Raime didn’t come early, choosing to finish their night of sleep at the same place they’d been recruited by Gale. The narrow impasse had been repainted up and down so the artists had left it alone to dry, making for a perfect resting spot in a district of very volatile activity.
The tribulations of yesterday had left them in a state of empty tranquility, leaving the warm pit of their bed for hard concrete somehow felt more comfortable. During the first days after Raime started following Dove’s orders, they had ventured under the Sun, revisiting places they had previously seen. The new perspective hadn’t given them much to think about, only a growing emptiness in their stomach from standing in familiar spaces, now devoid of color. Day after day, Raime moved around less and less, waking later and later, shortening the time between opening their eyes and delving into the underbelly. It hadn’t been a conscious choice, they barely rebuked everytime Dove got on their case about schedules. They were early today, earlier than usual at least, credit to the Knightcall and he complained nonetheless. Raime figured as long as they showed up beforehand and went in as sundown, it would be enough. Although they were uncertain about how long this ordeal would go on for. Now at least, laying there, they felt like a part of a whole. They were woken up by sirens blaring.
“Warning to all citizens of Last Kunlun. Accumulation of snow detected in upper atmosphere. Four hours of torrential rain are to be expected after sundown.”
As the message repeated itself, Raime blinked and spared a thought to the one repairing an elevator they met this morning. With any luck, he could delegate tomorrow to someone else. The sky had already grown darker, everything around them still basked in monochrome shades. Clouds gathered way above their head, where Volantis couldn’t reach. Heavy snow would fall from them, melting away during its descent and pouring down with thunderous force upon the city. Torrents weren’t fatal for anyone, at worst being an annoying inconvenience if you hadn’t paid attention to the sirens.
However, the infrastructure of a few districts, including the lower stratum of the Hull would very easily flood, making for a few days of high activity while attempting to patch leaks and redirect the excess of water where it could evaporate quickly. Unlike the Hull, the underbelly was expertely equipped to survive Torrents, the Caldera had the most efficient water disposal systems of the city to protect the intricate underground system from collapsing. Raime would be safe and dry tonight by virtue of working two jobs, a luxury really.
There was a lot of entrances into the calderan underbelly, too many to count, Raime doubted having found even half of them. The entire district was twice its size below ground, a seemingly endless amount of tunnels, storage rooms, mining pits, and some functional and dilapidated shafts. Before joining Gale’s expedition, Raime only knew of its contents from incomplete maps above ground, every door, shaft or elevator they had found leading into the underbelly had been sealed shut. The rebuttal of the district to open its arms to Raime felt deeply frustrating for them, Gale offering the keys to these untouched grounds through Dove was a miracle.
In the sud, a large yawning crater gave its name to the district, the aftermath of the most destructive attempt at finding Volantis. Across the district, there were still some remnants of operations from when City Hall had attempted to turn the crater into a lake, akin to the ones in the Minnow Gardens. Fifty years later, nothing had changed, the terrains were broken down and painted over, most of its residents fled to the Fringes.
Raime could see the gap in the district skyline from where they sat, the Sun displaying its last feeble rays peeking through between remnants of buildings. They stayed there, motionless, for a moment, fixated on the weakening light. The star itself wasn’t visible anymore, hidden above the Fringes, Raime focused on the shadows, growing larger everytime they blinked. They got on their feet, shaking away the drowsiness of their body, once they realized they weren’t thinking about anything.
Raime entered the place of Gale’s operation. A great building, an old depot, had its time welcoming the usual inhabitants of the Caldera, but like the impasse they slept in, there was little to be done in the place anymore. Spacious and empty, shards of glass strew upon the floor, the walls that still stood were covered in paintings and scriptures, many generations of artists visions clashing on every surface.
Under the glass fragments, they could still see attempts at painting the floor as well, but the same amount of generations coming and going had erased almost everything, what remained was an indiscernible mess. As the night entered the depot, the paint all around the great hall slowly came alive, welcoming Raime as they strolled past without paying much attention. The sight hadn’t changed after all.
