Omega City (18 page)

“Why are you so afraid of them?” Howard asked.

“Vey are giant, slimy monsters,” Eric replied.

“Salamanders,” Howard corrected.

“
Monster
salamanders.”

Savannah turned her eyes skyward. “Please don't let me be stuck in here with these two until I die.”

After a minute or two, Nate came back, and the gathering salamanders vamoosed again.

“Do you guys want the good news or the bad news first?” He climbed back up on the tank, dripping wet.

“Good news!” Savannah clasped her bad hand with her good one in a pleading gesture.

“The good news is I found a door.”

“Ve bad news is it's full of worms?” Eric asked.

“Salamanders,” said Howard, on cue.

“Shut up or I'm feeding you to one,” Savannah groaned.

Nate cleared his throat. “No. The bad news is it's underwater.”

How was that supposed to help us? We didn't have scuba tanks this time.

“But,” he added, his tone encouraging, “the passageway is short, and it lets out on a stairwell. You could be out of the water in twenty seconds after going through the door.”

Savannah looked doubtful. “You're saying we have to hold our breath for twenty seconds.”

“Or thirty. Depends on how fast you can swim.”

Savannah cradled her broken arm, looking worried.

“But then we'd be out!” Nate said. “And the staircase—I don't know how far it goes up, but what if it goes all the way? What if that's exit four? We could be
out
.”

Even the salamanders seemed to shiver with joy at the thought. I wondered if they spent their whole lives down here, blind in the darkness. I wondered how long it would take us to go blind in this endless black.

“We have to try it,” Eric said. “Worms and all. We have to.” He gingerly touched his jaw.

Things were going south quick. We were all freezing, Savannah may have had a broken arm, and the only way out of here was a long underwater swim through a river of wormy salamanders. But the only other option seemed to
be sitting on top of the water tank until the salamanders decided we were food, after all. Or we froze to death. Or the lights went out.

I don't know why that last option scared me more than all the others, but I felt for my spare flashlight in one of my leg pockets until the blood stopped roaring in my ears and I could speak without choking.

“It's the only way out,” I said. “The only one that even has a chance.” And we all knew it. We didn't even have to take a vote.

“It's going to be a long swim, so we should rig up the flashlights to keep our hands free,” Nate suggested.

Eric and I still had our head lamps from scuba diving, but I traded mine for Savannah's flashlight, figuring she needed all the help she could get. Using stretchy bandages from the first aid kit, Nate tied his flashlight to his head and then repeated the process for Howard and me. We looked ridiculous, but who was going to see us, anyway? Certainly not the blind salamanders.

Then we got in the water. That was the hardest part, because we all had to get in first and shoo away the salamanders before Eric would agree to follow us, and then he insisted on staying surrounded by three other swimmers at all times. I was swimming next to him and he was kicking his legs like a crazy person, as if it would keep the creatures at bay.

“Watch it,” I said to him.

“Look whove talking,” he replied, his words mangled by his broken mouth.

We swam over to the door Nate had found. The threshold was only a foot underwater, and the sign on the door read
ΩSILO
. We all hugged the wall, reserving our energy.

“So the secret to holding your breath for a long time,” Nate coached, “is to take three deep breaths in a row. It's kind of like winding up.” He demonstrated. The first breath was sort of short, followed by a long one and then a super long one. “The hallway is short and a straight shot. If you drop your flashlight, don't worry about it, just keep swimming forward. There are enough of us that you should be able to see. When you get to the end, the landing is flooded about halfway up the flight of stairs. I'll be waiting to pull you through. Get out of the way as soon as you clear the hallway so the next person can get up.”

We all nodded.

“All right, I want you to buddy up. Eric and Howard. Savvy and Gillian. Do not let your partner get away from you.” He looked at me. “Okay with bringing up the rear?”

I nodded. There was no way I was going to let Eric bug out about the worms or Savannah not be able to make it with only one arm. If I had to shove them both the whole way down the hall, I would. I'd brought us all down here. It was only right I be the last one out.

Nate pointed to himself and took three deep breaths, then went under. Howard and Eric followed. I looked at Savannah. It was tough to make out her expression under her head lamp, but her eyes were wide with fear.

“This isn't like the elevator, Sav,” I said. “We're not going to get trapped. All we have to do is swim down a hallway, and we're out.”

