A World of Ash: The Territory 3 (10 page)

As Nim, Squid, and Sister Constance were led out of the arena they came to a fork in the tunnel. The left-hand branch was sealed with a thickly barred steel barrier fitting the circular shape of the tunnel, and a heavy door was set in the center. A red-cloak standing guard moved hastily to unlock and open the door as they approached. Down the other branch of the tunnel Nim could smell the thick stench of stale urine and old sweat. He could almost see the fear that radiated from down there, as if it had stained the air.

“That’s where they keep the prisoners for the colosseum,” Sister Constance said, noticing Nim’s lingering gaze and the way his face curled at the smell.

“Shut up,” one of the clergymen barked, forcing them through the open door. As their escort of clergymen continued moving them further down the dimly lit tunnel Nim heard the door close with a clank as it was locked behind them. The sound of fighting could still be heard from the arena, and it seemed to be growing louder. Nim looked back through the bars at the clergyman guarding the door, but the man’s attention was fixed in the direction they’d come from, as if waiting to see whether a crazed group of prisoners would come charging toward him. Nim hoped so.

The tunnel turned and continued in a wide arc. It must have been leading them around the outside of the arena. When they had gone what Nim guessed was about halfway round, they took another branching tunnel. He was amazed. How many tunnels did this rabbit warren have? It must have taken years to build all this, perhaps even whole lifetimes dedicated to excavating the rock and clay. To think the Dwellers wasted this much effort on building a place just to house prisoners of the Church when their own people suffered all across the Territory.

“Where are you taking us?” Nim asked.

Lieutenant Werther emerged from the dimly lit tunnel ahead of them. Nim noticed he hadn’t been out there fighting – instead he’d been skulking back here, waiting for them. He smiled, an unpleasant and unfriendly smile. “The warden wants to see you. You’ll have your audience with her once this mess you’ve started is cleared up,” he said, “but you’ll be waiting in the slot.”

“The slot?” Squid asked.

Werther hummed a noise of affirmation but didn’t offer any further explanation. Nim looked at Sister Constance. Though she didn’t say anything, the look on her face was enough to tell him that she was concerned. He supposed she would know what the slot was, and if she was anxious about it, then he guessed that he and Squid should be equally worried. He prepared himself for the slot to be something he wasn’t going to enjoy.

As they were led down corridors of darkening red stone the sound of fighting diminished until it could barely be heard. Here, deep in the prison, you could almost forget what had just happened; you could almost forget there was a rebellion afoot. Still, there was a feeling in the air, even in the tunnels away from the fighting, a feeling like the weather was shifting, a change was coming. Though the clergymen escorting them tried to remain calm and emotionless it was clear they were tense and afraid. If every prisoner in Pitt shook free the chains of obedience they had been trained to wear, then the Holy Order would stand little chance of keeping them contained. They were vastly outnumbered.

After descending a set of spiraling stairs carved into the rock they entered a corridor lined with metal doors, not barred like most of the others in the prison but solid, with only a thin cut-out at eye level that could be closed with a small sliding cover. The doorways were barely wide enough to pass through sideways and as they passed some open cells Nim saw they were only about three feet deep. There was just enough room for someone to stand side-on, but not enough room to turn around or to sit and certainly not to lie down.

“You can’t put us in there!” Nim said. He felt panic and bile rising in his throat. He was used to the open sky of the Territory, nights spent looking up at the stars. Being underground was bad enough, but being locked in the dark, in a room too small to turn around in – he couldn’t handle that. “I’m not going in there!”

Nim stopped in the middle of the dim tunnel. A clergyman pushed him from behind.

“Indeed you are,” Werther said.

“No!” Nim said. Any other thoughts left him. All he could think about was avoiding that tiny room. “I’m not going in there!” Two clergymen grabbed his arms and began wrestling him toward an open doorway. He thrashed and tried to fight against them but inch by inch they moved him closer to the cell. Nim spread his arms and pinned them either side of the thin doorway, trying to resist being pushed inside.

“How long?”

Nim looked toward Squid, who was entering the cell next to him. He moved calmly. He spoke calmly. His behavior alone seemed to settle everyone. Nim, and even the clergymen who were trying to force him into the cell, stopped and turned to listen.

“How long what?” Clergy-Lieutenant Werther said.

“How long will you be keeping us in here?” Squid said.

“As long as it takes us to secure the prison again,” Werther replied. “As long as the warden decides to keep you here.”

Squid looked to Nim. “It won’t be long, Nim.”

“What are you talking about?” Werther said to Squid. “It will be as long as we want it to be.”

“No,” Squid said. “It will be as long as it takes for the warden to realize she needs to ask us about what we did in the arena.”