Raime descended three flights of unassuming stairs before reaching the entrance itself, nestled in an alcove. They had joined the expedition when Gale’s group had already made some progress, the time it took to find a room with work to be done was getting long. In the succession of rooms, crates that had been checked where left piled up and unorganized in corners, no longer anyone’s concern.
From what they’d seen so far, the underbelly wasn’t terribly interesting. Even at the mercy of the Sun, the colors and markings that had previously indicated purpose or directions within the veins of the network had been withered by time. It took Raime three rooms and a flight of stairs down to meet someone. A human who hadn’t introduced herself to them was stuffing her face with a round pastry, light in her eyes and calluses on her hands. They nodded to each other without a smile. Raime found Gale in the tunnel after.
“There you are! We have everyone again today then, I must say I’m proud of the work ethics we’ve put in place.”
Gale was wide and strong armed, talking with the confidence of someone who prided himself with his size. Raime wasn’t weakly built either but their first impression of the human had been that if push came to shove in the undercover operation, they’d go down first in a fist fight. They didn’t want to entertain the idea much, Gale had three other close associates that they didn’t feel like heroically fighting for the sake of the Cors. They empathized with Dove and the Cors’ proactive surveillance back when they thought Gale’s crew were Volantis seekers. Another bad hit in the Caldera would be devastating for a lot of people even outside the district, all of the water recycling, trash disposal and air purifying went around the sturdy skeleton of the underbelly.
“If you still want to go one room ahead of everyone else, you have one just waiting for you,” Gale continued, handing a card to Raime while holding a stack of papers under his arm, “I’ll be right behind so holler if you find anything-”
“That’s not forks and knives, you got it boss, thanks for thinking about me.”
That would be all Raime would say to him for the day. No need to risk letting something slip by engaging in small talk. A loose tongue and a bad liar made for a poor spy but neither Dove nor Gale needed to know that.
“Sweet bread isn’t the only thing I can provide to feed hunger, Raime, I adapt to everyone’s needs,” Gale chuckled before hurrying behind one of the workers as they entered a large cyan room divided in two by metal archways.
Raime let him get to business, offering curt nods to colleagues that they met eyes with. They didn’t seek out much conversation with them and the feeling was mutual. They were seven without counting the handlers, who never showed up all at once.
Raime had taken the habit of going ahead on their own, only to see what more of the underbelly looked like without having someone behind their shoulder, keeping them further apart from everyone else. They didn’t revel in solitude but the constant back and forth of the handlers would get on their nerves quickly as the tedious crate inspection went on. They crossed the last archway to head down another flight of stairs. The clanging of their boots against the steps reminded them of the floor they lived on. Raime thought of their neighbors and all they could picture was the back of their heads.
Raime found a locked door; the first one they’d personally encountered in the underbelly. They dug in their left pocket for the skeleton key that Gale had provided them. It looked less like a key and more like a small card that punched through locks from the inside. All of the underbelly had been abandoned more than a century ago and the real keys must’ve been long lost. It was of upmost importance to Raime that they took one back with them once the work was done, the ultimate reward for unbound access to every part of the city. The underbelly had been an unbreachable fortress in their explorations because of the seemingly infinite layers of sealed passages. They had no idea how Gale even got a hold of these, maybe noone cared until he started digging where the Cors didn’t want him to. It took the card a few seconds to dislocate the mechanism and the door opened on its own with a creak.
The storage room was small and its ceiling low, the ocher walls offering a sickly atmosphere, the usual assortments of boxes were littered throughout. Raime felt a bit disappointed that their first new room of the day was this dull but after a moment of introspection, they came to the conclusion that maybe there wouldn’t be secrets full of wonder waiting in the underbelly after all. They closed their eyes, the stale air offering little comfort, and exhaled while attempting to draw back nonexistant sleeves.
