Petra Vane's Arc

Chapter 2 of 10

The drainage crawl spat Petra and Juno out into a wider tunnel she had never seen. Water ran in a thin line down its center. The walls were old stone and cracked concrete. She helped Juno to his feet and looked both ways. She had no idea which quarter sat above them. She only knew the sweeps were still hunting a struck-off doctor and a branded boy, and no door up top would open for either of them. "We can't go up," Petra said. "Not yet. Every door up there wants points I don't have." Juno pulled his oversized hazmat suit tight around his shoulders. He would not look at the daylight seeping from a grate above. He had trusted her once, on her table, with a blade in his arm. He trusted her now, in the dark, because she was the only thing that had ever helped him. Petra walked deeper. She kept one hand on the wet wall and counted her steps in her head, never out loud. Then the tunnel opened into a small carved room. Damp stone arched overhead. Old junk lay in the corner. She stopped and listened. Through the wall came a low, steady thrum. Engines. Boots on gravel. A voice barked orders in the flat tone the regime used. She pressed her ear to the stone. On one side, the sound of the military compound. On the other, muffled and heavier, the prison. Juno flinched. His hands went to his ears. Petra's first thought was to run. Then she stopped. She looked again at the little room. Two of the worst places in the city sat close on either side. That meant fugitives. That meant the beaten and the branded, close enough to reach her if she stayed. No patrol would think to search the dead space between their own walls. "Here," she said. "We set up here." Juno stared at her. Petra opened her black bag. She had lost her clinic. She had lost her table. But she still had her meat tools. She found a dry ledge and cleared the grit off it with her sleeve. She laid the bag open. Then she pulled a bent metal rack from the junk pile and stood it against the wall. One by one she hung her tools on it. Scalpel. Forceps. The old bone scissors. They caught the thin light from the grate. "They won't dig here," she said. "Too close to their own gates." Juno lowered his hands. He watched her work. Slowly, he crossed the room and sat by the wall, near her, where he could see the tools and the door both. Petra tied on her apron. She had a room again. She had a table again, of a kind. Now she needed the branded to find their way down to her, and she needed to make sure no patrol above ever heard a sound from below.