Page 20 of The Sin

When Roman joined me at the bottom, we had to walk in single file. This time he went in front. I fought for breath and trailed the tips of my fingers against the stone as I walked, reassuring myself that the walls remained an arm’s length away, they weren’t closing in on me, they weren’t about to crush me.

Finally the tunnel opened up into a room-sized square. The walls were the same natural stone as the tunnel. Cut into the far wall was a solid metal door with a keypad.

This was the security that had been missing.

Roman punched in a series of numbers and the metallic clang of heavy duty lock pins disengaging echoed in the bare room. He depressed the handle bar and pulled the door open, gaining us entrance into the train tunnel.

I stood back on the raised platform against the curved wall, waving my flashlight up and down the tracks. I assumed he knew which direction to take, but that wasn’t the question burning in my throat.

“Does the Guard know about this access hole?”

“In the highest levels, yes, they would have to know,” he said. “This tunnel was part of an existing transport network from before. These access points were service hatches back then.”

So either Rose’s reliable source was high up in the Guard, or knowledge of the access points had filtered through the ranks over time. I was inclined to think the latter. Or I could be wrong. Maybe the Sisterhood didn’t use this tunnel to smuggle people out.

We walked a few steps, and then the platform ended abruptly, forcing us to jump down onto the tracks. I shone my flashlight across the tunnel. On either side of the tracks, there was barely more than a meter or two. That wasn’t a whole lot of distance between us and a train rushing passed.

“What happens when a train comes along?” I asked.

“The train has already returned to The Smoke for the night.” Roman started walking beside the track. “It runs on a daily schedule, leaving The Smoke in the morning, and returning to The Smoke at four in the afternoon.”

I hurried my steps to fall in line beside him. We settled into a steady pace with him lighting the way while I tucked my flashlight away as a backup if his batteries ran out.

9

We walked mostly in silence. Walked and walked and walked. I stripped off my scarf and undid the buttons of my coat. Then my coat came off, tucked under my arm. But the heat kept building and before long, I was wiping sweat from my brow and panting.

I’d always considered myself relatively fit. The last week of being confined to a cell, then the cabin, was showing. I should have spent more time doing jumping jacks and less time moping.

We stopped at intervals to take a drink of water. I waved off Roman’s concern every time he asked how I was doing, but he noticed. His pace slowed. The intervals shortened and the breaks lengthened. A three hour hike was much longer in practice than in theory. With all the breaks, I’d probably added an hour or two.

My left running shoe chaffed against my little toe. After a while, it started to feel like my feet were growing flatter and flatter, the hard ground punching out their natural arch. His flashlight dimmed and I swapped it out for my juiced one. Eventually the quality of air in the tunnel became less stifling and the visibility in the distance improved. Not exactly a light at the end of the tunnel, but not pitch blackness either.

“The tunnel’s opening up,” I said, confused.

“Once we’re out, it’s only another twenty minutes or so,” Roman confirmed. “We’re almost there.”

I’d assumed we’d be climbing out at another service hatch.

We didn’t.

We simply walked out of the tunnel into the starlit night...and into an alien landscape. Solar fields, Roman informed me. Almost every building in Capra had solar panels, but these panels were large and winged and mounted onto metal stalks that tilted them in various directions, and they seemed to cover every inch of ground for miles. They looked like shields, protecting the earth from the sun rather than harnessing its energy.

Across the field to our right, loomed the shadow of a high wall. “Is that The Smoke?”

Roman gave a nod.

“It’s walled.”

He looked at me a moment, considering his next words. “It is, although the gates stand open. People are free to come and go.”

“A warden approached me at Sector Five,” I said, staring at the wall that didn’t keep anyone in. “He said he just wanted to talk, that he wouldn’t stop me from crossing the bridge to the Outerlands.”

“We call it a debriefing,” Roman offered. “The Smoke is hard living, and some people start to think they might be better off out there in the wild. They’re not. But all we can do is share what we know about the wild. What they do with that is up to them.”

“Because they’re not prisoners.” Where had that come from? I’d never thought of myself as a prisoner before.

But if the people in The Smoke weren’t prisoners because they could come and go at will, what did that make me?

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