Page 46 of The Song Rising

“Reminds you of the Rookery, doesn’t it?”

Ivy was leaning against the bricks. The others had fallen asleep, leaving the flashlights on top of Eliza’s backpack.

“I guess you weren’t in there much. I wasn’t, either. But we knew about it. The squalor.” She was staring at the ceiling. “I’m trying to figure you out, Paige. You were happy to leave those voyants just now, but you didn’t kill Binder at the scrimmage. Or in the Archon.”

“I wasn’thappyto leave them.” It came out hoarse. “I did it to protect us. I’m trying to protect all the people who are left. Who survived.”

She drew in a breath, deepening the hollows over her collarbones.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

Now the adrenaline had worn off, I felt the burn in my hand where Styx’s knife had opened it. I didn’t sleep, but I pretended. I didn’t want to talk if anyone woke up. My mind was too full of thorns. ScionIDE. The bargain with Styx. Terebell, and how she might respond to this disaster. Senshield.

But most of all, Vance. That eerily calm face and the eyes that seemed to stare right through me. In a matter of hours, she had reduced me from an Underqueen to a sewer rat.

The net was closing in around me.

I allowed myself a few deep breaths. Not all of it was my fault. I had to be rational.

Not all of it, but some. Andsomewas far too much.

Dobrev turned over in his sleep and knocked the second flashlight into the water, putting it out. The darkness was so thick that it seemed to seep inside me with every inhalation.

Hours must have passed before our rescuer arrived. A slender amaurotic with a lamp on her helmet, clad in the same sort of uniform Styx had worn. Auburn hair was visible in the lamplight, cut haphazardly around her face, which was splashed by a grape-stain birthmark.

Wynn said, “Styx sent you?”

The tosher nodded and beckoned for us to follow.

It was a long walk. Styx had ordered the tosher to guide us to a crisis facility over four miles away from where we had entered the Beneath, where some voyants had already been taken via the Underground. Our noses quickly forgot the smell. the darkness wasn’t so easy to bear. Jos was a trouper, as usual, but he was soon exhausted, so Nick hitched him up on to his back. Every so often, water would rush from a nearby pipe and swell what was already around us, reminding us that there was no way out if it came higher. It rose past our knees, carrying waste I thought it best not to examine too closely. The tosher didn’t seem worried by the idea that we could be swept away. She guided us in silence, sometimes stopping to listen to the tunnels or pocket something from the water.

Wynn seemed just as comfortable. This had nothing on the squalor of Jacob’s Island.

We cut through a chamber, out of the storm-relief drain, and into the mainline. By the time we had scaled the ladder, we were all drenched to the bone. Maria braced herself against the wall and coughed up bile.

The tosher stopped a few feet ahead of us. “What now?” Nick said. His cheek was smeared with dirt.

“We can’t go any farther upstream,” Wynn said.

Maria wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “You’re not telling me we have to go back out.”

“No.” She nodded to an opening in the wall. “We have to go through here. It will take us into the crisis facility.”

The tosher handed her a flashlight, which she shone on the passageway. The sight of it made my throat close up. It was barely wide enough for Jos, let alone the rest of us. And we would have to crawl through it, in near-total darkness, for as long as it took to reach the other side.

Wynn crouched beside the opening and followed the tosher. “Take this,” she said to me, and passed me the flashlight. Beside me, Nick was still as stone, transfixed by the prospect.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go first.”

8

Counter Play

It felt like years that we were in that final tunnel, a pipe so cramped and black that it plagued me with persistent thoughts of being in a coffin. I could hear Eliza choking back sobs of disgust as we crawled, elbow-deep, through congealed filth, following the bluish light of the headlamp. It was hard to remember, through the aching and the stench and the sense that we were being suffocated, that daylight had ever existed. When the tosher opened a grate, the nine of us were poured into a pit, where murky, leaden water stagnated in a pool. Shaking with exertion, I towed myself on to a set of winding steps and lifted a heavy-eyed Jos out with me. He was dead on his feet.

Another tosher, who carried a signal lantern, met us at the top of the steps and, without a word, led us down a passageway. The walls were gray and nondescript. We passed a door embossed with the wordBATHROOM.

“Well,” I said, “this is civilized.”

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