“Good. We may need them. We’ll try to reach the apartment.”
Yalena just nodded. They set out, slogging through thigh-deep water. It was hard work and the water was cold, but she kept them moving steadily. They rested once every half-hour, heading north. When they finally reached the area near their building, Kafari found a ladder that led up to another manhole cover. The sun had long-since set, so they should be able to scuttle across the street and into their building under cover of darkness. Someone might spot them, but she was hopeful that the crisis underway downtown would keep the P-Squads too busy elsewhere to take note of their emergence from the sewers.
She was nearly to the top of the ladder when she smelled smoke. Kafari hesitated, trying to hear through the slots in the grate. The night was far too noisy, but she couldn’t tell what it was, making that noise. So she put her shoulder against the cover and pushed up one edge, lifting it no more than the width of her hand. A tidal wave of noise assaulted her ears and the smell of smoke touched the back of her throat with acrid fingers. She peered out cautiously. The instant she saw what was happening, Kafari dragged the cover back down again, careful not to let it drop with a bang. Then she slithered back down into the muck and stood huddled over for long moments, fighting the need to vomit and shivering so hard her bones clacked against one other.
“What’s wrong, Mom? What’s up there?”
She shook her head, unable to speak just yet, and gestured farther north. Wordlessly, Yalena took the flashlight and the lead. An hour later, reeling with exhaustion and the chill of the sewage sludge, Kafari called a halt. She didn’t want to eat anything, but they couldn’t keep moving all night without fuel. It was a long and hellish walk to the spaceport from here. They pulled supplies from their impromptu carry sacks, chewing and swallowing while leaning against the sewer-pipe’s walls. When they were ready to set out again, Yalena broke the long silence.
“What was up there, Mom? The last time we stopped?” Her voice took one a vicious edge Kafari had never heard, before. “Was it the Bolo, again?”
Kafari shook her head. “No.” She didn’t want to remember that glimpse into the lower circles of Dante’s hell.
“What, then?”
She met Yalena’s gaze. The glow of her daughter’s flashlight caught the fear in Yalena’s eyes, touched her skin with an eerie, red-tinged glow.
“Mom? What was it?”
Kafari swallowed heavily. “Lynch mobs.” She managed to hold down the nausea surging up with those two bitten-off words.
“Lynch mobs? But—” Yalena’s eyelashes flickered in puzzlement. “Who was there to lynch? Everybody in Madison supports POPPA.”
Kafari shook her head. “They went out to the collectives. My warning…” She stopped, swallowed the nausea back down. “Maybe my warning didn’t go out in time. Or maybe some people just didn’t believe it. Or they didn’t get out fast enough.” It hadn’t been the people hanging from light poles that had shaken her so desperately. It was the pieces of people…
“Where are we going?” Yalena asked in a whisper.
Her question dragged Kafari’s attention from the horrors in town to their immediate needs. “The spaceport.”
Her eyes widened, but she didn’t comment on it or ask another question. Yalena’s silence both relieved and distressed Kafari. Relieved, because she didn’t want to think too closely about the charnel house, back there, let alone what she intended to do about it, once Yalena was safe. Distressed, because it illustrated in painful terms Yalena’s sudden shift from trusting child to determined adult.
The next two hours were brutal, but they kept going, spurred on by the twin desires to remain whole and not end up as decorations for a light pole. By the time the sewer pipe narrowed enough to block their way, out near the edge of town where there wasn’t enough infrastructure to need a larger effluent pipe, Kafari was more than ready to give in, as well. Shaking with fatigue and chill, they stopped at the next manhole cover they reached. It was nearly midnight, by Kafari’s chrono. She whispered, “I’m going up top, to look.”
Yalena leaned against the sewer-pipe wall, gasping for breath while Kafari climbed slowly up to the cover. She listened hard, hearing nothing but silence. Deciding the risk was worthwhile, she pushed against the heavy metal cover, wincing as it scraped and shattered the silence. She held it up a few inches and peered out. The city behind them was an eerie sight. Great swaths of it were dark, where the power was off. A ruddy, baleful glow flickered in the heart of downtown, where multiple buildings were burning. There was no motor traffic anywhere.
She peered in every direction, finding only silence and darkness. They were, as she had hoped, near the edge of town, out past suburbia. Even navigating blind, she’d come within a few blocks of where she’d hoped to be. The slums of Port Town were off to their left, a disorderly sprawl of tenaments, bars, sleazy dance halls, nano-tatt parlors, brothels, and gambling dives, all of it ominously dark, tonight, but far from silent. Kafari didn’t want to know what was causing that particular combination of sounds. What she’d glimpsed back toward their apartment had been enough to give her nightmares for the next year.
To their right stood warehouses and abandoned factories with weeds growing in cracks in the parking lots. More or less dead ahead lay the spaceport, half a kilometer away. The power was on, courtesy of the emergency generators, which left the port buildings shining like stars in the stygian darkness. Kafari saw no police or federal troops, but that didn’t mean there weren’t patrols out. Given the total lack of traffic, Kafari was betting a martial-law curfew had been imposed. They couldn’t afford to be caught, now. But they had to get out of the sewer and into the spaceport. They had to risk it.
“We’ve got about half a kilometer to go.” They crawled up, shivering hard, and pulled themselves out onto the road. Kafari levered the manhole cover back into place, then they trudged toward Port Abraham. They didn’t go in by the road. Kafari took them across country, the long way around, in the opposite direction from Port Town, toward the engineering complex and her office. If there were guards anywhere, they’d be around the cargo warehouses near Port Town. As they approached the main terminal complex, Kafari’s puzzlement grew. The whole place was deserted. Not a cop, not a guard, nothing.
An uneasy glance over her shoulder revealed the baleful glow from fires that still smouldered. They were upwind of the smoke, but the magnitude of the disaster gave Kafari the clue she needed to understand the complete lack of port security. Every guard, cop, and P-Squad officer was needed elsewhere. Urgently so. They reached the engineering hub without incident. Kafari fished her ID out of a dripping pocket and headed toward the door she’d used five days a week for years. The reader scanned the card and they slipped through. Once inside, with the door clicked safely shut behind them, Kafari breathed a little easier.
“This way,” she said in a low murmur. “There are maintenance locker rooms back here.”
They limped their way through the back corridors, finding the lockers rooms and laundry facilities used by the maintenance and cleaning crews, cargo handlers, and shuttle pilots. They dropped their filthy, reeking clothes in a refuse bin, then hit the shower stalls. The feel of hot water and soap was glorious, working wonders for their spirits. Clean maintenance uniforms, socks, and shoes pilfered from lockers Kafari jimmied open made them feel almost human again.
Yalena held Kafari’s now-clean belly-band holster under an electric hand dryer, while Kafari busied herself cleaning her pistol at a sink, rinsing out the worst of the muck. She reassembled the gun, then wrapped the now-dry belly-band holster around her midsection and slid the gun into it. She didn’t even bother to conceal it under her shirt. Not tonight.