After positioning to place a few levels of clanking metal gantry between my tormentors and I; I glanced upward. Rat Face was my sole, visible observer. His sneer was easy to see. His beady little eyes, nestled above his long hooked nose, tracked me at a retentive pace, adding weight to the lingering, bad feelings of being sucker punched.

Across from the shadows in a nearby stack and several levels above, I saw another Security Officer holding up both hands as if trying to look through a narrow opening. He straightened his fingers, making them into a blade-like shape before pushing the flattened hands forward and backward as if zooming along a narrow corridor: Port Sign for Attention.

My optics suite fired up, having identified an initiation action for signage data translation. He held up one arm, straight like a flagpole, establishing a point of origin as the other arm was rigidly directed at me like a targeting laser. My optics, having the default port translation package, automatically calculated the pointing trajectory as a semi-translucent red beam, sliding out from his fingertips straight to the center of my chest. It moved like an aimed turret to follow my position, a spotlight pointing out an escaping prisoner.

Anyone who saw the initial signal would see the same, a bright visualized line straight to where I was standing.

Great.

Reaching ground level, I decided a bit of obfuscation might be prudent.

A small plume of dust rose and swirled in my wake as I pivoted, pushing forward suddenly and utilizing my arms in a swinging heave to make way for the opposite side of my original exit. The visualized beam disappeared as line of sight was broken, and my motions brought me before an area which seemed railed off from access. Like a cavity beneath a pier, with supports and walkways above covering an almost secretive space below, it brought forth dark thoughts of trolls and other boogeymen fabled to haunt abandoned alleys and dangerous bridges to nowhere, ready to snatch you for their own nefarious purpose.

McCreed wanted me followed. I didn't want to do what McCreed wanted me to and he knew it. I also had a feeling he wouldn't care about giving me back what was mine, not after he saw what was in there, and there was little to keep him from ordering Rat-Face and his Goons from, "Dealing with" me once I'd done what he ordered to keep it. I was left with a bit of a conundrum. Even if I was going to do what he wanted? I didn't need him telling me when; I'd get around to it, but not before I dealt with my own, more immediate problems.

My stomach squirmed, the excitement of not wanting to be caught was an all too familiar feeling.

An idea came over me.

I jumped over the railing into the restricted area, and began a game: A game I was more than prepared to play.

Kids, and even most adults tended to feel uncomfortable in a restricted areas, worried someone might discover their tresspass, but not me. For me, it was a classic starting move. One useful in childhood games like Stacker Tag, Staggered Chutes, and Bluebell Winter where children used any extra edge to be declared winner among the racing stairways.

The ultimate goal of these games? Don't get caught.

The way to do this? Don't be predictable.

The added trick was making your chaser assume they've already gauged where you're going, and then trying not to be there.

My secret? As the de facto Bluebell Winter King of Block 13? I had an edge some others never possessed: I liked these spaces, and I knew about the Feed Tunnels set into the base. Tunnels which might now be my most likely means of losing McCreed and his Thugs and maybe finally getting a handle on the remains of my smouldering life. I wouldn't be able to use the entirety of the tunnels, being much larger now and in a completely different Block, but I'm sure I could formulate a way to make it work.

Under the Plastcrete columns on which the walkways and support struts were perched, hidden from view, a short flight of molded stairs sank down under the baselevel. The stairs ended at a door. A heavy door. One protected by an access code which required the use of a contact datapoint to even enter. In the eyes of an imagination-heavy child, the door looked like the entrance to a bunker, or some treasure horde of untold riches. The truth proved to be far more mundane, and had been a partial disappointment of my childhood ideologies: They were just there for the feedlines.

All Pods had a number of requisite feedlines supplying data, air, water, and sewage. The feedlines themselves traced up and down the support stuckers of the Pod walkways, with each Block's lines terminating at Substations and Primary Feed paths like some large interconnected network with gateways and subcontrollers. The tunnels were almost always empty save for a few automated crawler drones meant to check for structural, mechanical failure, or to run and reroute the feeds.

The tunnels became my first introduction in how few people knew the workings of our infrastructure. Spurred by the urge to learn more, I'd inquired with one of the maintenance workers on how and why the Pods were connected the way they were. He'd been ecstatic to teach me, giving me lessons about how the Stacks were connected and how they maintained them. It had been the beginning of a trail of breadcrumbs necessary to find the way.

Through painsaking discovery and exploration I uncovered four major facts:

1. Every Stack of every Block had one.

2. If you ever gained codes for a particular tunnel's maintenance access, they were almost never changed out.

3. Nobody seemed to ever monitor them, or even rebuke me for being down there despite having used them for years.

4. Unless their job involved maintenance, most people had no clue they were down there and so never thought of them existing; Perfect for losing someone if you knew how to use them.

Just knowing a code wouldn't give you access. Most workers only knew what items were needed to do their jobs, but didn't actually care much about code security so long as someone couldn't wander in and cause an incident report. An Overall Rig and Cortex Link were considered the bare minimums to work the door mechanisms, but turns out, weren't fully necessary, or so I'd discovered.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I heard a commotion above as booted feet clanked, voices yelling in urgency. They'd lost me, and were now trying to determine my current location.

Good.

On the face of the door, in chipped and faded stenciled yellow paint on burnished metal, sat a label:

[Block D, Stack 43, SS21A]

I extended the index finger of my left hand, pressing the tip to the hollowed data-contact spot in the middle of the door. An access authorization request blinked up as if in mid-air, projected within my implant Heads Up Display and appearing before my eyes.

There was more shouting as I assumed other Security Officers signaled down the line, trying to triangulate where I might be. My position was obscured from their view, and so I was still safe unless someone thought to climb into the restricted zone and peer down the stair.

