Olly Briggs
“I’m not going.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m not. I won’t leave you here alone.”
“I’m afraid that’s not an option for you.”
Olly grumbled. This had been an ongoing argument since the brick had sailed through their front window and shattered his ambitions of leaving. His uncle had it replaced quickly and there hadn’t been any further issues, but despite this Olly was worried.
Currently, his uncle was seated across from him at the table reading the newspaper with one leg casually crossed over the other. It was covering his face so Olly couldn’t read his expression but his tone suggested there would be no swaying him.
A page shuffled. “Have you packed yet?”
He inwardly groaned. They were due to travel to Donnol that afternoon so that Olly could begin his first term at the Academy. However, he had stubbornly refused to pack; once his belongings were contained within that suitcase there was no turning back.
“No,” he admitted.
The paper lowered slightly, revealing an exasperated look in his uncle’s eyes and a furrowed brow. “You don’t have much time, I suggest that you get a move on.”
When Olly didn’t move he sighed and lowered the paper to the table. “I can see that you won’t be so easily told what to do. So what can I do to make this easier for both of us?”
Olly was disarmed. He knew he had been pressing buttons so he fully expected an argument. However, his uncle was seemingly determined to prevent one.
“It’s just… The Mayor coming here clearly put you in a weird position. I’m worried if I leave for the Academy now you’re going to be even worse off for it.”
Eli leaned back, folding his hands across his stomach. “You’re probably not wrong. I won’t lie to you that dynamics are changing here but I did account for this. I knew this was a risk and I don’t intend to stay here forever. But believe me, it’s much better for you to be in the Academy than it is in the sixteenth.”
“Where would you go?” Olly asked hopefully, “And what about Hijinks?”
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe Aspir, maybe somewhere else. And Hijinks is more than a building. The building is just a place where I buy and sell information, and I can do that anywhere. The business can be anything that suits the location.”
Olly wasn't shocked by this confession. He always knew it was more than just a bar and games room. His uncle often had other business to attend to elsewhere; with the time he spent away from Hijinks, there was no way it was just about liquor and games.
“Do you intend for me to supply you with information to sell?” Olly asked. It wasn’t an interrogation, merely establishing facts.
Eli smiled. “No. I don’t intend to dabble with the Grandmasters and their drama. My hope for you is that you use your new position to gain all the insights that you can and use them for yourself. I won't lie though, you’ll face an uphill battle with the visibility that you’ve bought yourself. And despite the way you shattered my plans for you to remain shrouded in the shadows, I anticipate you will still find a way to use information to your advantage. You’ve stubbornly insisted on carving your own path so you might as well make it yours but I hope something of me has rubbed off on you.”
Olly still knew there was more to it. His uncle had told him as much when they had fought over his choice to become a Conductor instead of a Cartographer as originally planned. And yet he believed his motives. Eli rarely gave away his hand. On the few occasions that Olly had watched him play poker in the games room, he maintained the stoniest face in the room and rarely lost. He had no tells, but he always used other people’s expressions against them. It seemed like only Olly had properly been able to out-maneuver him of late, and even then it was clear that they were still on the same side.
There was still something that concerned Olly though. “Are you worried about further retaliation?”
“Even if I was, how could you help me?” he countered. It wasn’t intended as a slight, merely a fact.
Olly said nothing, knowing there was nothing that would change his uncle’s mind.
“I’ll go pack,” he acquiesced.
“Good idea,” Eli reached for his paper again.
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It was time to leave and Olly looked around the neighbourhood mournfully. He would miss the feeling of home. They were going to travel by car to the central tunnel station; there was too much to carry on foot and it was better to miss the tunnel systems right now. The car service hadn’t arrived yet so Olly had decided to go for a final walk.
The feeling was strange. This would always be his first home, for better or for worse. He wouldn’t miss all of it certainly; in the last several months he had begun to see an uglier side of the sixteenth. But he also knew that coming from here would certainly be held as a weapon against him, so he maintained a strange sort of pride about coming from up the bottom.
