The ascent lasted days.No one spoke of the Schlund.No one dared look back.
They went in a line that wasn't a line so much as a wound pulled closed with thread—slack in places, taut in others, always aching. The path began as a maintenance corridor carved by men who believed in right angles and ended in roots and iron where the city had argued with itself and both sides had lost. The first tunnel was the sort that teaches you what your shoulders are for: narrow enough your breath touched the walls, wet enough your breath came back colder.
"Single file," Lig said, voice even, not loud, the kind of calm you borrow. "Rope between groups. Call 'hold'—not 'help'—if you slip."
No one asked him who had put him in charge; he'd shown up with a coil of line and words that fit the space. Breuk took the back half of the first section because that is where things break. He tied himself into the rope with his teeth and his one hand, the knot work clumsy and aggressive, like he was arguing with the cord. The woman with the walnut hands (they called her "Tella" now, because names grow when work does) took the lead of the second group. Frehn, the guard-boy with the plate chest, walked a pace behind Lig, pike held sideways to fit the tunnel and not to stab faith.
They went.
Dark made rules. The lamps they'd found in a cache burned clean for an hour and then dirty for three. When they guttered, the wet stone grabbed whatever light was left and broke it into small knives. The tunnel roof went from low to nearer and back again. At places the floor became stairs only because enough feet in old boots had decided to pretend rubble, roots, and broken grille were steps. If you treat anything like a stair long enough it starts behaving.
On the second turn they reached a split where the left-hand passage breathed cold and the right-hand passage throbbed heat. Lig ran his fingers along the wall and listened with the meat of his palm. "Right," he decided. "Air that moves means engine or open. Air that freezes means duct to nowhere." It sounded like science. Breuk nodded because he wanted it to be, then touched the pendant in his breast pocket without looking at it. It was cool now—the coin of a man you can't decide to forgive.
They climbed.
Hands bled because hands aren't knives until work makes them. Rope bit. Rungs that weren't rungs cut; one man learned the way rust eats into you from the inside out. The children wore masks for the smoke they might meet later and for the courage they needed now. The smallest boy—bowl-helmet, eyes too big—followed Tella's boots like they were a story. Every twenty steps Breuk took a breath at the back and counted heads in his head, making a tally against the city as if the city wouldn't cheat.
On a platform that used to be a meter of something official, they stopped and drank water out of a tin lid because the bottle cap had gone missing and the lid had decided to be dignified. No one filled their mouths all the way. They held a swallow like a coin between the teeth of thirst and sense and then let it go. The air smelled of damp metal and old rubber, the way a warehouse smells in a dream about work.
"Keep to the left side on the next straight," Lig said, brushing his hand over a warning stripe that time had chewed. "The right-hand grille is false. There's a drop."
"How do you know?" Frehn asked, not challenging—trying to be a different kind of soldier.
Lig's mouth twitched. "I once had to run down here with men who hated me," he said. "I learned the parts that were too good to be true."
They reached the false grille anyway because the city loves repeating its tricks. The third person in line set his heel down on what looked like regular mesh and the world answered no. Breuk's body moved before his mind; his arm locked around the rope and his shoulder learned again what it was built for. The line went hard. The man hung for a hot second above the absence and then swung into the wall and came back cursing and alive. In the breath after, all the mouths in the tunnel forgot how to make words and then remembered thank you in a dozen shapes.
They climbed.
On the second day—if days can be measured by the way a group breathes when it gives up the night and finds it again—they reached a duct with heat like breath on a neck. The metal sang quietly, a hum in the feet. "Don't touch it with skin," Tella warned, hitting the wall with the back of her hand. "Use cloth. Use your anger. Not your body."
They edged along, backs flat, toes searching for ledges old workers had left with the kindness of indifference. Past a bend, a sheet of water dripped like strings and the light from a lamp broke into glitter on it. Children reached with tongues and Tella slapped the gesture out of the air without looking, loving their lives more than she loved their thirst.
