The shiver that took hold of me right then was more profound than any the cold had gotten out of me so far.
I had to resist the urge to accuse her. She’d been waiting. Not warning me, only waiting.
But the rules and expectations were different here. She knew I was friendly-ish now, but she couldn’t know before.
I couldn’t let myself blame her. She’d been genuine in other respects, and quite frankly, I couldn’t afford to give up even a tentative friend.
Not the first time I’d been in that position.
“Hey,” I said. I didn’t have a name for her. “Green Eyes? Can I call you that?”
“Yes. I like that.”
“Green Eyes, if and when I do fall in, if you can’t or won’t help me get somewhere with a secure grip, can you kill me instead?”
“Kill you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just… no offense, but that sounds like a torment that would be custom-made for me in hell.”
A pause.
“After I kill you, can I eat you?”
Eat me?
She said it so very casually. I might have felt a chill run down my spine if my spine wasn’t already all chills.
“Go to town,” I said. Better to say yes than risk her not killing me.
I heard a short, reedy laugh. “Cool.”
She said it in a way that made me think it would be spelled ‘Kewl’. I suddenly had a very clear vision of her as a teenager, stumbling into here much the same way I had.
I wasn’t drying off, and the darkness was disorienting. Without my eyes to go by, I was very concerned I’d lose my sense of up and down and simply teeter over into the water.
I broke eye contact with her, looking toward the light further down the tunnel, hoping to center myself.
Big mistake. It left phantom lights against my eyelids, making it twice as hard to see the ledge.
I was more blind than ever, with only two feet of damp, slick ledge and a watery grave before me, a cannibalistic Other waiting to dine on me.
“If you’re looking for a way past, it’s one big stride to get by,” she said. “You’ll want to lean on something. There’s a big branch here. A couple of really good places to put your wood there.”
I reached out blindly for the tree branch.
A hand seized the plank, and I felt my blood go cold.
She moved it, and I felt it scrape.
I tested, pushing, and found it firm.
Would she move it away as I made the step?
“Can I trust you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
I hesitated. “Can you lie?”
“…You know about that?”
“About?”
“That some things down here can’t lie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I do.”
“I’m not one of those things. They don’t tend to be very pleasant, just so you know.”
“I know,” I said.
On a level, I’m one of them.
I made the leap of faith, a blind step into utter darkness, my heart dropping out of my chest as the branch gave. The plank slipped.
A moment’s give. Something stopped the plank from sliding free. It provided the resistance I needed. I felt my foot set down on Terra Firma.
I pushed, carrying my momentum forward, and I felt a momentary resistance as I pulled the plank away from the branch.
She let go of it. She’d been holding it secure.
I was upright, safe on the other side.
Would I be able to make it back the same way?
“Thank you,” I said. “I don’t have much to offer you in gratitude. I’m sorry.”
“Then, can we keep talking until we have to go separate ways?”
“Yeah? I might be benefiting from that more than you are,” I said. “You can ask what you want.”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Just hearing another voice or having someone listen is nice. Usually the only one I hear is the little man that sells snails, if I find something I can barter.”
I nodded slowly. “Then… can you tell me more about how to get out? We got distracted.”
“I got distracted, it’s so easy to do, when you focus on the now all the time,” she said. She was falling behind me, her already quiet voice growing fainter. “Moment.”
I heard the faintest of splashes. A metal-on metal scrape.
Her voice came from a new location. “Can’t stay afloat on my own. Have to grab stuff, or I get pulled under. Um. So if you want out, the only way I know is to go through. Change, adapt, eat, and get stronger. Then there’s places where it’s closer to the real world than others. You gotta get to those places, and it’s not easy. One part, you have to swim against a current that’s three times as fast as this, and you have to do it for a while without a chance to surface.”
“That’s not an option for me, then,” I said.
“I don’t know about any others, really.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“But if you do get to one of the exits, there’s usually someone or something there, or so I hear. They sit there and they get in the way and they make you work to get past. Usually, you’re really tired, and they eat you. Or you can put up a bit of a fight, and they make you promise to do something for them. To carry something back.”
I nodded slowly, continuing my slow, careful, shuffling progress. “There’s no way out that doesn’t force me to give up my Self?”
“Sort of, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“What is it?”
“Sometimes someone comes, and they pick a few of us and take us with them when they leave.”
“These people that come, are they monsters?”
“Very sometimes monsters, but mostly it’s people. I thought at first you were maybe one of them.”
“But?”
“But I think if you were, you wouldn’t have gotten stuck where you did.”
“Ah.”
“And your arms, when I saw them…”
“Yeah,” I said. “My tattoos have a mind of their own. I don’t really get it.”
“If you’re thinking someone’s just going to show up and help, I wouldn’t count on it. They only come for the worst monsters, and I don’t even think they ever come looking for anyone specific. That would be almost impossible because this place is a maze and it gets more like a maze all the time, when stuff breaks down. Just like people break down. It’s just what this place is.”
“Where things that fall through the cracks go,” I said.
“Yeah? I like that,” she said.
“What would you call this place?”
“Dunno. I think of it as the sewers,” she said.
They weren’t really sewers, but I didn’t correct her.
“Or the compost heap,” she said.
“Compost?”
“That’s how I think of it. It’s what this place is, what it’s meant to do. It wears you down and grinds you up, like the water would have done to me if I hadn’t been rescued. The mold gets you, or the rats gnaw you up, or something. Then you’re gone. Some like me eat and we get by, but we have to fight constantly and in the fighting we get worn out and hurt too, so we get worn down there. The strongest… the strongest eat and get powerful. And because they eat a lot of things and they get scarred, and they get ugly, and maybe they lose some big part of whatever they were before they came here. They get composted,” she said. “Then they leave, and I dunno what happens next.”