He had learned from the package about his parents that his uncle had given him that neither Eli nor his parents were originally from here. But Eli apparently had settled here sometime around the time of Olly's parents dying and seemed to be a mainstay now. Most people from the sixteenth were born, raised, and died here, so he suspected that was part of the reason why Eli had designs for him to leave.
“Traitor.”
A voice came from a nearby porch and he swivelled to face it. A few of the former regulars who had stopped coming to Hijinks were sitting on Leroy’s fathers' porch. They appeared to have been drinking heavily and smugly looked down on him on the sidewalk.
He decided to ignore it, he had places to be and didn’t need a fight on his hands. He turned without a word but they decided they weren’t done.
“Figures, you’re just like your uncle. Cowardly, and always thinking you’re better than us. Go suck up to your new friends at your fancy school, maybe they'll give you a second look one day.”
He felt his jaw clenched and willed himself to keep walking.
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“Do you think the Mayor will run down to protect him when we -”
Olly whirled around, feeling a surge of power rush through his arm. He found that while he couldn’t stop it, he could aim it. He settled on the corner of the house and watched as one of the loose bricks disintegrated into dust.
“Finish that sentence!” he demanded. They had ducked for cover and were watching him walk towards them with fearful eyes.
“Just a joke -” one weakly began to say.
“If I hear even a hint of another ‘joke’ I will punch a tunnel straight from Donnol through your house. You will not threaten my home or my family,” he growled, “Got it?”
They continued to cower.
“Good,” he said coldly, turning on his heel before they could see the horror that had taken over his face.
He willed himself to walk deliberately until he reached the corner. Once he was out of sight he ran home as fast as his legs could carry him. That was the first time he had some semblance of control of over power and while he hadn't willed it to come to him, it did offer him a theory. Perhaps once he was at the Academy he could talk to someone about it. Just without telling them that he had used it to threaten someone else and cause property damage. On the plus side, it might force some of the people who meant his uncle harm to think twice before they did anything stupid.
He was out of breath by the time he reached the house, and saw his uncle putting his bags into the car.
“Ready to leave?” Eli asked, looking curiously at Olly who was clutching a stitch in his side.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
Eli didn’t ask further questions and Olly didn’t offer anything up.
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The roads leading to their destination, the central tunnel station, occasionally intersected outside tunnel access points and when they did it was jarring to see the state of affairs. Protests were breaking out in full force. There didn’t seem to be any signs of violence but Olly could detect numerous Controllers in their black uniforms milling around the entrances. While they were stopped at a light he took in the scene before him. They seemed to be making sure that the protests did not block access to the tunnels but the crowd seemed to be actively booing them.
Strangely enough, it only got worse the closer they got to the first borough. Around the eighth borough, the protest numbers were in the dozens. By the fourth borough, there seemed to be over one hundred people.
“What could the Controllers do if people started acting out?” Olly turned to ask Eli.
Eli had been looking out his own window at the display. “Likely nothing, they don’t carry weapons. Neither do most people for that matter, but they aren’t used to civil unrest. Though I’d hesitate to call it coordinated because it’s mostly just people collectively becoming angrier.”
“What do you think is going to happen here?”
Eli pursed his lips. “I’m not sure but since this happened in the first borough and likely impacted people from the highest social standings I suspect there will be calls for action against the Guilds.”
“Good timing,” Olly said cynically.
“The Academy is far away enough, you’ll be far removed from this, fortunately,” Eli went back to looking out his window.
“Have you talked to -” Olly began to ask but his uncle cut him off before he could finish the question.
“No.”
“How did you know what I was going to say?”
“You don’t need to finish it, and I’d rather you didn’t,” Eli looked annoyed.
