Chapter 10 - INTO THE SHADOWS OF SECTOR 9
We spent two hours inside the darkness of the bunker waiting for the steel doors to cool and the tremors to stop.
Clara had stopped crying, her tears dried into dirty streaks across her cheeks. The naive, cheerful girl who had offered me half a loaf of sourdough on the sidewalk looked pale and hollowed out, but when she looked at me, her brown eyes held a new, dark resolve.
"Which way?" she asked softly, picking up a heavy tactical flashlight from a wall bracket.
I pointed toward the back of the bunker, where a heavy iron door marked EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE RAIL stood half-open. "Sector 9. Hayes said to find Marcus Vance."
"Marcus is my father’s estranged brother," Clara whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum of the auxiliary generators. "He left the High District ten years ago. Everyone said he died in the lower slums."
We stepped out into the damp, disused subway tunnel. The air here was vastly different from the pristine, pine-scented halls of the estate above. It smelled of sulfur, burning trash, and ancient grease—the familiar, suffocating stench of the lower sectors.
We walked along the rusted train tracks for miles in near total silence. Clara wore her camel coat wrapped tightly around herself, while I wore a dark, oversized tactical jacket I had pulled from the bunker rack to cover my rags.
Around midnight, the underground track opened up into a cavernous, subterranean city.
Sector 9 was a towering labyrinth of stacked shipping containers, glowing neon signs in foreign scripts, and narrow catwalks suspended over abyssal drainage canals. Thousands of forgotten citizens moved through the rain-slicked streets below, their faces hidden beneath hoods and smog masks.
May you like
"It's huge," Clara breathed, her eyes wide as she stared at the chaotic neon wilderness. "How are we ever going to find one man in all of this?"
"In Sector 4, if you want to find a phantom," I said, adjusting the oversized sleeves of my jacket, "you don't ask the police. You ask the scavengers."
