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Ten or twenty meters into the duct there is a split to the left and right. Looking down them, both paths seem equally far and neither show signs of additional branches. I have no time to think about it. The guard and the woman’s other lackeys are no doubt scouring the building for me. My first impulse is left. Having trusted my gut so far, I go with it. Wasting no time, I continue down the duct to the left.

The further I travel in the narrow metal duct the more proficient I become at moving less noisily. I don’t think there is a way to move through an air duct without making any noise, but I have definitely mitigated it substantially. Hopefully that’s enough so that the people looking for me down below cannot hear it. Whether it is or isn’t is beyond my control so I press on and shove the thought from my mind.

After what seems like hours, but what is surely only minutes, a small gleam of light becomes visible at the end of the duct. Feeling freedom close at hand, my body fills with a renewed vigor and I make quick progress toward the light.

Coming to the end, I see that the light is shining through a similar ventilation cover as I had in the small room. Peering through the small crack that is letting light in, I see a street lamp and a soot-covered walking path. I can’t help but smile. The “ventilation system” doesn’t even have a filter. It just pumps outside air straight in. Now all that stands between me and freedom is a ventilation cover, but this is no simple obstacle to overcome in my position. There is no way I can reach through the small slits to remove the screws holding it in place. The only option I see is to spin around and kick the cover out with my bare feet. Two problems with that option give me pause. First, I’m barefoot, and there is no telling how much more running I will have to do before I’m safe, so I can’t risk breaking a bone or tearing up my skin so badly I can’t walk. Second, banging against the cover will make a lot of noise, and if I’m not successful quickly they’ll be able to hone in on my location. Despite my reservations, I see no other option. I can’t give up; I can’t quit now. I have to keep on until the bitter end.

Turning around is a precarious and awkward experience in the confined space, but I feel confident that I didn’t make too much noise. In position, I place my feet on the cover and prepare. I pull my legs to my chest and then as quickly as I can, shoot them out and hit the cover with full force. Much to my surprise my legs continue past the cover, kicking into the open air.

The bewilderment I feel at my luck completely overshadows my pain. Wiggling free, I shimmy out of the vent. With nothing to put my feet on, I fall painfully to the sooty cobblestones below. The landing is hard. I lay for a moment clutching my right elbow, which bore the brunt of the fall. Wheezing and shaking my head, I fight through the pain and clamber to my feet. The ash feels warm and rough under my uncovered feet. My deep breaths bring in bits of the ash leaving a foul taste in my mouth and burn my lungs. I look left and right down the street. I am totally unfamiliar with my surroundings.

Trusting the same impulse I had in the air duct, I head to the left sprinting from shadow to shadow between the dim yellow light cast by the street lamps. Every movement is an enemy, every footfall an uncomfortable reality. I make it past six lights before I glance over my shoulder to look behind me. Flicking to life at the end of the path behind me are the two bright headlights of a van. The van’s engine revs loudly and it starts barreling down the path toward me. I turn back around and begin to sprint, no longer worrying about staying in the shadows.

My arms pump strongly, my lungs inflate to the breaking point, and my muscles and tendons act without complaint, but despite my body’s best effort, the van rapidly gains on me. The van’s lights illuminate the path in front of me revealing the dead end I’m racing toward. The wall at the end, cutting the path off, is only a few meters high. Knowing I can make it if I’m going full speed, I dump the last of my energy reserves into my legs and lungs and propel myself with maximum speed toward the wall. The wall races toward me, growing higher with each step.

At the moment of no return, I spring from the ground. The wall is higher than I thought, but my battered fingers latch onto the top. Pulling myself up I get my left, and then my right, elbows over the edge of the wall. I’ll make it. The thought of escape vaporizes faster than it formed. Strong hands grab my ankles and, with a violent jerk, pull me from the wall. I fall back, my head cracking painfully against the cobblestones. The world spins, while copper-tasting blood fills my mouth from my bitten tongue. A knot is already forming on my head. The pain has left me both disoriented and out of breath but my fire to survive remains un-dwindled. I flip over and push myself from the ground and begin to sprint off in the other direction. A pair of arms grasp my middle. I throw my right elbow back forcefully and it connects solidly with my attacker’s mask-covered face. I feel the glass eye port shatter. The attacker lets out a filtered cry of pain. The strike loosens his grasp enough for me to twist my way out and continue running away.

Beyond exhaustion, I tap into the deepest, most primordial parts of my brain and muster forth the desperate energy of an animal running for its life. My strides are long and my breaths are deep. I pass the open ventilation duct and feel safety approaching, but once again the illusion shatters. A thunderous roar barks out behind me and rumbles down the walls of the alley, stopping me in my tracks. Turning around slowly, I see another man aiming a rifle at me, smoke still billowing from its barrel.