She nodded, but looked no less scared. I couldn't blame her. After all, I wasn't doing this with a broken arm.

“Come on,” I coaxed. “Three deep breaths.” We did them together.
One, two, three . . 
.

Facing each other, we slipped beneath the surface, and I had to steel myself not to gasp as the icy water closed over my head. The underwater world was black and silent, but I was almost used to it by now. I tried to imagine I was one of the salamanders, going about my life in a flooded cavern, swimming, swimming, swimming. I kept my eyes on the hallway's end, past the kicking legs of Eric and Howard several yards ahead of us. I could see the outline of Nate, floating in the water in the landing, holding the door open, waiting. Savannah was at my side, pulling herself awkwardly through the water with her left hand. She was going slow, but I still thought we could make it.

We passed dark doorway after dark doorway and for once, I wasn't even tempted to look inside.
Just get to the end and you can breathe again
. I willed my thoughts into
Savannah's head.
Keep swimming. Keep swimming
.

That familiar burning ache of held breath started filling my chest.
Keep swimming, keep swimming
. Eric and Howard had made it. I watched them pass through the doorway and disappear.
Keep swimming, keep swimming
. I felt Savannah falter to my left and reached for her hand.

And then the world turned upside down.

END OVER END I TUMBLED IN A RUSH OF WATER AND BUBBLES AND debris. I had no idea which way was down or up. I couldn't find Savannah; it was like being knocked off your feet by an ocean wave. Seconds later I slammed into Nate at the opposite end of the hall and surfaced, sputtering.

“What was that?” I coughed out, as the water frothed around us. We were swimming at the base of another stairwell, though it looked like the sea at high storm.

“Anover explosion!” cried Eric. He was standing halfway up the first flight of stairs, where the water churned around his knees. “Look, ve water levels are rising. We have to get out of here.”

“Where's Savannah?” I whirled toward Nate, who was still treading water at the entrance to the landing. His face was grim.

Oh, no. “Savannah!” I screamed, as if she could hear me under the water. “Sav!”

“Get up on the stairs,” Nate barked, but I ignored him, breathed deep, and dove back under the water.

It was hard, fighting the current coming down the hallway, but I struggled past two doors until I caught sight of a light in one of the rooms. The explosion must have swept her inside.

I pushed myself in. Savannah was floating near the ceiling. I swam up to grab her and noticed she was treading water. Warm relief shot through me. She was still conscious.

I broke the surface and bumped my head against the ceiling. I couldn't even get my whole head out of the water. I maneuvered until my face was carefully aimed up and surfaced again, into a pocket of air only a few inches high between the water and the ceiling. “Are you all right?” I asked.

That's when I heard it. She was breathing fast, choking, sobbing breaths. “I can't,” she whispered. “I can't.”

“Yes you can, Sav.” I rubbed her shoulder under the water. “You have to. We can't stay here. The water levels are rising. We have to go forward.”

“Did you hear me, Gillian?” she snapped. “I can't
anymore. I can't even . . .” She coughed. “I can't even breathe. I can hardly stay up with this arm . . .”

I bit my lip. She wouldn't even be down here if she hadn't wanted to help me. I had to save her. “You don't have to swim, Sav, I promise. There's a current. We'll just get out of this room and let it carry us to the stairwell.”

“I can't.” She coughed again. Her voice was low.

I stared up at the ceiling. Was it closer than it was a few seconds ago? I wished I could look Savannah in the eyes. “It's only two doors down. Nate is there—”

“I don't care. I'm so tired.”

“Sav,” I begged her. “Please. This is just like that fast turn in the creek. This is just like the water slide down at the rec center.” This was just like all the crazy things we'd done every summer of our lives. Me and Sav, year after year. She'd always stood by me—when Mom left, when I was new at school, when I didn't wear the right clothes or say the right things.

“Just hold your breath and let the current take you. I know you can do it. I've seen you do it a hundred times.”

She shook her head and sniffled.

“I
know
you, Sav,” I said to her. The real her, not the cool, school Savannah. It was summer Savannah who'd followed me underground. “I know what you can do and I promise you can do this.” Under the water, I caught and squeezed her uninjured hand.

She looked at me sideways, since that was all we could manage at this point. There was no mistake. The water level was rising, and fast. In a few seconds, there'd be no air pocket left.

“Three breaths,” I said. “Just like before. Ready?”

