The room was crowded to the seams. Between the cots, from which the babies peered like peas from ragged pods, clustered dozens of adult drudges, lining every wall, squatting on tables and
perching on the craggy juts of the rough-cut wall. Delvers with broken nails, treadmill-trudgers, bow-backed carriers, a hundred faces so still and greyed with dust that she might have been facing
down a crowd of statues.
Neverfell heard a click behind her, and turned to find that the matron had bolted the door from the inside. Stepping forward, the matron yanked the mask from Neverfell’s face. Neverfell
froze, but did not duck or cower. It was too late for that. They knew. All of them knew.
It was only slightly reassuring to note that most of their unblinking, unwavering stares were fixed not on her, but on Erstwhile.
‘Did you think nobody would find out about her?’ asked one of the men squatting on the milk trolley. Neverfell’s gaze flew to the source of the voice, but could not work out
who had spoken. None of the drudges before her held themselves like a leader, nor did the silent crowd look to anybody for orders. It was as if the crowd had chosen one person to be its
spokesperson, and had done so almost at random.
‘I was just . . .’ Erstwhile’s sentence halted, looked around itself, and realized it had nowhere to go.
‘This is the outsider.’ It was a woman who spoke this time, wan-haired and faded. ‘The one everybody wants. Last time she was loose down here, the Enquiry tore half of Drudgery
apart looking for her. And now you’ve brought her back here.’
‘Listen!’ Erstwhile was scratching for his last threads of courage. ‘We have to hide her. She knows things, about the Grand Steward’s death, and . . .’
His words were lost in a murmur of consternation and disapproval, a soft sound more like a fading drum echo than the sound of human voices.
‘The Grand Steward’s death?’ Another man, with a broken nose. ‘Worse and worse. This girl is only a danger to us. Unless we hand her over to the Enquiry, or the
Council.’
‘No!’ Neverfell and Erstwhile exclaimed at once.
‘The Council will offer a bigger ransom,’ came a voice from the back of the room.
‘And perhaps treat us better,’ suggested another. ‘Give us more eggs for our children.’
‘Listen, listen!’ squawked Erstwhile. ‘It’s not just the Grand Steward! The murderers who did for him killed drudges too!’
‘It’s true!’ Neverfell pitched in. ‘The last rehearsals, that was them. They were using a poison that drove people mad, and made them kill their loved ones.’
The murmur of disapproval died completely, and was succeeded by an absolute silence. It crossed Neverfell’s mind that if stares had a sound these were the loudest set of stares she had
ever heard. Erstwhile had won one victory at least. Everybody was now listening.
‘It was Maxim Childersin,’ Erstwhile continued breathlessly. ‘The vintner. The leader of the Council. He did it all. And he’ll get away with it too, unless we stop him.
And, with the help of Neverfell here, we
can
stop him. We’ve been finding out about things he’s done. Crimes that will topple him. The Enquiry hate him – this is just the
chance they’ll want. They’ll be drooling to hear it.
‘We can’t prove he killed the Grand Steward, but he’s done more than that. He’s had a secret tunnel built, running all the way to the overground, so he can smuggle in
daylight.’ Erstwhile had recovered now and was building momentum. ‘An illegal tunnel. It’s right there in his breakfast room. That breaks about a hundred laws, doesn’t it?
Neverfell found out about it.’
‘Then we give the girl to the Enquiry,’ rasped an old man with one eye. ‘She can tell them about the Grand Steward and the secret tunnel.’
‘What? No!’ shouted Erstwhile. ‘The Enquiry’s full of torturers and murderers! We can’t hand her over to them!’
‘If they hate Childersin so much, they’ll need her alive,’ came the answer. ‘She’ll be safe enough. What reason have they to keep
us
alive if we cross
them?’
‘It won’t work!’ cried Neverfell. ‘If I thought it would, I would have gone straight to the Enquiry, and taken my chances at the start! Do you think I like running around
endangering everybody? Yes, if I actually could get a chance to speak at the Court’s grand hearing, and tell everyone what
really
happened to the Grand Steward, maybe that would make a
difference. They’d all see I was telling the truth. I can’t lie.
‘But I never would get a chance to speak! Master Childersin and his friends have spies and agents in the Enquiry. By now he must know I know something, or I wouldn’t have run away.
So if I turn up in the hands of the Enquiry he’ll have me killed in seconds.’
