Curfew

I was still naked with all my possessions bundled under one arm when Carmen's apartment door slammed shut behind me. It was freezing even in the narrow corridors and stairways between the flats inside the blocks, and even once fully clothed again I didn't stop shivering.

The street lamps usually shut down in the night around one o'clock, so there was only weak morning light outside, just about bright enough to get around. You could about make out the shapes of buildings and some of the basic detail all in grainy colourless shadow. I reckoned there was still a good hour till sunrise. If the City had been quiet and still on my walk to school the day of the change, then at this moment it should be utterly lifeless but for me, out wandering alone yet again. In theory this meant that I was under less pressure to quickly find my way back to a safe place, but I didn't feel there was a safe place to hurry to anymore. Home would probably mean Mother asking why I skipped school and didn't return for the night. More than Carmencita she would see through my act, see that all was not right. Eventually someone would hear of it with a mind to scramble me back in line.

I walked to the middle of the small square between police HQ and the old church, still not clear on what to do next. My feet, dragged, and carried me aimlessly in a circle until I was facing Carmencita's mini apartment block. I saw the window that we had sat next to in the sunset. I saw in my mind's eye her naked form squashed against the glass while someone fucked her senseless. It was absurd, and I'd no right to feel this way, but a vicious knot of jealousy flared in my stomach as it occurred to me that from now she would likely do it with another man. It was the same feeling as when I had truly been pining after her, and thought about others winning her affections. No one else had the right to be in her. She was mine. And she'd been so close to reason...

A noise like a giant bird chirping broke the silence somewhere behind me, and I whirled around to see its origin. The rash move nearly lost me my footing, and what I saw bearing down on me came very short of finishing the job. Four black masses approached. Two stood upright, hulking figures stalking forward under deep cowls, with pale green eyes glowing bright in the dark, staring right at me. The other two crawled forward ahead of the others, appearing as shapeless oblongs in the gloom. It was these two creatures chirping at me and there was little mistaking the sound: full grown Argyrean scarab beetles.

The eyes inside the left cowl flickered. "Good girl, Rover," said the policeman, his voice high and thin like air whistling through a cracked door. "Now," he hissed, "Kill!"

I spun round and took off in the opposite direction, and narrowly avoided face-planting. The road and pavement's surface were treacherous, inconsistently salted so there were unpredictable patches of ice. Weighed down and constricted by my winter clothes, it was a monumental effort to get any momentum and not fall. Those monsters would have no such problems on six legs and with not even a leash holding them to their masters.

The inevitable came after I ducked sideways down an alley beside the boundary wall surrounding the church's small graveyard. On a thick sheet of ice down a gentle slope I skidded flailing and kicking out of control. Long rotten wood which turned out to have been a door and downward staircase shattered as I crashed through like so much frozen paper. I tumbled head over heels and crumpled amidst collapsing wafer thin timber. My head did hit the deck on this my second blind fall of the last forty eight hours, but the impact didn't quite knock my lights out.

It was dead silent where I'd landed, and pitch black. I couldn't imagine the police hadn't seen where I'd gone, and yet strain as I did to hear their approach, nothing came. My painful panting was the only sound at all beside the bizarre noises my brain spontaneously conjured on its own. The chase was over, and for all I knew, that might be because I'd actually escaped the law, or because the law considered me as good as dead already.

The fall couldn't have been more than a few metres, leaving me stunned and aching, but without ostensibly broken bones. I found sharp pain in and around my right shoulder, and it clicked awkwardly when I moved my arm, but that was the worst of it. Groaning, I got to my feet. Here I was again, lost somewhere underground in the early hours when no one was awake to come pull me out.

My first steps in cautiously widening circles around the wreckage of the stairs revealed I was in some large open space, as it took a long while for me to find a wall. I opted not to hang around. In the time it would take for bright enough light to come through from outside and reveal to me where I was, the coppers might change their minds concerning my fate, besides which it was still horribly cold, and I needed to keep moving. I put a hand to the wall, and started walking slowly away.

Unlike under the ramparts, no strange lights or sounds awaited me in the depths. When I finally arrived somewhere recognizable, it was after thoroughly losing count of how many twist and turns I had passed, down endless passageways, empty chambers, spiral staircases and the odd ramp. It was after time became meaningless in the absolute blackness and quiet. It was at the point where my stimulus-starved brain was producing hallucinations just skirting the edge of believability. The air dampened and warmed ever so slightly. Water splashed under my feet in small puddles, and my footsteps echoed around me. The sounds didn't bounce very far, but enough to tell this was a much larger tunnel than before. Going to my knees, I put my feet against the wall, and slowly pushed directly away from it, hands sliding on the floor ahead. About twice the length of my body further, I found an edge, and a steep slope going down. I leaned over the edge, and just at the tip of my finger, there was water, running sluggishly along, almost stagnant. While I crawled back to the wall my surroundings coalesced into a meaningful image. I was on a wide walkway beside a huge trench with sloping walls, full of water. Above, somewhere beyond several layers of concrete, was the City, and somewhere below were the Burrows. And to have come so deep down that there was fluid in the trench within human reach meant there would be hundreds of tunnels to explore before I neared the surface again, all in the dark, abandoned, and not really protected from the wear of time. Here was one of the disused canals.

Maps of this netherworld existed in the library, and I'd seen one before. I knew that going upstream would always lead to the centre, to the original pyramid city. Unfortunately, that location only ever had two entrances from above. I might arrive at the buried ruins at the wrong end, with no pathway to the surface. Following the current was also a gamble. Some lanes crossed others on the way, and others simply went straight out. I might walk for days and days, and the spot where the canal was no longer concreted over could be miles and miles out of the city, deep in the Argyre with not a shred of civilization nearby - or at least not reachable before **** by starving.

I should have realized there was one obviously less terrible gamble than the other: only two ways out from the pyramid, but definitely more than two ways out everywhere else. And if I found an intersection then I could change lanes. But my thinking was hampered, and both choices seemed equally bleak. I sat in the dark, unsure which way to go. And then, fate dropped a clue my way.

I heard voices in the distance, and other faint sounds. At first I assumed it was my imagination, and so waited for it to go away or change into a more overtly unreal form. No way could my luck not be totally spent in somehow escaping the coppers and not dying. But the noise persisted, and grew louder. I made out footsteps echoing down the tunnel, and the very beginnings of intelligible words exchanged. Jumping to my feet I strained my ears to listen and spun around looking for even a glimmer of light.

But just as quickly as they'd appeared, the voices faded away. I didn't get a chance to even try and roughly guess where they came from. You would think this might be straightforward when standing around in an otherwise completely silent tunnel, but sound has bizarre habits in different environments, especially in the presence of water. In my state, disoriented and probably suffering a mild concussion, I couldn't process the information properly. If there'd only been a light; I was sure they had come close enough that even a weak torch would have flashed a tiny glimmer where I might catch it.

I was sure these particular noises were real and not figments of my slowly breaking mind. But the canals were vast, and there was really one chance of finding them.

Now was not the time for my good fortune to give out.