The House, Chapter 1—The Raven, Part 2

Chapter 1—The Raven, Part 2

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Eass studied the two circles on the blackboard and the gap left in the middle. She looked between the box of chalk sticks and the felt eraser, and chose a chalk stick. She set the tip against the board. It screeched as she started to draw a line connecting the circles. The closer she came to the second circle, the heavier the chalk grew in her fingers, as if the blackboard resisted her. She pushed harder. The screech grew louder, the chalk trembling under the pressure. Blood leaked from the white line, running down the board as if from a mortal wound. 
‘You can stop this, you know?’ 
The chalk crumbled between Eass’ fingers. ‘I am not the one doing this.’ 
Max pointed to the blood-soaked remains of the chalk in her hand. ‘Then who is?’
‘Gwyston. He—‘
‘—killed me.’ Max’s voice was calm. 
She looked down at her blood-covered hands. ‘He killed you because of me.’ 
A klaxon blared in the distance. 
You can’t stay here,’ Max warned.

‘I can’t go back either.’ 

Max shoved his hands in his pockets, but his voice was sad. ‘I need you to wake up.’

—

Max’s words faded as the klaxon outside blared a second time. Three short sounds, thirty seconds apart, proclaiming thirty minutes to the end of curfew. Eass blinked her eyes open. She lay on a cold stone floor. Her throat felt dry, her stomach hollow with hunger. Dim light fell through the broken panes of a window above her. She must have fallen asleep while watching the entrance to Niuen’s safe house from an abandoned house across the lane.

She stood, brushed off the worst of the dust clinging to her parka, and looked through the window. The lane was deserted. The weathered wooden door in the opposite wall stood slightly ajar, a faint impression marking where the House lock had been. So Niuen hadn’t waited for Gwyston’s SES troopers to come crushing through the door, but Eass needed to find her and this was her only lead. 

She pushed the window open and climbed onto the windowsill. A pipe ran down the facade, offering enough hand and footholds to get her down to the cobbles. Another quick glance up and down the lane, and she was at the door. The wooden frame creaked open at her touch, revealing a narrow hallway. She hovered on the threshold, taking in the cracks in the wooden lining, the broken light bulbs and dull fixtures, and the spiderwebs covering every corner.

She glanced back out to the lane. She was at the right place, but the inside of the safe house had been polished to a shine, and this hallway looked as dilapidated as any of the neighbouring buildings. She tiptoed to the door at the end. The room that had been Niuen’s study was empty except for a crumbling desk, a rusted chair, and a shelf ready to fall over at the slightest breeze. 

Eass had stood in this very room only days ago, facing Niuen across her desk, desperate to blame her for Max’s death. Now the room looked so different that it might have happened in another world. She drew a line through the dust on the desk but stopped short when she spotted other marks. A fresh imprint, no older than a few days; someone had sat in the rusted chair and put his boots up. 

She drew back and scanned the floor. Several pairs of shoes had left prints in the dust, some of them the unmistakable impressions of heavy boots. She darted to the window, keeping to one side so that she would be hard to spot from the outside. 

When the Conglomerate had occupied the city, they had built their looming towers on metal stilts, cutting through the historic quartiers like steel spiders squatting over a discarded past. For a few years, people had hung on to their homes, but their children soon fled the perpetual twilight under the shadow of the upper city. The incoming Sector government had feared that the emptying warren of narrow alleys might turn into a refuge for dissidents. It relocated the few remaining residents, using force when needed, and stripped the buildings of services. The lack of water and electricity had driven the rest to seek shelter elsewhere, leaving the lower levels to fall into darkness and disrepair.

Now, the abandoned quartiers were off-limits for all but the city’s security forces, but they preferred drones to manned patrols, and only Gwyston’s Eschaton Security wore the combat boots that had left those prints. 

Coming here had been a risk, but where else could she go? Niuen had erased all of Eass’ records, and without an ID, work order, or anything else the city required to allow its citizens to move through the streets, any drone would report her to the nearest patrol. 

The klaxon rang again, two short blasts. She had fifteen minutes until the end of curfew, and she needed to get to the closest tunnel before the service levels above her filled with crews on their way to their morning shifts. If she found one of Max’s stashes…

She glanced at the boot prints in the dust. Neither she nor anyone close to her would be safe until Gwyston was gone, but anywhere must be safer than here.

The entrance door almost collapsed as she leaned on it to peek out into the lane. The sounds of the waking city drifted down the brick walls, carrying the distant hum of dirigibles and the busy hiss of delivery drones mixed with the electric buzz of newslines.

She stepped out onto the cobbles, keeping close to the wall and out of sight of the rooflines. The closest access to the tunnel was a metal hatch in front of a gate at the end of the lane. She had almost reached it when she spotted the red seal taped across the metal cover. It would alert every surveillance drone in the area if she so much as scratched it. And as if this was not bad enough, the poster glued to the gate’s metal bars made it worse.

Underneath a slogan proclaiming ‘Security through Surveillance’ sat a drawing of a girl with wiry hair, black eyes, and a surly expression. The large block letters below asked: ‘Have you seen this person?’

Eass ripped the poster off the gate. This made no sense. Why would Gwyston advertise that someone had slipped through his precious surveillance web? And why print it on paper if with one click the notice could pop up in every feed across the city?

