Episode 042| The First Light Wasn't the City's

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 4 · 8:46 p.m. · Saint Tranya, Underground · Beyond the Drawings

Lika climbed down for he didn't know how long.

In the corner of the brain-chip, the depth readout ticked up a notch at a time, past 800, past 900, and when it rolled over into four digits he stopped for half a second — the tallest tower in this city, from foundation to spire, came to just over 600 metres. The distance from the soles of his feet to the surface now was deeper than that whole tower flipped over and driven into the ground.

[Current Depth: 1,040 metres underground]
[Official Level Map: no data]
[#002 coordinate: further down]

No data. The whole way down, no data.

And then the metal ladder ended.

Not broken off. Welded to a platform, the run finished off clean — the last stretch given two extra cross-braces, so no one would put a foot through. Exactly the way he finished off his own work. The him of the past had run this shaft all the way down to here, and here, had welded him a place to set his feet.

Lika's foot came down on that platform. That knot of cold, 1 degree lower, had already gone a step ahead of him and was waiting at the platform's far end.

---

Ahead of the platform was a passage running crosswise, black.

Lika didn't switch on the floodlight. His habit — going into an unfamiliar place, you let your eyes feed on the dark first, you don't let yourself be seen first. He stood in the black for nearly a minute, waiting for his pupils to open.

Then he saw that lamp.

Far off, where the passage turned right at its far end, a little light leaked out.

Lika watched that point of light for 3 seconds, and somewhere in him drew tight a step ahead of the rest.

That wasn't the city's light.

He knew the city's light too well. The cold white of Source-Stone power, the shifting colors of holographic ad boards, the blue-white of the maglev arc that flickered through the tunnels once every few seconds — the city's light was all orderly, mechanical, run by the timetable.

The one at the end of the passage was warm, was yellow. And it was trembling — unsteady, flickering bright and dim, like it was hooked to a patched-together power source about to give out.

That was a light someone had lit, by hand.

---

Lika walked toward that lamp.

Closer in, the sound came leaking through too.

Voices. More than one. Around the corner he couldn't make out the words, but the texture of it he knew. Not synthesized — not the city's kind of voice, edges sanded flat, every one of them sounding the same. Living people, not far below, getting on with their lives. Someone calling a price, someone answering, and threaded between them the brittle ring of metal on metal, the dull drag of something being hauled across the ground.

Lika stopped before the corner.

He'd lived in this city for he didn't know how many years. He'd thought he'd worked out every layer of it from spire to foundation — the tower clusters above ground, the glass curtain walls; the 7 maglev lines underground, the cooling pipe network of the Source-Stone power plant; further down, the dead rock of the old city.

He'd never once reckoned it in: below the dead rock, 1,040 metres down, beyond the drawings, there were people getting on with their lives.

---

He looked in, pressed against the corner.

Past the corner the passage opened out wide. It was a space hacked by hand out of the rock layer, high, deep, no end in sight. Patched-together warm-yellow lamps hung down along the rock wall, one after another, hanging on into the deeper dark. Under the lamps were things put together by hand — scrap, salvaged metal plate, old-city components stripped from who knew where, layered up one on another, built into stalls, built into sheds, built into paths a person could walk.

People moved about under those lamps. Not many, but with order to it. No one rushing, no one hiding; they walked here as if by right, as if the place had been theirs all along.

Lika watched, and the sentence in him took a long while to let surface:

This wasn't a crowd of people hiding underground. This was a city. Beneath that city of his, another one.

---

As he drew his eyes back, he caught something on the rock wall at the corner.

Not natural. Someone had brushed a mark onto the rock with something dark red, brushed over more than once, color layered on color. Right above the spot where he'd put his head out, as if it marked something — marked this passage, this mouth, or marked "past here, it's our ground."

BEYOND THE LINE

Three words. Brushed crooked, but pressed hard.

Lika knew this kind of thing. Every place that had rules would set up a sign of its own at the door. He'd spent his time in the dark net, and before going into every room he had no business in, he'd learned first to read the sign at the door.

This sign read: beyond the line.

Beyond — beyond which line? And the line — whose line was it to draw?

---

That knot of cold didn't stop at his side.

It went over the platform, over the corner, and drifted off toward the deeper, blacker reaches of that underground city — Shadow_001 hadn't waited for his order. The direction it was going was the same down that the #002 coordinate had pointed to the whole way.

Lika was about to follow when, at the other side of the corner, that trembling warm-yellow lamp was half blocked by a shadow.

Someone was walking toward this corner where he stood. Not fast, but steady — the kind of steady only someone who knew the place by heart would have.

Lika drew back half a step into the shadow of the rock wall.

But as he drew back, he knew it clearly: in a place where someone had set up a sign, whether an outsider could stay hidden was never his own to decide.

【Ch. 042 End · Saint Tranya, Underground, Beyond the Drawings → beyond the line】