There was no time for questions. There was no time for doubt. The old woman's words—"We are going to the Undercity" "The war for the light is about to begin"—were a declaration, and the expressions of the men behind her were a grim, silent affirmation. I was their prisoner and their guest, their new, temporary hope.
"Alright," I said, my voice low and hard, the magun still heavy in my hand. I pulled Nara tight against my chest. "We're with you. But we have to move. Now. They're coming."
The old woman, the Matron of this forgotten world, nodded once, her ancient, wrinkled face a mask of iron resolve. "Garr," she rasped. "You're on point. Get us to the 'Drip.'"
The large man with the rebar, Garr, gave me one last, deeply suspicious look. This alliance was a-thing of pure, desperate necessity, a bond of shared enemies, not of trust. He grunted his assent and moved to the shattered doorway, peering into the bleak, grey street.
"Hold on tight, kid," I whispered to Nara, my voice a strained vibration against her ear. "We're going for a run."
"It's clear," Garr called back.
We burst from the hovel, a strange, desperate parade. Garr in the lead, his head on a swivel, his rebar held like a rifle. The Matron just behind him, her movements surprisingly quick and nimble, like a shadow. Then me, with Nara clinging to my chest, my magun raised, sweeping the dark, empty windows and alleyways around us. The other two men took the rear, their heavy pipes a grim, last line of defense.
The Neutral Sector was silent. It was a city of ghosts, the only sound our own frantic, mismatched footsteps on the cracked, uneven pavement. The air was cold, oppressive, and carried the stench of rust and decay. But this was a new kind of silence. Not the silence of emptiness, but the silence of a hundred unseen eyes watching from the shadows. The entire sector was holding its breath.
We ran for two blocks, a lifetime of terror-fueled adrenaline. We were heading deeper, further from the light of the Faction-controlled city, toward the great, unseen western wall.
And then, it happened.
A brilliant, sterile, blue light flooded the far end of the long street we were crossing. It was a searchlight, cold and precise, and it sliced through the gloom, painting the collapsing buildings in a harsh, alien glow.
With the light came the sound. A heavy, rhythmic, metallic clang-clang-clang.
"Sentinels!" Garr hissed, shoving the Matron back into the shadow of a rusted-out doorway. I dove in after them, my heart a trapped bird, slamming against my ribs.
My blood ran cold. Two of them. Two Administrator Sentinels, the same kind of merciless, efficient machines that had patrolled the pristine halls of Sector Beta. They were here. In the Neutral Sector. They had crossed the line. Krauss wasn't just watching this place; he was invading it. The quarantine had been broken, not by the blight, but by him. For us. For her.
"Subject: Kael," a synthesized, emotionless voice boomed from the machine, its volume amplified to shake the very windows. "Fugitive 819. Halt and surrender the anomaly. Non-compliance will be met with lethal force."
The Sentinels advanced, their heavy feet crushing the debris in their path. Their optical sensors, a cold, red light, swept the street, methodically scanning every shadow, every broken window. They would find us. In ten seconds, they would be on top of us.
"Back!" I whispered, my voice frantic. "We have to hide! Find another street!"
"No," the Matron rasped, her voice sharp. "They'll have the main routes locked. They'll box us in. This way. Faster!"
She grabbed my arm with a surprisingly strong, bony hand and pulled me, not back, but deeper into the alley. It was a dead end. A solid, ten-foot-high brick wall, stained and crumbling. A trap.
"You led us into a trap!" I spun, my magun coming up, my back to the wall, preparing to make a final, pathetic stand.
The clang-clang-clang was deafening now. They were at the mouth of the alley. "Fugitive detected. Final warning."
The Matron ignored me. She shoved her hand against a specific, grimy, unremarkable brick in the wall. "The Factions built this city to keep us out," she hissed, her voice a low, triumphant growl. "But we, the forgotten, know its cracks."
With a deep, groaning sound of metal on metal, a sound that had been buried under a decade of rust and grime, a section of the wall moved. It receded a foot, then slid to the side, revealing a pitch-black, yawning hole, no bigger than a cellar door.
"Now, move!" she shrieked.
There was no time to think. Garr and the other two men dove in headfirst. The Matron scrambled after them. I turned, my heart in my throat, just as the Sentinel's red eye-light flooded the alley. I threw myself through the opening, shielding Nara with my own body, and landed hard on a pile of damp, cold earth.
Behind me, Garr slammed a heavy, iron bar into place. The door slid shut, the sound of it locking in with a heavy, definitive thud.
