The Shades of Brighthide
Post-apocalyptic science fiction short story
There was something about being Outside, under the black sky, that made his skin crawl.
Crane was from Brighthide. He was used to ceilings and rock caverns, and the vaults of the grow-zones, and the constant sight of stone overhead. He had been Outside twice before - his first time at Saltstone with the ceaseless crashing of the oily ocean waves, and then later at Lowland’s salt-blasted shrub fields - and his discomfort now was much less than before, but still…
The black sky just did not feel right.
The way it moved - clouds, the books called them - and the big slice of the moon showing cold and white and sterile overhead, like a cracked light from the grow-zones. Gleams and movements far, far overhead, as if the sky was twitching and trying to twist away from his upturned gaze.
It felt wrong, all of it.
There were three of them up in Topstreet tonight. Hardy was there as the leader, ostensibly, although Crane did not think much of that. Hardy was from one of the Pillar Families - old money, old blood, old ideas. He got the lead role just based on where he was born.
Geela was there because she was not Pillar Family, and saw Hardy as her chance to change that. Her scarf kept coming loose every few minutes, quite by chance, and her blonde hair was a pale glow in the darkness whenever Crane looked in her direction. He tried not to, though.
That hair was not meant for him, and her eyes were only for Hardy.
Hardy, of course, was more focused on enjoying his first expedition out as leader, and barely noticed the blonde hair. He had eyes only for the outside world, for the dark towers and the darker streets, and the strange lights that sometimes looped by far overhead in the black sky that Crane did not want to look at.
That’s life for you.
Topstreet was a vast sprawl around them, and Hardy’s first direction had taken them up one of the crumbling towers that filled the area. The tunnels that led down into the earth, from which they had come, lay far below them now, and the gates of Molt - kept by the Molemen - were hidden in the darkness that shrouded the base of the tower. The Molemen had not asked for a transit fee, and instead just stared mutely when Hardy asked for passage. Crane thought some of them had been looking at Geela instead, and her hair, but it had not been his place to ask questions, and the moment had passed, and they too had been allowed to pass out through the gates of Molt.
Here, many floors up, Crane felt close enough to the black sky that he could reach out and touch it - but that fear, that clawing, tightening in his chest - it kept him back, and quiet.
Hardy was pointing off to the east somewhere, with Geela at his side. His eyes were on the nighted skyline, and hers on his. Neither seemed to notice the black sky.
“That’s where we need to go. All the best finds are out on the peripheries.” His voice was muffled through his mask, which they had all been forced to don the moment they passed through the gates of Molt. The outside air was not something any of them could breathe, not any more. “If we just scratch in the dirt here, we’ll go back with nothing.”
“I agree. We definitely need to explore that side.” Geela nodded in agreement, hair swaying, and Crane made sure to nod as well when Hardy glanced at him.
Everyone knew the region directly around the Molt was picked bare. Decades of scavenging had left it barren, and yet Hardy was stating this fact as if it was some profound insight he had just obtained while looking out over the dark ruins.
It was only his second time outside. Hardy had the ring tattoos around his wrist to mark his First Outside - Saltstone, just like Crane - but his other tattoos, to mark Lowland and the other places he had been outside, were fake. Crane knew they were even when Hardy came back the year before, grinning and talking about all the things he had seen. Someone in one of the small transit towns must have been bribed, and the tattoos had been done in closed rooms underground instead of out in the open like they were meant to.
Crane had heard and seen what really happened on the cliffs between Lowland and Midtier, and no-one who went there came back smiling the way Hardy did.
Geela also had her Saltstone tattoo, and no others. She clung to every word Hardy said, and when he turned and led them back down the tower, she was constantly at his side with soft words and gasps of amazement at the things he pointed out. She had been that way ever since they left the main caravan group in Midtier to travel the final stretch to Topstreet, and Crane could not help but notice how often she touched Hardy, or brushed against him when they were passing through tight passages.
Crane, following in the rear, tried to focus on Topstreet instead.
It had been a city once, or part of a city, in the Before Times. Tall buildings rose from the darkness below and clawed into the darkness above - skyscrapers, the books called them, and Crane wondered if the sky was twitching because the towers were literally scratching its belly. The structures stretched off in clumps and tangles in almost every direction around them, their tops ragged and leaning sideways, their bottoms nested in piles of rubble and the occasional cleared street. The exception was to the west, a concept of navigation that had taken Crane some time to get his head around. To the west was the mountain, which they had to avoid unless they wanted to take the tunnels back down and then up into Cliffhold on the other side of the summit.
