Stormbreacher - Book 1 of Titanomachy Series

Chapter 19: Shot in the Dark

It was about a half-mile walk to the next stop. Stinger's stubby legs wore out long before then, and he buried himself in my soggy sweater hood for warmth. Everything was sinister and quiet now–only the echo of our own footsteps and chattering teeth crying weakly out to the darkness. I wondered who was the last person to walk through here before us, last to breathe in and smell the musty desolation. Must've been a long time ago.

At least we were safe. Probably. As long as there wasn't anything to stop us on the middle levels, it was a straight shot home and Mom would be none the wiser.

"What do you think Project: Basilisk will do now?" Stinger suddenly whispered.

His words boomed through the hall and startled me. I jumped. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"They're not gonna just let you go, you know that. We broke in. They're gonna be looking for you."

I groaned, almost too tired to even consider the future consequences. "Zeno's the only one who's gotten a good look at my face, and he doesn't know my name. He kind of sucks at his job anyway."

"He sucks at his job?" Stinger repeated. "I remember the abandoned buildings, he choked you out immediately!"

"And he didn't finish the job, and here we are. He sucks."

"So what if someone else does his job for him? Who's better at it?"

"Who else do they have?"

We both fell silent. Stinger had a point, admittedly, but I didn't have the energy to think about it right now.

The next stop appeared not far along the tracks. This one was even more damaged than the stop we came from, though it didn't seem like the effects of age and water damage. The doors were violently ripped out of their slides, and glass fragments crunched under my sneakers and nipped for my skin. All of the windows were webbed with cracks; some were missing entirely.

I felt my goosebumps tighten. This was the damage from the panic to leave the underground, when the hurricane came and flooded it out. The result was a city-wide crowd crush and the hollowed tomb of ancient bunkers. It was empty now, but in a way, I could still feel the suffocation—hundreds of people clambering onto a station meant for a few dozen, shoving and screaming...

I swept the glass fragments out of the way before I climbed onto the platform. "Stinger, don't stand on the floor. There's glass and it'll cut you bad."

"Yeah, I know."

I scrambled onto the platform with some effort and scanned the room. It mostly had the same layout as the first one, though anything of note had been trampled. There were more exits, though, and a mostly undamaged map on the opposite wall. I crossed the room to study it, crystals crunching beneath my feet.

"Look at this." I pointed at the red YOU ARE HERE marker in the center. To the northwest of us, there was a section outlined in blue labelled "Residential Areas". It was within walking distance, but observing it closer, there was a long blue line dividing the two areas. The legend identified the blue line as part of the water transport network, and the paths between the residencies and the train station cut right through it.

"Dammit." I mumbled. The water transport systems fed a decent-sized park nearby, so the water channels were out in the open. It was almost certainly flooded—maybe it was even draining into the flood we just came from. "Stinger, we can't go through there. It's flooded because of this drainage pipe cutting through."

"We can't?" He squinted at the map. "What about through the other area? The one to the right of the residential area?"

He pointed at another orange sector labelled "Agrarian and Botany Development". I frowned. The main water pipe did have branching pipes going into the agrarian sector, but there was no way to know if it was flooded, too. Just because there was a breach farther down the drainage system didn't mean that there was one higher up. The water was collected from the ocean, flowed from east to west. The agrarian sector was to the east, upstream of the breach, so it wasn't like it was affected by it.