ACCESS REQUEST INITATED: INVOKE CODE

As a kid, I'd had to scrounge and salvage after coming across a technical document on one of my father's old chip drives. It was a very dry read, but outlined the security mechanism and their processes perfectly. A wrecked Overall suit's glove, an integrated controller, and a few pre-loaded script sequences were used to construct a Contact-Stick, a small device which could key the door open without needing a full Cortex implant suite. The access code proved to be trivial to get. One of the workers had an obsession with an old entertainment media, heavily featuring a specific number. The number had been seeded in the varous works like an easter egg for fans to identify, and it had been easy to find after overhearing a converstation.

"Delta, Four Three, Twenty One Alpha, One, One, Three, Eight," I sub-vocalized quietly, allowing my implants to convert the spoken words into one the doorway's controller could utilize. The door unsealed, silently pulling inward before wooshing downward into a recessed base embedded in the ground. The yawing entrance of a forbidden tomb now stood open, the pitch black tunnel humming ominously in the chill night air.

There were mutterings as Rat Face and the Goons communicated between higher walkways. I entered the tunnel, needing to crouch and turn slightly to make my way into the interior, but stood mostly and clicked on one of my suit's forward facing worklights to see.

The doorway closed behind me.

It was achingly cold, and damp.

The feeling of the tunnel was not unlike entering one of the Corporate Cantina's deep protein freezers, where I'd worked a few shifts during the final years of my primary education. They were air-tight, and set low to keep the various freeze-dried foodstuffs from spoiling, or aging. There had been many, many warnings and training sessions to remind people never to stay within them for too long without specialized equipment. I'd felt a flash of panic when I realized what dangers my adolescent mind hadn't taken into consideration.

I had to stoop slightly to avoid hitting my head on the upper metal supports, the tunnel sides were close, but there was room enough for me to be able to turn around if necessary, even suited. The environment was much too cold for me to use as any form of permanent shelter. Like a wight, a being with a thirst to consume the souls of the unfortunate as they traversed the Underworld, the tunnel leeched away any bit of heat my body fought to retain. The walls, ceiling and floor of the tunnel acted as cooling surfaces.

My breath curled like smoke around me in the illuminated beam of light, phantom tendrils probing the cramped interior for a way out yet finding none. The vapor, which hung in the stale air was a physical reminder the tunnels were air-tight. Hypoxia might be my biggest enemy if the code wouldn't work on the other doors.

I moved forward quickly, the deck clanking as my booted feet gave traction on the dusty surface. There were trails, like dots, marking the passage of the crawler drones as they had done their work. The tunnel walls were densely packed. Neat and orderly rows of feed lines shot off in clusters to various ports of access. The metal bracings above ran the length, following along into cavities drilled straight into the walls as they progressed.

When I had been smaller, a number of the crawler drone sub-tunnels were uncomfortable, but easy to inch through. Now I was larger and an adult. These side passages were no longer an option, which shortened my list of possible destinations. The thought of being stuck, now, with hostiles around and no way to send for help, sent a shiver up my spine.

The short walkway ahead led to a T-intersection, the ceiling and sides opening up for a greater number of feed lines. A trunk, or main-line which would head staight to the primary substation. I stepped out, and turned down both sides, clearing them with my worklight. Being given only two actual options from my current position, Foward and Back, I quickly made my way forward. Both directions led to one of the adjacent stacks on either side of the Lane.

Late one night, when I'd felt the need to be alone on a really bad and stressful day, I'd realized I was wearing my Port Uniform, fully inegrated with the Cortex rig I'd had since I was Eighteen: The minimal requirements. My mother had confiscated my original Contact-Stick after finding out I'd been using it. I had no clue where it had gone after that, even after she died. With the suit and rig, I'd tried the old trick, and it worked. I had gotten in. Whether through laziness, or archaic protocol, the very first blackout maintenance code I'd started with was still valid. After the initial shock and excitement died down, it made an odd sense why it would work. When I began my role as a working part of the "Corporate System", so many design decisions became apparent once I learned why and how people worked the way they did. It was obvious the old addage of Corporate Operations still held true: "It isn't a problem until it's MY problem."

I'd yet to test the code on any other door, and I needed to resolve that.

The tunnel continued on, meeting up with several cross junctions, all labeled to indicate the Grid-like directions toward each Stack on the alternating lanes. I pushed onward, my goal shifting toward first finding another door within view of Rat-Face, one which would work with my sole remaining confirmed-working access code, and secondly, leading the Goons on a merry chase opposite where I meant to go.

My plan required at least two accessable entrances to work.

Honestly, while I felt a bit stupid tromping around as if I were back in a childhood game, I had to admit I enjoyed the statisfaction of letting my rebellious streak buzz along without trying to stop it. Any embarassment I was also feeling was overpowered by the sheer quantity of Goons involving themselves in the search. If I were lucky, they'd do the same as every other Kid used to do when they eventually couldn't catch up to me: Go home and complain.

I continued on. The only noises other than mine were the slight vibrations along feed conduits as the platforms above were swarmed, and far off clicking noises as the crawler drones worked and roamed in the darkness. Earlier, on the walkway, I'd felt trapped, penned in like a wounded animal. The irony of being underground, with feedline covered walls pressing in yet somehow receiving a sense of boundless freedom, was not lost on me.

Now? I had room to move. Room to evade. The numbers outside made the game more difficult, but not impossible.

I felt, oddly, alive.

Flexing my fingers, which had begun to feel cold and achy even within their gloves, I directed the single beam of illumination to cut the darkness ahead and pressed onward.