It was curious to Olly; he wondered if Eli blamed Tarry for the brick. He suspected he didn’t blame the Mayor so much as he blamed himself though. He had steadfastly insisted to Olly previously that they were not friends and could never be friends, and Olly was beginning to see his point. They had a history, that much was true, but the history couldn't bridge the gaps between their current worlds. Allowing the Mayor into their house to honour that history had been a bad move, compounded by even worse timing.
When he woke up the morning after he found his uncle sitting on the couch alone, looking grim. It was then that Olly turned his attention to the news and noticed that the Mayor was considered missing. Before he could ask after his whereabouts, Eli had stated that he was fine in an unreadable tone. Olly put two and two together, realizing in horror that the Mayor had stayed the night while this was ongoing, and nobody had been able to find him because of it.
They had watched the news together all day, enduring the play-by-play of events. First, the mayor was found, with the only explanation provided indicating he had been away on other business. Then people on the streets were interviewed. Most of them openly disparaged the safety of the tunnels and asked how this could happen in their borough. Once it was announced that the Mayor was safe, many called for accountability from him. So-called experts provided their opinions and theories; it was a mess.
By the time the Mayor had taken the stage, there was little to do to salvage the situation. Olly wondered how it was even possible for him to be drinking at their house one night and then addressing the city the next.
“Will they close down the other tunnels?” he asked, wondering if using the central tunnel station was going to be a problem.
“They can’t, at least not right now. It would shut down the city, not even the Mayor could make that call on his own even if he was under pressure.”
They reached the central tunnel station and Olly was able to see the full scale of the aftermath. It was the largest crowd they had seen all day and it was several hundred people deep, surrounding the magnificent building. There were dozens of Controllers maintaining a boundary between the crowd and the front entrance so that people who needed to access the station could do so without facing the crowd head-on.
He had been here the last time he traveled to Donnol, but to say that the collapse had changed the ambiance was an understatement. The intercity tunnel entrances were located on the outside. The collapse had taken place between the downtown of the first borough and the central tunnel station and the collapse entrance was entirely cordoned off. Olly could see authorities, mainly Guild personnel, moving in and out of a large tarped-off area. Something about it sent a shiver up his spine.
Only tunnels leading outside of Occaigh were located within the building, which was where they were headed. Eli placed a guiding hand on his back and led him past the lineup of Controllers holding back the throngs of angry people. The crowd was shouting all around them. It wasn’t entirely clear who was the subject or intended recipient of their calls but they were unfriendly. He wasn’t quite sure why but Olly felt the inclination to keep his head down. They reached the colonnade that marked the entrance and found themselves in front of a temporary checkpoint. Two Controllers stood outside and they glowered down at them.
“State your business.”
Olly gapped. Nobody had ever asked them about their movements before.
“We’re citizens of Occaigh. I’m escorting him to Donnol where he’ll be starting at the Elite Academy of Higher Principles,” Eli responded matter-of-factly.
They exchanged glances and Olly decided to dig out his badge from his pocket to expedite the process. As soon as they saw it, they motioned them to come forward, visibly relaxing.
“Good luck,” one of them called to him. That was the first time that Olly realized he was one of them now. He felt unsettled rather than proud; it felt like he was taking a side in a conflict that was not his own.
He didn’t have time to dwell on it further as they entered the grand building.
It was a large, circular building and featured a gilded main concourse. A ticket booth was featured in the very center with a large, golden clock just behind it. The expansive space featured grand arched tunnel entrances, elegant chandeliers, and a marble floor featuring an intricate tunnel map. A large, spiral marble staircase led down to lower levels where other tunnels were located. As one traversed the staircase, each landing led to tunnel entrances which were manned by a Controller present to check tickets. In this station, there was one tunnel leading to each of the major cities as well as tunnels to some of the more well-traveled smaller cities and recreational areas.
“You ready?” Eli asked, and Olly unclenched his fist, releasing the tension that he had been unknowingly holding.
“Yeah, yeah I’m ready.”
They procured their tickets and began the short walk through the tunnel leading to Donnol.