Chapter 9: Chapter 9 – UNDERGROUND

The Gargoyle and I peered into the pitch-dark tunnel. It opened to a downward slant.

“Well,” Huang said, “Let’s check it out.”

I let him go first. The walls of the dark tunnel were a jumble of textures similar to the city outside: smooth, jagged, and lumpy surfaces of glass twisted together. The Gargoyle’s glow only lit our immediate surroundings—It wasn’t long before darkness closed in behind us.

“Keep an eye out for demons,” Huang said as if I needed reminding. Aside from our own footfalls on the glassy floor, the tunnel was silent.

We walked for what felt like a long time. The air was stale and still. The glass walls around us gave way to metal and concrete, and rusty scaffolds appeared overhead. I could faintly see my breath misting in front of my face; it had to be freezing down here, even if I couldn’t really feel it.

And then we entered the maze.

Our entry tunnel levelled off and five separate tunnels opened around us, each only visible for a few feet and then masked by darkness. The gargoyle hesitantly moved forward and stuck its head down one tunnel, its glow not make a dent.

“No signs of life, at least,” Huang reported. “Can you sense what direction we should take?”

“Give me a second,” I said, closing my eyes and moving to the centre of the branching pathway. The first time I’d entered the Grey City, I’d been able to use my sense to move ahead of my body, exploring the paths around me at length. I tried that again, focusing on the tunnel directly in front.

Sure enough, I could send my sense travelling out down the path. It continued down for another thirty feet or so, then split into two more tunnels. I chose one and tried to push further down, but my sense seemed reached their limit at that point.

“I can’t see too far down the tunnels,” I reported. My voice sounded strange, echoing harshly on the concrete walls. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“We’re trying to get to the Waterfront,” Huang reminded me. “There has to be a trigger.”

I tried the leftmost tunnel, wondering if anything would stand out to me. It seemed identical to the first, except that it faced the other direction. Slowly rotating in a circle, I sensed out all five paths to the limit of my spatial sense and found only one thing that was slightly different.

I pointed down one tunnel. “There are some small pipes on the ceiling down that way. That’s the only difference between these paths.”

“That could be it,” Huang said, moving in that direction. “I didn’t notice what brought us to the Waterfront last time, but I have seen that there are sometimes small pipes on the edges of the buildings. And it is associated with water, so it makes sense. Let’s try it.”

I nodded and again fell into step behind him, for once wishing that the light he cast was a little brighter. The maze proper seemed even darker than the entry tunnel, maybe due to the lack of reflective surfaces. I needed to start carrying around a flashlight—wait a second.

I dug out my phone and checked the battery: forty percent. No service. I tapped the flashlight app and a narrow, bright beam sank into the darkness ahead. It wasn’t much, but it helped a little. The Gargoyle glanced at me and nodded.

I turned the flashlight up to highlight the small, brassy pipes in the corners of the ceiling. If I hadn’t detected them with my sense, I wouldn’t have noticed them at all.

We came to another intersection and I took us left, sensing more pipes that way. After a few more twists and turns, it was starting to seem like we were on the right track. The pipes were becoming larger and more frequent, and the remaining traces of glass in the walls disappeared—which I assumed meant we were getting further from the Glass District we’d entered from.

As we approached another intersection and I stepped forward to feel out the path, I suddenly sensed a quick burst of movement at the very edge of my radar. I flinched back, retreating a few steps down the tunnel. The Gargoyle swiftly stepped forward.

“Sense anything?” I whispered to Huang, covering my flashlight.

“I thought—maybe a flicker, for a second,” Huang said, confirming my fears. “I think we found one of the demons.”

“Do you think it saw us?” I asked, still alert to any movement.

“They usually strike as soon as they do—so maybe not,” Huang said. “Let’s just move slowly and stay alert.”

We had little choice but to go down the same tunnel where we’d sensed the creature, seeing as that’s where the pipes were leading us. My heart pounding a mile a minute, I followed Huang down the tunnel. I was now starting to wish he was less bright. It would be impossible for him to hide.

We continued on through several more halls and still sensed nothing. But whatever that was, it had been fast, and Huang had mentioned earlier that the demons knew how to stay out of range of his life radar. Maybe they had learned to stay out of my range, too.

But we were also getting closer, and the ceilings were now lined with several layers of exposed piping. Maybe I was imagining it, but the ground seemed to have a slightly upward slant. If we could just avoid detection for a few more minutes—

As if I’d jinxed it by the very thought, I immediately sensed something shift directly above us—above Huang. I cried out in alarm but Huang was already moving. Something pushed its way through the pipes and scaffolding in a screech of bending metal.

In a split second, I realized a few things.

One, the demon had been burrowing through dirt above us, and a shower of earth was now pouring into our tunnel.

Two, this thing was a fucking nightmare—a fifteen-foot tall spider with huge mandibles and a mass of long, sharp legs. My sense rendered it in perfect, hairy detail.

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Three, this thing was not breaking through, but reaching out. It remained in the ceiling as its long front legs shot down around the Gargoyle, locked together with the force of hydraulic machinery, and lifted up. The Gargoyle’s glow vanished.

