Titan Song Dan Stout (top 20 books to read txt) 📖

occupied was two paces wide and a half-dozen long. Beyond its lip the sinkhole stretched down into the darkness, a black wall that echoed with the impacting metal and shattering glass as the buildings and cars landed in an invisible heap.

All around, the walls were pocked with holes ranging in size from fist-width to large enough to crawl through. I stared at them, then realized that they must surely have been branches of the geo-vents that heated the city and made life in Titanshade possible. The societal proscription against tampering with vents ran deep, and I felt an unexpected twinge of guilt for even seeing them laid bare, like walking in on a parent changing clothes, seeing their once-strong body grown feeble with age. I averted my eyes and looked upward to the street.

Between me and the surface was a maze of torn electrical lines and jagged rims from shattered sewer pipes, buried since the days when the whole city had been raised to provide proper sanitation, the city’s waste being shuffled off to processing plants in the deep-freeze of the ice plains. I stepped onto the loose cobblestones beside me, using them as a boost as I tried to climb out. I was still relatively close to the surface, and could almost jump up to grab it, but it was just beyond my reach. I tried to decide if making a grab for those utilities was worth the risk of the shock or infection that they might bring. Luckily, before I could decide, Guyer’s face appeared over the edge.

“Carter?”

I waved, and the concern eased on her face. “Shortcuts,” she muttered, before gesturing to someone I couldn’t see. “Over here!”

There were muffled shouts and instructions being passed around overhead, and even though my head was ringing I knew enough to wait and see what my rescuers had planned. Maybe that’s why I noticed the body on the ledge below me.

As I waited for the patrol officers to return, I perched on the edge of the ledge I was on, straining my eyes in the dim light and calling out on the off chance that the person below me was still alive.

“Police officer! Can you hear me?”

No motion, no response. No way to reach them. But when a rope came down from above I noticed there was enough slack for me to reach the ledge below.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted. “Hold on! I’m going to reach someone else!”

With the rope wrapped around my waist I was able to slow my descent. At the second ledge I carefully added my weight, keeping a tight grip on the rope and fearing that the whole thing would slide away at any moment. But it didn’t, and eventually I reached out to touch the dust-covered figure. As soon as I made contact, I knew they weren’t alive.

I rolled the figure over, but instead of a fresh corpse, killed by the fall, or with a bashed-in skull from falling debris, I found a desiccated, almost mummified human male. Whoever he was, he hadn’t died in the fallout of the sinkhole. He’d been there already.

I stared at the body for a long moment. Because beyond the impossibility of finding a body that far beneath the city, beyond the sheer insanity of there being a cavern this large in the heart of the city, something else had caught my eye—beneath the body was the glint of clean metal. A Titanshade detective badge, still shiny and new.

My shock must have immobilized me for too long, because a new round of shouts greeted me from above. However long this brief respite from the hole’s expansion would last, I simply didn’t have time to sit there and ponder the mystery before me. So I did the first thing that came to mind: I scooped up the badge, threw the body over my shoulder, and began climbing the rope.

With several patrol cops pulling from the top and making minimal progress on my own, it wasn’t long before I was up to and over the lip of the sinkhole. Hands scrabbled at my shirt to help pull me over and jerked away as they discovered the corpse I carried with me. I stood cradling the body as if it were a newborn child, just seeing the light of the world. I spotted Guyer rushing past and stepped in her direction. She either didn’t see me or chose to keep running. I slowed to a stop and called to her, but one of the patrol cops gave me a rough shove and a command to clear the area.

My rescuers began sprinting away from the hole. I followed, doing my best to hold the mummified body together, a bundle of sticks wrapped in tissue paper. Even a quick glance told me that I had lost a good portion of it in my desperate climb to safety.

Farther down the street, I searched for Guyer once again. I approached her and she eyed me and the body with equal parts concern and distrust.

“Listen,” I said. “I found this man’s body in the hole. But look at him.” I raised the body slightly. “There is no way that he died just now. He’s . . .”

“He’s been down there for years.” Guyer bit her lip, understanding what that meant. She hesitated, her eyes flicking at my hand, wrapped around the body’s shoulder, missing fingers on display. For a moment she wore a look of uncertainty, maybe even distrust. A scream from the distance drew her attention, and she shook her head. “Get him someplace secure. We’ll deal with it later.”

I did as she instructed, turning my back on the madness of collapsing buildings and an all-consuming gaping maw in the ground. People fled past me as I walked, mummified corpse in my arms, the badge that had lain beneath it safely tucked away in my pocket. I slowed, watching them pass. Guyer, Harris, even Paulus worked to save the living. And me? I was slipping into the