"Condensate's clean," Lig said. "If it runs off hot." He demonstrated by wetting a bandage and wringing it into a cup. "A sip each. Not a story."
Breuk did not drink there. He lifted the cup to the boy with the bowl-helmet and then to the old woman whose ankles were two honest ropes under the skin. He drank last. The pendant warmed—a small pulse against his sternum—then went shy again. He didn't have room for the thought that followed and so left it on the floor with the dirt.
They crossed a service bridge missing one side. The bridge hung the way a memory hangs on a bad day—at the angle that makes men step wider to trick their fear with mathematics. Below, there was only drop; not black but the dull green that metal gets when it vows to be forever and is proven wrong. The Under City breathed in that cavern: way off, a vent opening like a god's yawn; nearer, the catwalks whining under sudden attention.
A drone skated through the far air like thought—small, smooth, humming. It had once been a maintenance unit; now it was a law someone had taught to fly. "Down," Lig said quietly, and they obeyed the word the way you obey a fire. People pressed into the bridge's rivets. The drone passed and did not see them because nobody had told it to look for hope.
On the third day, a man's knee broke its old agreement with him.
It happened on a climbing frame that used to be a ladder before fire moved through and bit every other rung. The man made it three meters up and then down without insult and then the knee simply quit, folding him into an angle no body agrees to. He clung with both hands and this is when hands learn whether the mind is worthy.
"Hold," the line called, not shouting. The rope went quiet as a taught thing. Breuk moved up to him, wedged his boot hard against rust, and spoke close: "I have you." The phrase worked, not because it was true, but because it sounded like what a beam says under a roof.
"No," the man whispered, and the shame in it could have set rooms on fire. "I will slow—"
"Good," Breuk said. "We should go slower."
Tella dropped a loop down from above with the efficiency of someone who has looked at problems and refused to believe in them. "Put your foot through," she told the man. "Trust the loop. It won't care about you. It will hold you for that reason."
He did. They moved. The knot squealed. The frame shook like a dog. They made the next platform. The man cried for a breath into Breuk's coat like a debt being paid. He stood after, one leg now a rumor, and went on with a stick.
They climbed.
Nobody talked about the Schlund because it made the air sweet for the wrong reason. When exhaustion taught their mouths new habits, they talked about the piece of pipe they would use for a bannister if the city ever let them be safe again; about the taste of the soup of last winter; about the turning of screws—left, right—no, righty-tighty, lefty-loosey—and how a man they loved had remembered it wrong and broken a thing that broke him back.
At a rest, someone began to hum the rain song—the one you hum under noon and eighteen—and the others let him make two bars before they broke it gently.
"Not here," Tella said.
"Not yet," Lig added.
They went under a duct that panted and over one that sighed and along one that felt like skin: warm, damp, with a pulse you could set a metronome to. Once, in a narrow, a hiss took the rope by the throat—a steam valve opening where no one had asked it to. The cleverness of the city is the cruelty of the city. Lig took three steps backward fast; Breuk stepped forward into the fog and hauled a lever with a hand wrapped in his jacket until the jacket smoked and the lever remembered to be a lever. He stood after, breathing like a man who has outrun a dog.
"Idiot," Lig said, which is a word that means four other words no one can say without crying.
"Say 'thank you,'" Tella snapped, and Lig's mouth found it.
"Thank you."
Breuk shrugged with the shoulder he had left. "I was tired of the part of me that wasn't scar," he said, because humor is the bandage men wear when blood is busy.
On the fourth day they slept in a room that had been a control hub once. Screens stared at them with faces like dead moons. The carpet under the rust was corporate—a good, quiet brown that did not remember shoes. They laid down in the corners where sightlines crossed and didn't speak. Breuk's sleep was a fall with no impact and then a room where water made a bed and his lungs decided to rest. He woke to Lig's breath on the other side of the desk, slow, even, a metronome again. He did not reach. He let the desk be a wall that friendship sometimes needs.