Raime always started with the biggest boxes, the one that took the most effort to open. Sliding covers and punching through locks over and over felt increasingly repetitive, during their weeks of experience Raime had found they had little patience for menial tasks and wondered how their peers still upstairs could stay focused for so long. Maybe the pastries helped, the sugar pumping their blood enough to distract them from the most mindnumbing experience in Last Kunlun. But they didn’t entertain the idea of going for a snack, the most important to them aside from seeing new rooms was staying on good terms with their coworkers.
They’d found only cables and transponders so far. Raime knew they had to report anything but with Gale and company still hard at work, Raime figured they’d get a head start. With the biggest crates down with, up next were the long boxes. They settled on one hidden behind the biggest they’d already opened. Three locks, mechanical, with six digit codes each, were encased in the crate. Not the usual amount of protection, definitely the most layers they’d seen. They’d come across similar locks before, but smaller, which contained mostly old papers. Texts that must’ve been important, a long time ago. Gale had taken them but he’d take for himself half of what they’d report. Raime assumed he’d barter to collectioners later, or had his own private collection, or ate them. They didn’t feel like asking him, even if Dove would’ve loved to know more.
Once the punchcard finished working on the locks, Raime opened the crate. They had no idea what they were looking at exactly. The inside was padded, protecting an ornate tricolor tube. Even though the shaft was hollow, the outside was built with such precision they doubted it was meant for regular plumbing. They tried picking it up. So light. The tube was wieldy and smelled oddly nice, like the fresh grass of the gardens. Its design was intricate mixing blacks, oranges and whites in varying amounts. It struck them as familiar. They immediately put it back down and ran to the door.
“Gale! Come down and see this!” Raime yelled from halfway up the stairs.
They ran back down and sat themselves on top of an unopened box opposite of the prize as him and one of his associates whose name Raime didn’t remember entered the chamber. They made no mention of the unreported boxes and they proudly and wordlessly pointed them towards the ornate tube. They both kneeled down to inspect it, Gale carefully laying his papers aside. They stayed motionless, taking longer than they’d expected before Raime saw two exchanging a look and whispering to each other. The associate sighed and headed towards the door, her back resting on it.
“Good find, Raime. Definitely unusual,” Gale looked around the room, as if looking for more, “Say, what do you think it is?”
“Same colors as the Major, maybe a spare arm,” Raime exhaled, jokingly.
Gale held eye contact, one of his pupils darker than the other. They had rarely seen him move this little, he’d always been running between people, between boxes, to the point of always being short of breath. He looked at his associate.
“Does look like it huh,” Gale sighed, standing over the tube and looked back at Raime, “I don’t think one of the little guys upstairs would have made the connection.”
A shiver ran down their spine. The associate was blocking the door to the stairs, the other one-
“I’ll save you the trouble,” Gale said calmly, putting the tube under his arm and heading towards the yet unopened door, trying its lock, “Closed. You had to punch the lock to get in this one too I imagine?”
“I shouldn’t have?”
“No, no, that’s why I recruited you for. They’d lock up anything back then really, all these papers I have now… inventories and memoirs mostly. What mattered after the Exodus, rehabilitation efforts, what to take with and what to leave behind,” Gale mumbled, wielding the tube in both hands, sizing its shape, “I don’t know if you’re smarter than them, Raime, but when you come in to work you look me in the eyes and you don’t eat the food I offer. I trust you’re someone that can understand what’s happening here.”
Raime attempted to swallow but struggled. They thought that playing independence naturally instead of trying to imitate the timid workers would work in their favor but in this room, it only ended up singling them out. Gale couldn’t know the reason they had joined. He wasn’t smart, not smart enough. Raime had worked hard to keep their mouth shut, nodding obediently and watching time pass. He couldn’t have guessed.
Gale sighed, “Like you said this is indeed a part of the Major, or at least from the frames like him that got dismantled before the Exodus.”
