Dara's Arc

Chapter 2 of 10

The tunnel swallowed the last of the outside light. Dara crawled forward on her hands and knees, Eli close behind. Water soaked through her jumpsuit. The dark was total. She could not see the walls, the floor, or her own fingers. One wrong turn would drop them into a side shaft or a flooded pit. She needed light. But above them, the ground carried guards, and the smallest glow would leak up through a crack and give them away. "We can't crawl blind," she whispered. "And we can't light a flame." "No flame," Eli said. His voice came from just behind her boots. "The vents run straight up. A lantern down here is a torch in the yard up there. They'd see it in a breath." They stopped. Ahead, faint and steady, a voice reached them through the stone. A woman, reading. Grain totals. Victory numbers. The same flat words the regime piped out every morning. Dara knew that broadcast. It came from the tunnel entrance overhead, where a thin woman in a red jacket read the daily lies into a crackling microphone. Wren Joss. Dara had heard her voice a hundred times and hated it. Then the reading stumbled. The woman above them slowed. Her voice dropped, close to the vent, as if she leaned toward it. "Sector Seven," she said. "The real number is half." A pause. "I've kept both hands flat on this desk for three months. I'm tired of it." Eli gripped Dara's ankle. "She knows we're down here." Dara's heart slammed. But the woman above did not shout for guards. She kept talking, low and plain, only into the vent. "There's a lamp in the water shed. Blue glass. The guards read it as a signal light. Harmless. It won't give you away." A breath. "Take the left fork. The right one floods." "Why help us?" Dara said toward the ceiling. "Because I finally said one true thing," Wren said. "Now go, before I lose my nerve." Her footsteps moved off. Dara crawled left, one hand tracing the wet wall. The fork split exactly where Wren said. The right passage gurgled with black water. Dara took the left. Twenty feet on, her fingers found a low shelf, and on it a small lamp with blue glass. She struck it. The glow was dim and cold, no bigger than a coin, but it lit the tunnel floor. Eli's face appeared in the blue light, wet and gaunt. "That color reads as regime," he said. "Clever. She's braver than her broadcasts." Dara could see now. She could move. But the light showed her something she had not counted on. Ahead, the tunnel narrowed to a rusted grate, bolted shut across the passage. Beyond it, the way ran on toward the camp. The blind dark was solved. Now a locked iron gate stood between her and Kael, and she had no key.