Read Tunnels 02, Deeper for Free Online Page A

what was wrong. Sarah found she'd passed out between two parked cars. Shielding her eyes with her hands, she pulled herself to her feet and ran.
    She'd eventually found her way back to Seth, but stopped as she saw figures milling around him, dressed in black. Her first thought had been that they were Styx, but then, through her watering eyes, she had been able to read the word POLICE on the car. She'd slunk away.
    Since that day, she had tried to tell herself a million times that it had been for the best, that she'd been in no condition to care for a young child, let alone go on the run from the Styx with one in tow. But that did nothing to dispel the image of the small boy's tear-filled eyes as he reached out a tiny hand and called for her over and over and over again as she'd slipped into the night.
    The tiny hand wavering in the light of the streetlamps, reaching for her...

    * * * * *

    Something hurt recoiled in her head, like a badly injured animal rolling itself into a ball.
    Her thoughts were so vivid that, as a passerby on the pavement threw a glance at her, she wondered if she'd been talking out loud.
    "Pull yourself together," she urged herself. She had to stay focused. She shook her head to dispel the image of the little face from her mind. Anyway, it was so long ago now and, like the buildings around her, everything had changed, changed irreparably. If the message for he in the dead mailbox was true -- something she couldn't yet bring herself to believe -- then Seth had become Will .
    He had become someone else altogether.
    After several miles, Sarah came to a busy street, with shops and a brick-built monolith of a supermarket. She grumbled beneath her breath as she was forced to stop at a crosswalk in the midst of a small crowd, waiting for the lights to change. She was uncomfortable, and huddled tightly inside her coat. Then, with a beeping, the green man lit up and she crossed the road, forging ahead of the people burdened by their shopping bags.
    It began to rain, and people scurried for cover or back to their cars, leaving the streets less busy. Sarah carried on, unnoticed. She heard Tam's voice, as clearly as if he was walking beside her.
    "See, but don't be seen."
    It was something he had taught her. As young children, in brazen disregard of their parents' instructions, they had often sneaked out of the house. Disguising themselves by donning rags and wiping burnt cork on their faces, they had taken their lives in their hands and gone deep into one of the roughest, most dangerous places you could find in the whole of the Colony -- the Rookeries. Even now she could picture Tam as he was then, his grinning, youthful visage streaked with black and his eyes shining with excitement as the two of them hared away after yet another close scrape. She missed him so much.
    She was pulled once more from her thoughts. A loud exchange in a language she couldn't understand had caught her attention. Several shops down, two workmen were leaving a cafe, its steamy windows illuminated by the striplights inside. She made a beeline for it.
    She ordered a big cup of coffee, paid for it at the counter, then took it over to a table by the window. Sipping the thin, tasteless liquid, she slipped the creased note from her pocket and slowly reread the artless handwriting. She still couldn't bring herself to accept what it said. How could Tam be dead? How could that be? As bad as things were in this Topsoil world, she'd always been able to draw small comfort from the knowledge that her brother was still alive and well in the Colony. It was like a flickering candle at the end of an incredibly long tunnel, the hope that one day she might see him again. And now even that had been taken away from her; now he was dead.
    She flipped over the note and read the other side, then read the entire letter again, shaking her head.
    The note must be wrong; Joe Waites must have been mistaken when he wrote it. How could her own son, Seth, her