Memento Mori

2.5 - STREET RAT'S SECRET

The earlier dose of caffeine kicks my heart into gear as I lead Lain and Matthias through an increasingly narrowing series of service gaps between the residential complexes. Despite the quiet, I can feel the clock ticking like a physical weight around my neck. My steps accelerate into a quick jog the further we lose ourselves deeper in the twists and turns. Eventually, we dead-end in a dry alley with no doors or windows. Thick copper pipes funneling steam, water, and gas from the overcity infest the square-shaped space. Hot mist presses against my face like a spa towel. I pad along the left side of the alley, counting the pipes until I reach the eighteenth. "This is it."

"This is your backdoor?" Lain asks, searching the ground for some hidden exit. "A one-way street?"

"Not exactly." My hands are greased by sweat as I fit them around the eighteenth pipe. With a grunt and a full-body surge of strength, I pry it away from the wall, leaning it against the others. Beyond, a hairline gap in the concrete stretches ahead into impenetrable darkness. "There's a few abandoned airshafts in the layers above Dax's territory that Krey and I checked out last year. They're all hidden in the middle of the blocks, completely absent on the civic maps. A few even run all the way to the surface."

Matthias lets out a low whistle. "No shit. All the way?"

"Straight to the Electric Town." I rap my knuckles against the pipe, loosing a dull gong to echo around the confined space. "One of them goes down to the Vector Seven block. That's our way in."

"A nice, tiny, claustrophobic little way in," Lain mutters.

"There a problem?"

Her eyes dart to the gap, then her chest, then me. "Yeah. I'm not a pencil."

I cock my head for them to follow, already sidling to fit into the gap. "Just suck it up."

She waves a hand at my back. "Easy for you to say. You're built like a fifth-grader."

"Then buy me a fucking schooldress and cry about it on the way back."

Matthias chuckles as he squeezes in behind me.

Rough concrete scrapes against the fabric of my borrowed clothes as I push into the darkness. Looking on a civic map of the block, no one would ever expect this foot-and-a-half gap to be anything more than a design fault by whatever engineer was responsible for this part of the Vents. Only by cross referencing it with air ventilation and power grid shafts in the overcity districts were Krey and I able to figure out that there might be more useful space on the other side. The shafts are huge empty cylinders, open to the elements, hundreds of meters tall. Completely abandoned territory that no one in the Vents even knows exists.

Knowing how to get to them, like most street rat secrets, is the tricky part.

I'm pressing forward on faith of memory alone. Even if I can't see the walls, I can feel them narrowing on every side. My breath comes back loud and raspy in my ears. I try my luck with Matthias just to take my mind off the oppressive closeness.

"I've never worked with a Psi before. Did you grow up in the Orange?"

Matthias' reply echoes through the narrow passage. "I can't remember a time before the brothels. It was only housekeeping tasks when I was young, but as I aged up..."

Disgust shivers down my arms.

"They told me my parents sold me to Dynasty to pay off a medical bill. Some of the other girls took me in and helped protect me as long as they could. I've been trying to save up to go back for them, but... I don't even know if they're still there." His voice hardens to a degree I didn't think him capable of. "If you were telling Nero the truth about a guaranteed way to remove Dynasty from the Vents, I'll help however I can. I never met Sarah Morninghawk myself, but it sounds like she had a plan for real change." He goes quiet for a moment. "Was she that much of a believer in the Vents?"

"More than I am," I sigh.

I've rolled my eyes at Sarah's schemes over more breakfasts than either of us could count, not that I'm much better. And the rare few times I'd shoot those plans down as being delusional, remind her of the constant admonishment she gave me, she'd always fire back by asking who stole my faith, so she could track them down and get it back for me. I'd tell her I'd know when I met them.

The unexpected memory hits like a knife to the back. I do my best to bury the emotion as we emerge onto a shallow ledge set into the perimeter of the massive air shaft. Look a couple hundred meters up, squint hard enough, and you can just barely see the true night's sky above the heaven-aimed spotlights of the Electric Town. Look across, walls of grungy steel and ductwork making an empty cylinder dozens of meters wide. Down, nothing but yawning darkness, faintly creaking metal. As dark as the Abyss itself.

Matthias and Lain gape up at the distant night sky, moving to the end of the ledge for a better view. I busy myself unlocking a portacrate in the corner that I've spent the past few months filling. Sarah's birthdate opens the digital lock.

Inside, dark kneeboots perfectly fit for my size, a backup poncho I used to use as a blanket, and handfuls of custom-forged ammo cylinders for my gun. I lace up the boots first, then get to work slotting the cylinders into every free pocket my borrowed clothes have. The poncho comes at the end. Ragged and grey, it hangs down the right side of my body like a one-shoulder cape, wrapped in layers around my neck.

Matthias whistles quietly behind me. "I didn't know there were places like this in the Vents. Mori, this is..."

Even Lain is affected by the stillness in the air. "...so quiet," she adds. She holds a hand up to her ear, eyes gently closing. "Must be over a mile to the surface, but you can almost hear the Metro Blockhouse. You come here a lot?"

"Just to watch the clouds." I play it off cool, not looking up. Don't want to show total strangers the full hand of how much this place means to me, why I keep it a secret.

"It's beautiful," Matthias murmurs, surprisingly gentle. "I get why you wouldn't tell anyone about it." Turning back from the edge, he watches me blindly scrounge around the bottom of the crate. "How do we get down?"

Prying back the crate's false bottom, I take out three handheld objects that gleam in the night. Two are shaped like long, squared rings, ridged with finger-grips on the inside. I palm one over to Lain and make a point of tapping the toggle on the top side. "None of us are fliers, so we'll have to use autocables. Trust Foundries tech, doesn't sync to a JOY. Use the toggle to adjust your speed once we're moving. Should be enough cable to get us all the way down to the Vector Seven block in one go."

"And those?" Matthias points to the third object in my hand, a pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses with metal frames the same color.

"Sarah's Rule Number Twelve." Spinning a fresh cylinder of ammunition into the 6-Teba, I slide the sunglasses so they're resting just above the tip of my nose, shuck my braid to one side, and slap the autocable's magnetic latch against the inner wall of the airshaft. "If you're going to pick a fight, you better look good doing it."