Undercity
- 35 -
Curled up in bed around her.
There's banging in the next room over. Picked a little basement motel to hide out in this time. My head hurts. I pull just a little away from Rhodes. Delicate and sleeps lighter than anyone I've ever met. Datapad on the nightstand. I reach over. Don't wake up, don't wake up. Sleep. Heavy raggedy comforter over the both of us, keeping away the morning light out the window. Smells like paint in here.
I flick on the datapad. Six AM.
Fine. Whatever. I'll be awake now. I set my chin on her head, nuzzle into her faint warmth, and scroll the news for a little while.
-
Still nothing about our escape attempt, but the dead man in the water did get a tiny news story, some press release from Salt Row PD, no name, no theories, just a little note at the bottom of the back page. Not the first person to haunt my thoughts. Been on my mind the past few days. I can't stop thinking about it. I wince every time I try. Why didn't you just do something else, Nelly. Why didn't he?
No use in it. I go back to scrolling elsewhere.
New bad habit of mine. I didn't do this shit back home or even when working with Ceder, but we have a lot of downtime again, and I can't help but check everywhere all at once for anything related to us, anything notable, any opportunities. Free day at a local gym got us showers and a sale at a Salt Row thrift store got us cheap sets of clothing, and I've been trying to silently scrounge up any info about Ceder and the Hang'd Knight but there's nothing at all, even on pirate news sites.
Little news story from Baultriel last week—as little as the one about the dead man in the water. Two dead protestors, it says, and fifteen more sent offworld. Accident, it says. Shit is no better than last time I checked. Wonder if Ceder's got cold feet yet. Or if things are imminent.
Rhodes buzzes a little. Does it while asleep sometimes. I wrap her tightly and sit there, just thinking.
Time to move, I reckon.
-
I don't want us to go through Corundum Town the normal way. If it's an ambush we're fucked with no recourse. Unfortunately this means we have very few options—there is only one normal way, after all—so we need to take the abnormal way, and that's going to be hard.
-
In the Undercity it is tough to get a meal. In Corundum Town it's not so hard—people take money and sell you food, cooked food—but any further down and things get troublesome. The cost goes up, or the cost becomes barter. Money stops working, stops mattering. Difficulty is reaching those places, and reaching them intact. Get robbed or eaten by some foul thing in the dark. So in the dark, a can of food goes a long way, and we need to make a trade.
Our cans of food went a long way this week, but we've eaten through the most of it and the last bit is part of our plan. So me and Rhodes split one final spare can of beans on the floor of the motel bedroom, pack up, and hoof it to the nearest way down.
Ceder wasn't kidding. Lot of the easy ways down—the ones that get any traction on the intranet—become hotspots, and then someone makes them inaccessible. Good intentions I guess, trying to keep the peace down there, keep out cops and nosy journalists, but I've lived down there for months now and still hardly know any tunnels that still work. But there is one nearby, in the back room of a bagel shop. Headed there now.
Got the New Bug Bag and the Bug inside and she's tapping along with me, check in, all clear, check in, all clear. It's a light drizzle and a dim morning and the streets of Salt Row, here, are overly wide and cars are passing us. Little downtown area six blocks from the waterline, and not fun to be exposed here. Lots of tall-as-hell buildings made of glass and hewn of a thin foreign stone, and sidewalks too wide to be comfortable, but too grimy to be regal. A tiny Guild lives in that tower, across the street from us—a million little window entrances and a bustling market in the ground floor, once a furniture store, now a loud and freakish place. My stomach sinks a little. Check in. I look forward toward one last crosswalk. All clear, I respond.
Planning to talk less during all this. My words haven't done me any good lately.
-
Cozy spot in the base of a megastructure, with the door hidden in the shadows beside the entrance to an office lobby. I keep my eyes level and my expression stony as I walk in. A gangly and thin Neriak leans over the side counter with tired eyes, and gives me a little "Ba." I give them a little head-up and walk right past everything. Nice linoleum floor has gotten yellowed and all the seats are empty right now. Got to act like I work here or I've got business or something. I just waltz to the nearest employee entrance and step into the back room.
