The stairs are steep. The rail I grab for support shifts and rattles. A musty smell envelops me like a damp fleece blanket and I shiver at the chill that seems to have materialized out of the chipped, pocked walls.

“Be careful of where you put your weight on those last steps. The wood is rotting,” Atlas warns from the bottom.

He holds the lantern up high. The shadows undulate. I feel the soft sections of wood move under my feet and leap to skip the bottom step. I smack into Atlas, who lets out an “Oof!” The lantern clatters to the ground, taking the light with it. I start to push away, but Atlas’s arm wraps around me and squeezes me against his chest. He stumbles, hits the wall, and swears when he kicks the lantern and it scrapes against the hard, cold ground. But he doesn’t let me fall.

“You okay?” he asks as he steadies us both. Without the light I can’t see his face. I can only feel the warmth of his chest and the strength of the arms that didn’t let me hit the ground. It reminds me of the only other embrace that I couldn’t shake loose and made me feel secure and safe.

When I was a toddler, it was a game to try to slip out of Mom’s arms. Her laugh would shimmer in the air, and she would hold tight and tell me that no matter how much I tried, I would never be able to shake her free. When I got to middle school it was more something I had to put up with, like taking the red cough medicine that is supposed to taste like cherries but never fails to make me gag. I tried to explain my feelings to her. I yelled. I complained. I gave her the silent treatment. I stepped back whenever I could to keep her at arm’s length. I’m not sure when she stopped trying to close the distance between us or why I didn’t tell her that I never wanted her to.

“I’m fine.” I shrug and step away. “No damage done.”

“Not to you, maybe. The lantern wasn’t as lucky.” The moist chill returns full force as Atlas retrieves the lantern from the ground and holds it aloft to display the large dent in one of the bottom corners. “I did warn you those steps were rotten.”

“You should probably get someone to fix that.”

“I’ll put it on the list right under find my father and hoard the resources that will someday rescue a country that doesn’t understand that it needs rescuing.”

Well, when he put it that way . . .

“The problem with running an underground movement like this is that a lot of what we do needs to happen in areas the city has lost interest in or forgotten about.”

There can’t be a lot of those places left. Not with all the work the City Pride Department has done. Everyone says the reason the program is so successful is that it focuses on places that had been neglected by the government for so long.