Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles) Read Free Page A

done, I’d have to do it myself. Today you just reminded me of that.”
    At that precise moment, the fluorescent light burned out, leaving Monroe in twilight. It was her turn to smirk. “It’s hell being left in the dark, isn’t it?”
    * * *
    Seline woke to a sudden squeal, letting out one of her own as she bolted upright in the blackness, the sleeping bag provided by her captors twisting around her legs. She unzipped it, the opening of the nylon teeth sawing on her ears. She tried to determine the direction of the noise, or if there had been one, and not yet another hallucination. The chain that stretched from the thick collar around her throat to a concrete pillar clunked and scraped against the floor with her every move, messing with her ability to gauge sound. God, she hated the chain. Early on she’d measured it using her hands and estimated it to be fifteen feet long, not long enough to reach any of the walls in the tiled room, walls she knew existed because if she stretched her legs her feet barely brushed against them. She craved to have a wall at her back.
    She sat cross-legged on the bag and breathed deeply, the smell of cold iron and stale air filling her, and willed her racing heart, the beats impossibly loud, to slow. It took longer each time the panic attacks hit, but she calmed herself enough to allow for rational thinking. She’d been down for about a week, though time was fast becoming a shredded concept in this world of perpetual night. She’d tried using the number of times she slept to gauge the passage of days, until she realized that the lack of light and noise made her sleep too often. Or maybe not. All she knew was that she was far from the surface, in the lowest levels of the tunnels, and that despite the silence that surrounded her, she wasn’t alone.
    She could only guess how many captors there were. She hadn’t even gotten a glimpse of them before they’d pulled a sack over her head and dragged her through endless passages, her screams muffled. There were at least two of them to start with—one had held a knife at her throat while the other had bound her wrists behind her back. She now sensed that there were more. Many more.
    “Hello?” she called, her voice echoing through the chamber. She always called out after waking. It was a way of establishing contact with her captors, of reaching out to possible rescuers, of proving her humanness. She’d heard somewhere that the best thing to do if kidnapped was to try and make friends with your captors. If they saw you as a person, as opposed to just a hostage, it made it harder for them to harm you.
    “Hello?” she tried again. As usual there was no response, and it was the silence that made her more afraid than anything. She wished she’d listened to Lindsay, to that Jack Cole, to everybody. They all said the tunnels could kill. She’d gone down before, twelve times, and nothing had happened, not a whisper of anything. And then this. For the thousandth time she thought of Lindsay’s story about when she and Jack went into the tunnels as teenagers. Was she going to be ripped apart like that poor man?
    No. No. Against all odds she was alive. They would’ve killed her outright, if the stories were to be believed. Whoever or whatever was keeping her prisoner actually seemed intent on keeping her alive. She hadn’t been beaten or raped. While she slept, the provided bedpan was emptied. A stringy meat stew, palatable after hunger had hollowed her out, was regularly provided along with a bottle of fresh water.
    Only they hadn’t uttered a single word to her.
    “Listen,” she called out, repeating once again her offer. “If you contact my sister, she’ll ransom me. If you let her know that I’m alive, she’ll pay for my release.”
    Silence.
    “Her name is Lindsay Sterling,” Seline continued. “You can reach her at Sterling Restorations. Or you can call her home.” She rattled off the numbers.
    Behind her she thought she heard