Werther’s brow furrowed. “Get them in the cells,” he said as he turned and walked away.

“Nim,” Squid said. “You’ll be all right.”

Nim let the clergymen shove him into the tiny cell. Jammed sideways between the cold walls felt exactly the way he’d feared it would: it was just like being stuck in the rocks as the ghouls screeched behind him. Nara was out in the night and he wasn’t there to protect her. He wasn’t there to tell her to run. He wasn’t there to stop her being pounced on by a ghoul, driven into the dark dirt and having the life sucked out of her. His heart pounded in his ears. His breath came in short gasps. He desperately tried to maintain control of his adrenaline-ravaged body, tried not to call out or scream to be set free from this tiny box.

He remembered what Squid had said, that they wouldn’t be here long, that he’d be all right. He had to trust him because he couldn’t handle this for long. The truth was that he did believe Squid. He wasn’t sure when it had happened – maybe during their death-defying journey to Big Smoke and the dome, maybe during the chaos of the dust storm, maybe even before that – but Nim knew he had given his trust over to the scrawny boy from Dust. He had always been intelligent; Nim had seen that from the very beginning, but as his confidence grew Squid had become a leader, a person who could inspire those around him despite all his apparent physical limitations. They had their differences, Nim knew, not least of which had been about Lynn, and they would probably have differences again, but if Squid told him to jump off a cliff, Nim would do it. He would do it because if Squid was suggesting it then it was probably the best idea at the time.

As the door closed with a clang Nim’s world was thrown into darkness. He leaned his head back against the cold wall and squeezed his eyes shut, but even with his eyes closed he could feel the walls so close to his face and could sense the tiny cell closing in on him. He pushed aside the memories of the night he’d lost Nara. He calmed himself. He trusted Squid. They would get out of this. Somehow.

It was early morning and there was a constant dull pressure behind Lynn’s forehead. Her eyes felt scratched raw, as though the inside of her eyelids were coated with the coarse red sand that was so much a part of life in the Central Territory. She supposed these were symptoms of how little sleep she had managed the night before. After Clergy-General Provost had brought her to this place – which she had discovered was an abandoned warehouse in the Gap and now a clandestine safe house for Knox Soilwork’s resistance movement against the High Priestess – she had spent many hours with Knox meeting other members of this group, a group that were calling themselves simply the Free. She hadn’t learned what they specifically considered themselves free from; the Church, the government, the threat of the ghouls, all of that, perhaps. She supposed it didn’t matter. They did not consider themselves Pure, or redeemed, or Insiders, or Outsiders, they were simply Free. This was the way she herself had felt since the moment her father had died, even if it had taken her some time to realize it. Free. Free in all the wonder of being unconstrained by the oppression of the Church and all the terror of facing the world alone.

There were members of the Free from almost every denomination of life in the Territory, even true Nomads like Nim, those who still lived out on the land, surviving in the way Nim had shown them. Lynn had met two of them last night, an older man and his daughter. They had been visiting Alice on some sort of official business, keeping up what relations they could with the Church, when they had been informed they wouldn’t be permitted to leave. Lynn asked whether they knew Nim but they didn’t; it seemed they were from an entirely different mob. When they asked her which mob Nim had belonged to she hadn’t been able to say. He’d never been all that specific, just always called it
his
mob, though she wondered why she’d never thought to ask such a simple and seemingly important question. The best answer she could give was that they came from somewhere in the Western Ranges. She was suddenly faced with the deficiencies of her knowledge about the Nomads. The ignorance she, and almost all Insiders had about the Nomad culture, was embarrassing.

“I trained at the Rock,” she had said to them. “Uluru.”

She had been trying to make conversation, raise a topic she thought perhaps they could talk about, if only because she’d heard the Rock was important to the Nomads. The response she received was unexpected.

“Do not speak to us of Uluru,” the young woman said fiercely. “That place was desecrated by you Dwellers. Torn open, hollowed out, and used as a place of war.”

“It was a sacred place,” the man said, his voice calmer, a sign perhaps of his years. “The Dwellers took it and tried to make it their own just as they try to shape all the land instead of letting it be as it is meant to be. This land is a partner, not a servant.”

“The Diggers that were trained there, they kept you safe, too, you know,” Lynn said, her tone biting.

Both the Nomads stared at Lynn with their dark eyes and she immediately regretted her words. It had been instinctual for her to jump to the defense of the Diggers despite knowing that was the Insider within her speaking. She wanted to break free of that, to be inclusive of everyone in the Territory, but she found that negative aspersions about the Diggers still raised her ire. She had idolized the Diggers her whole life; her father had been one, she had been one. It was difficult to let that go.

