Chapter 41: Sewer Level

“If I didn’t see it every time we walked past here,” I said, “I’d think this bank was a Third Eye thing.”

It looked like a white nautilus shell tipped on its side, entirely out of place in a sea of normal box-shaped buildings. The bank itself lived in the glassed-in area beneath the shell. During the day it was a cool, if kind of run-down, landmark. At night, with the cold, thin air fighting my parka for dominance and the streetlights creating pools of visibility, it loomed like some kind of monstrous guardian.

“Clearly an omen,” Lena said. “We’re on the right path.”

Said path, the sidewalk that wound its way down to the greenbelt – and, supposedly, the tunnel – started just behind the bank parking lot.

Miguel finished locking his car doors and joined us. “Let’s not waste time. It’s a terrible enough idea to come out here at night, and loitering in front of a bank won’t make us seem less suspicious.”

“You didn’t have to drive us over,” Lena said.

“But,” he said, “I’m really curious.”

I glanced back and matched their grins.

We started walking.

The path wound downhill and through a small, triangular park. Below us, a waterway gurgled along, carrying old snowmelt to runoff tunnels. Above us, traffic whizzed along Hampden. Around us, the cold tried to find gaps in our defenses. Behind us, the bank’s non-euclidean roof loomed.

Ahead of us?

I couldn’t see anything with the naked eye, which didn’t mean there wasn’t anything. The streetlights from Hampden and the parking lot illuminated the sidewalk, mostly. They didn’t do anything for the embankment or the runoff ditch.

I scanned both with my phone. If there was anything Third Eye-related, the shadows hid it. They hid whatever door or gate was going to keep us from going much deeper, too.

Or, you know, the smooth concrete where the tunnel had been sealed.

No joggers tonight. No other pedestrians of any kind.

If we wanted to sneak in somewhere, it was a good time for it.

But the bank would have security cameras, and if the tunnel really still existed, and if it still led to what used to be Cinderella City Mall’s underground level, it would mean sneaking into a police station. Okay, the ground floor actually housed the library, but the police were above.

Somehow, I didn’t think they’d appreciate us slinking through their maintenance tunnels.

We passed the last sidewalk splitting off to the parking lot where I’d first found Wood. We passed the last streetlight. We passed a flange of pavement that approached the embankment but didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

We approached the point of the triangle.

“Is the tunnel gone, or what?” Lena asked.

I turned my phone’s light on.

I flinched. It seemed so bright! Somebody would check, right? Even if we hadn’t done anything wrong, would they listen to our explanations?

I got so caught up in worrying about it, I almost missed what the light revealed.

Cut into the embankment, right by the waterway, angled away from the lights, beyond a stretch of grass, there was a passage. In that passage was a gate.

Normal, right? You’d expect a gate. Maybe a sign with ‘Property of the City of Englewood; No Trespassing!’

And, hey, maybe that’s what the sign said.

I wouldn’t know, because it was written in Third Eye runes.

“You getting this, too, Miguel?” I asked.

I heard his lighter click. Twice. His hands must be shaking. “I am.”

“You’re not supposed to smoke in public places,” Lena said.

“And we’re not supposed to trespass,” he said, “but unless there’s a real gate behind that fake gate, I think it’s going to happen.”

“No fair,” Lena said.

I tore my eyes from the gate to glance at her. “Oh?”

“It’s not trespassing.” She waved at the greenbelt. “I don’t see anything saying we’re not allowed in there.”

“I can’t read the sign, but...”

“What sign?” She lowered her phone.

So did I. When I looked back to the tunnel, there was no sign. No gate. Just a gap in the embankment and a whole lot of shadows.

“We could reasonably assume,” Miguel said, “that this tunnel isn’t part of a park.”

“But we could be drunk or high or just clueless. It’s on the city to put up a sign.” I hesitated. “... right?”

He looked around the tunnel, then sighed. “It’s too long of a tunnel to plausibly be a covered walkway, but it’s not impossible. As soon as we come to a real gate we have to stop, though.”

“Sure, sure.” Lena pushed past us and shoved on the Third Eye gate. Instead of blocking her, or swinging open, it turned into Iron in her stockpile. It had been a while since we collected Materials, so I forgot to expect the blinding flash; Miguel had never seen it. Did I mention it was worse at night? We both came away blinking.