They climbed.
The fifth day began with a sound like a door not slamming. Several floors above, something gave—quietly, efficiently, a design failing the way good designs fail, with grace. Dust fell in a diagonal and made everyone older. They craned their necks and saw two maintenance platforms hung at drunk angles, their chain-mounts twisted like sugar.
"We go around," Lig said, and traced a path in air: across a brace, into a side conduit, back up where there is a seam.
"Or we make the platforms right," Tella said, already measuring a chain with her eyes. She owned the kind of mind that believed in tools like children believe in parents.
"Too long," Lig countered. "People are tired. Standing is a tax."
"Tax or not," Tella began.
Breuk said, "We split." He hated the word and liked the solution. "Half with me along the brace. Half with Tella—fix the first platform and use it to fix the second. We meet at the seam. If either of us is wrong we become right fast."
Lig looked at him, at the rope, at the faces. He didn't smile. He nodded. "Do it."
Breuk's half crawled a brace that had not been meant for hands. The metal's paint had given up and gone to powder years ago. His palm came away black; it felt like shaking hands with the old city. Below, a void bigger than good sense; above, pipes written with stencil ghosts: DO NOT ENTER. DO NOT FEED. DO NOT. The boy in the bowl-helmet lost his cap to a gust that wasn't wind so much as pressure looking for a home. It skittered down the brace and into forever. He did not cry. Tella's half worked with chain and stubbornness in the other path; once, a chain jumped a tooth and kinked and jumped back and everyone learned what the sound of luck feels like in the ribs.
At the seam, the two halves met with the stunned grins of people who had each expected to have to learn grief today and were instead handed a joke. Tella lifted the chain for Breuk like a toast. He touched the pendant through his shirt in response and told himself it was only to steady his breath.
They climbed.
In a chamber the size of a city block, they found air that had been released from somewhere important. It was warm and smelled like oil and a little like meat. The sound in that room was a chord of machines: low, higher, higher, nearly song. People walked faster in that air without choosing to. Hope is a drug; you don't need a priest to hand you a spoon.
They crossed under a lattice of cables that carried power spiders make in nightmares. A maintenance drone returned—this one with a scar where someone had tried to make it kinder with a hammer. It hovered, puzzled, then left, bored by humans. Lig exhaled into his scarf. "We're near a trunk," he said. "Good. It means doors that lead to more than themselves."
"Bad," Breuk said at the same time, because habits. "It means the kind of doors people guard."
"Then we pay in silence," Lig said, and for a while they did.
They met their first other people on the sixth day—a pair of men in the orange of some contractor long bankrupt. Their faces had gone thin and hard, which is how honesty looks when it lives on bouillon. They had two carts on narrow rails loaded with coils and luck. They saw the village and pulled their pistols in the same motion a man uses to pull a splinter.
Lig lifted both hands. "We're passing through," he said. "We make no claim."
"Everybody makes a claim," one of the men said, exhausted. "That's the point of a place."
"We have nothing worth stealing," Tella said, and the men laughed because the line always works.
"They have him," the other man said, pointing the barrel at Breuk—not the jacket, not the empty sleeve, exactly him. "He's worth something."
Breuk felt the rope tighten in hands behind him—the village making the word hold into a prayer. He didn't reach for the pendant. He wished to death he could.
"Worth what?" Lig asked, friendly, curious, as if they were discussing a part number.
"Blame," the man said, dry. "Hope. Stories. All the expensive things."
Lig nodded like a man buying apricots. "And what do your bosses pay for those?"
"They pay in leaving us alone," the first man said. He looked at the carts like they were children who could run away if he looked at them wrong.
"We'll share a lane," Lig said. "We don't cross. You keep your rails, we keep our rope. We'll help you level at the next bolt and you help us not be seen."
The men considered. In a different century they would have prayed for guidance. They had numbers instead and found their god there. "All right," the second said. "But if anyone asks…"
"—we never met," Lig said.
