Trauma was a good trigger.
That"s why I liked engineering. Electronics. Things that worked the way they were supposed to. If they broke, you could fix them again.
I was lying on a collection of burlap bags that smelled pleasantly of coffee beans. All around me were broken things--iron wheels from factory carts, bent candlesticks, dented microwave ovens, glittering shards of cracked Christmas b.a.l.l.s piled together in a deflated tire, mannequins missing body parts, stacks of broken televisions. There wasn"t enough light for me to see the edges of the room, but I was sure there was even more junk hidden in the dark.
Beside me was a half-eaten bagel on a paper plate. Beside it was a metal thermos. I opened the top and inhaled. It didn"t smell like anything, but there seemed to be some liquid inside. My stomach growled.
"You"re awake," said a voice from the dark.
I started to get up and realized that under the burlap sacks, I was undressed. I looked around frantically for my clothes.
A boy came out of the dark, moving cautiously toward me like he was afraid I was going to startle. His face was smudged with dirt, his pale hair sticking up at odd angles.
"Are you okay?" he said, voice sounded raspy. He coughed. "You were really sick."
"Where"s my stuff?" I shouted. Wrapping one of the coffee bean bags around myself, I started toward the edges of the room that I couldn"t see.
He held both his hands up, palms toward me in surrender. "Calm down. You had a fever and you were really sc.r.a.ped up. Your clothes were rubbing dirt into your wounds. I cleaned pus off you, so do not even think of yelling at me."
I took a long look at him. His face was partially shadowed, but he didn"t look like he was lying. He was wearing a T-shirt that hung on him, like he"d lost weight. It made him seem even taller than he was.
"What"s your name?" I asked. I wished it was even darker right then so that he couldn"t see how embarra.s.sed I was. No boy had ever seen me naked before. I felt conscious of myself in a way I wasn"t used to--aware of my body, its curves and flaws.
"Hank," he said. "I"ve been down here two weeks." He laughed a little in an odd manic way. "I was going kind of crazy. When I found you in the tunnels, I thought you were dead. I nearly tripped over you."
"Two weeks?" I asked. My voice shook.
He sat down on the remains of a television and pushed back greasy hair with one hand. "This crazy woman who"s obsessed with my dad used to come by my house and watch the place from across the street. One night, I"m coming home from a friend"s and she and these two other people just grabbed me. I don"t know if they planned on it or what, but here I am. I thought they were going to kill me."
"They grabbed me too," I said. His name rang in my head. Hank. Lots of people were named after their dads.
"How come?" he asked.
"That crazy woman? She"s my mother."
For a moment, he just stared at me in astonishment. "Oh," he said and frowned as though he was trying to figure something out. "So you know about the dragon?"
I swallowed hard. "Dragon?"
Apparently my own inner crazy isn"t the only thing I should be worried about.
"I don"t think I heard you right. You mean their crazy made-up religion?"
"No," he said. "I mean the dragon in the tunnels. It"s the reason we can"t leave--it sleeps near the only way out. Didn"t you hear it?"
I thought about the thing sliding over me in the dark. "I guess not."
"It"s real," he said.
I nodded, because I knew agreeing was what he wanted me to do. "Okay."
"Look, I know where there"s a pipe of fresh water. I"m going to go there and fill up some more bottles for us. And there"s a grate outside a deli where trash gets dropped. People are careless with the dumpster or something. That"s what I"ve been eating and that"s what I feed to the dragon. I"m going to go and--"
"You feed it?"
He nodded. "Yeah, otherwise it might attack. I"m pretty sure that"s what we"re here for--to be that thing"s dinner."
"Ah," I said.
He must have realized how freaked out I was getting, because he suddenly shifted tone. "But we"re going to be fine. We"re going to find a way out of here. G.o.d, you must think I sound totally insane."
I shook my head. "I don"t know what to think." I didn"t. My mind was going over possibilities. The thing that moved over me had a head too small for an alligator--plus it felt warm. But it had to be something real, something rational.
