Muriel coughed.

 The dust had got in her throat early in the tunnel and she was yearning for the fresh air Julian promised when she first agreed to come with him that evening—the evening of the Arena. Julian had been leading her for about five miles along the winding old sewage corridor, dripping with fresh spring water, banked with moss and sweet-smelling mildew.

         “Here it is,” he said. He handed her the flashlight and got up on a stone ledge. Feeling the concave ceiling with his hand, he found the gap he was looking for, and grinning at her, slipped through.

         “Julian!”

         “Get on the ledge. I’ll pull you up.” She hoisted herself on the stone ledge, teetering for balance. She reached up and felt him gasp and pull her until she kicked the sides of the narrow opening. Dirt and pieces of cement fell into the sewer beneath her. Another tug of his strong arms and she was in the open. They were on their knees, touching grass. There was a wetness on her knees. When she looked up, she could see a fray of stars clipping the Eastern Wall.

         “I told you,” said Julian. They stood up. “It ends here so far as I can tell. But there could be others. Other tunnels I mean, that go farther.” They caught their breath. Muriel kept scanning the world around her as if a copter or a Propper was going to appear and laser them into dust. But there was nothing like that. She even heard crickets.

         “Believe me now?”

         “Yes.” She brushed her hands clean. For weeks, she had watched Julian from the back of the Old Coffee Room on the Wash’s West End, listening to him talk about the unspeakable. There was a world beyond the Wall. All the crypts he’d found layers down in the earth confirmed it; a world of grassland and pasture, big cliffs and roaring waterfalls, an alien dimension of life and danger and potential. “If we could just find the tunnels.” He ended every convention with a note on the tunnels. “There’s no way over, obviously. How about under.”

         She went with him because she was starting to worry he might not come back. Propers policed the outer layers of the Wash. Since the Hegemon’s latest health minister, Lord Canner Realstead, had taken office, there were more disappearances in the Wash. The crouching homeless, usually straining the sewage with their fishnets, were plucked off in the night. Certain Wash Lords and Drug Rats were wheeling drunk on their thrones at night and found floating facedown in sewage the next morning. Muriel stood on the balcony of her flat just a week ago, balancing on the unkempt boards to get a look at the spiral of Pearl Proper burning against the night, when the thin beam of blue laser seared through the darkness, burning a hole through a man where he sat under the bridge.

         “It’s so open out here,” she breathed.

         “Can you see the Wall?”

         “Yes.”

         The Wall, 1,000 feet tall, towered darkly thirty miles away, prefaced by a mix of trodden plains peppered with abandoned neighborhoods, factories, and automobiles. “How many times have you been out here?” she asked.

         “Oh, I don’t know. A few dozen, maybe. I go a lot a night.” He put his hands on his hips and sighed, leaning his head back. The glow of Pearl Proper was dim here, but still showed the glittering blackness of his pupils, his strong, willful jaw, the pursed lips ready to preach.

         “You really think a tunnel might reach all the way? And be deep enough?”

Stolen story; please report.

         “It’s possible.” He plopped down on the grass and tore off a blade. “The maps seem to say so. Old maps from the old layout. But nothing’s certain.” He sighed again, smiling up at her in the darkness. “But it’s quiet here, isn’t it? Could you get used to this?”

         She nodded. She wondered about the empty houses with their yawning black doors and windows, and whether the Propers ever checked them this far out. She wanted to mention nabbing a house for them to live in but didn’t want to wound his broader ambitions of escape, or assume that he wanted to live with her. This was Julian Rilke. Every girl her age in West End was in love with him.

 “We could always resume the diggings,” he said, more soberly.

         “Risky, isn’t it?”

         “Everything is at risk now. I could be assassinated any day.”

         “They’re killing the Wretches. Not you or me.”

         “That’s the point, maybe. They’re sending a signal of what’s coming. The Health Minister. He’s starting to make his moves.”

         “This has been happening for years. Keeping the Wash in check. Fearful.”

         “It’s escalating. I’m telling you; it’s coming. Something big. If we don’t find or forge the tunnel in the next three months, I bet the Wash is gone. I can feel it in my gut.”

         More Wretches than usual were dying, true. Crawling down the winding labyrinths of the lower levels, marked by their red scarves and tunics, street sweepers had to stuff their lasered corpses into basements and ditches. The Hegemon chimed in through their Interactors saying it was all for their good. The Wash was a sprawl of almost 500 million people now, with Pearl Proper sporting just two million in their roosts of glory. The Wretches, in some pockets of the Wash, bred like cockroaches. The Properian shell could only hold so much.

         “You didn’t want to go to the Arena.” She didn’t phrase it as a question. She sat next to him and tore off her own blade of grass, swiping her soft yellow bangs to the side.

         “I don’t pay to see human beings killed. They used to do that in ancient times. I read it in the crypts.”

         “The forbidden crypts.” She laughed, nudging him, then stayed quiet.

         “You heard they’re putting him on display for the first time. I was curious to see what he looked like now. What they did to him. But then I stopped myself, realized that no, I didn’t want to see…I never want to see.”

         “Do you think he’ll win?”

         “Yes. They want to show him off, to show what they can do, so they probably won’t let him lose.”

         Muriel remembered the first time she saw Stylus Mang before he was carted off by a Propper after wounding the Prefect. He had stood in the rain, a foot dipped in the gutter running red with gore at West End. He held a smoking pistol. His seven-foot frame, hunched like a slim cloak in the deluge, made her, for the first time, curious to know who he really was. A Wash King, yes, and a Rat. Ruler of Rat’s Nest, to be clear. But he looked at her with those violent gray eyes, almost hidden by his hair, and dropped the pistol into the water as if he’d just shot his last enemy.

         “Stylus Mang,” whispered Julian. “The terror of the Wash! If he ever escapes the circus, he’ll be the terror of Pearl Proper.”

         “Would he have ever joined us? I mean…would he have joined the cause?” Muriel asked. Julian shook his head. He looked at the Wall again, just as the sirens began to whine miles behind them.  

         “I don’t think he’s the kind of man who would ever join any one side,” he said. Floodlights abruptly glared from overhead, like a falling star. The youths ducked as the copters hurtled towards them, and then ran for cover.