Page 34 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Mercy stepped back as part of the wall swung open, revealing a narrowarchway that was just big enough for her to squeeze through, if she turned sideways. She peered inside.
Through the secret entrance, she spied what must have once been the bathroom in this flat. Tiled flooring, moldy walls, and emptiness greeted her. The sink and toilet had been ripped out, as had the far wall. Someone had simply knocked a long hole through, and then built a chute on the other side.
“Don’t think that’s allowed in the rental agreement,” Mercy muttered, peering over.
The chute itself descended into darkness, accessible only through a series of metal rungs fixed into the wall. Someone had done some serious conversions on this room. The chute went down at least two levels to the ground, maybe farther. Mercy wondered how that worked, with shops beneath.
She stared, wishing Bao were with her. She’d come out this morning in search of answers, but the questions were only piling up.
If she climbed down there, she would find out things she might not wish to know. Things to explain what was going on with Kit Ling and Cobra Lily and the water fetcher girl and the phoenix sister’s ghost in the basin. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Didn’t matter, it was too late. She had to know.
Mercy set her foot on the top rung.
She soon figured out what exactly had been built. It was rather ingenious.
Like many buildings in Kowloon, this one had a lightwell that ran down the center of it. Lightwells were narrow, vertical shafts. Some were open to the air, others were roofed. They typically ran from the roof to the lowest levels. In more expensive flat blocks, they might be illuminated and decorated, but this place was old, and cheap. It was simply a dank, narrow gap between buildings, filled with blackness and dripping water.
Someone, maybe Kit Ling or perhaps Red Bird, had knocked a hole in the bathroom wall. They’d then added rungs to the wall outside the former bathroom, to reach the bottom of that narrow shaft. That sort of building modification was illegal in most places, but Mercy had seen far worse in Kowloon.
At the bottom of the lightwell was a large storm drain. The lid had been removed, and the rungs carried on down, uninterrupted. A dank smell wafted from below, and the faintest hint of light.
Mercy took a breath, and kept descending.
Another eight feet lower, and she was well below street level. It was cooler down here, and gently damp. At the very bottom, Mercy found herself standing on concrete, with a tunnel stretching off in either direction. Several inches of water covered the bottom, but she could imagine it being much deeper when the weather turned to rain.
It seemed Kit Ling had found an entrance to Kowloon’s waterways system. It was no small job, knocking through a wall and adding rungs. Surely this had taken a few months of work.
The liquid churned, and Mercy felt her stomach flip. Only shallow water, she reminded herself. Not like the oceans she’d viewed yesterday; this was no worse than a bath. Well, apart from the smell.
She took a steadying breath, forced herself to get a grip and focus. The tunnel was lit in both directions. Mercy looked toward the northward one; by her calculations, that would head farther under the Walled City, unless she was much mistaken.
Interesting, and disquieting. That meant Kit Ling had an underground path straight into various buildings. That route looked far more flooded, the water noticeably deeper as the path progressed.
She looked southward. The path curved away, and she couldn’t see where it led, but it was drier and shallower, and better lit. She decided to choose that route first. Going toward Kowloon was always an option for later.
It turned out to be the smart decision. After thirty feet or so, all of which got progressively drier and cleaner, she turned a corner.
The path here widened out into a large room. It had the feel of a cavern: rock walls, damp with moisture, and a high rock ceiling, about fifteen feet above her head. Perhaps thirty feet wide, in a crude oval shape. It looked to have been some kind of reservoir or water-processing room, which Kit Ling had apparently adapted. Lanterns swung from the ceiling, casting moving shadows; the water carried a loud echo.
Mercy walked forward, fascinated. She was studying the lanterns so intently that she didn’t notice when the floor ended—and abruptly stepped off its edge.
Cold, goopy water swallowed her up. She flailed in extreme panic for a full ten seconds until she found her footing, and realized with angry shame that it was only waist-deep.
She stood up, gasping from the sudden temperature change, still mad that she’d floundered in shallow depths. Too late, she spotted a series of stepping stones that would have kept her dry.
In all directions, she could see machinery, pipes, and pumps. Presumably topump all this water in here, in the first place. Drainage grates pocked the ceiling, dripping with discolored water. No rainfall was going to waste.
She climbed out, and eyed the stepping stones. They took a winding path, branching to a series of three rocks. No, not rocks; concrete platforms, rising out of the water.
Several of the slabs had indistinct lumps lying on them, covered in heavy tarps. They looked worryingly like corpses, if the long shapes were anything to go by.
Mercy’s tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. So many years in the city of darkness, most of that spent dealing with ghosts of one kind or another, and she had never seen anything like this. She hardly knew where to even start.
She needed to know more.
Mercy slogged to the nearest stepping stone and heaved herself onto that small rectangle of dry rock. She crouched there for a second, shivering and sodden, trying vainly to wring excess water from her trousers. Her shoes had gotten lost, down in the foul-smelling mud and sucking silt, and she didn’t care to go looking for them.