She breathed in—once, twice, three times. And we went under.

A few seconds later the water spit us out in the stairwell. It was almost all the way up the flight of stairs now. Savannah, coughing, crawled up to the landing, and Eric caught me and dragged me up to him.

“I'm going to kill you,” he said to me angrily. “You know you don't actually have gills, right?”

I coughed up some water. “Yeah. I mean,
now
.”

There was another rush of water through the hall. Salamanders starting flooding in, turning end over white, slithery end in the turbulent waves.

What in the world did Fiona think she was doing? We all stood and started up the stairs, and the water poured in behind us, bubbling up step after step, careening over handrails and across landings.

Ten flights up. Twelve. Every time we got ahead of the water by a flight or two, we took a rest, but it wasn't for long.

Fifteen flights up. I could hardly breathe. “We have to take a break,” I gasped. “A real one.” We were still two
stories ahead of the water. It looked like it was slowing down.

“Yeah,” Howard agreed, panting.

Nate looked up between the bars of the handrails. The stairs went up forever in their awkward, square-shaped spiral. “Can't we rest once we're out? I just want to get out.”

“If we don't stop, you'll be carrying us all out of here wiv coronaries,” Eric said. I guess his jaw was feeling better. Either that, or the cold water and aspirin had numbed his pain.

Savannah just plopped her butt down on the stair and buried her face in the crook of her good arm.

“No sleeping.” Nate went to touch her but she shook him off.

“I don't have hypothermia!” she cried. “I'm just exhausted, okay?”

Howard studied her. “If he tells you you're cute, will you get up?”

She glared at him, then squeezed her eyes shut. “No, Howard. I don't care if he thinks I'm cute right now. I know I'm
not
cute right now.”

“That's true,” said Howard. “Silver really isn't your color.”

Sav groaned and dropped her head back into her hand.

Nate bounced on the balls of his feet with impatience. “We're close, guys. I know it.”

Eric looked up between the twisting stairs. “How many more stories?”

“Ten, maybe? Fifteen?”

“Fifteen?” I moaned. “No.”

“You know,” said Nate, “you should really think about taking a break from those books and joining a sports team or something.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“I'm just saying, you're out of shape.”

I stopped wheezing and glared at him. “I've spent the last six hours running and swimming through an underground city. My shape is fine. I'm just exhausted.”

“And lay off the pizza.”

“Oh, I see what this is. You just want us to stop ordering pizza from you.”

“Yeah.” He smirked. “Pretty much.”

I peered over the banister. At least the water had stopped rising. “Tell you what. We get out of here, we'll never make you deliver our pizza again.”

“Are you kidding?” Nate replied. “I get out of here, I'm never delivering anyone's pizza again. I've decided life's too short to keep that job.”

After a minute, we started up again, this time at a much slower pace. This staircase was different—there were no other entrances on any of the landings where the stairs turned, just one unbroken staircase going up and up and
up, with numbers written on the wall. We passed twenty and kept going. At twenty-two I wanted another break, but Nate had caught sight of the ceiling, and urged us on. Twenty-three through twenty-five were kind of a blur, and twenty-five through twenty-seven were sheer torture.

When we hit thirty, the top floor, there was no number painted on the wall. Instead there was a giant omega symbol and a single word on a big, reinforced metal door.

Ω

SILO

“Weird,” said Nate. “I was hoping for ‘exit.'” He reached over and turned the knob. The door opened on a vast round cavern, lit by the same dull blue light we'd seen before. My heart fell. We weren't out. This was just another cave, not exit four at all.

“Oh,” said Howard, in his usual flat tone. “Silo. Like a missile silo.”

Every muscle in my body seized up. A
missile
silo? In Dr. Underberg's masterpiece? That didn't sound like him at all.

We crowded around the door and peered through. A square metal grate platform about the same size as the landing we were on led to a narrow walkway that jutted out over the space. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could
see that most of the cavern was taken up with a huge rocket ship, as tall and nearly as wide as the silo itself.

“Awesome!” cried Howard, and the sound ricocheted off the silo walls and fell away as the rest of us stared wide-mouthed at the rocket, unable to speak.

There were massive letters painted down the side of the ship but I couldn't quite read them. One by one, we stepped onto the platform and peered out over the narrow metal walkway. It was barely wide enough for a single person, and when Howard went out a few steps, it bounced and waved beneath his feet.

