Chapter 15 #4
“I think this is what we’re looking for.”
“Why would you think—”
But Smita is crouching, closer to the grate, close enough that she can reach down and push some of the fallen leaves aside, revealing a tetractys scratched into the metal.
“Isn’t this a sign of Pythagoras?” she asks, wide-eyed and so innocent that Lilianne feels instantly bad about her rising suspicion.
“What do you know about Pythagoras?” she asks, not so besotted that she’s forgotten everything she knows about being careful.
“Scholar, philosopher, mathematician—I’m a scientist, there’s no way I got through grad school without learning more about all the dead Greeks than anyone really needs to know. But this is one of the symbols he designed, isn’t it?”
“It is,” says Lilianne, and glances again at her motionless pendulum, excitement starting to spark behind her breastbone. Her hand isn’t perfectly still, but the pendulum is. It dangles without swaying at all, pointing straight down into the drain.
She’s found it. The sealed lab. She’s found it, and now that she knows where it is, it’s hers to claim.
Smita is a problem, though. She looks up, focusing on the other woman for a moment.
Smita has a stick in one hand and is using it to peel back the layers of fallen leaves, peeling them away from the grate like the skin off of an orange.
It doesn’t seem to be about keeping her hands clean; she pulls leaves off of her stick when necessary, tossing them carelessly aside.
It’s just a matter of having something to do with her hands.
Lilianne recognizes that simmering anxiety, that need to stay busy all the time, forever, no matter what else might be going on.
No matter how inconvenient it might be. There are no further symbols etched into the grate: only the tetractys, the four-leveled pyramid, with four dots at the base and a single dot at the pinnacle.
It’s such a simple design that it seems strange to credit anyone with having “invented” it, and yet it hadn’t been so much as conceived of before Pythagoras made it one of his secret symbols.
The grate is still filthy, even with most of the dead leaves removed. It also looks like it hasn’t been secured quite right. Shoving her pendulum into her pocket, she bends down and hooks her fingers through the bars, tugging on the metal.
“This is a tetanus shot waiting to happen,” she mutters.
The grate shifts. It doesn’t quite come loose in her hands, but her pulling is enough to move it. Raising her head, she looks wide-eyed at Smita, who grins. It’s an almost-feral expression, absolutely delighted by everything that’s happening.
“Need help?” she asks, and without waiting for a response she leans forward, so close that Lilianne can smell her shampoo, to hook her own fingers through the bars on the other side of the grate.
Pulling together, they’re able to lift it free, revealing a water-choked passage on the other side, a ladder descending down into the dark.
“I never liked these shoes anyway,” says Smita, and rises from her crouch, gesturing grandly to the hole. “Ladies first.”
Lilianne straightens more slowly. “You’re coming down with me?”
“Well, yeah. I’ve come this far; I want to see how this all plays out.” Smita shrugs. “Your magic rock led us to a secret passageway. How can I say no to something that exciting? If I go home, all I have to look forward to is doing the dishes.”
Maybe it’s the sincerity in her tone, and maybe it’s just that Lilianne wants to believe her, but she nods either way, turning to sit on the edge of the exposed hole in the street, grasping the rough concrete sides before she lowers herself down, feet scrabbling a bit for purchase on the rusty ladder.
Shifting her grip from the opening to the ladder, she begins her descent into the dark.
Smita waits until Lilianne has gone far enough to open a little distance between them before lowering herself into the dark and beginning her own descent, hands clutching the rails so tightly that bits of rust bite into her palms. Step by step they make their way below the city, until, with a splash, Lilianne’s questing feet find the water.
It’s colder than she would have imagined possible, so cold that it momentarily takes her breath away, soaking through her clothing with a speed that feels almost malicious.
She continues going down until her feet find the ground below the ladder, water coming nearly to her waist. Digging her phone out of her the pocket of her sweater, she moves it to her bra where it has more of a shot at staying dry, then pulls her pendulum back out, only realizing after she does that it’s pitch-black down here: she won’t be able to see what, if anything, it indicates.
