KAUSS
The tunnels smell of rainwater, old concrete, heater coils, and soup.
That last scent is new.
Before Evie started coming down with food, the drainage settlement beneath Halo smelled like survival and nothing else. Mold in the wall seams. Rust from old grates. Damp fabric. Cheap tobacco. Exhaust leaking through cracks from the industrial roads overhead. The sharp medicinal odor of cybernetic joints patched with bargain lubricant. Fear, sometimes. Despair, often. Now, on certain nights, the air carries onions, bread, chocolate, roasted potatoes, citrus peel, and the warm sweetness of bakery sugar that does not belong underground.
It changes the place.
Not enough to save it. I know better than that. Soup does not repair a collapsed roof channel. Bread does not cure addiction. Chocolate does not turn a drainage tunnel into a home. But people sit closer to the heater coil when there is food to share. They talk more. Children sleep with full stomachs. Al Simmons complains with greater energy, which he insists is a medical improvement.
Tonight he sits on his overturned supply drum with a blanket around his shoulders, a cup of coffee in one hand, and an expression that tells me he has been waiting to become irritating.
I should have taken a different passage.
“You’re pacing,” he says.
“I am not.”
“You’ve gone past that pipe six times.”
“I am checking for structural seepage.”
“Sure. And I’m the Pontiff of the Alzhon.”
I stop near the runoff channel and look at him. “You are not pious enough.”
“I’m deeply pious when pastry’s involved.” He takes a sip of coffee and grimaces. “This from the bakery?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I can tell. Tastes like somebody threatened a bean in an alley.”
I fold my arms. “What do you want?”
“Straight to business. Good. Saves me the trouble of pretending I’m subtle.” Al leans forward, his artificial eye clicking softly as it refocuses. “You need to ask that girl out before somebody else does.”
The tunnel quiets in my mind.
Water drips from a ceiling seam into a metal pan someone placed beneath it. Far overhead, a freight platform rumbles through the street, vibrating dust loose from the old concrete. A child coughs behind a tarp. Nearby, Doreen mutters in her sleep. All of those sounds become suddenly too loud because my thoughts have stopped behaving.
“What girl?” I ask.
Al stares at me.
I stare back.
He lifts his cup toward the ceiling. “Precursors, give me strength. The bakery girl, you scaled refrigerator.”
“Evie.”
“Oh, good. You remember her name. I was worried, what with you bringing us her food every night, fixing her building, walking her home, glaring holes through any man who stands too close, and looking at her like she personally invented oxygen.”
“I do not look at her that way.”
“You look at her worse than that.”
I turn toward the east passage. “This conversation is finished.”