The gate secured a service staircase to the upper levels, and footfalls from above reminded Eass that anyone looking down might spot her. She ducked into the shadows under the stairs. Someone had sketched a black bird onto the bricks in the corner. A rare sight in a city that didn’t look favourable on the defacing of property, and this was no hasty scribble. Charcoal lines skilfully traced velvet feathers; a large beak shone like polished glass, and a beaded eye reflected an impossibly blue sky. It had an uncanny resemblance to the raven that had followed her in the Fragments. 

The eye blinked. 

Eass sprang back, her boot scraping over the cobbles. She had all but convinced herself that she had imagined the blink when the raven shifted to sharpen its beak on a stone edge, its black silhouette moving over the wall like a shadow without its puppet. Its blue gaze never left Eass as it stretched its wings and hopped onto the gate as if daring her to follow. 

A quiet but insistent bleep cut through her stunned disbelief. Her left foot had nicked the security seal on the hatch, leaving her seconds before a drone would arrive. The raven hopped onto the stairs, pausing to look back at her. 

Eass muttered a curse, stuffed the poster into her pocket, and experimentally shook the bars. The gate was locked, but the wrought iron provided easy purchase. She set her foot on a crossbar, pushed herself up, and swung her legs over the top before lowering herself onto the rusty stairs on the other side. The raven hopped up another step, beckoning her to follow. 

They climbed to the service level below the city’s underbelly, and Eass crouched at the landing to peek over the edge. A newsline on the opposite wall scrolled through a Sector Citizen Education notice, reminding passers-by to report any disruptive or recusant behaviour, followed by a prompt not to loiter and to keep work order codes visible at all times. The walkway was deserted except for drones on early delivery runs, and somewhere overhead, mechanical legs scuttled over steel gratings.

Eass ducked down again. After she had graduated from the institute, Max had found her a job as a courier. Delivery autons required barcodes matching official records, and many official and unofficial businesses in the upper city preferred certain wares or messages to be transported by a human. Word had gotten around that she would run jobs with no questions asked for customers willing to meet her price. She had learned how to move through the city like a ghost, and she had never been caught—or not until the fatal pickup last week. 

A shadow passed along the wall, and the bird’s silhouette hopped onto a handrail a few paces ahead of her. It pecked at the metal and hopped further along the rail, keeping to the shadow of the looming city. 

To her right, an auton delivery cart waited by a back door for its parcels to be carried inside. Shrugging out of her parka, she turned it inside out to hide the orange colour, then stuffed the red scarf into a sleeve before tying the parka around her waist. Her grey tunic and trousers matched what workers on the mid levels would wear. There was not much she could do about the poster other than pull her hair back tightly and fasten it with a hairband. With a last glance to the left and right, she left the cover of the stairs and stepped out onto the walkway. 

The raven waited at an intersection a dozen paces ahead, stretching its wings. Eass grabbed a smaller parcel from the cart. She tapped the ‘damaged in transport’ button on the decline label, spinning a story in her mind of a supervisor sending her to complain about the damage. It would not buy her more than a few seconds of confusion from any patrol, but even a few seconds would give her a head start. The raven shifted from side to side impatiently. And really, what other choices did she have? The bird at least seemed to know where it was going. And, as Eass was surprised to discover, it was no stranger to the city.

It stayed away from the busy elevators in favour of the less used maintenance stairs and fire escapes, flickering along walls, skipping the few patches of sunlight, and avoiding the city’s ever-present electrical eyes. They had made it onto a catwalk on level five when their luck ran out—an auton cleaning the floor gratings rolled around a corner, heading directly towards them. Eass stopped short. All autons spied on the human population, and this one wouldn’t fail to notice her missing ID. But the auton swerved around her legs as if she were an unexpected but inanimate obstacle. She stared after it as it continued down the walkway without so much as a glance back. She eyed the raven, but it only ruffled its feathers impatiently.

As they continued their ascent, other autons crossed their path, all of them ignoring her as if she had become invisible to the city’s automated workforce. When they reached the main pedestrian level, the raven hopped onto a gate leading into a public roof garden. The lock on the gate clicked open. The bird shook its feathers one last time before it faded back into the shadows. 

Eass chewed her bottom lip, but she had come too far to give up now. The gate drew shut behind her, the lock clicking back into place. The park was empty except for half a dozen runners out on a morning run. She circled the park twice before she sat on one of the benches along the main track around the central lawn. Nothing happened. Nobody approached her or came even close. She stood, circled the park two more times, and chose a different bench next to a drinking fountain in the shade of a tall tree.

She fidgeted with her sleeves. This was ridiculous—she could not be more conspicuous if she tried. What had she expected would happen? She had worn a hole in the already strained fabric of her left cuff when a tall woman in tight-fitting running gear entered the park on the opposite side and joined the runners. The woman passed Eass’ bench twice, but stopped at the fountain on the next pass and sat down next to Eass, leaving an arm’s width space between them. 

Eyes still on the track, she said, ‘You shouldn’t have come back.’ 

And for the first time since Max had taken her to the safe house years ago, Eass didn’t disagree with Niuen Adalowe.

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