Page 43 of Five to Love Him
They loosened their hold, and I looked at one of them with wide eyes.
“You’re pulling my leg here, right? Orca shifters?”
I saw two of them shrug. “Yes. They are…an acquired taste, we find.” “Should we keep going?”
I nodded, and we headed toward the end of the hallway, then left until we came to the arrival and departure area, the screens there still bright.
“Look,” one of the hivelings said and pointed.
“Ugh, fuck. Where did they get that photo?”
A special announcement was up, introducing “Head Secretary Hill” with a photo of me. The announcement was quick, letting everyone know to please congratulate me and make me feel welcome.
“It’s a good photo,” one of the hivelings said. “We like you in photos, although we think you are even more attractive IRL.”
I snorted as we stepped on the escalator. “Thanks for the compliment. Anyway, I’m just going to be doing admin stuff. The headprincipal is blowing this out of proportion.”
“You’ll be good at it.” “And we can help.” “We can help with learning the school rules as well.”
“Don’t remind me.”
We were silent for the way down the escalator, the electric hum of it accompanying us as the lights changed, turned brighter and warmer, all while the temperature dropped.
“Bet you don’t sweat buckets down here, not even in this heat.”
“No. Although it does get very cold in winter.”
I nodded, and once we arrived in the underground proper, let the hive lead me. I remembered the way Ezra had taken us, toward a busier, brighter part of the underground.
The hive took another turn right off the bat, and instead of increasing foot traffic, this area was quiet, almost like a pier by the ocean at night, what with the boardwalk underneath our feet.
Benches and trash cans sat on the sides of the walk, and we passed one of those electronic mailboxes that hold your online deliveries, not with a retailer logo but rather with Hawthorne written across it in large, flashy print.
“Wow,” I said.
One or two hivelings chuckled. “It’s picked up above and then taken down here. Everyone shops over the internet.”
“Nice. We haven’t talked about the postal network yet.”
“It’s good. Maybe even more reliable than the one the humans run.”
Around another bend in the boardwalk, the residential area really started. Down here in the underground, there was only so much room to build a house, given that these were subway tunnels. When I’d first heard about the underground, I’d expected something out of a post-apocalyptic movie franchise, seedy and gray, but the buildings we walked past were nothing like that.
The streetlamps charmed with a 1920s flair, the fixtures swirling and the light they cast bright even though I was sure it would be even brighter still once day came rolling around. The buildings themselves were almost futuristic but not that impersonal. Clean façades came with windows of varying sizes and shapes, same with the doors.
The buildings were set one next to another, but you could tell where one ended and a new one started because the residents had personalized things, had either painted the walls in different shades of beige or yellow or put up flowers and yard decorations right outside the buildings or on the windowsills, working with what space they could. There was even a row of houses in shades of blue, and one standing out in a deep, shiny red.
“That one will be privately owned,” the hive said, indicating the red house. “Hawthorne specifies bright façade colors in their contracts, nothing too dark.”
“Right. To keep the place from looking foreboding or like a monster lair out of human myth.”
“Yes. Is it working?”
The hive sounded anxious, which was adorable, given that I knew I was staring at what had to be normal for them.
“It is.”
“We’re glad. We’re over there, at the end of Silver Line.”
