Secret Super (Book 1)

6. Too Many Tunnels

Zadia usually prided herself on not making bad decisions, but this had to be one of the worst choices of her life.

She was miserable.

Shoes splattered in sewage, the stink of it in her nose, legs aching from walking so long on the slippery ground, she was just about ready to scream. All because she'd followed an insane whim. How would she possibly get any information back from the supers anyway? What had she been thinking?

Forget the bottle of perfume. She was going to drown herself in the stuff if she ever got out of here- and it was increasingly looking like that was not happening anytime soon.

At first she had tried to count the bends in the tunnels. Two lefts, straight through a crossroad, right, left, right again . . . After what felt like the eightieth turn, she gave up on counting.

The supers' voices continued to echo and bounce around the tunnels as Zadia sloshed through steadily behind them. They left behind a trail of ice that crunched beneath her sneakers; one of the supers had to have ice powers. Zadia guessed it must be the woman with the frosty eyes and white hair.

Great, she thought. She was chasing not just supers, but supers who didn't seem to have control of their own powers. If she didn't die from an infection in these tunnels, one of the supers would probably realize she was following them, and then she'd get carted off to freak-school or get frozen into an ice sculpture. She wasn't sure which fate would be worse.

Suddenly the voices stopped, and she paused, her breathing the only sound in the tunnels. A few seconds later, there was a scraping sound of a grate being pulled aside.

She breathed out a sigh of relief. Maybe she was finally getting out of these tunnels.

She forced herself to wait and count sixty seconds, then splashed the rest of the way to the grate. Her cold fingers scrabbled at the edges. It was heavier than she thought, but she was able to lift it up and shove it aside with a metallic screeching noise that made her cringe.

She hoisted herself up, squirming as her hands touched the filthy ground. With a grunt, she shimmied her way onto the surface.

When she emerged, she almost screamed.

More tunnels. Why? Why did there have to be more tunnels? Was she ever going to get out of this maze? The curved walls seemed to press in on her in the dark gloom, dashing all her hopes of ever seeing the sky again.

That was when she started to hear voices- coming towards her. Hurriedly, she kicked the grate back into the manhole with her shoe and ran in the opposite direction. At least she was out of the sewer, she thought as her feet hit the ground with a hollow slapping sound. Although she was probably never going to wash the stink out of her hair.

She came to a fork in the tunnels and hesitated for a second before plunging into the darkness of the left tunnel. She wiped her sweaty palms on her pants, her heart hammering in her throat.

Despite all the running, she still hadn't lost the voices. They kept getting louder in the background, raucous laughter and chatter that wouldn't stop. She swerved right into another bend. This one dead-ended. She looked around wildly.

The end of the tunnel seemed weirdly black, a different, darker shade than everything around. Then she realized that the dead-end wasn't an end at all- it was a doorway, a round, circular doorway. Desperate, she pushed on the door.

It didn't give. Then a screen flashed to life in front of her, blinking blue.

"Please look into the camera for your facial recognition," a female voice said coolly.