Chapter 14 Swallow the Stars
SWALLOW THE STARS
The darkness is suffocating, unnatural. I feel it pressing in, a presence rather than an absence.
Inside it, something squirms, touching me everywhere.
Did the others feel it too, the consciousness of the void, the vitality in the nothing?
It quickens my fear to a fever pitch, every breath drawn more ragged than the last. Even when I knocked out all the power at Solidago as a teenager and plunged the city’s icon into the night last week, I didn’t know darkness like this.
I hear a scuttling sound behind me followed by a clang, an old pipe shifting.
“Who’s there?” I call out, my voice twisted with fright as I spin around blindly.
What else is down here with a heartbeat?
Plague rats, according to Arla. Even scarier, the things without a heartbeat.
Ghosts of angry civilians, their lives cut off too soon by misfortune, their heads gaping in the darkness as they wait for a fool like me, the enviable living, and hope to steal their breath.
No one answers.
I’m afraid to leave this spot where a connection to the world above—my world, Levi’s world—existed only a moment ago.
Afraid to step into the underground’s fray.
Afraid that it will consume me. I didn’t count the steps that brought me here, the times I had to shift left or right to avoid a hazard, the piles of detritus in the way.
I believed Arla when she said I was one of them now.
I wonder if Cadence walked this path before me.
If Brennan stood here alone, waiting for Arla to return.
Is it just another test, or do they intend to keep me down here, to let me become a thing of the past?
Do they want me to disappear?
I recall Cadence’s last words— It’s haunted as fuck, by the way.
So watch yourself. Now I understand why she uttered them.
She knew this was coming; she was trying to warn me.
Or scare me. Or both. It’s becoming increasingly clear how much was said for my benefit this morning.
They were planning this all along, probably since before last night. Why?
“Come on, Judeth,” I tell myself. What did Arla say earlier? One step at a time, kitten. That’s how any road is traveled.
A fist squeezes my heart, and adrenaline gushes out over its knuckles, but my limbs are frozen, my legs stuck like two pins in a cushion.
And in the disorienting premature night, I’m not sure which way to go.
I’ve spun in too many circles to direct myself back toward Medusa’s basement, and I curse the sound I heard moments ago.
With a shuddered breath, I slide one foot forward, more like a dance move than a step, and leave the real world behind.
Again and again, I graze the floor as I inch along, arms out, hands groping for purchase, eyes desperate to create form.
But in only a few moments I manage to smack into a barrier.
My fingers feel along its rough surface, and I don’t recognize the orderly shape and mortar of brick.
It must be the side where they filled in the street.
Turning behind me, I take a few steps until I meet the opposite wall, the Lego masonry of Pioneer Square greeting me.
I inch along this wall until my hands find an opening, a shaft through the brick, not as large as Arla’s gated doorway but big enough to pass through.
Maybe it was a window once, a single door.
Slipping into it, I hope for the best but am greeted by haphazard stacks of boxes and crates, a jumble of other things I can’t make out.
It’s an arduous slog through the densely packed maze, around one abandoned item or another, until I finally reach another wall, which I scoot along until I find myself at another portal, still brick lined but taller than the last.
Moving through into the next space, I veer right when met with a wooden post and a line of crooked shelves, my fingers gliding over their dust-coated levels and the thick curves of old glass bottles.
It’s here that I realize I must be inside another building’s basement, connected to the one before by a shared doorway.
My progress is achingly slow because I don’t want to hurt myself or break something, to be responsible for damaging someone else’s property.
Before long, I find myself at a third wall and pass along it until my hand grips a slick knob.
This door is closed, but with some effort it wrenches open.
On the other side, I try to stick to the wall, the grit guiding me like braille until I meet a blockade of what feels like old beams and worktables.
Forced to go around them, I finally make contact with brick—another wall or the same one?
—but am soon pushed off it by a mountain of debris.
When I at last catch the wall again, I come quickly to an open door, its knob cold and hard.
For a second, I register victory, and then it sinks like silt.
I’ve made a circle, the shape of this knob the very same I turned before to come in here.
My heart grows stone heavy, dropping as if kicked off a cliff.
This can’t be more than a city block, but that’s still over an acre of square footage.
And if I have to sift through the out-of-sight, out-of-mind refuse of the last two hundred years to navigate it, who knows how long I could get lost in circles like the one I just made? Especially in this impossible dark.
Unlike at night, my vision isn’t adjusting to Twig’s little trick in this subterranean space, slowly gripping the edges of my surroundings, even if it can’t be sure of finer details.
Everything remains a viscous, satiny black like it is in the deepest part of the ocean, miles beneath the surface where unfathomable creatures live in an alien world.
My hearing, however, isn’t compromised, and I recognize the beat of something small, a fluttering hope in the echoey silence.
It draws near, a feathery whisper followed by a deep-chested coo.
I strain to see where the sound came from overhead, my sight miraculously managing to grasp at the faintest trace of a bird resting on what must be an obsolete pipe.
A chalky sheen reflects off of its feathers as if it brought a touch of light with it, and I am able to make out the graceful head and delicate beak, the prayerfully folded wings of a dove.
How I can see these traces of form in such unnatural dark is beyond comprehension, but I’m too grateful to question it for long.
The sense of orientation is profound. I can’t imagine what it’s doing down here or how it got in, but it thrashes on its perch, fanning the dark, lustrous underside of white glowing.
And then it is gone, sailing away from me into the black, until I hear it land and call with a ghostly wail several feet down.
Shuffling blindly, I follow the dove’s flight path and reach the soft dig of rotting wood and a drift of air beyond.
I can feel it’s an old window, broken out, the frame hanging vacant like a cavity pecked into a tree.
On the other side, I realize, must be the areaway, as the windows down here face out to what would have once been street level.
Though it’s likely not the same one I was in with Arla.
This is how we travel, the dove and I, through the next plodding hundred feet of below-street tunnel that feels endless.
With my labored breathing, the thud of my toe bumping the concrete rim of a discarded cinder block or a what I guess is an old sign, silken whistles of flight before me.
I’m slow because I can’t see, because my fear is like drag in the water, because my shins are bruised and my toes aching, my knuckles scraped raw from brick.
It’s taking much longer to get out than it did to get in.
I tell myself I cannot continue to play these games.
That when I make it out of here, if I make it out of here, I’m done with Arla and the lot of them.
I don’t care if they’re the only others like me I’ve known since my mother died.
I don’t care if they’re a “family” and I’m an orphan.
I don’t care if Arla is the first person to truly see me since I was a child on the steps of Solidago. They’ve gone too far.
Fear constricts my throat to a straw, my breath so shallow I can barely draw oxygen.
Or maybe it’s the dust and the mold. The inhales come wheezy and sharp, windpipe contracting more with every negative thought.
I never had asthma as a kid, but I recognize it now, my body revolting against this place, these people.
Every minute down here feels like a day.
Before me, the faint smudge of the dove blurs.
I’m close to blacking out. Though I’d hardly know the difference if I did, already trapped in a sea of naught.
And then I hear the voice— Remember.
For a second, I forget where I am and see goldenrod flowing around me, the lick of flames behind us flickering a sienna radiance.
That moment when the world exploded, when the ground dropped away from my feet, and I lifted into the sky.
The freedom in flying. The slippery nature of reality when shock set in.
The release when contact was made with such force the soul ejected from the body.
And then the peace. Long undulating waves of it coursing over me.
A thick carpet of calm creeping like moss as I was weighted beneath the blanket of death.
And somewhere in the deep, whispering all around, the power—raw and feral and alive, freewheeling and atomic, an undoing and a promise.