IT WAS the general rise in background noise that awakened Ryan. The people of Raw in the partitioned units around were getting up and beginning to go about their daily business. Their muted voices and shufflings were enough to disturb the light sleep that had kept the one-eyed warrior alive for so long.
He opened his good eye, the light from outside the curtain filtering through in the artificial morning. Just as the lights were dimmed when night came around, so the ville dwellers’ lamps and the lighting that lined the tunnels had beckoned the dawn of the new day. The lamplighter shuffled past their curtained partition, tunelessly humming some dirge to himself.
Ryan gently disentangled himself from the arms of the still sleeping Krysty, moving his body from under her where she had lain across him. She murmured to herself and opened her eyes sleepily.
“Morning?” she husked, her voice dry and clogged from sleep.
“What passes for it,” Ryan replied, rising from the bed. The sounds of his own rising had caused the others to stir, and Ryan made a quick head count, a reflex that he couldn’t prevent.
He was glad he had done it. “Where’s Jak?” he asked quietly.
JAK LAUREN PADDED down the tunnel. Despite his heavy combat boots, his footfalls were quieter than the echo of someone else’s footfalls. As he reached the door, he cast a wary eye around the lintel. There were no alarms or booby traps that were visible. Extending a hand, he traced around the lintel with his fingertips, barely touching the edges. There were no wires of any kind.
The door was made of beaten metal, the hammer blows that had shaped the old sheets into a flat door still visible, the welded edges rough. There was a lock set into the door beneath an old wooden lever handle. The fact that it was a wooden handle reassured him that there was little chance of the handle itself being electrified.
Jak brushed the handle with his fingertips. Nothing happened, so he took a tentative hold of it, and gently started to depress the lever.
It was then that the sound of someone approaching reached out to him. They were still some way off, but in the silence of the tunnel, broken only by the shallow sound of his own breath, it was loud enough for Jak’s sensitive hearing to discern that whoever it may be was approaching him slowly, with a shuffling walk that suggested lameness. The newcomer was also singing to himself and stopping every few yards.
Jak doubted that it was a sec man. It sounded too slapdash and without stealth. Someone carrying out routine tasks within the ville, without doubt. But still someone who may be armed and who could raise an alarm. Outside, Jak would have taken no chances and chilled whoever it was. But in here, where could he hide the body? And whoever it was would, as a routine worker, be missed.
There was nowhere to hide in the tunnel, not even to position himself so that he could ambush the newcomer. He would have to try to get through this door and hope that he could deal with whatever was on the other side.
The trouble was, when he depressed the lever, nothing happened. The door stayed fast. He pushed at it, gritting his teeth as he exerted pressure yet tried to control that effort so that the door wouldn’t suddenly explode inward with a noise that would only attract the attention he was trying to avoid.
The door refused to move.
The shuffling and humming were getting closer.
Jak cursed to himself. The smell of sweet, burned human flesh filled his nasal cavities as he leaned up against the door, and through the thick soundproofing of the metal he could just about discern some quiet whimpering and shuffling.
He was no doomie, but he had a bad, bad feeling about whatever was hidden behind the door.
That would have to wait until later, though. Right now, he had to get back to his friends without being seen. And with the shuffling growing louder, approaching the bend at the far end of the tunnel, that was going to prove difficult.