Underground you moved in all three dimensions, with tunnels and stairwells and old elevator shafts - but on the surface there was this magnetic field that you could tap into with something called a compass, and with that little device in hand you could then figure out where you were going. It was an Outside thing, Crane thought, part of the strangeness of the black sky. In the tunnel-cities and bunkers, there was no use for a little device that would get distracted the moment you walked past any big metal machine, or near the old power lines that still hummed and crackled. Down there, you had to follow the signs and the marks, and the glyphs left behind by the pathfinders as they explored the shifting subterranean world that stretched into the depths for endless kilometres.
Up here there were no pathfinders, and the glyphs were of the Molemen kind, unknown to them, so they had to use the compasses that they had been entrusted with. When they reached the ground floor of the tower again, Crane and Hardy both did a direction check - they had to go east, which meant placing the cliffs and blasted stone of the mountain behind them - while Geela waited and eyed them. She had been entrusted with the medicine bag instead of a compass, and when their soft lamp light reflected off her mask lenses, Crane thought he saw envy there. They were all armed too - Hardy with a break-bill, Geela with a machete, Crane with a hatchet - and they made sure to check their weapons again before leaving the tower. If they found anyone else up here, they would not be friends.
The Outside was not civilized, not like the bunkers.
At street level, Topstreet made you feel like a rat. Some of the main passages around the Molt had been cleared over the years, and the old road surface was actually visible here. Flagstones, almost a metre on a side, gleamed wetly underfoot, mixed in with pockmarks where some of the stones had been replaced with smaller patches and repairs over the years. To the sides, the cleared rubble had been pushed into mounds that engulfed the lower floors of most of the buildings, and when one dared to move down a cleared road, the surrounding buildings towered overhead and frowned down at you with dark, gap-toothed snarls.
They did not have the weapons or the flares - or the numbers - to keep the shades away though, so they avoided the cleared streets and kept to the uncleared lanes instead. Hardy led the way, Geela hot on his heels, and Crane scrambled along behind them as they moved over an ever-shifting carpet of building rubble, ejected debris from the floors above them, and the strange muck that seemed to grow and bubble in the stagnant ponds here.
The shades haunted Topstreet, and Cliffhold, and every other point where people left the underground network to be Outside. No-one knew what they were, who they were, or where they had come from. Strong light could drive them away, usually, and some electrical fields could slow them down, sometimes, but other than that your only option was to avoid them. They flowed out of corners and nooks, taking the shape of men with wide hats and flowing coats, and when they reached for you, their arms could become metres long in an instant. They had no legs, or so it was told - instead, they were just shadows and fog from the waist down. Despite having no visible legs, they could move as fast as a jogging man, so you needed to be fast, quiet or damn lucky to avoid them.
“Don’t let them touch you,” Gaspar had said just before they left, and rolled up his sleeve to show them his shade-print again. A black scar, shaped like a grasping hand, still clung to his arm from the encounter years before. “If they touch you, your heart stops. I got lucky - you won’t be.”
Gaspar had been revived by his scavenger team moments after they drove the shade off with a chemical lamp, and their healer had managed to get his heart going again. He was the only one in Brighthide who had ever survived an attack like that, and everyone had come to know his story over the years since. He now made a point of warning every one of the new scav teams before they left.
Crane thought of that black handprint now, and tried to keep his feet quiet on the rubble. The areas around the gates of Molt rarely had many shades in them, according to the experienced teams, but less than average did not mean zero. The creatures could, and did, appear when least expected, and every time someone tried to make a settlement on the surface - even here, close to the Molt - it was inevitably overrun by the shades. It had been years since the last time anyone tried it, and no-one that Crane had spoken to prior had seemed interested in trying again any time soon.
Hardy was decently quiet over the rubble, and had rubber-soled scav boots from his family vaults. He was only the second owner, according to the boasts he had made on the way up from Brighthide, and Crane had listened with mild envy at every silent tread of the dark boots. His own boots were reworked and restitched, many times now, and both had steel plates in the bottom to protect against spikes and nails. They were heavy, and the soles were hard, but Crane had worn them for years now, and practiced his silent walking even when he was in the public concourse of Fountain Avenue and the admin district of the Seven Pillars. He was easily as quiet as Hardy by now, and far more than Geela.
Geela was a problem.
Either she had been sleeping during her lessons, or something was wrong with her shoes, because she was kicking debris and grinding things underfoot every few paces. She even stepped in one of the foam-slicked puddles they passed, and Crane gave the same spot a wide berth moments later when he saw how the surface of the puddle twisted and moved as if something was inside it.
