Chapter 30- The flood

Chapter 30: 30- The flood

"Stop walking," Sol said, grabbing the collar of Valera’s torn shirt to pull her up short.

In the pitch-black service tunnel beneath Sector Three, Valera stumbled against his chest.

Her breathing was still shallow from the wire-wound across her ribs, though the half-digested energy of Lyra Vane’s Peak crystal was already knitting the meat back together.

"What is it?" Valera whispered, her hand dropping to the Night-iron batons at her belt. "More hounds?"

"Listen to the floor," Sol said.

He dropped to one knee on the dry concrete and pressed his blistered right palm flat against the stone.

With his Mid-Stage thermal vision active, he didn’t look down the tunnel he looked straight down through the soles of his boots.

Through six feet of bedrock, the lower drainage arteries were glowing a violent, sickly yellow-green.

The stone was vibrating like the throat of a roaring animal.

"That’s not water," Sol said, pulling his hand back as the concrete began to warm up. "Whatever’s coming down those pipes is sizzling."

Valera’s eyes went wide in the dark. "The tannery reservoirs. On the north canyon wall. They use million-gallon vats of lye and acid to strip the hides off Blighted bulls."

"Vane opened the vats?" Sol stood up, adjusting the rag-wrapped hilt of his half-melted silver sword on his back. "There’s thousands of people living in the lower levels between here and the river."

"Cassian doesn’t care about slum laborers, Sol. They’re cattle to him," Valera said sharply, grabbing his arm and pulling him toward a rusted iron ladder bolted into the concrete wall twenty feet ahead.

"If that lye hits this level, it won’t just drown us, the fumes alone will melt our lungs before your core can burn it off. Up. Now!"

They didn’t make it to the top of the ladder before the lower grates blew.

Fifty yards behind them, a heavy iron manhole cover shot straight up into the ceiling like a cannonball, shattering the brick arch.

A geyser of foaming, yellow-green sludge erupted out of the floor, filling the tunnel with a hiss that sounded like ten thousand snakes.

And then the screaming started.

From every air shaft, pipe, and stairwell along the two-mile stretch of Purgatory, the muffled, echoing shrieks of hundreds of scavengers, beggars, and tunnel-rats rose up as the boiling chemical tide swallowed the lower cisterns.

Sol went up the iron rungs two at a time, keeping one arm hooked behind Valera’s waist so she wouldn’t slip with her cracked ribs.

"Don’t breathe through your mouth!" Sol shouted over the roar of the sludge rising below their boots. "Bite your shirt!"

He reached the top of the shaft and slammed his shoulder against the heavy street-grate.

It didn’t budge.

Sol looked up.

Through the iron bars of the grate, standing under the gray smog of the Sector Three surface street, were two pairs of heavy, silver-plated boots.

An iron chain had been threaded through the bars and padlocked to the cobblestone rings.

Above them, looking down through the grate with a long silver pike in his hands, a Mid-Stage Vane retainer stared right into Sol’s glowing orange eyes.

"Got two at Grate Fourteen!" the retainer yelled down the street. "Red eyes! It’s the butcher!"

The guard didn’t wait for backup.

He drove the heavy silver point of his pike straight down between the bars, aiming for the center of Sol’s face while Sol was hanging one-handed from the ladder.

Sol didn’t dodge, there was nowhere to go in a three-foot shaft.

He let go of Valera’s waist, reached up between the bars with his left hand, and caught the shaft of the pike two inches behind the spearhead before it could pierce his nose.

The force of the thrust tore the skin on his blistered palm wide open, sliding a fraction of an inch before his Mid-Stage grip locked the wood in place.

"Hold the rung!" Sol snarled at Valera.

Below them, the foaming yellow wall of lye-sludge slammed into the bottom of the vertical shaft and began shooting upward like a piston.

Sol didn’t draw his sword.

He dumped a violent surge of Sun’s Believer heat straight through his left palm into the wooden shaft of the guard’s pike, setting the iron-wood ablaze, and with his right hand, he punched straight upward against the padlocked iron grate.

He used the raw, dense bone of a Mid-Stage body backed by Lyra’s half-digested Peak crystal sitting in his stomach.

CLANG-SNAP.

The padlock shattered.

The three-hundred-pound iron grate flew upward, catching the pike-man square in the shin and snapping his leg with an audible crack.

Sol vaulted out of the hole onto the muddy cobblestones of Sector Three, hauling Valera out by the scruff of her collar half a second before a geyser of steaming, yellow lye shot ten feet into the air out of the open shaft, splashing over the wounded guard on the ground.

The guard screamed as the chemical sludge ate straight through his silver-wood greaves, melting skin and bone alike.

"Look at the street," Valera gasped, rolling to her feet and snapping her two Night-iron batons together into a short-spear.

Sol turned his head, scanning the thoroughfare.

Sector Three looked like a slaughterhouse during a fire.

Every twenty meters down the crooked cobblestone lane, heavy iron grates were either chained shut with people screaming and rattling the bars from underneath, or standing open while squads of five Vane retainers systematically speared anyone who crawled out of the holes before checking their faces.

Directly in front of Sol and Valera, four retainers, three Mid-Stages and one Late-Stage sergeant wearing a plumed silver helmet were already running toward Grate Fourteen, their pikes leveled.

"Drop your weapons!" the Late-Stage sergeant barked, his cold blue core flaring as he tried to lay a sheet of frost over the mud to slow them down. "Lord Cassian wants the boy’s chest intact! Break his knees!"

"He wants my chest?" Sol reached over his shoulder and drew the wrapped silver sword.

The blade looked pathetic.

From the fight with Lyra, the top four inches had melted off entirely, and the edge was warped and wavy like an old saw.