Raime’s mind was running at light speed. Why were they feeling pressure laid on them? Gale never stated a goal with their workers, if he found what they were looking for why were they telling them about it now?
“This turns the tide against the Cors,” he continued, his tone rising, “Someone left a piece for us to find and now we can fight back. Fifty years the blind bitch has been using the war machine to make her own law, we deserve better, all of us. We cannot spend our final days living in fear.”
Raime shot looks at his associate, but she looked impassioned by the speech. Noone was moving. Raime’s hands were clasped the top of the box, sweat chilling their skin. They felt like puking, they weren’t following him, they had crossed paths with the Major during their time in the city on some occasions but that was it, they never even saw the Capitán herself. What fear was he talking about? Did Gale want to overthrow the Cors? Take their place? Raime didn’t want to hear anything more. They felt the filter they put on their tongue slip off.
“And what’s that got to do with me?” Raime said between their teeth.
“We can’t let you go back upstairs.”
“Why not? Why not? I don’t have anything to do with the Cors, you can do what you want, I don’t care. I can just go home.”
They could feel their themselves boiling. They waited for one more sentence, a shift in his eyes, a hint that they knew why Raime was here in the first place.
Gale’s associate spoke for the first time, calmly, with a cold sincerity that didn’t leave room for sympathy, “This is our whole lives, decades in the making, countless hours of trying to find any crack in his armor. Every day spent knowing it could all have meant nothing. We’ve never been so close now, we do not have any contingency plans.”
Raime’s head was spinning. They didn’t see a way out, all they could do was talk, “Decades in the making and I could topple it just by myself overnight? Come on, I could even join you if you wanted to keep an eye on me!”
The plea felt pathetic, they tried to grasp at anything that could hold Gale’s attention away from what they were now convinced to be a tool he wanted to use against them.
Gale scoffed, “More than forty years we’ve kept our circle this small… We need people that care, and who can do more than open doors and boxes.”
The comment was insulting but his face remained stoic, his words carried no intent to hurt Raime but he meant every one of them. They felt heat rising to their face, an imbalance of temperature throughout their body only accentuated a blooming nausea. They felt so small.
“And you still needed seven of us to go and do that for you. Was that too hard for your old bones?” the insolence came freely as Raime immediately regretted spitting out the words but they couldn’t stop now, their words flowing free, “I’m only twenty-three, if you’re old enough to want to go back to your lives before the Capitán then you can use someone with better resources, I can do more than you think.”
“Can you?”
Raime snapped back instantly, “Sure I can, I’m an informant for her.”
Raime felt their whole body shutting down, they hadn’t moved their hands in torturous minutes and now they felt disconnected from them. The world was crumbling around them, their vision turned blurry and the only thing they could manage was to ventilate shallow breaths. Both Gale and his associate were too stunned to speak.
“Why even say that now?” the associate said, dumbfounded.
“I want to say that I was willing to give whatever you said a chance. I don’t enjoy this, I guess I hoped you’d give me a way out. I thought you were smarter than this,” Gale sighed, looking between the tube in his arms and Raime.
Raime was completely frozen, their mind scattered. Words wouldn’t come out anymore, a faint gasp died in their throat. They could hear the pipes in the walls echo with flowing water. Outside, so far away now, the Torrents had started.
“I have to ask… why? What could they possibly offer you to go through this?”
Dove had offered nothing, framing this as an opportunity for them. Raime had found it exciting, a new path opened, a vision for the future, a place to go with purpose. They remembered Avril smiling at them from the stairs earlier today and tears welled up in their eyes. When Raime told her they “got a gig going”, they had fled trying to discern her emotion when a reply came out of their mouth, looking away, blocking the words reaching their ears. Raime had been looking for something in her eyes, the possibility of not seeing it reflected in them had overtaken any other emotions. This uneasiness hadn’t dissipated after a week, her concerned looks had changed into hopeful consideration but the weight of those eyes clung even harder. Raime didn’t suddenly become her, no sharp and fancy suits, noone praising their disciplined schedule and noble calling. Weeks and days blurred in their mind as the semblance of their life outside of this room faded away. Steps leading nowhere, guided by no particular purpose, had led them right here. Raime lowered their head, slightly opening their mouth.
