”
I stared directly down the barrel of Halflance’s gaze. “Remember what we talked about.”
“Bastard.”
“Please. What are you really giving her right now?”
Lady Halflance stood up, once more unruffled. She observed her surroundings with the commanding presence of a legendary general. “Quartermaster,” she said. “I require two additional packs. Focus on food, water, shelter, basic survival materials. No rifles, revolvers only. And light, lots of light.”
The tension letting itself out of my body was an explosion of relief. Laura grabbed me and pulled me into a tight hug, unable to put together two words in the proper order. She clearly had no idea how I’d managed to sway her mother. I’d explain later.
But at that moment, we had the go-ahead. Relief faded quickly into fear. Sure, we weren’t going to be stuck in a losing battle anymore, but all of our other allies were staying behind. We would be going with all the supplies Halflance could provide, but that was still only two backpacks against a total unknown. We had no way of knowing if this was even going to work; the fact that Tersine hadn’t used the tunnels to attack us from below meant she almost definitely didn’t know about them, but that still left a whole host of potential dangers.
Always moving forward. We’d settled on this path, and something with decent odds of success was still better than remaining at the oasis.
It was the better part of an hour later when a Blueroser soldier handed us our two backpacks. Mine was too big for my frame, but considering I couldn’t get tired, it was fine. The battle was still raging outside, the air now thick with the scent of blood and gunpowder, but the fact that the command post hadn’t gotten sacked meant things were going well. Laura wanted to leave at once. I wanted to talk with Lady Halflance.
“What are you still doing here?” she said as I approached.
“I just wanted to thank you for letting this happen,” I said. “And… leave a message for the others, in case I don’t come back.”
Halflance raised an eyebrow. “Very well. Speak freely.”
“I guess I… I just wanted to thank everyone. Amina, Anna, Unity, Rook, all of them. Everyone who helped me. Hold out hope, no matter how long it takes. I’m not easy to put down. And if I somehow don’t make it, I just want you all to remember that I went out fighting.”
Halflance nodded. “The message will be relayed. But on a personal note…” She grimaced, as though the words pained her. “I have entrusted the safety of my daughter to you. Do. Not. Fail her.”
I returned the nod and went on my way. Laura and I slipped through the battlefield with relative ease, now that we knew the route and where all the cover was. It still felt as though we were about to die the entire journey; wouldn’t have wanted to do it twice. There was little hesitation once we reached the subway station itself. With lanterns in hand, we descended into the dark.
Those lanterns were the two most complex pieces of equipment we’d been given, and the only thing that made this underground journey even vaguely feasible. They had a battery life upward of ten hours, and with an external device we could recharge it using muscle power. Mine, seeing as I wasn’t going to get tired as easily. Other than that, our backpacks were stuffed almost entirely full of portable, condensed foodstuffs, cooking implements, and a single tent. So long as water was available we could keep walking for a couple of weeks.
The first step was figuring out which direction to walk. Without the time pressure of being on the surface, Laura could take her time reading the station map molded into the plaster on the walls. After about twenty minutes, she sounded fairly convinced that she had determined which station we were standing in, and what route was best for making it to Primary Control. While she was doing that, I explored our surroundings, getting a feel for this long-abandoned labyrinth. The air was shockingly cool and, though not quite wet, surprisingly damp for being under the Desolation. I even found some places where water dripped out of the cracks in the smooth arched stone roof, meaning we weren’t going to die of thirst so long as we remained careful.
Then we set off down one of the tunnels. It was easy goings, much easier than above: there was no terrain, nothing to prevent us from moving at full hiking speed. Only when we were a few hours removed from that starting point did it really begin to sink in how incredible it was that this tunnel had remained intact for however long it had been since the fall of the Forebearers.
We hadn’t seen much in the way of branches by the time we had to stop for the night. Ten miles we’d walked, maybe further, and we weren’t even at the next station. This was going to be a long journey. We stopped by another place where clean water dripped from the ceiling and refilled both our canteens and our lanterns overnight, camping out on the thin ledge between the trackway below and the edge of the ceiling’s vault.
As it turned out, it wasn’t until late in the second day of walking that we came across anything besides further tunnel. The kind of strange malaise and tension produced by that level of monotony is impossible to put into words. After enough hours with nothing but the eerie green illumination of the electric lantern revealing identical stretches of tunnel in every direction, it became difficult to shake the feeling that one had stumbled into a manifestation of purgatory.
But, at last, the tunnel came to an end. At the drop of a hat, the narrow confines opened up into another grand vaulted hall, multiple sets of tracks, benches and long-emptied stands of some description spreading out around us. This second station was different to the first in one key respect, however. That being the skeletons.
Have you ever seen those photos of the excavation at Pompeii, where they filled the hollows in the ash drifts with plaster to create images of all the people who’d died? Some of the buildings were piled high with people, a thick carpet of bodies that had all tried to flee the fire and smoke and been extinguished. Replace the three-dimensional forms with scattered human bones and you start to get an idea of what we walked into. There were narrow corridors where you could walk without crushing somebody’s skeleton underfoot, but nearly every other surface was densely carpeted with bodies.
“Well,” I said. “This is archaeology if ever I’ve seen it. Conclusions?”
“Fuck you. These were people.”
“I know that! How’d they die? What can you say about who these people are?”
“I’d need a whole dig for that,” Laura said. “They’re… they’re probably Forebearers. It’d take at least a few years for them to have decayed this completely, which rules out anything recent, and there’s no other human population out here big enough to produce something like this.”
“Okay. I’m guessing they must have died all at once for them to accumulate like this. What do they call it? A bone-bed?”
Laura nodded. She fell into a grim silence, and I could see by her expression that she was trying to apply some sense of analysis.
“I think… I think they all starved down here.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Two things: first is that I can’t see any signs of violence. I’d need a more thorough search to make a conclusion, but all the disruption I see is from scavengers. No blade-marks, no bullet-holes, no blunt impact. They died peacefully. And this pattern…”
She gestured at the floor, and at first I wasn’t sure what she was pointing at. Then I realized it. The pathways; she was pointing to the clear pathways in which we were standing.
“If they’d all died suddenly you’d expect random scattering. These pathways are for access. Implying that they arranged themselves like this, maybe laying down one by one as they grew weak, and then died there.”
“So hundreds of people fled into a subway station, but they didn’t have enough food, and they would rather starve than return to the surface.”
“Fleeing whatever brought the Forebearers to ruin.”
I raised my lantern, trying to illuminate it all, just to give myself an idea of the magnitude of what we had walked into. The green light fell unobstructed across the entire station, turning the black shadows into faint glimmering green. Something loomed out of the dark that made my jaw drop. Heedlessly I rushed towards it, racing into the bone-bed and sending the high-pitched sounds of shattering bone echoing through the huge chamber. Laura yelled at me to stop, but I wasn’t going to.
I came to a halt in front of the wall. Now, up close, I could see it for real, that thing that had drawn my attention. Laura pulled up behind me, ready to berate me for damaging a site until she, too, was rendered awestruck by what I had seen.
It was a carving on the wall, crude but elaborate, as though etched by the desperate hand of one who needed to convey their message before the countdown to inevitable doom was complete. Ten feet high and easily a hundred feet from one side to the other, Laura and I stood before a grand relief that explained, in whatever language those unfortunates who took shelter here had available to them, exactly why they had fled underground to die.