Feel like I've got eyes on me and I do—I'm behind the Neriak now, and their odd horned head curled to look at me. It's kind of getting popular now. On the intranet. Just passing through. Just a tourist. I don't say a word and I don't hear one.
Into the pantry and the slow scuffing of heavy footsteps from behind me, and I swing the Bug Bag around my back and start down a ladder in the far corner as quickly as possible.
Small tunnel, tight fit. I climb down a few rungs and feel the concrete scraping against my elbows, and then I hear Rhodes in the bag. "Ow," she mutters.
I shut a hatch above and then speak, trying to get even closer to the ladder, give her some space. "Sorry," I say. "I'll be quick."
"You're okay," I hear. She shuffles slightly and grunts. "Ready to be out of the Bag though." There's lights along the way, emergency lights, just enough to see what I'm doing. I bump my nose on a rung and make a sound but continue. Knew it wasn't exactly going to be luxurious.
Takes me a minute of climbing down, huddling up, huffing and keeping my breath steady, to reach the bottom. A little concrete box with a couple rusty doors, a grated floor, some emergency submarine lights. The air is immediately different here. Dusty and stale and frozen in time. Not gonna waste any time; I unload the Bug Bag by placing it on the ground, and a frazzled, achy Rhodes emerges, stretching her thin limbs and shuddering from the sudden chill in the air. "Beh," she murmurs.
"Sorry," I say again.
She steps over and embraces me, and I embrace her back, reaching my arms down. "Good. All good." Pulls away, then looks up. Her pretty eyes are half-lidded here, tired, but she's smiling. "Ready."
I nod and crouch down to the duffel, and she does, too. Still a lot of random shit here, although we did find a good trashcan for the old evidence. I have to fuss through our belongings a little while before finding what I'm looking for. "Shit, you know," I chuckle weakly, "never looked up if this would work underground or not." I pull free a cheap plastic compass and hold it level.
"Why wouldn't it?" she asks.
"I don't know," I say, shrugging. North is that way. Remains stable, at least. Works however compasses usually do. "South. South is Corundum Town."
Rhodes grins and stands up straight, having found her end of the deal. A little kid's ball cap with a hole for her antenna. It'll be better than nothing. "I'll get us there," she says. "Pal cotta, sa baata jora."
- 36 -
Walking down a big concrete slope now, with grates in the ceiling sealed over by a dark and old cement. Along the aqueduct on our left, there are still bits of rubble—asphalt that seeped through and solidified into odd organic piles. The lighting is spotty but solid, and not flickering, and I can't tell if it was built particularly well or if there are still folk replacing the bulbs. Don't know where the power's coming from, maybe the same grid as the city above. Rhodes leads the way and I hold the compass in one hand, stable, keeping track. We are headed northwest right now, which is less than convenient. Got to go down before we can go anywhere.
She walks funny, like she is trying to take all the pressure off both her legs at once and not succeeding much. Still kind of fun having her lead me around for once. Always felt that way, but now it's literal.
Proceeds like this for a long while. Flat parts, intersections, all uninhabited by people, but now we are seeing some of the particular vermin that like the stretches of mildewy underground. Little bug lizards, or maybe just very agile lizards, that Rhodes calls niddies, with a grin on her face. A spot of moss along one ceiling seems to gestate and breathe, and there is at least one dog running about in the shadows. Then we find another ramp that heads downward, this time looking like an old maintenance tunnel for an even older trainway, and we proceed.
After an hour of walking we take a break along the wall where there is a small inset for a doorway, and Rhodes collapses against me. I sit with her.
"Hi," I say.
She hums. "Shit is a long way," she says.
Trying to look sympathetic. "Just the way it is, I guess."