‘He can do that too,’ put in Erstwhile. ‘Neverfell nearly got murdered in an Enquirer cell, just because they thought she knew too much.’
‘We don’t have any choice,’ was the answering growl. The murmur of the room became louder again, the tide of feeling almost visible like smoke.
‘Listen!’ exploded Neverfell. ‘It’s not just about me and Master Childersin and the Enquiry! If you hand me over, don’t you see what you’d be doing?
It’s true, I don’t want to be murdered or tortured. But you shouldn’t want to hand me over either. Didn’t you hear what we said about the passage?
‘There’s a secret shaft to the overground. Maybe the first one for hundreds of years. The only other way to the surface is the main gate where the outsiders come to trade, and that
one’s locked and barred and guarded to the hilt, to make sure that nobody gets into Caverna and nobody leaves. If we tell the Enquiry about the hidden shaft, they’ll tear in and seal it
off forever, and that’ll be the end of it. Don’t you see? This is a chance that none of us will ever get again if we live to be a hundred. Which we won’t. This tunnel –
it’s not just a way of getting daylight into Caverna. It’s a way out.’
The murmur began again, this time with an incredulous edge to it. Again Neverfell sensed the fear of the outdoors, the dread of the burning sun. Even Erstwhile was staring at her.
‘I know, I know what you all think,’ she protested hastily, before the sound could grow too loud for her voice to rise above it. ‘I know what we’ve all been told about
the world outside Caverna. But I don’t think it’s true. I lived out there once, for the first five years of my life. I can’t remember much, but I can remember sunlight. And I
don’t feel scared when I think of it. I feel . . . I feel like it’s something I’m meant to feel on my face. I feel like I’ve gone blind, and I’m remembering what
it’s like to have eyes.’ She faltered to a halt, losing confidence before so many stony, indifferent stares.
‘Keep talking,’ Erstwhile muttered through the corner of his mouth.
‘What?’
‘Trust me. Keep talking. About the overground.’
Neverfell could only assume that he had sensed something in the frozen crowd that she could not, but she took a deep breath and reached for the scattered stars of memory amid the blackness of
her amnesia.
It was a stumbled, piecemeal explanation, nor could it be otherwise. She started with the bluebell-wood vision she had experienced after eating the Stackfalter Sturton, and tried to describe the
way the blooms had crushed under her feet, the green teeth of the ferns. She tried to find words for the way the air moved crazily and made everything shiver as if it was alive, and made your face
cold. She reached for a phrase that would show them dew, and the smell of moss. She failed.
‘I don’t have the words!’ she wailed at last. ‘And I know that all around this mountain there’s desert and baking heat – everybody knows that. But
that’s not all there is. You can cross the desert, the overgrounders do all the time, and then you get to other places. Places where the grapes come from. And the spices and the timber and
the hay for the animals. And the birds, they . . . they’re faster, and . . . so fast you almost can’t see them. Just hear them. And the sky is a thousand times bigger than Caverna, a
thousand thousand times.
‘Oh, I can’t show you!’ The frustration was an ache. ‘She’s got us, she’s got us all. Caverna. She doesn’t want to let us go. Do you know what
she’s like? A huge trap-lantern with us inside her, digesting us really, really slowly, and not wanting to let any of us go. Maybe that’s the worst kind of prison – not knowing
you’re in a prison. Because then you don’t fight to get out.
‘And we should all be fighting to get out. All of us. We should be fighting to get all of
them
out.’ Neverfell waved a panicky hand at the ranks of silent babies. ‘None
of us should be down here, and maybe if we weren’t we wouldn’t get bow-leg and stoop-back and out-of-clock and everything else. Even though I can only remember tiny bits about the
overground, every little bit of me has been tugging and yanking at me all these years to claw my way back to it. And if I thought that I couldn’t ever see it again I think I’d go
mad.’
Again Neverfell tailed off, wishing for once that she had the mind and tongue of a Childersin, with their easy grace and way with words. But she was just Neverfell, a bit mad and a little
Cartographied to boot.
It was a moment or two before she realized that there was no murmur of contempt or disagreement, and nobody had stepped forward to grab her by the arms and drag her to the Enquiry.
There was a pause and then the drudges turned away and began a susurration of whispers. The same phrases were audible over and over.
