Chapter Six
Ben clipped Lucy’s heels as she slowed. She thrust a shoulder back to make him retreat a step.
“Keep your distance, lover-boy.”
He rubbed his forehead. “For Purity’s sake, it didn’t mean anythin’. Can’tcha understand I was a bit desperate right then? Y’know, to live?”
She raised an unplucked brow. “So you’d only kiss me out of desperation?”
He spluttered. “That’s ain’t—I mean, you …”
She shook her head in exasperation. “Muck and buckets, Ben. And you were complaining about not getting me to laugh.”
“Yeah? Mebbe you could try a few knock-knock jokes. You know I’ve always been partial to ’em.”
“I remember. Karen was always studying joke books to find ones you hadn’t heard yet.”
He grimaced. “Can we talk about somethin’ else?”
“Sure. What’s it like to buddy up to one of the most psychotic entropy mages we’ve ever dealt with?”
“Hey, you watch your words. Sydney and me ain’t never were and ain’t never gonna be bestest buds. Also, he might not take a shine to you callin’ him a psycho.”
“Would murderer work better?”
“A’ight. Howsabout we just cut the talkin’ altogether.”
“But I’m enjoying this too much.”
“Can’t have too much fun at once, don’tcha know? Ain’t healthy.” Ben patted the spray bottle on his hip. “’Sides, Carl’s the only buddy I need.”
Lucy nodded to the elemental, who swirled in hello. “How’s he doing these days?” she asked.
“Couldn’t ask for a better partner. Comin’ on ten years together.”
“You do you realize that makes you married by common law, right?”
Ben sighed. “You ain’t gonna let up, are you?”
Her grin promised plenty more taunting. “You know the only way you’ll ever recover your wit is to keep practicing. Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle. For now.”
“Oh, yay, we’re here. Can’t talk. Gotta focus.”
Lucy chuckled to herself as Ben strode past her. He headed for a door that looked carved from blue marble, with the words Employee Records chiseled into the stone.
She pressed a hand to the door which rumbled aside. A soft white light gleamed in the chamber beyond. Lucy waved for him to take the lead.
“After you, Mr. Bundle of Joy.”
Ben stepped inside and closed his eyes as he crossed the threshold. He waited until he sensed Lucy enter and the door seal behind them. Then he gazed about, reminding himself to not try and absorb every detail at once.
They stood on a wide steel platform, worn to a dull burnish by the countless feet which had trod through here. It circled around to the far side of what appeared to be a bottomless pit, with further ringed platforms visible in the depths below. Pillared arches stood at regular intervals, and Ben knew if he headed down those other halls at random, he’d end up right back in this first chamber.
The ceiling was a dome of blue marble, etched with silver glyphs which appeared to shift and mingle with each blink. Curved glass panels covered every inch of the dome and reflected the source of light, which hung in the center of the space like a tiny azure sun.
The orb of Pure knowledge blazed in silent fury; occasional arcs of lightning shot into the dome and lit the panels briefly before fading. The whole chamber smelled of ozone and boot polish.
“This place always gives me the creeps,” he said, trying to check out the orb without looking at it dead on. “It just ain’t right. Makes me feel like I’m starin’ at the back of my head.”
Lucy shielded her eyes by his side. “Yeah. Trying to perceive seven interwoven dimensions can do that to you.”
“Is that what they’re up to these days? Golly jeepers. I’m gonna have to learn me some proper ’rithmatic if they go any higher.”
With an electric spray, one of the glass panels detached from the dome and floated down to hover above their heads. The glass frosted over and a figure appeared at the center like a caveman frozen within a block of ice. Ben knew it was a man only because he’d met Rick in person years earlier, before he’d been elected by the Board as the newest in an ancient line of filing managers.
The Filing Clerk stared down at the janitors.
“Janitor Benjamin. You are late.”
Ben tried to look contrite. “Rick, hey, sorry ’bout that. Bit of trouble in the trainin’ center.”
“Yes.” Glowing lines of text whirled about Rick too fast for Ben to make any sense of them. “The maids. I already received a death certificate for Sherri Dabien and Chairman Francis has filed for the dispensing of health benefits for one Margaret Elmster. Your and the Catalyst’s actions during the encounter have also been recorded.”
“Must be nice bein’ so connected to everything.”
“My functions as Filing Clerk hold no consideration for my feelings about the position.”
The panel dropped until the bottom edge clinked against the metal platform. Rick’s image faded with a final warning. “You have half an hour. Use it wisely.”
The panel shimmered and then melted into a translucent cube. Another shiver and it congealed into a glassy desk, complete with a chair, keyboard, and computer screen. The screen blinked on with a green flash.
Ben nudged the chair with a knee. It rolled smoothly on glass wheels, and he eased into the seat, trying to get over the feeling that it would shatter under his weight.
