“It was terribly difficult to build,” the other woman added. “But it’s so much nicer. Makes you think of the old days, doesn’t it? With a sky and sunlight? Trees and plants?”
Marasi numbly took a biscuit and bit into it, partly to keep the blonde woman from forcing them on her. It was good, Marasi noticed absently as her mind raced. These people … they’d been tricked into believing the world was ending. Forced to live in a bunker underground. But why? Surely the Set had plenty of willing participants in their schemes; why keep some of them so ignorant? And how did this relate to the impending army or the bomb?
A few other people soon piled in, along with Fialia. Three women and one man, a stocky fellow with a belt full of stone tools.
“No metal,” Marasi mumbled.
“Well, naturally,” the blonde woman said. “The metal mutants can sense it. The only metal we dare use is a little aluminum to make lights and the speakers for the public address system.”
The four others huddled, gaping at Marasi. Did she really look that much like she’d survived an apocalypse? She supposed her outfit was a little worse for wear, after multiple gunfights and struggles for her life. Plus the rucksack, and having no chance to wash up …
Well, maybe she did.
“You poor people,” Marasi whispered.
“She’s in shock,” said mousy Drenya.
“Can you tell us what it’s like up there?” the man with the toolbelt said, stepping forward, a cloth cap in his fingers. “Are the ashfalls still strong? It’s been a year since we saw an outsider.”
“There have been others?” Marasi asked, confused.
“Once in a while someone from above finds their way through the tunnels, and our protections, to the town,” the blonde woman said, patting her hands. “I keep telling the mayor that we don’t need those protections — that we can take in far more people than we have now. But Gave Entrone is a stubborn man. He insists that outsiders are too dangerous.”
“Gave,” Marasi said. “Your … mayor?”
“Yes, he’s from the other caverns originally,” the blonde woman said. “Ones underneath Elendel. There are several complexes, and occasionally people from that one move here.”
“Entrone is a tyrant,” the man with the tools said. “He won’t let us help the world above. Won’t let us search for survivors. Won’t even let us explore the caverns. And when people like you come—”
The blonde woman shot him a glare.
“It’s all right,” Marasi said. “I need to know. Please, there are secrets here you don’t understand.”
“Well,” the blonde woman said, “when outsiders like you arrive … they get shipped off to one of the other caverns. We never get to talk for long.”
“And they … tell you about the world above?” Marasi guessed, connecting the clues.
“A world of ashes,” one of the other women said. “A destroyed land full of terrible metal mutants.”
“I saw one once,” the man said. “A terrible, twisted thing. Poor soul. It broke in here, and the lord mayor’s security force killed it.”
A Hemalurgic abomination, Marasi guessed, let loose in here on purpose to keep these people frightened.
“Newcomers,” the woman said, “can’t help sharing how terrible things are — then get taken away. We think the lord mayor doesn’t want them frightening us.”
“Quite the contrary…” Marasi said. “They’re actors. Brought in to prove his lies.”
Marasi looked around the room, meeting their concerned eyes. They were worried for her. They had no idea.
The blonde woman patted Marasi’s hand yet again. “We keep hoping that we’ll get word that people we knew … had survived…”
“I had three daughters,” said the man with the tools. “In Bilming? It’s been corroding me ever since I was saved, not knowing what happened to them. Please, miss. Do you have news of any pockets of survivors up above? The last refugee who came down here, he said the entire city was a wasteland, completely destroyed. But … some people must have lived…”
Marasi frowned. “Wait. You were saved? How did you end up here?”
The blonde woman forced another biscuit on her, and shared a glance with the others. “It was a random lottery,” she finally said. “The scientists who discovered the impending eruptions realized they could save only a few. So they made an impossible decision, randomly selecting people.”
“It wasn’t completely random,” one of the women said. “It was weighted toward women of childbearing age, for obvious reasons. And an emphasis on Allomancers or those from the lines of Allomancers. Again for obvious reasons.”
“We couldn’t bring our families,” the man said, looking down. “We argued for it, once we woke here. Oh, how we tried to get the managers to see reason. But … eventually … we felt the earth shake, and we knew…”
“Then the lord mayor arrived,” the blonde woman said, “and instituted stricter protocols.”
“Tyrant,” the man muttered.
“We still feel it shaking now and then,” one of the women said, looking up. “From the explosions of the Ashmounts. It must be deafening out there. We are occasionally allowed up to glimpse your world, but not often. Too dangerous. Still, I’ve seen how it is out there. The distant rubbled city, the red sun, the suffocating ash. Like a funeral shroud…”
“How do you see these things?” Marasi asked.
“An observation room,” the woman explained. “There’s a ladder to it at the edge of the cavern.”
That wouldn’t lead to the room Marasi had seen with the projector — they were too far from there. She suspected that entire room was a test chamber, and that these people were somehow shown something more authentic-seeming, without such an obvious light and projector.
Regardless, she was now certain that was what the ruse was for. Along with actors sent to reinforce the illusion — who were then taken away “to another cavern,” so that they couldn’t slip up and reveal the truth. As long as none of the actual subjects of the experiment were allowed to leave, no one would ever know.
But why? So much work, for what?
Except … Allomancers.
“Some of you are Allomancers?” Marasi said.
“Yes,” the blonde woman said. “I’m a Rioter, though not even my family knew about my powers. Fialia is a Lurcher. Kessi a Soother.”
“I had two Allomancer parents,” the man said, “but I never got any powers myself. The others are similar.”
That was the final piece. Marasi knew what was happening. And as she put it together, another revelation struck her. She did know the blonde woman. There was a reason she was familiar.
She was Marasi’s distant cousin Armal Harms: a woman who had been kidnapped by Miles Hundredlives and the Vanishers seven years ago, during Wax’s first case in the city after his return.
57
Marasi should have left right then. There was little she could learn from the people caught in the Set’s experiment. Yet the implications weighed her down. So she sat in that plush seat with a biscuit, feeling overwhelmed, surrounded by people who’d been lied to for years.
Wax had been the first to notice that the kidnapped people had a history of Allomancy in their families. They’d thought them all women at first, though a few other mysterious kidnappings during the same time period had proven to be men.
Marasi and Wax had searched for these people for years, on and off. They’d worried that the Set had done terrible things to them, but had never imagined anything like this. Locking them all up in a bunker? Convincing them that the world had ended?