“What the hell?” Miguel spat. He rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his coat.

“Shit, sorry!” Lena rushed back to us and peered up at our faces. “You guys okay?”

“I’ll check with my optometrist,” Miguel said. “I think I’m all right, though. Cam?”

“All good,” I lied. I’d be seeing spots for an hour.

“Third Eye does this every time?” Miguel asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Mad.”

“Yeah.”

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“Wanna stop?” Lena asked.

He made a show of considering it, but we all knew he wouldn’t have driven us over here if a little thing like getting flashbanged by his phone would satisfy his curiosity.

“Let’s hurry up and find whatever’s down here,” Lena said. “If my adrenaline runs out, one of you is gonna have to carry me home.”

I patted my chest. “Not it.”

Miguel made a show of considering this, too. “I couldn’t deny you the chance to exercise.”

“Dicks,” Lena muttered. She bent over, rubbed her calves, and stalked into the tunnel.

I had to admit, she had a point.

When I looked at the tunnel, which extended farther than the light from our phones – why wasn’t it lit, anyway? Did the maintenance crews have to go in with mining helmets? –, it made me remember how much walking I’d done today. Three times up and down the stairs to the apartment, to the bus station to get to Yvonne and Big Charlie’s, plus the trip to the park, plus all the running around I’d done with Albie and the video shoot.

I was surprised I didn’t feel worse. My legs and arms didn’t burn like they had after days of grinding. Hell. I felt better rested than usual.

If nothing else, Third Eye had been a hell of a fitness program.

For example, if you’d asked me two weeks ago to walk into a pitch-black maintenance tunnel with a waist-high railing between me and a – admittedly mostly-empty – runoff ditch, extending into who knew how many miles of darkness beneath the Englewood earth, but probably leading to the underbelly of a police station where I was probably technically trespassing?

My legs would have felt a little like jelly.

Instead, I strode after Lena. Pain-free. Confident. Athletic? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Miguel brought up the rear. They really should sell Third Eye as a fitness program. You didn’t even need to be an active player to reap the benefits.

I expected to freeze my ass off in the tunnel. For one thing, the air was cold. For another, it was low and wet. And don’t get me wrong, it was chilly, but as long as the three of us stuck together, I thought it actually felt warmer than the evening outside. Coats and body heat in an enclosed area, I supposed.

Which reminded me. “How do they not have a huge problem with homeless people sleeping here?”

“Maybe the city doesn’t care?” Lena said. “It’s kind of win-win, right? The homeless keep the wind off their backs and assholes don’t have to see them on the street.”

“It seems like something we’d have heard about,” I said.

“Where? I don’t follow the city on Twitter, do you?”

I shook my head.

“So you’d hear it on the local news?” she asked.

I spread my open hand, which probably didn’t express anything to her, since she didn’t even glance over her shoulder. “I get it,” I said. “Neither of us are civic-minded.”

“So,” she said, “folks could totally sleep down here.”

“In which case,” I said, “we’re going to barge into their bedroom. That’s kind of fucked.”

Lena paused. She gripped the railing.

“I don’t think we need to worry,” Miguel said.

I’d caught up to Lena, so I could afford to turn and face him. “How come?”

“Look around. No blankets, no cans, no dog beds, no shopping carts, no wrappers.”

“Not everybody’s sleeping area is as much of a disaster as ours was tonight.” I don’t know why I brought it up again. How much of my being a dick to Miguel had been embarrassment over that? If I were emotionally intelligent enough to know the answer, I probably wouldn’t have done it. “Ours isn’t, normally.”

“A disaster, no,” Miguel said, “but does this tunnel look the least bit lived in? No one has dropped a Taco Bell bag when they’re hungry and tired? No one has so much as worn muddy boots?”

I studied the smooth concrete floor. He had a point. Nothing looked brand new – the railing had a coat of peeling paint that might have started red but looked all rust-brown now, and the concrete was chipped and pitted with time – but it didn’t really look used, either. It was like someone had sealed it up when the mall closed.

Except for the part where it hadn’t been sealed.

“Why, though? It’s not just me that’s warm in here, right?” Oh, shit, was I coming down with something?

“No,” Lena said, “it’s way nicer than outside.”