"Tsshh, yeah. It could be worse. We'll ask for, ah, directions soon."
"That'll be nice."
Rhodes nods along, and glances at our backpack. At first I figure she probably wants a snack, probably knows we can't afford to eat any more, but then she speaks. "Armed still?"
I nod. "We expecting things down here?"
"Maybe. There's wild animals and stuff."
"Well, okay." That eases me up some. "Can handle wild animals."
"Just going to avoid them if we can," Rhodes says.
"We'll see."
We rest there for a little while so she can get her strength back. Though I suspect it never really fully comes back. Always takes a little bit more from her until she's so sapped she breaks.
-
After we're up and about again, and after we reach the bottom of a series of ramps, we finally come across people again, or at least signs of people—a still-hot camp stove and some clothes piled around a doorway in the tunnel, along with signage for a 'MATACHIN CAMP'. We peer inside and, past a ramp downward, spot the dark remnants of a train platform; black water in the dark pit where rails once were, and a kayak tied to the 'shore'. A sign held up in the water pointing towards 'SEA EXIT'. No movement for now, so we move on. Finally able to head south, and the ground stays mostly level.
We pass by a few hatches in the ground that have the Vasthi word for 'FLOODED' on them, and more than a few possible exits out of the spillway seem to have collapsed, or been sealed after-the-fact to keep out water. Doesn't rain here anymore but the sea is close enough to cause problems.
Eventually the way to proceed gets a little convoluted. The train tunnels take an unwelcome bend westward, so we try to cut through an exit that heads upward on a bit of scaffolding, but the heavy metal door is both locked and sealed behind with concrete. We backtrack to find another door of the same make with a sign in Vasthi, and Rhodes gets us in with a more complicated lockpicking attempt, something with two metal bits and a while of tinkering. Swears under her breath some, but we get through.
On the other end is a pretty striking place, odd and dark and not altogether easy to understand. "This was outside at one point, I bet," Rhodes says.
"Shit, maybe." The ceiling is held up only in part, and only in places—concrete bulging downward from the weight of a city atop it, with pillars from what was once an overhang above a train station holding it up. More like a cavern than a tunnel, and then hewn out in places manually by people trying to make more passageways. More signs than we've seen yet, none in Colonial Common. Modern electric lanterns held in by cheap wrought iron pitons, with long power cords going into the distance one way and another.
"Okay, getting somewhere," Rhodes says, now. She stands with her hands on her hips and leans forward to read the intricate details. Not quite a map but closer than we've had. "Corundum Town gets mentioned here. Plus some other shit. There's... ah, ah... a way down to Little Hegemony, but it's kilometers and kilometers off."
I shake my head. "Don't need that. Just need someone native to trade with."
"Yeah. Someone dug a tunnel to Varre Trading Post. Or, uh, I guess it's just Varre... Post. There's probably people there."
Makes me glance up at the ceiling a little. Reinforced concrete buckling in places, bits of rebar poking through. "Crazy to imagine tunneling through all this."
Rhodes faintly giggles. "Yeah, can't be good for the fucking stability up there."
"Just not what I'd expect people doing under a big city," I say.
"Could have been decades ago," she says, "or earlier. We're levels and levels down."
Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Perfectly good train station here, or it was once upon a time. Why keep building on top? Why all this for so many years? "Velnias," I murmur distastefully.
But that just makes her beam. "Yeah," she says.
We trek towards Varre Post.
-
Tunnels like they used pickaxes, maybe something mechanized, but the toolwork is uneven and often leaves gaps in the concrete where cobwebs gather and tiny eyes flit at us in the dark. The air is musty and nasty, and condensation drips occasionally off the many hanging extension cords along the ceiling. I lead and Rhodes tails so close I can feel her.
Awkward footing and not fun to breathe such a muggy atmosphere. We take another break just to sit, but there's nothing comfortable to rest on.
