Chapter 12

Raelin stepped away from the door, his stride short and stiff after so long on the ladders. The corridor stretched beneath pale ceiling lights to a three-way junction. Without the elevator and the machinery around it, each footfall echoed along the empty corridor. He kept one hand near the wall and set his boots down more carefully. With every pace, the vibration underfoot lessened until he could hear air moving through the vents and water inside the pipes as separate sounds.

The right-hand corridor ended at a steel door marked LOWER SERVICE LEVEL. A badge reader glowed beside the handle. To the left, a narrower passage continued between ventilation grilles and water pipes. One of his father’s fragments showed the same split, its line turning left before dropping farther on. The door might have offered a shorter way down, but only to someone it recognized. Raelin took the left passage and followed it farther into Sector 7-C. Warm air began flowing through the ventilation grilles as he went, carrying the sharp smell of cleanser and something cooking in oil.

It carried bits and pieces of life from the residences as well. Muffled laughter emerged from one grille as Raelin approached and faded behind him, while a child’s voice reached him from another farther ahead. A deeper voice answered, the words blurred by running water and the clink of dishes. Then came a low pulse of music. He heard the rhythm for half a dozen steps before it disappeared beneath the rush of air.

Ahead stood a steel door marked BLOCK 7-C UTILITY ROOM. Water pipes entered the wall beside it through sealed openings. Unlike the door to the lower service level, this one had no badge reader beside it, only a recessed handle. The copied route marked it with a one-way arrow and a cramped warning: BADGE REQUIRED FOR RETURN. Raelin looked back along the narrow passage and listened. It remained empty behind him, with air hissing through the grilles. He faced the door again and lowered the handle.

The door swung inward. Raelin stayed in the service corridor, keeping one hand on its edge as he leaned past the threshold. The utility room was about six paces deep, with water pipes and gauges covering the wall to his right. A second door stood directly across from him, with another badge reader beside its handle. Raelin swore. He searched the floor near his boots for something he could wedge beneath the door. Nothing. He set the toe of one boot across the threshold and let the door rest against it.

Eventually, the latch on the far door clicked. Raelin pushed the first door wide and stepped inside as the opposite one opened.

A woman stepped through the far doorway, glanced at Raelin, and returned her attention to her OmniLink. “Finally, you’re here. The water pressure on the upper floors is dropping again.” She headed for the gauges, leaving the door to swing shut behind her. Raelin released the first door and hurried across the room. As he passed her, she looked up. “Where are you going?”

“Upstairs.” Raelin caught the closing door before it shut. “I need to see what the taps are doing before I touch the valves.”

The woman hesitated. Her gaze moved over his dusty clothes and the pack on his shoulders. “They sent you up through the Shaft?”

“I was closest.” Raelin kept one hand on the door. “Where does the pressure start to drop?”

“Two floors up,” she said. “We haven’t had any complaints below that.”

“Two floors up,” Raelin repeated as he backed through the doorway. Once his pack cleared the frame, he let the door go. As the gap narrowed, the woman looked back down at her OmniLink and turned toward the gauges. The door settled into the frame with a click. Raelin hurried away and checked over his shoulder every few steps, but the handle remained still.

The passage beyond the utility room was another service corridor, scarcely wider than the one from the Shaft. The copied route lost detail here. It pointed toward the block’s drainage system and, beyond it, service tunnels leading toward Greenbelt, but it did not show where he could enter. The corridor divided at the first junction. Several narrow pipes continued right, while the thicker ones turned left and angled slightly downward before disappearing around a bend. If they carried wastewater out of the residences, they might lead him to an access point. Raelin checked the left-hand passage for Eyes, then glanced at his wrist. His OmniLink remained dark beneath his skin, safely off. He followed the larger pipes around the bend.

The corridor descended along a shallow ramp, widening at the bottom around a junction where several pipes from the right-hand wall joined the main run. A steel door in the same wall bore the words COMMUNAL KITCHEN 7-C. Warm light filled a narrow window set into the door. A figure passed by the glass, briefly blocking the light. Raelin stopped to one side of the door and listened.

On the other side, dishes knocked together beneath a running tap. A child laughed, and a woman’s attempt to scold her ended in laughter of her own. Their footsteps moved away from the door. Raelin crouched beside it and leaned just far enough to look through the lower corner of the window.

Beyond the glass, the woman and child stood at the nearest of several sinks spaced along a long counter. At the stations farther down, residents squeezed past one another. The woman rinsed a plate and handed it to the child, who dried it and added it to a stack. Beside the tap sat a shallow bowl of round, orange fruit.

The woman picked up one of the fruits and turned it in her hand. A dark bruise ringed its stem. She pressed the spot once, then dropped the fruit into an organics chute beneath the counter. By the time the chute’s flap swung closed, she had already picked up another. She rinsed it beneath the tap. The child set down the drying cloth and took it from her.

The child worked a thumbnail beneath the skin. The peel came away in curling strips, revealing golden segments packed tightly inside. She pulled the fruit apart and lifted one half to her mouth. Juice spread over her lips and chin while more ran down her fingers toward both wrists. She laughed and licked at one wrist while the woman wiped the other with the drying cloth.

Raelin’s gaze shifted from the bowl to the handle beside his shoulder. His fingers curled around it. He imagined darting through the door, snatching one of the fruits, and carrying it all the way home. Kiri would sit at their table with the peeled fruit cupped in both hands, juice shining around her mouth and running down her wrists as she laughed.

Raelin pulled his hand away from the handle and rose. Beyond the kitchen, the main pipe run sloped toward a bend at the far end of the passage. For several minutes, he followed it past service doors to laundries and communal washrooms. Machines thrummed on the other side, and water entered the pipes beside him in uneven rushes. As he went, smaller pipes emerged from the wall and joined the larger ones, all descending in the same direction. The voices from the kitchen were long gone when the corridor finally curved away from the residences. Around the bend, he heard only water moving through the pipes and the low hum of machinery.

The corridor ended at a maintenance landing where the main run turned downward through the floor. A square hatch was set into the floor beside it, its cover marked with a faded water-hazard symbol. The metal around its edges was dark with moisture, and the air smelled faintly of mold and old soap.

Beside the hatch, a service-water tap protruded from the wall above a grated drain. Raelin drank the last mouthful from his flask, filled it from the tap, and dropped in one of Lily’s filter tabs. He tightened the cap and shook the flask. The tablet broke apart, spreading a pale haze through the water.

Raelin returned the flask to his pack and hooked his fingers into the hatch’s recessed handle. He lifted the cover until it swung upright and came to rest against its stop. A ladder descended along one wall of the opening and disappeared into darkness. For one tired second, he wondered if it would have killed the Oracle to install some stairs. Damp air drifted up around him. Somewhere below, water rushed past. Raelin turned and lowered one boot onto the first rung.