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Is she breathing?Yes.
Is she blinking?Not that I can tell.
What the fuck.
I shake her a little, and there's nothing. Avery's gone, and she left her shell behind.
Note to self, maybe warn her next time before you whip out your lighter and mark her with it. I was just trying to make her a little more agreeable, though I didn't mean to make herthisagreeable.
I snap my fingers in front of her face again. Still, there's no response.
Goddammit.
This complicates matters, and the noise at the back of my skull is getting louder with each passing second as the buzz of students and guards fills the hallway. Somebody laughs, and it feels like nails to the chalkboard of my brain.
I have to make a decision.
I'm either going to have to leave her here or do something with her. Since the guards will be looking for her soon enough, my decision is made for me.
Well, I guess a little sightseeing never hurt anybody. She can agree when she wakes up, and we aren't both in the hole. I grab her hand, and thank everything she can still walk as I steer her to one of the employee-only passageways kept under lock and key. There's only one way to the basement, the others having been sealed off ages ago, and the way down begins here.
I pull out my badge, stolen from the employee locker rooms on the fifth floor, and swipe it across the card reader. The door unlocks with a click and a green light on the card reader. I push her inside and down we go, our shoes loud on the stone stairs.
I send a quick text to the boys to take care of shit for me. I make sure it goes through before we descend farther. The already limited cell network doesn't work at all underground. Most of the tunnels that wind through this place, snaking through its seams, don't go to the basement. Hell, no one goes to the basement if they know what's good for them.
We head down the stairs until we reach the end of the line. From there, I push open a door and drag her with me down the dark hall. Down here, it's just old emergency lighting on motion sensors, and as we move, the lights click on, illuminating the next twenty or so feet. One of these days, the light at the end of the hall is going to click on, and I'm pretty sure a clown with sharp teeth is going to show his face and smile.
That would be cool.
We could make plans together.
We veer into another damp dark room, and Avery starts to snap out of whatever state she's in and starts to struggle. She takes a lazy swipe at me as I force her down the hall and through another door. Most students don't even know this place exists, but I've explored every inch of it. The tunnels are Saint's territory and the graves are Kill's. Me, though? I like the darkness and the smell of wet decay like I've entered a catacomb.
We go down another flight of stairs, and this one doesn't have the motion sensor lights like before. A single line of incandescent bulbs hangs from the ceiling. They turn on with a buzz when I flip the light switch.
Her breathing is loud with panic seeping into each breath, as I drag her farther into the depths with me.
I push open the heavy metal door at the bottom of the stairs, and it screeches noisily. The lights are scattered now, some of the bulbs broken, and a patchwork of shadows stretches across the stone ceiling.
"Where are we?" she asks slowly. "How did I get here?"
"The basement," I say, giving her a half-answer as I tug her forward.
"Why?"
I don't need to explain. She'll figure it out.
Cells line the walls on either side of the massive room, their rusting metal bars touching the ceiling. They're finished on the north end but unfinished on the south.
I throw her a bone.
"In the early 1900s," I tell her, "after the typhus hospital shut down, this building sat vacant for years, but then the state came in. They wanted to convert it into a jail, and they put a lot of money into it before the Great Depression hit and everything went belly up. This building has had many lives, baby girl. We're just in its newest reincarnation."
"I don't want to be here," she says. "It's creepy."
She can't leave yet. She hasn't seen my surprise.
Her shoes clack against the stone, echoing in the massive space, as we reach the north end of the basement. I steer her into one of the empty cells, its steel bars flaked with rust.