Hardy, in the lead, was either deaf or oblivious, and kept taking them deeper into Topstreet. Geela crunched along behind him, and Crane flitted along in the rear, trying to watch the streets behind them while also not making the same noisy mistakes as the girl in front of him.
It was going to be a long walk.
It was also going to be a quiet walk, for which Crane was glad. In the tunnels below, Hardy’s voice had been a near-constant accompaniment as they travelled from Midtier towards the surface, and Geela’s whispers and coy looks had not helped. Crane had kept to himself, kept his hands on his gear, and his eyes on the path. He did not like most people on most days, and the time spent travelling with Hardy and Geela had not improved his opinion of either. They, in turn, had barely spoken to him - him, a commoner from the machine stacks, with his patched clothes and recycled boots and old backpack with the many repairs - and yet their voices had still fluttered around his head like a swarm of moths around a street light.
Topstreet was quiet, and he was starting to realise that he liked it.
They reached an area where the buildings were all short, sheared off at around the third storey as if by a giant set of scissors, and the rubble was so thick that they had to clamber up and through the buildings themselves to make progress. Hardy took them into this region, out into the open, and Crane felt the hairs on the back of his neck starting to climb up in anticipation.
It was too exposed.
Putting yourself in the open was never a good idea Outside, and Hardy was purposefully leading them directly away from the cover of the ruined towers behind them. The moon was a baleful eye overhead now, heading towards the mountain summit behind them, and Crane began to feel like a bug under a floodlight when he noticed his own shadow moving around him in the cold blue light from above.
They had just crossed into the midst of this open area when Hardy pulled them up short with a raised hand. There was a corner of a wall here, with a still-standing arch that framed more rubble and darkness on the other side. Geela did something and sent a stone tumbling off into the darkness, and Crane flattened himself against a pile of rubble when Hardy’s head whipped around to glare back at them.
“There’s a stairwell ahead.” Hardy’s hiss barely reached Crane, and he made a chopping motion to get Geela to hunker down too. “I’m going to have a look, wait here.”
His shape moved in the dark, dropping his backpack before disappearing through the arch of the cracked wall, and silence descended on the waiting pair. Crane listened for movement, but heard nothing except Geela as she shifted around to look back at him.
“Hey.”
It took Crane a moment to realise that she was talking to him. Low as her voice was, it sounded shockingly loud to him right then.
“It’s Crane, right?”
Crane nodded, and held a finger up to his mouth to keep her from talking again. He slowly made his way over the intervening rubble until he was shoulder to shoulder with her, and crouched down to face the way Hardy had gone.
“What is it?” Crane hated whispering with his mask on. The filters and muffles always made it sound like you were shouting. “Is something wrong?”
Geela did not answer, and when Crane snuck a quick look at her, he saw that she was looking down at her hands, and the machete that she held across her lap. The dark made it difficult to see where her focus really was.
“Why doesn’t he notice me?”
The question surprised Crane, and he found himself drawing back from her. His survival instinct - keep watch, keep looking for danger, keep your eyes on the darkness - warred with his confusion, and his silence must have been longer than he realised because Geela went on again a few moments later.
“I’ve been doing everything right, ever since we left Midtier, and he just doesn’t notice me.” Her eyes were dark and shadowed when she looked up and at Crane. “I need him to notice me.”
“Why?”
Crane knew exactly why, but he had not expected her to be this direct with him - or even to ever have this conversation with him.
“You know why.” She reached out and tugged at one of the patched areas on Crane’s jacket sleeve. Her own jacket had similar repairs sewn on, even if they were more subtle and refined. “You know exactly why.”
“This hunt is very important to him. He has to do well, for his family and his reputation,” Crane muttered, and pulled his arm away from her. She at least had a way out of her place in Brighthide. For him, it was a different struggle. “I think he’s focusing on that first. I don’t think he cares about pairing right now.”
The silence engulfed them again, and Crane tried to keep his focus on their surroundings instead of on the shape besides him. This was not the time or place to think about pairing. The cold of the night was starting to settle onto the ruins as the clouds dissipated, and the landscape around them had become a ghostly, moonlit blue field of stubby mounds and broken walls. The distant ruined towers were coarse shapes that watched from afar as the minutes ticked past.
“My dad’s ill.” Geela’s voice was small when she spoke again, and so soft that Crane at first thought he was imagining it - until he looked at her and saw her looking at him too. “Gas from the extractor shafts. The medics say he has a few months left. He hasn’t been able to pay his guild fees, so they aren’t helping either.”