“The country is large,” the man said. “We would be safe living how we live, moving around and avoiding the ghouls. It is the Dwellers and their towns that draw the ghouls here constantly. Your way of life creates the danger.”

“Why do you stay within the fence then?” Lynn asked, trying not to let her tone grow angry once more.

“Because this is our land,” the woman said. “Your presence here doesn’t change that.”

The old man looked from his daughter to Lynn. “When the fence stands there is no denying that being inside is better than being outside, if only because we don’t know what has been done to the land beyond.”

“It’s like this,” Lynn said. “More of this red waste.”

“You’ve been out there?” the young woman asked, suddenly less confrontational and maybe a little awestruck.

Lynn nodded. “I have. Tell me, though, why are you helping us? Why have you joined the Free in the fight against the Church if you wish the Dwellers were gone anyway?”

“Because we’re stuck here.”

“Because,” the elder of the two said in a tone clearly meant to overwrite what his daughter had said, “no one deserves to be left at the mercy of the ghouls. That is just evil. Even if we do not share a way of life, we share the acknowledgment that evil should be stopped.”

There was silence between them for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” Lynn said. “About Uluru, I mean.”

The man nodded to her. “Acknowledgment of history is the only way to a better future,” he said before they bid farewell and went to turn in for the night. As Knox had informed her, they all slept in the warehouse, at least temporarily.

Though Lynn had been tired and would like to have gone to bed as well, Knox had insisted she accompany him as he made his way around the large open space of the warehouse. Clergy-General Provost had walked with them for a short time before he left, explaining that his being away for too long would arouse suspicion. He would maintain his position as the head of the Holy Order for as long as possible, although he suspected the High Priestess already had misgivings about him.

As they walked Knox checked on the small groups scattered around the space, huddled over tables or upturned boxes or wooden slats placed across chairs. Each of the groups, comprising maybe three or four people, was examining maps of different areas of the city, highly detailed views of the streets and buildings but also sewer systems, underground tunnels, and plans of the Wall from when it was first constructed, long before it was expanded with bio-fuel storage and extra towers and then even later butchered for building materials for the city.

The Administrator had moved to one of these groups on the opposite side of the warehouse. Lynn looked over at him occasionally and would often find him returning her gaze with an equal amount of scorn. She wondered how long it would be before they clashed again. She would be surprised if they lasted a day. The fact she had learned he wasn’t responsible for the death of her father had done little to quench the hot hatred she felt for him. He was still a villain in her eyes, and always would be. He could try to pretend he was helping the cause of right, but she knew he would have some agenda, some plan where he would try and come out on top.

“Each of these groups are made up of the leaders of one cell of the Free,” Knox said, pausing to glance down at the table they’d stopped at. “They’re responsible for operations in one area of the city.”

“And you run the whole thing?” Lynn asked.

“In some ways,” Knox answered. “Each cell is quite independent. I provide some guidance but I’m mostly responsible for what we’re calling Operation Front Door.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s what I want you to be involved in,” Soilwork said. “Come.”

He led Lynn to the table where the Administrator stood. He watched them approach but neither he nor Lynn said anything to the other.

“Operation Front Door is our plan to get those from the slums inside the city. I thought you in particular would like to be involved in that.”

Lynn nodded.

“Good,” Knox said, “but it will be dangerous. The first step is for a small group of us to go outside the Wall in the early hours of tomorrow morning.”

That was why Lynn was awake now, roused in the early hours by Cod, one of the men who had posed as a Holy Order clergyman to escort her from the cathedral. She felt as though she’d only just drifted off to sleep when she’d opened her eyes to find Cod gently shaking her shoulder.

It had been a combination of her sleeping environment and the buzzing of her mind that had kept her awake and alert for hours in the darkness. She had slept on a thin mat in one of the rooms set aside as temporary accommodation up rickety stairs on the second level of the warehouse. Improvised sleeping mats made from piles of fraying green fabric were lined up along each wall of the windowless room. There were rooms with windows in the front of the warehouse where the building faced the noisy street, but Knox had sealed them off both verbally and physically; the doors had been bolted and barred and stern warnings given to anyone who would attempt to open them. Still, the sleeping arrangements didn’t bother Lynn that much. They weren’t exactly comfortable but it wasn’t much different from the Academy, if a little cruder. It was the other bodies in the room that worried her. Knox claimed they were all on the same side now, the side against the High Priestess, but Lynn couldn’t help but feel alone. She’d shared only the briefest greetings with most of the people she was sharing this room with and she didn’t trust any of them. Maybe she would eventually, but she didn’t yet. Knox’s assurance that they were on the same side was not as reassuring as perhaps he thought it was.

