Read Undercity for Free Online

Majdas, they genuinely seemed to love Dayj.
    Ahktar spoke. “Major, can you find my son?”
    “If it’s humanly possible,” I said.
    He extended his arm and his sleeve fell down, revealing the jeweled cuff of his shirt. A carved box lay in his palm, wood with enameled panels. “I don’t know if it will help, but Dayj valued this.”
    I took the box. Tiny mosaics covered its sides. “What’s inside?”
    “Dirt. I couldn’t open it, but I analyzed it with a mesh system.” He pushed his hand through his thinning hair. “Dayj has had it for several years. I don’t know why he kept the dirt, or if it can help you find him, but anything is worth a try.”
    I rubbed my thumb over the box’s tiled panels, which showed birds in flight, blue, green, and red against an ivory background. I had seen plenty of puzzle boxes, but none like this. “Thank you.”
    “Just find my son.” In a low voice, he added, “Alive.”
    So. Ahktar had acknowledged what none of us wanted to admit. Dayj’s chances of staying alive and unharmed on his own might be as vanishing as the ocean beyond the City of Cries.

IV
    The Black Mark
    I spent the endless Raylicon evening in the penthouse of a tower. The building belonged to the Majdas. Its sunken living room was larger than my whole apartment in Selei City, and one entire wall consisted of dichromesh glass, which polarized during the day to mute sunlight. Tonight it gave me a panoramic view of the City of Cries to the east, the Vanished Sea stretching everywhere else, and the gloriously crimson sunset that flamed on the horizon where the sea met the sky.
    I sat sprawled in a white chair near the window while I fooled with the box that Dayj’s father had given me. I could have a mesh node figure it out, but its solution might offer a clue to Dayj. After twenty minutes of my poking and sliding its panels, the top opened with a loud click. Ahktar was right: the box held dirt. Or dust, actually. That was it. Just dust.
    Red and blue dust.
    I knew where to look for Dayj.
    * * *
    No water had flowed for millennia in the aqueducts beneath Cries. The empty conduits networked the subterranean spaces under the Vanished Sea and the ruins of the old city. They were actually more like underground canals, but what few records we had of ancient Cries referred to them as aqueducts. The people who lived here used that name to mean the entire undercity, a world of ancient waterways, yes, but also mazes of tunnels and caves. In past ages, mineral-laden water had trickled through the stone, dripping from the ceilings to form stalactites that hung like stone icicles, or forming stalagmites on the floor, gnarled cones of rock that thrust up from the ground. Those eerie formations filled the caverns like a huge lacework of rock created by some mad giant.
    The ancient builders had created stone mosaics on the walls, artwork so well designed it had survived for thousands of years. Totem poles of gargoyles grimaced at corners, and pillars stood like sentinels at the junctions where canals met. Those long-dead architects had been geniuses, using beams, supports, and arches to support an underground network that lasted for millennia. But to what purpose? These canals couldn’t have all carried water even when the sea existed, and they had been built after the Vanished Sea did its vanishing act. The canals were too large and on too many levels, stacked at least three, even four levels deep. Such a gargantuan system would transfer incredible amounts of liquid. For what? No one had an answer. Like so much of our history, their reason for existence had vanished in the Dark Ages after the collapse of the Ruby Empire.
    Today I walked along an edge of one canal. I wore black trousers, a black muscle shirt, and black boots, and no jacket hid my shoulder holster or its pulse gun. A laser stylus hung from a cord around my neck. Its actual purpose was to write on holographic displays, but I used it as a lamp. One of my many