After twenty minutes of trekking south, passing a dozen little lantern-lit intersections in the cave, we hear the sound of an animal up ahead. A yelp maybe, half-sapient and half-feral, and it echoes unpleasantly against the craggy mined concrete. "Shitssake," I say, and I feel Rhodes jump against me.
"Gun," she whispers.
Already working on it. I unhook my shotgun from inside the duffel and pull it at a low angle toward the ground, though I keep the bolt uncycled. "Could've been a person," I guess.
I can feel her getting low against me. "Maybe. Don't aim at 'em."
Don't have to tell me twice. Preferable if I don't have to kill any more random people in front of Rhodes. I go onward. Hard to keep my footsteps even here, all the little marks of collapsed and swept concrete in places. I see some chalk marks along the wall but they don't look like script.
The tunnel takes a shallow left turn—further southward—and I crane my head right to follow it along. Wild animal, maybe. Wild animal. Fuck lives in a place like this? A couple niddies come out of the stonework along a piece of rebar and then clamber in the opposite direction to remind me. Little ecosystem. Whatever old vermin live in the city and crave the dark.
A little longer and my spatial sense tells me we're close to where the sound came from, but the echoes threw me off, and we're barely ten paces from where we heard it. I get a move on.
-
At one last intersection we find a person, and I lower my gun wholly to the floor. A Neriak here with muddy green and yellow scales, but not half the size of Ceder, and with a smear of blood trailing out a horrible gash in his leg. Looks like a bite maybe, or a prolonged gnaw, and from his unmarked raggy clothes and weak musculature I guess I could expect something big to get the better of him easily. "Ho," I say.
"Ba," Rhodes says.
A strained and awful expression on the lizard's face. "Ba," he mutters. "Ca co balata. Ca albala, djet—" He raises a trembling arm toward some shuffling in another leg of the intersection, and I swing around.
A scrawny thing, hairless and bright-skinned, with four eyes that gleam horribly in the artificial lantern light that surrounds us on all sides. It stands on six legs and is much taller than me. It begins to scramble towards me and I pull back the bolt and shoot.
- 37 -
Holding my head now, and knelt, and the smoke tastes like coals, and dust has filled the room thoroughly. I crawl over to Rhodes and the bleeding Neriak, who thwaps me on the shoulder, and cycle the shotgun 'til it's unloaded again. Then I load it right back up.
Generally a bad idea to fire this thing indoors though. We spend a few minutes recovering with our ears ringing like crazy but what used to be the creature is just now a plain contorted corpse with all its limbs in a pile, no longer attached to the body. I take the duffel off and set it beside me, and pull free some leftover medical shit from when I hurt Rhodes; a few stitches, gauze, disinfectant cream. "Sorry," I say. Still hard to hear myself.
"Incta tibla, a, a," he says. "Ca co chicoret Vasthi." I recognize 'thanks' in a different tone than I'm used to hearing back at the Hang'd Knight.
Rhodes looks at me with a faint smile. "No Common, I don't think."
I send him a smile. "Ask if we can get him somewhere, yeah?"
She reaches up and adjusts her hat, and speaks. Vasthi is a quick and tongue-tying language. I can pick out bits, just bits. Think Common came second for her. I examine the terrible marks the thing made on the Neriak and make the assumption that a bunch of cream and pressure will help it some, but he'd probably benefit from surgery. There is a loose brown tooth from the animal's maw still in a bit of his musculature around his digitigrade shin, and I don't feel like it'd do much good to dislodge it here. I just lather everything in disinfectant and start wrapping gauze. Not sure why it didn't go for the kill on him.
Eventually Rhodes switches back to Colonial Common. "He lives at the trading post," she says. Then, quieter, "He's really young."
"Ask him if I can carry him."
"Om, arret cor?" Rhodes throws a motion at me. "Pitza Nelly. Pitz Rhodes."
I look at her funny. "Using our names?"
"Come on," she says, tensing up her mandibles at me.