"Just stay here. I know my way by now--I"ll see if I can find us some food. You should rest or something." He stood up and looked at me, like he was trying to decide something. Then he left.
I listened as he rattled down a pipe, waiting for his steps to stop echoing.
As soon as he was gone, I crawled back over to the coffee sacks and stuffed the bagel in my mouth, chewing it greedily. I washed it down with gulps of water from the thermos. Then I ripped arm holes in one of the sacks so I could wear it like a dress.
After tripping over some tin cans and sliding on some boxes, I discovered that, as far as I could tell, we were in a nexus of pipes. They snaked off downward in several directions.
Looking around at the room, I wondered where all the stuff in it had come from. I doubted he"d had time to collect all of it. Had there been someone here before us? Had there been other sacrifices? The thought chilled me.
I needed to see better.
After my parents" divorce, the judge said that I was supposed to spend weekends with my dad. At first that was what happened, before my mom stopped being able to handle the scheduling and dad stopped demanding visits. But back when I did see my dad, he"d take me to science museums and we"d buy kits for home.
That"s where I learned how to make a flashlight out of regular household items.
First you need batteries. I found those after pulling apart a couple of ancient tape decks. I had no idea whether the batteries had any charge left, but I kept hoping. You"re supposed to tape them together, but the best I could do was tie them together tightly with one of the strings from the coffee sack--luckily Dad and I had also gone to a special exhibit on sailing knots.
Then there"s supposed to be aluminum foil, to stabilize. I skipped that part, since I couldn"t find any. But I did manage to get the batteries attached to two long pieces of wood before I heard a movement in one of the pipes.
"Hank?" I called, climbing back on my nest of burlap and tucking my makeshift part of a flashlight under one side.
He limped in, tripping over several of the boxes, and fell. I jumped up. Blood was running down his leg.
"What happened?"
He looked up at me from the floor. His voice was steady, but slow. Distant. "You never told me your name."
"I"m Amaya," I said as I leaned over him.
"Amaya," he repeated. He was sweating and his eyes looked weird.
"You"re in shock," I said. I wasn"t sure or anything, but that"s what people said on cop shows.
"I fell," he said. "I went to feed the dragon and it wasn"t by the grate. I thought maybe I could climb up high enough to stick my fingers through. Maybe someone would notice. But I saw it unwinding from the dark and I panicked." He laughed. "I forgot I was still holding food. The dragon must have smelled it."
"Come on, let me look at your leg," I said. All I knew about was fixing machines; I had no idea what to do with people.
I pushed up the cuff of his jeans and tried to wash out a shallow sc.r.a.pe with what was left of the water in the thermos. His ankle had already swollen up. Just touching it made him flinch. I helped him get over to the burlap sacks.
"I think I twisted it," he said faintly. "I"m going to die down here. I"m glad at least one person will know what happened to me, but it sucks. It really sucks. I don"t want to--"
"We"re getting out," I said. "Honest. I promise."
He snorted. "You promise? Like I promised you things were going to be fine? Before you got here I was thinking of just going down and letting that thing eat me. What was the point of delaying it? But then you"re here and I want to show off. Look at me, I can get us out. And I wind up like this."
"I think we should elevate your leg," I told him, purposefully ignoring everything he"d said.
"Okay," he said, defeated, his words slurred. I had no idea if that was part of shock or if he was just tired. "Do you know how to splint a leg?"
I shook my head.
"I was in boy scouts and I got a badge for first-aid that included splints. Never did one for real though," he said with a wince. "I"ll talk you through it."
"Okay," I said.
"Go find me something stiff and long enough to go from my knee to my ankle. That and rope." He was talking oddly.
I hunted among the junk. There wasn"t any rope, but I found enough long strips of string, parts of bags, and cloth to braid together into something pretty tough. He kept nodding off while I worked, though.
"Amaya," he called muzzily.
"Yeah?" I said, pulling a plank of wood off a piece of fencing.
