Page 14 of Laying Low

Anthony:Will do.

One step down the staircase, and another.He was low enough to reach up and grab the ring to pull the floor down after him, grateful for the light sconces in the corner.

“Oh,” he muttered.“How cozy.”

This end of the passage went a little deeper than the end near the house.Maybe five feet deep.Reg had apparently stocked it.There was a tiny portajohn, the kind you found in RVs; a box of trail mix, well wrapped to hopefully repel rats; and a case of water, as well as a reusable nylon trash bag.There were also several portable stools and some heavy-duty sleeping bags.

The boys were already laying the sleeping bags out to sit on, cross-legged, putting their backs up against the wall.

Anthony took the offered camp stool Reg indicated and sank onto it gratefully.He was a little over six feet tall, and standing upright was impossible for him—for any of them actually.Having a place to sit was a relief because it was easier to pretend he was in a regular sitting room when he didn’t keep walloping the back of his head.

“So,” he said when he was settled, “what now?”

“Now we wait,” Reg said grimly.“Marcus should be able to get rid of the ICE agents—unless they take him into custody for being too brown for them—”

“Ouch.”Anthony winced.Yes, he knew it was true that the rogue government agency was committing atrocities in the name of a corrupt administration, but his father had given so much of his life to the DOJ that it was still hard to hear.

“I’m sorry,” Reg said.“Your dad is awesome, but some of these undertrained morons would shoot him for having a limp, and they’d shoot Marcus for being too brown, and?”

Anthony grabbed his hand, hearing a thread of panic in Reg’s voice.“We can’t make it better by imagining the worst,” he said calmly.“We’re set down here, the boys are safe, and Marcus is smart.Take a breath.”

Reg nodded, and for the umpteenth time, Anthony wondered.Reg was obviously a cautious person by nature, but what had made him sure, so absolutely certain, that the worst would happen?

“Mr.Royal,” Reynaldo said after a few quiet moments, “what made you decide to build secret tunnels under your houses?”

Reg opened his eyes and focused on the question while Anthony blessed the kid for providing a distraction.“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug.“We were burying the coaxial cables and the fiber optics to increase the bandwidth of the computer system, and I realized that the soil was really compact and the bedrock was far enough down to give us some tunneling room.I had a friend who likes to mine—you know, for gold?—and we spent a summer researching how to build the safest tunnels, and I did a lot of free IT work for my other friend with access to a backhoe while my parents were gone, and, well, a little bit of skirting around the pool and here we are.”

“So you just planned to hide people from the government on a whim?”Ilia asked, sounding understandably doubtful.

“I like being prepared for an emergency,” Reg said placidly.“I have a secret escape from my apartment too.”He gave that shrug again.“It’s a personality quirk.”

“You got any more of those?”Ilia persisted.“I’m asking for Anthony, who might want to know.”

Anthony snorted.“Yes, I do want to know, but unlikesome people,I know to bide my time and not to pry.”

Ilia shrugged.“You two may think you have tomorrow, but me and Reynaldo here know better, right, Rey?”

Reynaldo bit his lip, and Anthony got the feeling that the other boy was a little closer to Reg’s temperament than Ilia.“Preparation is good,” Reynaldo said.“Thinking ahead is good.Look at us here.We’re as safe as we can get.This is a good thing.”

Reg let out a little laugh.“My mother used to bring home store leftovers, the stuff that expired the day before but hadn’t really gone bad yet.She brought that home every Friday.We’d have a big party for all our friends.They’d come, and we’d eat nothing but frozen pizza all night, with all the fruit that was perfectly ripe but wouldn’t be ripe tomorrow, you know?”

Both boys stared at him avidly and nodded.

“And then she’d give away bags of canned and dry goods to the kids who didn’t have much at home.The pizza was an excuse for all of us to help her distribute the food into the bags and find the friends we knew who needed it.I think we probably fed half the county at one time or another.”

“You didn’t keep any of that?”Reynaldo said.“Or sell it?”

Reg shook his head.“Some of it wouldn’t keep, and that needed to be eaten then.And as for the rest, we just had faith, you know?My parents kept working, even though there were seven of us and they didn’t make a lot of money.And it was so weird.At least once a week, somebody’s parents would stop by and drop off jars of jam their grandmother had made or corn flour from a brother coming from Mexico—there wasalwaysenough.”He shrugged.“A perfect peach?That can’t wait.A frozen pizza?That can wait, but only for so long.Sometimes you save and sometimes you savor, right?”

Anthony was still holding his hand from when Reg had been losing his shit, and now he squeezed it, wanting to kiss the man next to him so bad he couldn’t breathe.

Savor me, dammit!I am right here!

Ilia was not buying it either.“That’s some great advice coming from a guy ignoring the guy holding his hand.”

Reg stared at him and then noticed his hand and Anthony’s tangled together.

Please don’t pull away, Anthony begged, and to his relief, to hisprofoundrelief, for once Reg didn’t.