"Ba, ba," the Neriak assures us. He is out of breath and I can feel his weak limbs shaking against my grasp, and his words come out like he's trying to get them away from himself. "Pitz Cascine."
I top the wrappings with one more sticky bandage for pressure and then offer my arm to him. "Hi, Cascine."
He swallows, and takes my arm, and I lift him up into a fireman carry, his arms wrapped around my front, secure. Never lifted a Neriak before.
-
Gentle with him, especially given his scrawniness. Don't know what young precisely means for a Neriak, but Rhodes seemed freaked out—could still be a teenager. Get you back home, kid. I leave my shotgun slung in case we hear more shit, but things slow up and become a little chattier as we head the rest of the way to Varre Post. Neither Cascine nor Rhodes can agree on what the animal was, and the exact circumstances of how he came to wander out here seem vague. Kids like to wander. Not confusing to me.
After a little while of calming down, I ask Rhodes something as Cascine rests his head against my shoulder. "Isn't Vasthi a pidgin? Why don't I ever notice the loan words?"
"Not a Colonial pidgin," she says, and she's laughing a bit, though the situation has dulled both our humor some. "It's a meld mostly between Yontazzi and Dronhas. We were here before you, you know." She motions at herself and Cascine like they are representatives of their respective species.
"Shit, it is?"
"No way you didn't know."
I shrug and exhale. "Guess I'm that stupid."
"Ahhh..." Rhodes skips ahead of us and shakes her head. There's a bassy voice emanating from the halls far up ahead, almost like a gas engine. "Not stupid, just doing a bunch of shit. I think we're close. Gota i? Cascine?"
"Ba," he murmurs.
We reach a small spot-welded staircase made out of old train parts, and pass through a curtained doorway into a large space. Think it was a warehouse at one point, or even the skeletal frame of a factory—big and stretching off into the distance, with vaulted ceilings where there now sit a hundred hammocks and sheet metal platforms. There are fires and smoke vents like I'd seen in places in Corundum Town, but also electric heaters, and a thousand power cords hanging everywhere. Carpets too, and lots of curtains denoting different areas. We're greeted immediately by a few old-looking human women along a bench, two of whom stand to attention upon seeing us. I hear a few shouts in Vasthi.
"Ba, ba, ba," wails Cascine. "Tlec a catori ba tis saatu. Pitza Nelly." His voice is raggedy and creaks and cracks with unconstrained agony coming to him all of a sudden.
Rhodes does the talking and I remain a statue while the women call for help. Eventually they manage to get the kid down flat and a stout Baldari with a bag full of tools takes a look at the seeping wound, and all the while Rhodes gets the whole story across, I assume. Can't get a perfect idea of what life is like down here but they treat the Neriak kid like family, despite me not spotting another feral amid the various small crowds around. "Rhodes, ask about our thing,"
"I am," she says, nervously adjusting her cap. She turns over to a particularly large man in heavy clothes who is rubbing Cascine's head, cupping him in some broad palms. "Tjeti, ba? Arrete? Gota arret?"
The man nods. He has old, frail black hair and a dour expression, staring wordlessly at Cascine's leg get unwrapped. Looks worse now, and discolored. Rhodes stands up beside me and takes my arm.
"They do have a person who can scout," she says to me, her voice low now. "And we're not horribly far from Corundum Town, at least."
I chuckle faintly. "Hope this diversion wasn't stupid."
Rhodes shakes her head and holds me close as we walk through the damp, warm interior of Varre Post. "Playing it safe. You learned that."
"Took me a few months," I point out.
"Tshhh, whatever."
-
We barter with the courier and scout of the town, or at least someone willing to do the work, named Edjebo. Tall and slender Baldari with a tank-top and brown eyes with tiny pupils. At first we try offering money, of course, but it gets a laugh, so we barter with the six remaining cans of food. Given that we're close enough to Corundum Town and helped out Cascine it goes pretty well. Three cans now, to go check out the Hang'd Knight and, if possible, try to spot Ceder inside. Three cans when he comes back, regardless of what he finds. We hand over the first cans to his mother sitting beside him, and wait.