"What are you going to do when you get out of here? The very first thing?"
"When we get out of here," I said.
"Sure," Hank said. "We."
"A burger," I said. "A big fat one with cheese and mustard and pickles. Then a whole bag of Doritos. How about you?"
"Pizza," said Hank. "With every topping from anchovies to pineapple. Heaped. And a gallon of orange soda."
I made a face, but he couldn"t see me. Too bad, I"m sure it would have made him laugh. "Okay, other than food?"
"A hot bath," he laughed. "When my mom died, we never cleaned out her stuff from the bathroom. There"s a whole shelf of half-empty bubble baths. I am going to use them all."
"I"m sorry about your mother. I didn"t know she was dead."
"Yeah," said Hank. "You don"t know anything about me."
"You don"t know anything about me either," I said, picking up a strip of torn upholstery fabric and braiding it into my makeshift rope.
"I know about your mother. You know if we get out of here, they"re going to arrest her, right?"
"Because you"ll press charges. I know."
"She tried to kill us," he said.
"I know!" I shouted back at him. My voice echoed off the walls.
"Sorry," he said. "I"m just hurting. I"m a jerk when I"m hurting."
I walked over with my rope and board. He explained about making sure his leg was straight, padding the board and putting it under his leg, tying it so he still had circulation. I tried to keep my fingers gentle on his skin.
"Where are you going to go?" he asked.
"You mean because I can"t go home?" I shrugged my shoulders. "My dad would probably let me stay with him, although I don"t know if he"d like it. He didn"t exactly fight Mom for custody. But then, my mom steamrollered over him pretty much all the time. Or I guess I could couch-surf."
There was a long pause. I looked over at him and saw that he was either asleep or unconscious.
Not sure what else to do, I looked around for the rest of the parts to my flashlight. I found two small screws fairly easily and inserted them into cardboard. A paper clip attached to one screw. Then I pulled out two wires from the back of the television and wrapped one around the negative end of the battery and the other around the paper-clip-less screw.
I was almost ready.
The final part needed a working light bulb. I found one broken and two burnt-out ones in the pile of refuse. Luckily, the Science Museum covered fixing those too. It wouldn"t have been hard, except for the dim light.
Basically, the filament usually breaks so that there is no longer one clean connection. But the ends are pretty springy and flexible. So you just spin the bulb and wait for them to catch again. Unless the break is really bad, they usually will.
When I put the bulb back into my bootleg flashlight, it burned bright, stinging my eyes. For the first time in what feels like months, I could finally see.
"Wow," Hank said blearily. I hadn"t realized he woke up again. "Not a lot of girls know that stuff."
I grinned. "I"m a good person to be trapped in a sewer with."
"Yeah," he said.
In the light, I could see that despite the hollows of his cheekbones and the blue bruises around his eyes, Hank was the kind of guy you looked at twice. He had a nice mouth.
I felt suddenly self-conscious. "Where is it?" I asked Hank. "Can you give me a map to this dragon?"
"You still don"t believe me, do you?"
"It doesn"t matter," I said. "Maybe it"s a dragon. Maybe it"s some other kind of animal. It"s still got to keep getting fed and obviously you can"t go feed it."
He sighs and traces the directions on the dirt of the floor. I roll the remaining bulb to get the filament to attach and shove it in my pocket.
The odd thing about light is how it makes distance different. The sewer looked narrow, navigable now that I could see it. It wasn"t a labyrinth full of monsters, just a dirty tunnel.
I carefully picked my way along, according to Hank"s scratchy map. In one of my hands, a length of sharpened pipe hung, like a sword.
As the light splashed along the walls, I wondered about my mother. If there really was something in the tunnel that I can"t explain, did that mean that her magic was real? Did it mean that my mother, in her c.r.a.ppy apartment, could call down the G.o.ds? Even a crocodile--even an alligator--was so unlikely it seemed mystical. Even that would be hard to explain.
That thought lasted until I came to the dragon.