They shared the next fifty meters of tunnel in silence, the way you share a pew with a stranger who sings better than you but not well enough to hate. At a junction with a dead escalator, the men peeled off down a black hall without lights. One of them saluted the boy in the bowl-helmet before he went. The boy saluted back with two fingers and almost smiled.
They climbed.
At something that had once been an atrium and was now an echo with stairs, they ran into wind. Not the shy breath of ducts, not the constant sigh of an engine, but a true push—the whoomf of pressure finding a weakness and falling up. "Masks," Lig called, and they masked, and the line became insects blue in the face. The old ones breathed like machines and the machines breathed like old ones and it was almost music until a grate gave up and sang, and a child went to his knees. Tella took him by the collar and lifted him to his feet and put her palm flat on his back until the back remembered to move.
After, they rested in a room half full of filing cabinets. People sat on the drawers like benches. Lig went among them with the count in his eyes. Breuk sat against a cabinet and let his head lean the way a man doesn't let it lean when others are watching. His gaze ran up the corner seam where light had begun to creep down—a brighter light than mushroom, than lamp, than the soft lies of old signage. He thought about not thinking and failed.
Lig slid down beside him, back to metal, shoulder a near-shoulder that had once been a home. He didn't look at Breuk. He spoke into the air in front of them. "We don't do speeches," he said. "But if you had one, what would you say?"
Breuk rolled the word we around his mouth and decided to let it sit on his tongue. "I'd say keep your feet underneath you," he said. "I'd say no one is coming to save you. I'd say this is all there is and it might be enough if we admit what it costs."
Lig breathed out. "Good," he said. "I'd say this is the easy part. Because moving is always easier than staying."
They didn't touch. Their silence touched for them.
Night—or what they agreed to call it—came and went while the city rolled over. They climbed through it like ants through a book. On the last day before light became something that hurt, they reached a crack in the concrete big enough to shove a man through and small enough to make decent men reconsider being decent. The gold beyond it wasn't warmth; it was decision.
They pried the split wider with crowbars and good intentions and the cruelties of leverage. The concrete cried. The sound went through teeth. A sheet gave, and the crack became a door a child could fit through and then a door a mother could and then a door that the old woman with rope-ankles could step through upright. Everyone paused for the length of a breath to see if the world would take offense.
It did not.
The first skin the light found was Breuk's because light recognizes the people who didn't want it most. It penciled lines around his scars and made them into writing. He swallowed and his throat made the sound of an old hinge forgiving you. He did not pick up a child and hold him to the light the way one does in that kind of story. He turned sideways and made room.
Tella went second, because work should. The boy with the bowl-helmet had no bowl to lift and so lifted his hands and laughed once and then bit it back because we are always teaching children when to be glad and when not. Frehn went looking like a man at a museum who has finally found the painting his teacher told him about. The widow went as if stairs had returned to be stairs and not tests. Lig went last out of the first group, first out of the second.
Behind them, in the tunnel, the dark folded up without malice. No one looked back. Not one.
The ascent lasted days.No one spoke of the Schlund.No one dared look back.
They stepped out onto a platform larger than their square had ever dreamed of, into a light that was not forgiveness and not accusation—only exposure. The Under City lay ahead, stacked like a threat and a promise. The engineered sun washed them in an endless almost-noon that made every bruise true. The machines sang what machines sing—work and hunger, hunger and work—and from somewhere far below, carried up by ducts and rumor, came the low, patient thrum of a world that would go on being a world no matter how many men fell into it.
Breuk's palm found his breast pocket and felt the pendant burn once, the quick kiss of a wound that is not done being a mouth. He closed his hand over it and had the grace, finally, not to call that warmth a sign.
He looked at Lig. Lig looked at the city. Between them, the rope slackened and held. The line behind pressed forward and stopped, pressed forward and stopped—the heart of a people trying to learn a new beat.
"Keep your feet," Breuk said, and stepped toward the light that was only a different kind of dark.