“The next one won’t miss!”

Despite the distortion of his mask, his voice is commanding and forceful, and I do not doubt the sincerity of his words.

“Now run back over here as fast as you can!”

Without options, I do what the armed man says. I jog back toward him at a hesitant pace. All the while he keeps the gun leveled on me. Just before I reach him, his colleague stands up from clutching his face and races toward us.

“Put that away, she’s not our enemy.”

“It’d be better to shoot her then let her get away, she knows too much.”

“What are you saying? If we shoot her we’re no better than the Peace Officers and the subversives. Why would you stoop to their level? Lower the gun, Damian.”

Damian’s eyes keep their harsh glare behind the glass circles of his mask but he lowers the rifle compliantly. The other man steps forward. His left eye is swollen and bloody.

“I’ll try and explain in the van, but you have to come with us, and you have to trust me.”

I hesitate for a second. I have handed out my trust too liberally lately, and look where it has gotten me: barefoot, exhausted, and bleeding. But it also started my journey. It allowed me to follow Delia into the unknown and that led me to Margaret and the Oracle device. Despite the pain and hardship I have endured, I would not trade any of it for my former ignorance. In a heartbeat, I make my choice.

“I’ll come with you, but before I get in that van, I need to know your name.”

“My name’s Victor. Trust me, I’m on your side.”

I stride toward the van. I pass the two men silently, then open the van’s sliding door. Stepping inside I sit on the empty floor.

“I hope so.”

Chapter Nineteen

The interior of the van is empty. I nestle myself against the side and try to both relax and prepare myself for flight, a tricky task. Damian and Victor waste no time dawdling and quickly jump into the front seats. Damian gets into the driver’s position and kicks the already idling van into gear.

Wordlessly, he begins to race in reverse back down the path. Out the back windows, the world is a blur of yellowish light and deep shadows. At the end of the path the road opens up. Damian unexpectedly whips the van around. Without anything to hold on to, I slide across to the other side of the van. The rough floor of the van grates painfully over my injured flesh. Regaining some semblance of stability I look out the back windows. The shadowy figures of a dozen armed men swarm the place where I climbed out of the ventilation duct. I may not be completely safe now, but I’m beginning to sense that I made the right decision by going with Damian and Victor.

“I think they spotted us,” Victor says. “Try and shake them.”

“Already on it.”

Victor’s insight proves correct almost immediately. Two pairs of headlights kick on in the pathway behind us and began pursuit. Pressing the accelerator to the floor, Damian pushes the van to the limits of its speed. Quickly, though, it becomes apparent that the van can’t outrun our pursuers.

“You’re going to have to lose them in the alleys.” Victor’s tone is shaky but clear.

“I’ll take them down to the Under City. Those streets are almost impossible to navigate.”

With that Damian makes a hard left. The van whips around the corner and once again, I begin to slide. Already tired of sloshing around on the rough floor, I grab onto a dangling strap. With both arms grasping tightly around the strap I’m able to stop most of the sliding.

Now relatively stable, I look out the windows and try and get a sense of where we are, but between the bright yellow street lamps and the pitch-black shadows, my vision is distorted and it’s impossible to distinguish solid shapes. I’m glad Damian is driving and knows what he’s doing because I wouldn’t be able to find all the narrow paths or navigate the tight turns that he seems to know like the back of his hand.

Curve after curve, turn after turn we continue to race through the upper streets of the city with our pursuers hot on our trail.

“Here it is! Hold on back there.”

I am already clutching the strap for dear life, but that isn’t enough. He makes the turn at full speed and on the slick, ash-covered streets the back end swings wide. Crunching into the narrow side street, we narrowly make the turn without crashing. Damian must have made this turn before or else he wouldn’t have known that he could. Crashing back onto four wheels the van groans, then growls as Damian slams the throttle full open.

Continuing at full speed we make two more hairpin turns with nearly the same level of danger before finally slowing down to a leisurely pace. Once we’ve slowed down, I realize I’ve been holding my breath and let it out in a long, relieved sigh. Damian laughs loudly.

“Damn, Damian. If you hadn’t pulled that off, I’d be so pissed at you,” Victor says.

“You never have enough faith in me, Victor.”

“Well, it’s hard when you do stuff like that.”

Sensing my moment to interject, I raise my voice to speak over the rumbling of the engine and the rough cobblestone streets.

“What is the Under City we’re going to?”

Victor turns around in his seat to look at me. The left eye piece of his mask is shattered and his eye has begun to swell noticeably. Victor pulls his mask off. His face is young and angular.

“You don’t know what the Under City is?” he asks.

“No, I don’t,” I say honestly. “I’ve never been there. I live in an apartment high-rise so the lowest down I ever go is the street.”

“What floor of the apartment do you live on?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m curious is all.”