Crane’s own father and mother both worked for the guilds - his father in the lathe halls, his mother in the grow-zones - and while their fees were high, they took care of their people when things went bad. If you worked without guild protection and something went wrong, you were on your own.
“What about your mother? Where does she work?” Crane desperately wanted Hardy to come back with news - some news, any news, so that he could get out of this conversation - but a small, morbid part of him was also waking up and starting to show a sliver of interest now.
“She took my brother to Capstone three years ago to visit her sister. They never arrived.” Geela looked away, off to the crumbling field behind Crane, and made a sound that Crane took a moment to recognise as a sigh. “My dad went and checked, but the Capstone guards never saw them. They got lost in the tunnels. The two of us are the only ones left now.”
They got lost in the tunnels.
Sometimes, people stopped living. Even in Brighthide. Their eyes went dull, and they stopped caring about things, and then one day they would walk out into the tunnels and just never come back. Crane had heard about it, and even known one or two families who had lost members to it. People who went out and got lost in the tunnels.
It was more polite than saying what they were really doing.
“I’m sorry,” Crane mumbled, and Hardy was scrambling over the rubble in front of him the next moment.
“I found it!” There was a triumphant hiss in Hardy’s voice when he joined their huddle. “There’s a stairwell ahead, and it leads down into some of the basements. Looks like it hasn’t been touched in years. I think we should give it a shot.”
“Good find, Hardy.” Geela’s voice was bright when she whispered back, and her one hand touched Hardy’s arm for just a moment. “Is it clear all the way down?”
“There’s some debris at the end, but nothing we can’t handle. I’m sure there’s more basement space behind it, and if we are the first ones to open it, then we might just get very lucky.” Hardy collected his own backpack before turning and beckoning for them to follow him. “If we do this quickly, we can be back at the Molt before sunrise.”
Crane took the tail position again as they moved out, and Hardy led them down and over a small stretch of rubble before pulling into the shadows of what looked like a corner where three walls came together. The stairwell was a blacker-than-black hole in the ground here, and Hardy slowly sank away into it as he led the way down the unseen stairs. Geela followed once Hardy was out of sight, and Crane used the time to look back at the direction which they had come from. The rubble had little in the way of landmarks though, and he could not see the spot with the cracked archway where Hardy had left them.
How had he known the stairwell was here?
Geela disappeared fully into the darkness, and Crane pressed his own questions into the back of his head and followed her down. The stairs were concrete, wide, and relatively clear, and Crane felt his way down them by touch alone until they ended and he found himself on a flattened area of some kind. The darkness was absolute around him, and when he turned around to look behind him, the moonlit sky was a tiny square far overhead at the head of the stairwell.
Nerves clamped at his stomach, crushing the muscles together into a slow panic, and when something scuffed in the darkness beside him, Crane sank down onto his haunches and prepared to swing his hatchet at the first thing that touched him.
Something clicked instead, and a soft light appeared close to the ground some distance away from him. It illuminated a set of black boots, followed by a set of legs. Hardy was waiting for him, Geela already at his side, and motioned for Crane to light his own torch.
“I think this is the first basement,” Hardy whispered as Crane fumbled his own torch out and cranked the dynamo lever a few times. Their flickering beams revealed grey concrete floors, walls dripping with condensation, and surprisingly little else. “There are only a few tunnels out, and then the stairs continue over there.”
The second stairwell was in the corner of the room they were in, and a little cairn of stacked rubble flanked it on the one side. Crane swept his light over the other doorways that led out of the space, but none of them were marked in the same way.
Someone had been here before.
The thought rose unbidden in his mind, and did not want to leave once it lodged itself alongside the image of the small cairn.
“Is there anything else on this level?” Geela swept her light over one of the gaping side passages, but Hardy just shook his head as he moved towards the stairwell.
“I doubt we’ll find anything here. We have to keep going down.” He entered the second stairwell and began to descend, and Geela followed moments later. Crane gave the space around them one last check, and then followed them down.
This second stairwell was a switchback design, with a small landing every few metres, and Crane counted about seven of these before they got to the obstruction. A wall of rubble blocked them off from the next landing, with what appeared to be metal cabinets behind the rubble. Years of dripping water had streaked everything in lime scales and blooms of orange-brown rust, and toothy stalactites clung to the concrete ceiling above them.
How did Hardy know about this place?