“Howard,” Nate said. “Get back here. There's no water down there to land in this time.”

But Howard wasn't really listening. He took a few more steps, and the walkway bounced again.

“Howard!” Nate followed him out, making the walkway start jittering around like crazy. I gripped the handrails of the platform in fear.

Behind us, the door shut. Eric tried to yank it back open but there was a strange grinding sound, like something screwing into place. A voice echoed out: that same cheery, disembodied voice we'd first heard in the elevator.

Greetings, space explorers. You have arrived at the doorway to the Rocketship
Knowledge
. Please come prepared with your blood type,
life support gear, and thirst for adventure. All entrants must have passed a NASA Class A physical and either hold a commercial jet pilot license or have completed U.S. Air Force or Euro-NATO jet pilot training programs.

“Howard!” Savannah called, cradling her broken arm against her chest as if to protect it. “Did you hear that? You're not a pilot. Remember the Russians!”

Savannah was right. The last time the recording thought we were impostors, it had almost killed us.

But somehow, I knew this was different. After all, there was no way for the walkway sensors or whatever it was that had triggered the recording to know that Howard wasn't an Air Force pilot. Plus, the voice of Dr. Underberg didn't scare me anymore. He was the voice in the Comm room, speaking about the wonders of Earth while Fiona threatened me. He was the mind who had built this whole city for no more glorious purpose than to try to help normal people in times of trouble. People like me and my brother and my “impractical” father. All the scary stuff that had happened to us here in Omega City hadn't been his fault. It was because the city had been abandoned, because it was broken and lost and dying, due to people like Fiona.

Dr. Underberg was on our side.

I stepped out on the walkway, too.

“Gillian!” Savannah squealed. “What are you doing?”

I looked back at her. “There are no more stairs, Savannah. No more exits. Twelve stories of water back the way we came. If there's something in the rocket ship that can help us, I say we check it out.”

“Easy for you to say,” Savannah said. “You can hold on with both hands.”

“I'll help you,” I replied. “You aren't going to fall.”

“Watch out!” Nate called back. “There are some missing rungs on this thing.”

Savannah fixed me with a look. “You were saying?”

With Eric taking up the rear—for once—we edged farther and farther out, wincing in fear every time someone else's steps made the walkway bounce and shake. A few times I had to leap across places where the metal plates had fallen through or rusted away, and every time I landed, the whole thing juttered so wildly I thought it might throw me off the side. Savannah tucked her entire good arm around the railing, holding on with an elbow.

“This,” she declared, “is worse than the swimming.”

“Move,” Eric slurred from behind her, nudging her back.

At last I reached the far end, where a big, curving door was cut into the side of the rocket ship, right above the final E in
Knowledge
.

“How do you open it?” Nate asked as we met the
Nolands at the end of the walkway. It dipped now, in a slow, bounding bounce, at our combined weight. We felt around the seam to see if there was a lever or a button or something, but nothing happened. Howard pushed on one side of the door and then the other, as if that would make it release. Nothing worked, and Eric had already turned around to head back to the platform when there was another rushing, whirring sound and the door popped out automatically.

Just like the silo door had. I narrowed my eyes. Nothing in this city worked, until it did. The turbine, the elevator shaft doors, and now the rocket ship.

“Can I open it?” Howard asked.

Nate shrugged. “I don't think it'll be the stupidest move we make today.”

Howard pulled the door open. A ladder led down from the door and we climbed in, single file. Savannah had some trouble navigating the rungs with her bad arm so I helped her, spotting her from below as she slowly came down. The inside was well lit, and it looked like those pictures of spaceships you see from NASA. Every available space on the wall had a purpose: screens, control panels, cabinets, and holders and fasteners of all varieties. A porthole in the side of the floor led down to another layer, and another and another below that. Nate and Eric went down to check them out, and Howard just stood in the middle of the first compartment, basically shaking with excitement.
He started naming every item and contraption and control on the wall. After the fifteenth entry on his list, I sort of tuned him out and wandered off on my own. There was a panel much like the one in the Comm room on one wall, and an orange light was blinking next to a label that had the Ω symbol on it. I flipped the switch.

“. . . please respond at once. All Channels. Repeat. Gillian Seagret. Eric Seagret. Friends of the Seagrets. If you can hear this message, please respond at once.”