A split-second later, a massive, concussive force slammed into the other side of the door. The Sentinel's attack. The reinforced iron groaned, but held.
We were in absolute, pitch blackness. The clanging, the synthesized voice, the entire outside world... it was gone, muffled to a dull, distant thrum.
We were safe. For now.
The air was cold. It was the cold of a tomb. It was thick with the smell of damp earth, of rust, of old, stagnant water, and something else... a faint, chemical tang, like old, leaking power conduits.
A sickly, greenish-yellow light flared to life. Garr had cracked a chem-light. It cast long, dancing shadows, revealing the space around us. We were on a narrow, rusted-iron landing. In front of us, a set of steep, crumbling stairs descended into a vast, dark void.
"Where are we?" I whispered, my voice a hollow, echoing sound in the cavernous space.
"The old maintenance grid," the Matron rasped, her breathing heavy from the exertion. "The roots, like I said. Built before the city, to maintain the original foundation. Before... the fall. When they built their prison, they sealed the upper levels. But they forgot the deep roots." She grinned, a grim, skeletal expression in the green light. "Now, it's our home."
I secured my grip on Nara. "Lead the way."
The descent was a new kind of nightmare. The iron stairs were slick with a decade of accumulated damp and mildew. They groaned and buckled under our weight, the rusted metal flaking away with every step. I held Nara with one arm, my other hand sliding along the cold, wet stone wall, my magun a useless weight in its holster.
We descended for what felt like an eternity. The last, muffled sounds of the Factions above faded, replaced by the steady drip... drip... drip... of water echoing in the vast darkness.
We finally reached the bottom. The stairs opened onto a massive, cylindrical tunnel, as wide as a main city street, but utterly dark. Pipes, thick as a man's torso, lined the curved walls, their surfaces weeping a slow, steady stream of condensation.
"This is it?" I asked. "This is where you live? In a wet, dark tunnel?"
"This is the 'Drip,'" Garr grunted, his voice full of a strange, territorial pride. "The entryway. Don't be so quick to judge, Faction-man."
The Matron didn't speak. She just began to walk, her form a small, hunched shadow in the green glow of Garr's chem-light. We followed. I could hear... movement. Faint, scuffling sounds in the distance. Whispers, echoing off the curved walls. We were not alone.
We walked for another five minutes, the tunnel sloping gently downward. Then, it opened up.
My steps faltered. I stopped dead.
The tunnel emptied into a cavern so vast my eyes couldn't find the ceiling. It was a massive, natural-looking abyss beneath the city's foundations, a place that shouldn't exist.
And it was alive.
It was a city. A hidden, secret, underground shantytown. Makeshift hovels, built from the same salvaged scrap metal and splintered wood as the ones above, were bolted directly into the cavern walls, clinging to the massive pipes like barnacles. Strings of dim, salvaged light bulbs, powered by some unseen, jury-rigged source, created small, sad pools of yellow light in the oppressive dark. Cook-fires burned in old oil drums, their smoke rising to a ceiling that was lost in the gloom.
Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people were here. Gaunt, hollow-eyed faces, pale from a lack of sunlight, turned to watch us. They were the Neutral Sector's real population. The ones who lived so far beneath the cracks, the Factions didn't even know they existed. This was the Undercity.
The Matron walked forward, and the crowd of ghosts parted for her, their gazes filled with a mixture of fear, reverence, and desperate, soul-crushing hope. She was their leader. Their prophet.
But their gazes... they weren't for her. Not really.
As we passed, their eyes, one by one, shifted from the Matron to the small, sleeping child in my arms.
The whispers, which had been a low, suspicious murmur, began to grow. They swelled, echoing off the cavern walls.
"It's her..."
"The Child... she's returned... after ten years..."
"The old mother was right. The prophecy..."
"The light. She's brought the light back..."
One by one, the pale, forgotten residents of the Undercity began to fall to their knees. A man with a ragged beard. A young woman who looked barely older than me, clutching her own, thin-limbed child. An old, scarred fighter. They knelt in the mud and the grime, their faces, full of a terrifying, fanatical hope, turned up toward Nara.
I held her tighter, a new, cold dread replacing my fear of pursuit. I had escaped Krauss. I had escaped the Sentinels. But I had just delivered a living, breathing messiah to her new, underground cult.
I wasn't a fugitive anymore. I was a holy relic's guard. And my problems, I realized, had just become infinitely, horrifyingly, more complex.