The thought rattled through Crane’s mind even as he shucked his backpack and listened to Hardy’s plan. Breaking the amalgamated rubble apart would be the first step, after which they would shift the larger chunks sideways to get through to the metal cabinets. Hardy’s break-bill would make short work of those, and then they would hopefully be through the obstructions.
For all of his talk, Hardy did not shirk the hard work when it was time to start, and he worked side by side with Crane as they tackled the first layer of rubble. The clang of tools and the crack of limed-together rubble coming apart echoed loudly in the confined space, and they had to stop several times to let the sweat in their masks drain away. Geela had retreated to the landing behind and above them, and Crane found himself wondering what was going on in her head as she watched them. She had a future to figure out for herself, and if she could not get noticed by an eligible member of the Pillar Families, then her own options would drastically reduce from there on. Once her father passed - and that was a case of when, not if - she would be on her own, and pretty girls with no money and no family only had a small number of options left to them at that point.
They eventually got through enough of the rubble to clear one of the cabinets, and Hardy’s break-bill tore the rusted panels apart in no time. Darkness formed a black void behind it, with more stairs heading downwards. They took extra care to bend the jagged metal edges away from the hole before passing through - tetanus was one of the diseases from the Before Time which they still knew - and once Hardy and Crane were on the other side, Hardy turned around and stopped Geela from following.
“Wait here for us. I think we’re close now.” He turned and left her there, on the other side of the erstwhile blockade, and Crane had to wonder at what he was playing at. Geela gave him a helpless look, and he just had to shrug before turning and following Hardy down.
Something was going on, and Hardy was keeping both of them in the dark about it.
The stairs took them to one more landing, another switchback, and then they were at the very bottom of the stairwell. Stalagmites as long as his arm grew from the floor here, pointing up at the slow drip that came down the stairwell, and Hardy led them into a small, octagonal room with three other doors leading out of it. Crane saw more darkness down each of these doorways, but Hardy only had eyes for the middle of the room.
Here, neatly stacked, stood two bulging backpacks. Crane recognised them as standard ones from Brighthide, even down to the shoulder straps that had a quick-release on the one side and not on the other, and when he drew closer Hardy opened one of them and showed him the contents. Smaller bags filled the backpack, and Hardy took one out and opened it to show Crane the crystal batteries nestled inside.
“My father’s team found this during their last trip. He couldn’t take it back through the Molt though, the Molemen always tax the big teams that are too successful.” Hardy’s voice was smug, and he returned the battery to its bag before picking up the next one. Graphite shards tumbled out of the bag into his outstretched hand, and Crane could not even imagine how much the maintenance guilds would be willing to pay for that little bag alone. “The Molemen are always so damn greedy. They always want more.”
“This was set up, wasn’t it.” Crane looked at the two backpacks, and thought back to the blockade they had encountered in the stairwell. “Your family left this behind for you.”
“You’re bright, for a commoner.” Hardy returned the graphite bag to the backpack before buckling the whole thing up again. His eyes gleamed when he looked up. “The Molemen don’t tax the small teams, and when I return to the caravan with this, my reputation will be set. My family gets the money, and I get the respect I deserve. No-one will ever know.”
Crane looked at the two backpacks, then back at Hardy.
“You can’t have witnesses though. Is that why you left Geela at the stairs?”
“Right again. She won’t ever know the truth, and she’ll happily carry that second backpack as long as she thinks it gives her a chance with me.” Hardy straightened, and his break-bill was prominent in his right hand. “I know her type. I’m not stupid.”
Crane was not stupid either, and hurled the hatchet he carried before Hardy could get the break-bill all the way up. Metal sparked on metal, Hardy grunting as the spinning hatchet bounced off his shoulder instead of embedding itself in his chest, and Crane threw himself at one of the side passages even as he flicked his own torch off. A shout clamoured behind him, but his legs carried him off into the dark, arms outstretched to feel the walls around him, and he ducked to the side the moment his left hand swept off the wall and into nothing. He expected a drop, or something sharp, and his stomach clenched - but then his fingers found the wall again and he was sprinting into the dark, away from the octagonal room.
Hardy’s voice was raised somewhere behind him, echoing and bouncing off the dark walls, and Crane had just turned around to look back when he went full-tilt into a wall. An explosion of light flashed across his sight as his head met concrete, and then everything returned to darkness.
When he came to his senses again, he was back in the octagonal room, and Hardy was busy talking to someone. Crane felt a terrible pain in his skull when he opened his eyes, but kept himself limp and unresponsive as he slowly gathered his thoughts.