“Lily? You still there?” asks Smita. The tunnel around them catches her voice and amplifies it, bouncing it back and forth off the walls until it seems to fill the entire world.
It would be so easy to abandon her in this moment. It wouldn’t even take an effort. All Lilianne would need to do is move away, letting the sound of the water cover her retreat, and Smita would lose her forever.
But Smita is the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen, and she’s brave and wild enough to go on an alchemical adventure with a near-stranger, risking everything to unravel a mystery. That’s the sort of thing that Lilianne finds almost impossible to resist.
“I’m over here,” she says.
A second later, the flashlight on Smita’s phone comes on, casting a pale white light throughout the area. Lilianne blinks, squinting as she waits for her eyes to adjust to the brightness.
“You okay?” she asks, blinking rapidly until the ghost images stop dancing behind her eyelids and she can see Smita clearly. The shorter woman is almost up to the bottom of her ribcage in the water. She must be freezing. Cold spreads more quickly when it hits the body’s core.
“Just a little damp,” says Smita. “But I’m not sure how long I can stay in this water before I start freaking out. Do you know which way we’re supposed to go?”
“Got the pendulum.” Lilianne holds it up, then gives it a light tap to start it swinging again. Immediately it starts tilting toward something at the far end of the corridor, moving in sharp arcs far too wide to be explained by her initial push. “This way,” she says.
“You lead, I’ll follow,” says Smita, and the two of them start off into the dark, leaving the ladder and the watery midnight light from the storm drain behind them.
The water doesn’t get any warmer as they wade through it.
But it also doesn’t smell like anything, doesn’t leave a greasy film on their hands, and there’s an impossible lack of bobbing artifacts to bump against them: no sticks, no leaves, no unpleasant biological remains.
Lilianne keeps wading forward, letting the pendulum be her guide, softly reassured by the light from Smita’s phone and the sound of the other woman’s breath.
It’s starting to get shaky: she’s freezing. Lilianne looks back at her, concerned. The light’s too thin for her to see whether the other woman’s lips are turning blue, but Smita’s shivering hard enough that it’s visible, and she can barely force a smile when she meets Lilianne’s eyes.
“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “It’s not so bad.”
“We need to get you out of here.”
“There’s no way we’re making it back to the ladder at this point,” says Smita. “We just need to keep pushing forward, and we’ll find our way out of here. If we don’t, we don’t, and Erin will kick my ass tomorrow.”
She sounds distressingly certain of that, like she can’t imagine a reality where she isn’t alive for Erin to kick her ass.
Lilianne briefly considers the alternatives, and decides to subscribe to Smita’s version of the world.
It’s kinder than the one her own mind keeps trending grimly toward, the one that remembers how many people die of hypothermia when the ice breaks every spring.
She turns back around and keeps walking.
“I think you’ll like her once you get to know her,” says Smita, clearly talking just for the sake of hearing herself, for the sake of having something to hang on to in this seemingly endless dark.
“Erin can be a little prickly at first, but she warms up fast once she realizes you’re not planning to hurt any of her people. ”
“Protective?”
“I think they defined the word so they’d be able to describe her someday. It’s not her fault. Her brother died when she was young, and she wasn’t able to save him. So she tries her best to save everybody else. She’s never forgiven herself for not being there when he needed her.”
This feels too personal for Lilianne to know about someone she’s only met once, and then essentially in passing. She frowns into the darkness, feeling her stomach twist like she’s swallowed something bad.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“It is what it is. But we all try to forgive Erin when she gets a little overly intense, because she doesn’t know any other way to be. She didn’t have the upbringing for it.”
The water is getting shallower, or else Lilianne is getting so cold that she can’t feel it anymore.
She reaches down with her free hand, and while her thighs are still wet, the denim clinging to them like it’s never going to come off again, the water level is considerably below where she expects it to be.
Hope sparks through the sourness of her stomach, chasing it away.
They might survive this.
Onward they walk, following the pendulum ever deeper into the dark.