‘. . . danger every moment she is here . . .’ the children . . .’ crossing the desert . . .’
‘. . . only chance . . .’ risky . . .’
‘What are they talking about?’ Neverfell whispered to Erstwhile. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Shh!’ Erstwhile hissed back, a little shakily. ‘We got them thinking, that’s what’s happening.’
At last the room-wide whispers ceased, and the drudge crowd turned back to stare at Neverfell.
‘How could we escape through this tunnel, even if we wanted to?’ It was the crèche matron who spoke this time. ‘You say it runs from Childersin’s private tunnels.
How could we ever reach it?’
‘I don’t know yet, but there has to be a way.’ Everything was moving too fast. Neverfell’s plan had not reached this far, and yet she surprised herself with a thrill of
certainty. ‘Yes. I’ll find a way.’
‘You have a day,’ came the answer, and this time Neverfell did not look to see who spoke. ‘You have until the hour of naught tomorrow to come up with a plan to reach the
passage. If you cannot come up with one, we must take you to the Enquiry. I am sorry. The danger of hiding you is too great.’
‘I understand,’ answered Neverfell to everybody and nobody in particular. The thrill of certainty melted away like a fistful of ice crystals. Now there was just a clock face staring
down her mind’s eye.
Little more than twenty-five hours, and Neverfell could not think. It did not help that Erstwhile was with her pacing in small circles, his ideas describing even smaller
circles. In the end his circles got so small he nearly tripped over his own ankles.
‘You bought us some time back there, Nev, or your face did, anyway. The things you were saying were just a mad old jumble of nothing, but they weren’t listening to you. They were
looking at you. That’s what swung them. They could see little snippets of what you remember of the overground. Like holes with light pouring through them. They’re scared, though, and
they mean what they say. If we can’t come up with a plan by the hour of naught, they’ll hand you over.
‘You don’t have a plan, do you?’ he added, accusingly. ‘After all you said, about finding a way out. You don’t have any idea how to do that, do you?’
‘It’s just a . . .’ Neverfell failed her hands, wondering how she could make him understand the mess of tiny bubble-plans frothing around in her head, failing to make one big
usable plan. ‘Oh, I can’t think!’
‘There’s nowhere left to run,’ Erstwhile growled. ‘Except the wild caves. But then we’d run out of food or be eaten by cave weasels. Wherever we go, they’ll
find us. But we got to run. We got to. We got a day to run.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Neverfell said in a small voice.
‘What?’
‘If I can’t come up with anything,’ Neverfell continued unsteadily, ‘you should turn me into the Enquiry yourself. At least then you’ll get the reward, and the rest
of Drudgery won’t hold it against you any more for bringing me here.’
‘Shut up!’ Erstwhile took a moment to raise his hands and pull his frog-Face the way Neverfell had taught him, to show he was really, really angry. ‘What’s wrong with
you, always looking to throw yourself on the nearest spike?’
‘You’re right.’ Neverfell clutched her head again. ‘Yes, you’re right. Sorry, Erstwhile, I just can’t think straight right now.’
‘Right now?’ muttered Erstwhile under his breath.
Those two words, uttered in a sarcastic undertone, stopped Neverfell’s mind in its tracks. She lost her train of thought, and gave up on it, leaving it to steam away cross-country to some
dark, uncharted canyon. She even stopped breathing for a moment.
I can’t think straight. But why am I trying to do that anyway? Everybody else thinks straight. That’s why nobody expects me to think zigzag-hop. Which is what I do
naturally.
‘Erstwhile,’ she said, catching at the tail-end of a trailing thought and letting it pull her, ‘I need you to wear my mask for a bit.’
‘Your mask?’
‘Yes. And my dress.’
‘
What?
I’m not doing that!’
‘But that makes no sense! You’ve been risking your life for me left, right and centre, did you think I hadn’t noticed? So how can it be worse to wear my dress? It’s only
for a few hours, long enough that the drudges trying to keep watch on me don’t notice the real me sneaking off.’
‘Sneaking off? Where are you going?’
‘To do something I can’t do if I’m being watched. I don’t quite have a plan, but I think now I sort of have a plan for how to make a plan for coming up with a plan. And I
can’t think about it too hard right now or it won’t work. Please, trust me.’
Erstwhile’s hands twitched, and Neverfell guessed that he was thinking of putting his new angry Face on again.