“I live in one of the penthouses,” I say.

“And I bet you go to a private school too. How did you get mixed up in all of this then?”

“I met someone, and she left me full of questions. I guess I just wanted to know the truth. Does it really matter where I’m from? Everyone in the Great Society is being lied to, rich and poor. We are equally deceived.”

“That’s where I’ll have to adamantly disagree. You’ve had clean food, clean air, good school, good parents. Down in the Under City people don’t have any of those things. I certainly didn’t,” Victor says.

“Spoiled brat thinks she knows suffering, ha!” Damian’s disdain for me flows out uncontained.

“I cannot change the circumstances of my birth, and for your information, ‘good’ school and ‘good’ parents are not all they are cracked up to be. My father is never home. My mother is emotionally unstable and paranoid. My instructors poured propaganda down my throat and they resort to draconian punishments when anyone strays out of line.”

Pulling down a steep ramp, the Under City comes into sight. Damian stops the van on the side of the street and kills the engine. The street of the city above serves as a kind of roof for the Under City making the only thing visible when you look up concrete and steel. Despite the roof, ash continues to fall from the myriad openings in the low ceiling where the street sweepers ceaselessly deposit their filthy cargo. The road ahead is only wide enough for one car to pass through at a time. The buildings are built with no gaps between them and reach all the way up to the ceiling ten meters above. The windows are small and covered by bars. Dim soot-covered yellow lights produce so little light that the streets are left in a permanent state of near total darkness.

Damian turns around in his seat and looks at me through his veiled face.

“People who live here work sixteen hours a day making the clothes you wear, the mask you breathe through, and the electricity you take for granted. When they get home, they’re drunk, and more often than not, their children feel the brunt of their wrath and frustration as a bedtime story. Every meal contains, despite their best efforts, pieces of ash. They can’t afford new filters for their masks so they breathe in all the filth dumped on them from the streets above. They’ll be lucky if they see thirty. At school the instructors use the lash more than the pen and almost no one finishes their education because they have to go to work to support their large, hungry, exhausted families. These people don’t need to be fed propaganda to remain subservient. They simply have no time, money, or education to do anything other than survive. This, not the advertisements and the bombastic films, is the real oppression the people of the Great Society feel.”

The anger and emotion in his voice is powerful. I begin to see for the first time the true cost of our civilization. Before the people busying about on the streets were
ants,
nothing more than the object of my curiosity, but how can I continue to believe that after all that I’ve seen? Am I really a spoiled brat who simply can’t be content with everything she has? No, that’s not it, but it is evident that there is still so much I don’t know. I never knew this place existed. I never thought about who made the masks, who created the electricity. All the material things in my life just appeared on store shelves as if by magic and without perspective; how could I have questioned it?

“I’m sorry that I didn’t know. But that is why I’m here. I want to discover the truth, no matter how dirty or painful it may be.”

“But what do you want to do with that truth? Do you want to preach to people about how they should live their lives and then go to sleep in your silk-sheeted penthouse bed?”

“I’m not self-righteous, I want to change things. We need to rebuild our society. The system is corrupt.”

“But how to plan to do that? Would you be willing to fight? To burn it all down?”

Victor turns to Damian. “We’ve had this conversation a dozen times,” Victor says to Damian. “We can’t fix our problems by compounding them. If we go to war with the Caretakers, blood will flow from the innocent and the guilty in torrents. Once you head down the path of violence, you will cause an irreversible avalanche of death and destruction that will ruin any hope we have for living in peace!”

“Words are useless, Victor!” says Damian. “Have any of your attempts to change things through dialogue achieved anything? No! You cannot have a conversation with people whose only response to everything is violence. You have to fight fire with fire. Show the people that Peace Officers are mortal. Shatter the illusion of indomitable Guardians and the power of the Caretakers will slip away from them.”

“Your plan sounds like it would work, but it won’t. Violence begets violence. How can we ever hope to build peace on a foundation of war? We haven’t exhausted every peaceful option available to us, we have to try and try and try.”

“I’m sick of trying. It’s time to act.”

“Is there nothing I can say that would sway you from your path, Damian? Your friendship is important to me, and I would love to work with you, but I cannot take that road with you.”

Damian rips off his mask. His face is scarred and his skin leathery. I remain silent. My presence has struck a nerve with these two and I know no interjection of mine will help the situation.

“Let’s get back to the safe house,” Damian says. “I need to cool down before I finish this conversation with you.”

Victor looks understandingly into Damian’s eyes. They share a moment, then Victor looks away and places his broken mask back over his swollen face. Damian lingers a little longer then follows suit. Back behind their masks the men sit quietly with any sign of their confrontation hidden safely behind the veil. The van rumbles to life again and we resume driving into the Under City.