“Gotta love how user-friendly this place is gettin’.”
“You know how to actually use a computer interface?” Lucy asked. “I thought you’d still be stuck on typewriters.”
“I am a man of many talents.”
“The first part of that statement is true, at least.”
Ben reached inside his uniform and tugged out a manila envelope, thankful none of the items within were as fragile as the access sigil had been.
“What you got there?” Lucy asked.
He flapped the envelope. “This is all the info Francis scrounged up for me about Karen and our last job.” Setting it on the desktop, he undid the flap and slid the contents out. The one item he’d removed, the photo of Karen, remained in his breast pocket; a talisman of sorts, as he thought of it.
Lucy frowned as she spread the papers out and shuffled through them. He ticked off what she would be seeing. A typed report which would’ve been sent for the Board’s review, several notes in both Destin’s and Francis’ handwriting, and—
Lucy made a surprised noise and held the last item before Ben’s eyes.
“What’s this?”
He took the page. It presented a hand-sketched blueprint for a maze of tunnels which coiled in on themselves in a vaguely spiraling pattern. Certain spots were noted as major or minor junctions, others as nesting points for a variety of Scum critters.
“It’s s’posed to be a map of the section of the Sewers where we went in,” he said. “The official report says we was respondin’ to an invadin’ swarm of clogs. A simple burn-n-churn gig.”
“So what’s the problem?”
He laid the map over the keyboard and frowned at its familiar, yet confounding twists and turns.
“Problem is, I scanned this map into the system and asked for it to be ID’d and matched with any other junctions.”
“And?”
He slumped back in the chair. “And it ain’t nowhere to be found. Accordin’ to all our big and fancy know-how and know-what, this part of the Sewers just don’t exist.”
“That’s impossible.”
The rasp in her voice made Ben look up. Lucy had gone still and fixed on the map with an intense stare. Curious as to her reaction, he rolled the chair back a bit, giving her a clearer look.
“Best thing I can figure is mebbe this is a section of the Sewers we’ve somehow missed for hundreds of years, which makes us look downright shabby on the job, or …”
“Or it’s not really the Sewers after all,” she said, catching the line of his logic. “But still, that’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because …” Her gaze finally moved from the map to meet his. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
“Tell me.” He reached for her, but she shuffled a few steps away. Irritation bloomed, making Ben slap the chair arm and stand to glower down at her. “What’s goin’ on here, Lu?”
She scowled back. “What do you mean?”
“What’s goin’ on with you, huh? This has gotta be about more than our bump a couple months back or the fact that I ain’t been sendin’ you postcards sayin’Wish You Was Here since then. You got somethin’ gnawin’ at you, and it’s dealin’ with this.”
He rustled the papers, watching as her gaze darted to them and then away in a guilty fashion.
“Didja know some of this already?” he asked.
She hesitated, breaths coming faster, and then nodded. “A little. I spent some time researching it myself.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He pulled away from the fury which overtook her, turning Lucy from a plump janitor into someone he feared—if for a split-second—might try to rearrange his precious bodily bits in a way that would horrify Picasso. “Besides the fact that I knew Karen long before she ever became fond of you? Besides the fact that my best friend ended up dead for reasons no one’s ever cared to explain to me? I don’t know, Ben, why would I care about a silly little thing like that?”
She turned her back to him, but he could still hear the grief undermining her voice.
“All those months you spent in quarantine, I spent digging through as many records as I could get my hands on—anything even remotely related. Clogs. The Sewers. I looked at every job you two ever worked together, trying to find a connection, a link I could follow. Something about the situation didn’t sit right with me, but I could never pin down exactly what. And now you come back and all of a sudden are given access to information I never even knew existed.”
As her tirade faltered, Ben lowered his hand, which he’d ineffectually used to try and shield himself from her wrath. He knew Lucy and Karen had been close before he came onto the scene all those years back—had it really been more than a decade since?—but the force of her resentment still blew away any response he tried to muster. What sort of apology could he offer? Another joke about a kiss would just get him walloped right then, that was for sure.
He just didn’t remember enough, and those gaps in his mind remained as much an obstacle to him as Lucy’s enforced ignorance did to her.
“How much did you get wrapped in it back then?” he asked.
She deflated, if slightly. When she looked at him with the glowing orb at her back, her face remained shaded.
“I was there, Ben. Not when it all went down,” she clarified, catching his startled look, “but in the aftermath. I was part of the team Destin sent to pull you out after you radioed in an emergency status.”
Ben leaned in. This was news.
“What’dja see? Please, Lu, I gotta know.”
