Page 19 of The Sin

Roman pulled up beneath a seemingly random tree in the middle of the forest. He grabbed his backpack from the rear seat and extracted two flashlights, handing one to me. “We go on foot from here.”

Without the truck headlights, it was pitch black. The stars were up there, but the thick canopies of evergreens here consumed their faraway light.

I turned the flashlight on before I climbed out of the truck. “Where are we? Won’t it be a problem if someone sees the bobbing lights?”

Roman fitted his backpack on his back and hauled my overnight bag out, sliding the strap over one shoulder.

“I can carry my own bag.”

He ignored that. The truck lights flashed as he locked it and started walking. “Very few people know about the access points and I have the security clearance to be here without raising suspicion.”

We didn’t walk for long, perhaps five minutes, before we came to a stop by another seemingly random tree. Roman hunched down and dug a hand into the nest of damp nettles and leaves that covered the forest floor. He found what he was looking for and straightened, pulling as he came up, and a hole opened in the ground.

I dropped to my knees to peer down. My flashlight beam revealed a long drop into blackness and a ladder bolted to the circular wall of the hole.

My pulse sped up.

The access point.

Right here in Capra. We hadn’t gone through any barrier or gate or any form of guard security check.

My voice dropped to a whisper, because this felt like a secret too dark and deadly to even share with the night creatures of the forest. “Does this take us into a tunnel beneath the wall?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Roman said. “This access point takes us into the tunnel for the supply train between Capra and The Smoke.” He waved his flashlight toward the hole. “You’ll have to go down first, so I can close the trapdoor.”

I stared down into the black hole.

“It’s not a long a drop,” Roman said. “About fifty rungs.”

That wasn’t my problem. “How do I hold onto the ladder and my flashlight?”

“I’ll shine my beam to light your way.”

I tucked my flashlight into my coat pocket and used the ladder to carefully lower myself into the hole. As promised, Roman knelt on the ground and shone his torch down, helping me to see as I grasped the rungs. My feet had to feel their own way to make purchase on each next rung as I slowly climbed down the suffocating hole.

The air was musty and my lungs constricted, not unlike that crushed feeling in the lockbox. I definitely suffered from a mild case of claustrophobia.

Or maybe it was just a mild case of survival instinct.

Humans were not meant to squeeze themselves through a sausage funnel.

Acknowledging all that to myself didn’t make any difference. I could still feel the walls closing in around me.

I forced myself to think of something else.

Anything else.

My thoughts landed on the Sisterhood. Supposedly, they occasionally smuggled women out of Capra to The Smoke. I wondered if they knew about this access point. I wondered if this was how they did it.

My contact, Rose, appeared to know a little about The Smoke. That’s why the Sisterhood went to great lengths to avoid smuggling women out. Well,that, and the fact that disappearing women would raise suspicion. But Rose had heard that the conditions in The Smoke were appalling. That’s what she’d told me. She’d heard it from a reliable source.

The Sisters of Capra were secretive to the point of ridiculousness—and malfunction, if you asked me. How do you achieve anything if no one is allowed to know anything? But I was starting to gather my own intel about their ways, such as this: the reliable source that Rose mentioned could be someone who knew about this access point.

The bottom of the ladder came quicker than expected. Fifty rungs wasn’t a long drop at all, but I immediately saw why the hole had seemed so much deeper. It was pitch black down here. And I could still feel the cold, stone walls all around me.

I fumbled in my coat pocket to extract my flashlight.

What I saw wasn’t reassuring. The tunnel opening up from the bottom of the hole was approximately six foot wide and six foot tall. But it couldn’t go on for too long. Eventually it’d have to open into a tunnel wide and tall enough for the supply train.

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