-
We buy deep-fried niddy nuggets, which taste pretty good for being made out of a pest lizard, and bum it up with the locals for the hour and a half it takes. Things are quiet and peaceful, at least as peaceful as the Undercity can be, and there are clearly very few tourists. A couple trading stalls, only one of which takes cash—the food shop—but the atmosphere is good and Rhodes, despite not exactly being a social butterfly, is right at home amid these folk. I just nod along and say hello to people walking along, and fix my eyes on an elderly Tasran with a sewing machine on the upper floor.
Eventually Edjebo returns. I spot him jaunting along in the south-facing tunnel towards us and he seems pleased with himself, and relays as much as he can to Rhodes. He also writes down some simple instructions to get to Corundum Town from here, and Rhodes seems pretty excited about what she hears. "It's closed, but wasn't locked, he says," she says. "He says he stumbled in like he was there on accident, and there's tons of Baldari in there, and Ceder, and they're having a meeting or something."
"Baultriel play," I say quietly.
"Yeah. Well, and he's not fuckin' dead at least."
I nod, pursing my lips. "And probably not turned, given he's having guests..."
We stand up, but Rhodes pauses there. I see something real in her eyes. Tired, here, but she says, "We can go back, if you don't like how it sounds."
She's scared of this, maybe, willing to try a different plan. But it sounds workable to me. And I don't want to try a different plan. "I like how it sounds," I respond. "Let's roll."
I hoist her up on my back, bus our little plates back to the food stall, and we head out.
- 38 -
Ends up being that our easiest route to Corundum Town follows another abandoned train tunnel that has been turned into a canal, and we trail it mostly south along a bend and past various intersections to different spots in the Undercity. We can see the seawater now, low in the rusting pit beside us, but the concrete platform still shines with residual wetness and Rhodes was able to spot where—near to the ceiling—it seems to reach at high tide. Good for now, but could be inaccessible for hours at a time, days at a time. Routes change on the regular. We pass by one cloaked person riding a little kayak north, who greets us in Vasthi, but mostly it is quiet, and we come across no more big animals.
I talk a little, we shoot the shit. Rhodes has thought up a bunch more albums we should listen to when I get my UAP back. Still doubting we'll have time, though. Things with Ceder could be on a knife's edge. Just hope he'll have a talk with us. Not sure how he'll feel.
We pass by an entrance to another settlement, or at least instructions to climbing up to one, and by some enormous mural of the skyline in Tiab Town painted on the old black concrete of the train tunnel, and at least one capsized vessel in the water, possibly up to three, depending on how you count the debris. At one point we figure we can see reflected sunlight down one of the passages eastward, but it has to be too far, it has to be something else emitting light. We go on.
After a little over an hour I've carried Rhodes all the way to Corundum Town.
-
We come down into the old Velnias World Fair Aquarium to the sound of a low electric hum. All the pale blue lights are still on, and we have emerged from a hatch in the ceiling into the strange chamber Ceder and I once found, buried past kitsch plaster tunnels and seemingly nonsensical, with a pressure-sealed window into the Cestabin Sea some meters below the surface. I help Rhodes down the little pop-out ladder, seal it behind us, and stand a moment, slackjawed again by the sight of something so odd.
Then I realize I'm looking at a fish there through the window, peeking curiously in the murky water to the cold interior.
It's a fish I've seen before. Or a kind I've seen before, anyway. In the water it looks graceful—a many-finned eel with some faint trail behind it where it floats, and beady red eyes, and two mouths on either side of its body instead of along its muzzle, which ends in a lazy taper. I stop there still, to not alert it, and Rhodes comes up slowly by my side.
"I think I know that one," she says quietly.
"Yeah?"
Her voice is steady. "They're called Smiles of Biztram. Meant to be a good sign if you see one," she says, "but it speaks from both mouths."