Miguel puffed on his cigarette. There was another thing we hadn’t seen any of: cigarette butts. Or smoke discoloration on the roof. He said, “You called it win-win, but I’m not so sure. It would not seem like a win if there were too much runoff.”

I glanced over the railing. Water trickled through the ditch. If it had snowed heavily, or if we got a rare thunderstorm in the summer, would it surge up into the tunnel?

Would I care about that if I was freezing my ass off outside?

I didn’t know and hoped to never have to find out.

“Ugh,” Lena said.

I turned back to her. “You okay?”

She crossed her arms on the railing and leaned over, kicking her leg in the air. “Nope.”

I reached out. “What’s wrong?”

Her lip curled. “I just realized what this is.”

“Huh?”

“Linear path. Water below a railing. Underground.”

I blinked. “Oh. Heh.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I’m right, though, yeah?”

I nodded. “This is definitely a sewer level.”

“So cliched.” She sighed. “If they want us to beat up giant rats in the basement of an inn next time, I’m... well, I’m not out, but I better get some goddamn Fire for it.”

“You know,” I said, “I can’t think of the last game I played that actually started with rats.”

“The sewer level, though.”

“Oh yeah. Those are ubiquitous.”

“Why, though?” She shook her head. “Have you ever met somebody who liked them?”

I glanced at Miguel. This seemed like the perfect chance for him to drop a bombshell about his terrible taste.

“You’ll notice,” he said, “I have never included one in our games.”

We pressed on.

Another thing we had yet to find: anything Third Eye related other than the gate. I didn’t worry. We needed to go deeper. We were going deeper.

Physically. What about conceptually? The clue couldn’t apply just to where we’d found one Material, and not every location could have an extensive tunnel beneath it. I felt good about this expedition, but what would the equivalent look like for the sign in the Dollar Tree, the extra glass in the window of the Ross Dress For Less, the boarded up window of Silver Dollar Books? Were we supposed to pry manhole covers off and crawl around in the actual sewer? Because that was not going to happen.

What if the clue just meant each find was somehow paired with and hinting at another? Lena had already collected Iron from the gate. Maybe the sign on it had read “Look Up” or “Reserved Parking” if you learned to decode the Third Eye runes.

Were we wasting our time down here?

The only thing worse than a sewer level is one where, after you beat it, you realize you could’ve skipped the whole thing.

That was on my mind when I saw the light from Lena’s phone glint off metal.

A fence extended from the railing to block the tunnel. It contained another gate, marked with another sign.

This one was in English. “Closed For Maintenance.”

I turned Third Eye off. The gate didn’t disappear. I switched it back on. The gate didn’t change. Turning the app on and off drew my attention to something beyond the metal bars, though, just at the edge of my phone’s light.

Irregular shape. A statue, maybe? What was it made of? The light was too dim to show color, but from the way it reflected I thought it had to be something shiny. Metallic, I supposed, so it was probably more Iron, but it didn’t look like any we’d found.

Could it be Gold?

I pressed closer to the gate and tried to catch more of the object in the light. No luck.

I pointed at the object. “Can either of you see what that is?”

“I can see it’s there,” Lena said. “But not what. Too far, too dark. It’s teasing us.”

“I’d almost rather not know,” Miguel said, “since we can’t act on it.”

“Maybe the gate’s not locked?” Lena grabbed the handle. It rattled. She peeked through. “Shit. There’s a padlock.”

We could climb around the railing. I almost said it, then I realized how crazy it sounded. Trespassing would be our best-case scenario. Worst would be breaking something if one of us lost our grip and fell into the ditch.

“End of the line,” Miguel said.

Lena kicked at the gate. It didn’t give.

I caught her shoulder.

She shot a glare at me, then her shoulders slumped and she sagged against my arm. “Sewer levels really do suck.”

I squeezed her arm. “At least you got some Iron.”

“Not worth,” she said.

I agreed.

Miguel started back toward the mouth of the tunnel. Lena shuffled after him.

I gave one last look at the glint behind the gate. Still out of sight, and far out of reach.

Then I heard it. Surging down the drainage ditch. A sound I knew, bone-deep, and almost always wanted. But right then, I’d have been cool if it held off until we reached higher ground.

Water!