She held her hands out and rotated them as if manipulating an invisible Rubik’s cube, reconstructing her memories of the experience. “I saw … well, I saw the Sewers. We all did. We went in through a familiar junction and everything seemed normal. Until we found you, that is.” Her hands dropped back to her sides. “The whole section of the Sewers had been purged. Scoured spotless. I doubt even the Board could’ve found a single bacteria in the place. Karen was gone. And you …”
She shut her eyes. “You tried to kill me then, Ben. You were crazy. You took down Mickey and Julian and Sarah without even trying. None of us could get through to you until the Ascendants arrived. Can’t you see why I might’ve been willing to believe it was happening again back in the Recycling Center?”
He sat and stared at his boots, elbow on a knee as he absorbed her words. At last, he lifted his head. Her expression remained wretched, and he wanted to kick himself with a steel-toed boot for having caused her so much pain, even unknowingly.
“Why ain’t’cha ever come to me ’bout any of this?” he asked.
Her laugh went sour. “When? How? The moment we got you back, you were locked up tighter than a chastity belt. We thought you died in isolation. Then, when we found out you were still alive—and back on the job, no less—Destin and Francis kept everyone away. And even you shoved us back whenever we tried to approach, being so afraid of infecting us with the Ravishing. We had no way of knowing what was really going on while you kept aging and getting weaker, refusing any outside help. And all those years … do you know how often I laid awake at night, wondering what had really happened to my friends? To two people I cared about more than anyone else?”
“You think I did it, don’t’cha? You think I killed Karen.”
Carl spouted in his bottle, a sharp rebuttal of that even being an option.
“Thanks, buddy.” He swallowed as he faced Lucy again, but the fist in his throat refused to unclench. “A’ight. I get it. I ain’t gonna blame you if you hate me for failin’ her.”
She shook her head and wiped at her eyes. “No. The Ben I knew would never have done anything to harm Karen. You loved her too much.”
“The Ben you knew? So I ain’t that guy no more?”
“Nobody stays the same forever. But what I mean is that even if you did something, it wouldn’t have been of your own free will. You have to admit there’s the possibility that something or someone got control of you down there. Made you hurt her at the very least. The Ravishing doesn’t latch onto someone for no reason. There’s always betrayal involved.”
He stood again and walked over to the ledge, leaving her by the desk. A steel railing bordered the side, and he stared over this into the fathomless recesses of the chamber. Far below, white figures moved around on identical marble rings, while further down, other people sat at similar glassy desks which glittered in the orb’s light.
Ben didn’t pay much attention to the sights, his thoughts and feelings snarled into a distracting mess he couldn’t begin to untangle. Soft footsteps alerted him when Lucy joined him. Despite her quieter tone when she spoke, emotions still wavered her words.
“Ben, I’m sorry. It wasn’t right for me to dump all that on you at once. I should’ve … I could’ve …”
“Naw,” he said. “You was right. I did push everyone away, and I’m payin’ for that now. I figured everyone gave up on me so I gave up in return. For that, I gotta be the one to say sorry.” He put his back to the ledge and offered her a tentative smile. “Lu, I’m a bullheaded, slack-jawed, knob-kneed fool who has a hard time zippin’ his fly most mornin’s, much less bein’ quick on the draw when it comes to knowin’ who really cares about the same things I do. I hope you can cut me some slack for that, at least.”
She studied him for a minute, and then smiled back.
“Karen somehow managed to overlook all that, so I’ll try to do the same.” She blew out a whistling breath; most of her animosity went with it. “Whew. For a moment there, I really wanted to carve my initials on the inside of your skull.”
“Well thankya for resistin’ that particular temptafication. I’ll ask Monty to get someone else to drag my hide around if it makes it any easier.”
She coughed. “Truth be told, I didn’t get the unlucky draw like I said earlier. I made Monty assign me to you.”
“Why’dja go and do that?”
“Because I guessed you were up to something like this, and that you needed help but were too stubborn to ask. At least that’s one thing that hasn’t changed with you.”
“You sure you wanna play tagalong? I ain’t got no idea where this is gonna take me.”
A firm nod. “I’ll help you however I can, take you wherever you need to go, whenever. You don’t just need a chauffeur, Ben. Without your powers, you need a combination seeing-eye and guard dog. Someone to help when things get messy.”
“A’ight, just so we’re clear, you’re the one who just compared herself to a δπ♦§≈, not me.”
She snorted. “Finally. A bit of the old Ben. Maybe you aren’t such a lost cause.” She offered a hand. “So we’re agreed? I help you and you keep me involved. You share everything you learn with me and vice versa.”
He clasped her hand with his, reassured by her strong grip.
“Done and done,” he said. “Now lessee what else we can dig up before Rick boots our butts outta here. That guy loves his schedules so much, I won’t be surprised none when he marries one and settles down to have little schedule babies.”