Cod led Lynn downstairs into the main space of the warehouse. She immediately noticed the tables around the outside sat empty, cleared of the maps and plans, the makeshift trestles of boxes and wood had been disassembled, the whole room cleared of anything that could give the impression someone had been there.

Knox and the Administrator were already waiting with seven others, and Lynn noticed they were all men. One was Kook, the other man who had posed as Holy Order to escort Lynn from the cathedral. Both Kook and Cod were, she had learned last night, Diggers who had been on leave visiting their families when the Battle of Dust had taken place. Lynn imagined the others must have been ex-Diggers too. She wondered how they could stand being in the same room as the Administrator. Whether the High Priestess had manipulated events or not, it was still the Administrator who had given the order for the Diggers to attack. How many of their friends had died that day?

Two women were emerging from a door on the opposite side of the room. Lynn didn’t recognize the first woman. She was tall, her mouse-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail. But Lynn recognized the second woman immediately and it was all she could do not to run to her.

“Ms Apple!” Lynn said, her voice almost squeaking with delight.

Ms Apple smiled, not having lost one ounce of her warmth.
To the two hells with it
, thought Lynn, and she did run to her, wrapping her arms around the woman.

“Lynnette,” Ms Apple said, embracing her.

“What are you doing here?” Lynn said, pulling away from her old teacher to look at her properly, almost as if she needed to check it was really her.

Ms Apple nodded to Knox Soilwork. “He brought me here,” she said. “The High Priestess has suspended all education not conducted by the Sisters. Now I teach the children of the Free. Bren and several of your other classmates whose families may not be safe are under my care.” Ms Apple squeezed the tops of Lynn’s arms. “Tell me,” she said, lowering her head to gaze directly into Lynn’s eyes. “Are you well? Truly? I know you have been through a lot.”

Lynn nodded. “I’m all right,” she said. Emotion welled inside her, a rush of it that threatened to spill forth. If there was one person she felt she could let herself collapse around, it was Ms Apple. She didn’t, though. She fought the rising tears back down her throat. She didn’t want to let her guard down in front of the other people present.

“I know how strong you are, but I worry regardless.”

“Pfft,” Lynn said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You don’t have to worry about me.” But inside Lynn felt elated that someone, somewhere, had been concerned for her and had thought of her while she’d been gone.

“I’ve missed you,” Ms Apple said, squeezing the tops of her arms again.

That made Lynn’s battle to hold down her emotions all the more difficult. “I’ve missed you too,” she said, her voice cracking. She hoped no one else noticed.

Ms Apple pulled her in close again and whispered in her ear. “Do not mistake caring for weakness,” she said. “I have seen you do that all your life. It is not a weakness. It is a strength.”

Lynn nodded, knowing she would be unable to say anything without collapsing into a blubbering mess. Ms Apple, thankfully, held her long enough that the worst of it passed before she pulled away again. Lynn cast her eye around at the others but if any of them had noticed her emotional state they didn’t show it.

“Are you coming with us?” Lynn asked.

Ms Apple shook her head. “I’m afraid missions like this are well outside my area of expertise. I’ll leave this to you and the others here. I just wanted to see you before you left in case, well … never mind.”

“In case we don’t come back.”

Ms Apple reluctantly nodded.

“I told you,” Lynn said, forcing a smile. “You don’t have to worry about me.” She was sure, though, that if anyone could see through her bravado to the fear beneath, it was Ms Apple.

“Yes,” Ms Apple said. “You’ll be fine. Whatever happens just keep yourself safe. Stay with these brave Diggers out there and you’ll be all right.”

“Everyone,” Knox Soilwork said, refocusing the group’s attention, “as you know, Operation Front Door begins this morning. We’ll be exiting the city through an abandoned access gate we’ve discovered in a section of the Wall three streets over. Members of the local cell of the Free have been working nightly for a week to ensure the safety of this route out of the city and to free the gate mechanism which was rusted closed. We don’t know how long this gate has gone unused but it has been at least fifty years or more. Most people don’t even know it’s there, including, we hope, the Holy Order. Clergy-General Provost has lessened patrols in the area for us which shouldn’t raise too many red flags as the focus of the red-cloaks is keeping people out rather than keeping people in. Still, we will need to move through the Gap unnoticed.

“Once outside our small group will attempt to make contact with local community leaders living in the slums. We have reports of a well-organized group led by an individual known as Hank Barton. I will make arrangements with him to begin the complicated operation of simultaneously striking against the Holy Order and moving the Outsiders inside en masse through gates around the city.”