I let out a choked cry, scrambling back as dirt and stones rained down around me. Just like that, he’d—what was I going to—

The Gargoyle let out a piercing raptor’s cry and I saw a brief glimmer of light at the ceiling. I sensed him twist out of the spider’s grasp and the light returned.

The demon snapped its mandibles and caught one of the Gargoyle’s wings, but shining claws raked across the spider’s head, making it draw back.

“I’ll take care of it. Hide somewhere,” Huang ordered me. As the dirt settled around me, I realized that it had piled high in between me and the fighting creatures, blocking me from sight.

I didn’t need to be told twice. I ran back to the last intersection we’d passed, a four-way. I plastered myself against the rough, concrete wall, trying desperately to catch my breath.

I couldn’t go any further. There were more demons down here, if our map had been accurate. I needed Huang with me if I was going to get out alive. But…

I stretched my sense toward the fight, and I could tell it wasn’t going well for Huang. The spider was bigger, and fast, and its hide was so thick that Huang wasn’t doing any damage. The Gargoyle was taking some bad hits.

Not good. Not good. What could I do? The only advantage I had down here was that I didn’t need light to see, so I turned off the flashlight and tried to make full use of that. I sent my sense out all around me, as far as it could go down the tunnels. It was all more of the same, pipes and scaffolds, no help to be found, but in one area—

The Gargoyle screeched and I swivelled my sense back to the fight. The spider had given up trying to pull Huang up to its burrow and had instead descended fully into the tunnel, pinning the Gargoyle down with its full, considerable weight. Its mandibles snapped open and shut just above him, the Gargoyle’s buffeting wings holding it at bay.

I took a deep breath and yelled down the tunnel: “Huang! Get out of there and come this way!”

He tried, but the spider had one of his arms pinned to the ground, and the thing had to weigh several tons. “I can’t!” he called, using his free talon to claw at the demon’s leg.

I focused my sense as much as I could on the demon, feeling my spine twinge a little at the effort—It was a strain to get a reading from that distance. The thing exuded a horrible feeling to my sense, toxic and rotten.

It was so big, I could also sense the way it held its weight. “The upper leg! Near where it connects to the body!” I shouted, taking several steps backwards.

The spider attempted to sink its mandibles into the Gargoyle’s neck, but was staggered by a heavy slap from his armoured wing. Huang took my advice, twisting and using his back talon to slash deeply into the thing’s upper leg. The spider didn’t make any noise of pain or surprise, but I sensed the pressure let up on Huang’s arm.

The Gargoyle was free in an instant, barrelling through the barrier of dirt and charging my way. Instead of following him, the spider darted up the wall and back into its burrow, where I lost track of it.

“You better know what you’re doing! Where are we going?” Huang demanded as he reached me.

I booked it down the leftmost tunnel, knowing the spider would be burrowing through the dirt to catch up to us. I just had to hope I was right about this.

The tunnel I led us down was narrower than the others and it didn’t have any piping surrounding it. The walls were made of thick metal and concrete, like a bunker.

Above us, my sense suddenly picked up movement. A few pebbles clattered from the ceiling. I put on a burst of speed and Huang did the same, his enough for him to swiftly overtake me. He spread a wing over my head as we ran, sharp feathers scraping the other side of the tunnel.

The spider burst through the ceiling a second too late to catch us. Its legs scrabbled at the Gargoyle’s tail, but missed, and Huang and I kept running into a smaller tunnel, the concrete walls and the concrete ceiling narrowing around us.

On the bright side, it seemed that I was right: the spider wouldn’t be able to burrow through the thick concrete around us. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t drop down into the tunnel to chase us, which it promptly did. Could the thing ever move.

“I hate this, I hate this, I hate this,” I realized I was whimpering under my breath. Of all things why did it have to be a spider? We kept running, the echoes of our footsteps bouncing around us. I stretched my sense ahead of us—

“No,” I said in disbelief. “Up ahead, it’s—it’s a dead end.”

The walls around us continued to narrow until I was forced to pull ahead of Huang to avoid getting stepped on. In another forty feet, the tunnel would just… end, in a wall of concrete. As we approached the dead end, Huang spun around and flared his wings, ready for the spider to come at us.

It was very close; it had been gaining on us. But as we readied ourselves for the worst, its rapid pace started to slow. Some ten feet away from Huang, its many legs came to a halt, and I abruptly understood why.

“Get further back,” I whispered, to Huang, watching as the spider reached one of its front legs toward us. The tunnel had narrowed so much around us that it couldn’t get its whole body through.

Huang ignored my advice and leapt forward with a low cry, swiping at the spider’s face. I got a good look at the demon’s awful clutch of round white eyes and the two sets of mandibles on its face before it withdrew back into the wider hall.

Huang hung back, claws at the ready. The spider suddenly pounced again, this time squeezing both front legs and its head towards us. Huang slashed its eyes again and it pulled back a second time. In a swift movement, it ran up onto the ceiling, splayed out its legs, and settled in: waiting.

“Gross,” I groaned—shaking, sweaty, and covered in a fine layer of dirt.

“What… do we do now?” Huang asked, facing down the spider. Stillness settled in around us. “We’re trapped.”

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