Hardy must have dragged him back here for some reason.
“He attacked me when he saw the supplies here. He said something about wanting you, and wanting everything for himself.” Hardy’s voice sounded strained. “I managed to knock him out, but I don’t think he’s going back with us.”
“I came as soon as I heard the shouting. I knew something had happened to you, I just knew it.” It was Geela’s voice, and when Crane slitted his one eye open he could see the two of them standing by the backpacks. She was doing something to his chest, and Crane spotted the flash of a bandage before he closed his eye again.
Good. He knew his hatchet throw had not been totally off the mark.
Crane breathed in, and out, and realised that he was no longer wearing his mask.
Death sentence.
The realisation drove all thoughts of subterfuge from his mind, and he immediately struggled to push himself up off the damp floor. A splitting headache coursed through his skull as he cast around to spot his missing mask, but the darkness of the room, and the patchy light focused on Hardy’s wound, made it impossible to see anything around him.
Hardy noticed him though, and pushed Geela away with a shout while brandishing his break-bill.
“I knew it! You damn lunatic!” Hardy came closer but stopped once he was at arm’s length. He spat down at Crane’s prone form. “You’re going to die in the dark here, like the trash you are. Failures like you should never be coming to the surface in the first place.”
Crane was holding his breath, ignoring the ravings while casting around for his mask, and when he looked at the tunnel he had run down, he saw the shade.
It was just outside the octagonal room, a black clot of darker-than-dark that was slowly drifting towards them, and only the scattered swinging of Hardy’s torch made its outline visible. The wide hat, the long beak, the sloping shoulders and the long arms over the nebulous, undefined waist - Crane took it all in, in an instant, and began to scramble backwards and away from it. Hardy, still yelling and brandishing his break-bill, had eyes only for Crane, and when Crane looked up in terror, Hardy laughed.
“Look at you! Piss scared and crawling like a worm!”
The shade was behind Hardy now, and Geela turned at the last moment to see it beside her. She started back, dropping her bandages, and the shade’s one arm reached out and stroked through her face. She dropped, knees limp and arms wide, and collapsed onto the floor in a clatter. Crane watched with growing horror as the shade swept past her, and something in his gaze must have finally gotten through to Hardy.
Hardy turned, and the shade reached forward and engulfed him with both arms. The raised break-bill clattered to the concrete floor a moment later, followed by the harsh thump of Hardy’s body as well.
Crane was still scrambling backwards, desperately heading for the stairwell even as his lungs shrieked at him to find a mask, and when the shade kept coming and started to reach for him, something inside him finally snapped.
He sucked in a chest full of air, no longer caring about the toxins or the pollutants or the horror stories about the surface air - and he screamed. It echoed through the enclosed space, down the side passages and up the stairwell, and he covered his face with his hands and screamed again, and again, until something in his throat popped and the next scream turned into a mouthful of blood. Salty iron flavours flooded across his tongue, and he tore his hands away from his eyes as the coughing convulsions came over him and pulled him down into a curled-up ball. Tears streamed from his eyes, from both the pain and the fear, and when he eventually dared to look up, the shade was gone.
* * * * *
It was sunrise at the Molt when the two scavengers returned from their night-time excursion. The Molemen had already closed the two bigger gates, and they were on the verge of closing the last of the three gates when the two figures came plodding out of the morning fog. Green-grey vapour swirled across the streets, the last cold of the night clashing with the bubbling pools that dotted Topstreet, and the two figures appeared to float like shades as they drew closer.
They were not shades though, and the Molemen let them in, and watched with little interest as they paid the entrance toll before taking the tunnels that led downwards. The man carried a hatchet and had a break-bill strapped to the outside of his bulging backpack, and the woman had a machete that she sheathed the moment she was inside. Her backpack had a set of spare black boots dangling from the outside.
The man had blood on his chin when he took his mask off, and when the Molemen asked if he needed help, he just waved them away. His voice, the woman explained. He had damaged it with a bad mask filter, and could not speak at present.
The woman did not take her mask off, even when they were inside, and the two of them walked into the tunnels and found a secluded place before she finally pulled it off. Her hair was blonde, and her skin pale, and the black handprint that was scarred across her left cheek and throat gave her the appearance of wearing a harlequin mask. The skin there did not move when she finally talked.
“Let’s go talk to my father. I want you to meet him before his time is over.”
The man nodded, and searched through his jacket pockets for the last bandage before giving it to her. He would get her a nice scarf later on, but first he had to introduce her to his parents as well.
They had a lot to talk about.