“Nothing…”
Gale snapped in turn, “You were ready to throw your life away, and all of ours, because you were bored?”
It wasn’t boredom, it couldn’t be. They hadn’t found anything of interest during their expeditions so far but they were looking forward to seeing an old silo or a quarry. They paid attention to the better maps Gale had found and wondered what laid at the deepest point of the Caldera. Now they wished they would’ve gone ahead on their own, leave Gale to his battles, the others to their pastries and the Cors to whatever they were doing. Gale aimed the tube, angled across his shoulder awkwardly, his fingers looking for a trigger. Raime could see the ocher wall through the jaw of the tube.
Raime lowered their head, their mouth agasp, their hands still grasping the box they sat on. They hadn’t moved an inch since Gale and his associate had entered the room, they could faintly hear their coworkers still moving around upstairs over the buzzing of the ceiling lights. Their eyes fell on the strange shirt they’d left with and it reminded them of the stars. Raime hadn’t thought about screaming but the fight had already fled their body. Their throat was choked and they couldn’t focus on anything for more than a second. They closed their mouth shut without uttering a sound and raised their head.
“You said you were twenty-three, one of the last children ever born on Terra… I wanted to gift the remaining of the future to you, Raime. I’m sorry for what they did to you,” Gale hushed, having found a trigger, and the sadness in his voice felt genuine.
A silent pulse pierced the room. In a second, air had gathered in the tube from all around them and released itself in a flash forward, annihilating everything in its path and punching against the opposite wall, fast enough to bend the light in its wake. Raime’s head was cut clean off at the neck, exploding on the wall leaving a massive impact which rippled in cracks from the floor to the ceiling. The balance broken, their body fell behind the box in a thud. Whatever remained of their head was splattered against the wall, slowly dripping to the ground, flowing along the cracks.
“Fuck me, that’s even more brutal than I thought,” Gale restrained a gag, “We’re lucky the Major is still on a leash.”
His associate left her post at the door to join him, “Should we deal with the others?”
Gale thought about it, his eyes on Raime’s corpse. He could only see their legs from where he stood. He had never wanted to kill anyone not associated with the Cors. His group had sought quiet and dependent people for this reason but their progress had been slow, leading him to recruit this day sleeper he found near the Funerarium. He thought about their goal, if boredom was truly all there was to it. He had figured Raime had been looking for something more but an informant for the Cors never crossed his mind. Even after all this time, they were this close to failure because they’d underestimated the Capitán. He shuddered thinking about what would’ve happened if Raime had reported to the Cors tonight.
“No need,” Gale said, “We’ll keep our exit subtle, we know the Cors have an eye on us right now. No unnecessary risks.”
They both packed the tube back in the box and Gale began to slide it towards the stairs.
“Going to be a bitch to get up… Go send everyone home with what’s left of the food and get Dena down there to help,” Gale huffed.
His associate headed back to the door, opening it wide open. Her eyes went wide, aghast, her motion frozen. Feeling her presence still lingering next to the door, Gale looked to the his associate, ready to hurry her up, and met her eyes. Gale furrowed his brow, her irises were fluttering, unblinking and aghast, her motion frozen and her mouth stuck in an emotion Gale struggled to place. Following her gaze, he looked back to the impact in the wall.
Raime’s headless body had risen to its feet beside the box it fell from. In another second, the body stood motionless, the arteries of the severed neck spurting blood onto the floor, in rhythm with what still poured out from the wall. In yet another second, everyone was still. Gale could feel his ears ringing and had to force himself to not blink. The water in the walls pipes now loudly echoed the rushing water, drowning the sound of his heart pounding in his chest.
In a final second, the corpse walked towards them.