She puts her hands to her face and falls to her knees. She cries for five or six seconds before taking a deep breath and pulling herself together.

“We have to move. More will be here soon,” she says.

I nod and dash back for the headset. I glance at the dead soldier’s gun, only ten yards away, but the sound of more military vehicles fills the air, and we sprint away as fast as we can, down the spiral road. I’m certain we won’t make it out of here without being spotted.

We run and run. We make it to the end of the road and back onto ground level. Above us the sound of the Alt soldiers yelling orders echoes out over the city.

“This way,” Sam calls, taking a hard right, leading us away from the sewer behind the courthouse.

“But the library!” I yell.

“No time!” she calls back, and then shoulders her way through a boarded-up doorway, splintering the wood and disappearing through a spiral of dust.

I follow her into the building. It’s an old shop of some kind, with a tiled floor and a smashed glass display cabinet—perhaps an old butcher’s shop from long before I was born, when people used to buy animal meat. Sam is shoving part of the counter aside, revealing a set of rotted wooden stairs that leads down into darkness.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

Sam doesn’t answer, just carefully and quickly climbs down into the gloom. Outside, I hear the Alt army mobilizing: more vehicles, more footsteps, more orders being barked out. I follow Sam down, using my fingertips to pull the heavy counter as far as I can back over the staircase.

I move quickly, reaching the bottom of the stairs and walking right into Sam’s back in the darkness.

“Pander has mapped out a bunch of these old tunnels,” she whispers, “but they’re dangerous, they’re like mazes. We found some books on them. Apparently, politicians and royalty from a thousand years ago used them. Others were made by smugglers. One of them used to be a tunnel to the gallows where criminals were hanged.”

“Wow,” I say, still whispering despite the fact that we’re deep underground.

“And now they’re used by us,” Sam says. “Stay close—you do not want to get lost down here.”

It’s hard to know how close I am to Sam in the darkness, but I reach out every now and then to make sure she hasn’t gotten too far away from me. The thought of making a wrong turn and being trapped in a labyrinth of pitch-black tunnels terrifies me.

Tunnels, I think, I’m haunted by goddamned tunnels. If this thing ever ends and I’m still alive, I will never go near another tunnel again!