A biztram is a jungle spirit from the planet of Jazid! Next time you compliment a Tasran, maybe you could make them laugh by saying they look like one! Not now. That's shit advice, anyway. I lean my head to match its tilted self, but then it tilts the other way, so I tilt the other way, and then I am certain I hear it whisper something, and then it flits off into the dark deep of the water. "There it goes."
"Cool," she says, and there's a little shakiness in her voice. "Tch. Fucking crazy there's a window here."
"I know, right," I say, but seeing other parts of the Undercity has tempered my expectations of normalcy from this city-below-the-city. Nobody around with authority to dictate what is being done or why. It had some a purpose to someone once, and now it remains.
-
We take the short, leisurely stroll back to the west end of Corundum Town, passing through the World Fair Aquarium in reverse. I take her to the interesting little exhibits at least—we laugh over the one about brown gruel, and she has some delighted fascination for the one on deep sea poppels—but there's not a lot here for us and an air of urgency. The vaulted halls of the town are fairly occupied this time of the week, punks celebrating the weekend, shops popping up a little past the aquarium, smells of roast meat from every direction. Getting kind of sick of the smell of roast meat.
By this point I've stuffed my gun into the New Bug Bag once more—feels wrong packing so much heat in someplace more civilized. Funny how things shift so quickly through just a few passageways.
We take one final break for Rhodes' legs, sat on a bench in a little square, beside a fountain which is no longer running. The skylight has some discolored greenery wrapping around all the stainless steel framing, and the windows are missing, save for one little shard of glass poking into a bit of concrete.
"Like we agreed," I say quietly. "You need to explain yourself to Ceder."
"I will," Rhodes says. Her head is hung here, and her voice timid. "If he's not... if he would rather not do this plan, we can try elsewhere. Maybe a smaller MONITOR in a smaller district, maybe..."
I gently place an arm around her. "Yeah. We'll figure out something."
"Sorry it took so much shit to get to this point," she mutters.
Not the worst experiences of my life. I could've had worse. Had worse at times, and feeling like I'm doing something is a nice change of pace. "You're working at it."
Seems like that strikes a chord with her. She smiles, then the smile fades, and she envelops herself against me, and we embrace for a little while. "...I should get in touch with those girls from back in the day. And Jean Jacket, again. Tell 'em all the shit that happened. Be a person, I-I guess, is what you'd call it."
"Sure," I say, mildly amused. I grimace a little though. "I mean, probably not. Opsec."
"I know, I'm just kinda daydreaming. Just realized I got so much unfinished business, a-and I miss them, and I never said sorry to anyone's face."
"Could've guessed that much."
She makes a muted warble under my arm and then sighs. "Nelly, how the fuck do you trust me with anything? How's Ceder gonna?"
Not a great answer for that. I take a deep breath. "Coming clean about the League shit is the only thing you can do. First and only step. Then you just hope, and if it doesn't go well, we do something else."
"I wanna be a better person," Rhodes says, as quietly as if she never spoke at all.
Doesn't take much effort to want. Doesn't take much to want to be better, Pell. Truth is I am still in the dark, I am still the person I am, and wanting is the smallest little step. Rhodes is further in the dark than me, now. No chance to be selfless and stupid anymore. Fighting to live.
For the first time in a while, I feel my grip loosen over her. Part of me feels detached again. Maybe at the end of all of this I really will feel like a complete fool for doing so much for her, but then again I have always been a fool, and I will continue to be one for a while. Don't know the extent of heartbreak I could still feel if Rhodes betrayed me again, but I know it could happen. I only have stupid hope. I want you to be a better person. What kind of trouble makes a person think such a thing? Pell thought it for me, once, and now I feel the same for someone else.
Anyhow. I don't need to say any of that out loud to Rhodes. I just hold her tight and sit for a while 'til her legs get better, and then we head to the Hang'd Knight.