Arcane Exfil

Chapter 78: Dead Rails

Cole stepped off the last stair into what had once been a transit concourse.

The first thing he noticed – or rather, the only thing he could notice – was that the place was a hell of a lot bigger than any subway station he’d ever been in. The ceiling alone would’ve been impressive aboveground, but underground it felt almost absurd. Hell, it was high enough that his NODs could barely make it out, held up by support columns that explained how.

Each one was a thick spiral of structural glass that fanned out near the top into something like a tree canopy, spreading the load across the vaulted ceiling above. The whole concourse basically looked like someone had grown a forest out of glass and poured a subway station around it.

Outside of movies, Cole had never seen any subway that looked like an airport. Normally, cities built subway systems because they had to – not enough room on the surface, too many people, not enough space. Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong had all gone underground out of necessity, and while their stations could get pretty massive in their own right, everything in them existed to serve the foot traffic. For example, the little 7-Elevens and food stalls in Shinjuku didn’t take up much room; every square foot had to pull its weight.

The Istraynians, on the other hand, clearly had a different set of assumptions. Like, these storefronts were deep enough to have been actual shops and restaurants – not the grab-and-go stuff he associated with underground retail, but real, full-sized spaces. A few of them still had signage above the entrances, none of it legible to him. Whatever had been inside was long gone, cleared out with the same thoroughness he’d seen in the buildings above.

Despite that, they still retained some of their former glory – mostly because sealing the entrance had protected everything down here from centuries of weather. Even stripped bare, the storefronts remained impressive enough that Cole couldn’t help but wonder what they’d looked like when they were actually open. That alone probably gave him the best read on the Istraynians he’d gotten so far.

See, back home, if a city had freeways, it didn’t really bother with subways – the money went where the people were, and that was usually the road. The Istraynians had apparently built both. Not only that, they’d built their subways with more architectural ambition than cities that actually depended on theirs. Whatever that said about them as a civilization, they clearly hadn’t been hurting for cash.

Cole gave the concourse another few seconds, then got the team moving. They filed past the storefronts at a careful pace, footsteps flattened by whatever material the Istraynians had used for flooring – something smooth and faintly resilient, like stone with a bit of give to it.

It didn’t take long for them to run into the fare gates. The turnstiles were mechanical – metal ratchet arms bolted into glass housings that matched the rest of the station’s design. Cole pushed one, but it wouldn’t budge – at least, not without a coin, which he obviously didn’t have. They’d held up well, probably because there wasn’t much in them to degrade.

Fortunately, the housings were only about waist-high, so hopping over wasn’t much of an ask. It did make him wonder, though – if this was all that stood between paying and not paying, the Istraynians must’ve had quite a high-trust society. Which, hopefully, meant the rest of the subway would be just as easy to get through.

They hopped the gates and kept moving.

Past the gates, the concourse opened up into a wider plaza that must have served as the station’s main commercial level. Here they found more storefronts, all of them preserved well enough to make an archaeologist cry. Even the floors looked barely worn. If it weren’t for the dust and the silence, the place could’ve passed for a station that had just closed for the night.

They cleared the vicinity in about five minutes, finding nothing of significance. Sure enough, the place was a tomb.

After that, Cole made his way back to the big fat transit map that dominated the main thoroughfare. The thing was fully intact and about as detailed as he could’ve asked for – a full transit network, easily on par with what you’d find in any major city back on Earth.

He pulled out his phone and snapped a picture of the whole thing. Moments like these were exactly why he kept it charged.

He then held up his Ashpoint map alongside it to cross-reference.

Finding their position wasn’t too hard; the subway map had a small ‘you are here’ indicator near the bottom-left corner that matched the street layout they’d come in from. From there, he traced east along a coastal line that ran parallel to the waterfront until he hit a station about half a mile out, directly beneath the port compound, with two exits marked inside the perimeter. One of them opened into some sort of plaza or administrative area near the central quay.

That was their way in.

The route wasn’t a straight shot, though. The coastal line didn’t originate from this station, so they’d have to take a connecting branch one stop south to an interchange, transfer over, and follow it three stops east to the port station. All told, they’d have to crawl through about a mile and a half of underground corridor – easy work, assuming nothing along the way was collapsed, flooded, or inhabited.

Cole pulled out a pencil and traced the route onto his Ashpoint map, marking the interchange and the port exit. He double-checked the station sequence against the transit map once more before pocketing both.

“Got a route,” he said, turning back to the group. “Mile and a half through the subways, give or take. Connects to a station under the port.”

Mack looked like he had something to say about the whole scenario, but he knew better than to jinx their creepy underground dungeon crawl.

With everyone more or less on board, Cole laid out the path briefly before nodding toward the platform access at the far end of the plaza.

They made their way there, only to find that every opening had been shuttered, metal doors welded to their frames.

Cole counted six sets – three for inbound, three for outbound – and every single one had been fused solid enough that he couldn’t even find a seam worth prying at.

Miles knocked on the nearest door with the back of his fist. The dull thud that came back suggested it was solid metal. “Well, that ain’t ideal.”

“A profound observation,” Vale muttered.

Mack leaned sideways to look down the row. “They’re all like this?”

“Looks like,” Cole said.

Ethan, meanwhile, had already gone down the line on his own. By the time Cole looked over, he was on his way back, brushing dust off his knees. He seemed like he had something.

“So, a couple of these are actually pretty clean,” Ethan said. “Good bead, solid penetration. Whoever did those knew what they were doing.” He jerked a thumb toward the far end. “The rest aren’t even close. Slag everywhere, bead’s pulling away from the base metal, heat’s all over the place. Like they grabbed whoever was standing around and handed him a torch – or grabbed mages with good output, but no welding experience whatsoever.”

“So, multiple welders,” Cole said.

“At least three, probably one each, so six. The good ones – man, they’re so good they might’ve been the same guy. The bad ones, on the other hand, don’t even match each other.”

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“Think we can get through the weak ones?” Cole asked.

Ethan wobbled a hand. “Probably not. They’re bad, yeah, but bad welds are still welds. You’d need something that actually cuts through the seam. If we try to ram it, it’ll just deform the metal. Could work after a while, but I don’t think we have that much time.”

“How ’bout we try the hinges?” Miles said.

Ethan shook his head. “Already checked. They welded those too.”

“What of alternative paths?” Elina asked.

“Like maintenance shafts or whatever? Didn’t see anything,” Mack said. “Could go looking, but honestly, if they went through the trouble of welding six doors and then burying the entrance on top of that, I kinda doubt they left a back door open.”

Cole agreed. Nothing about the Istraynians so far had suggested they did things halfway.

“Graves, can you cut through the weld with magic?”

“It could be done, Captain, but the force required would not go unnoticed. Severing fused metal is no small expenditure, and at this distance from the ritual, I should not care to test whether they are watching.”

Cole rubbed his chin. “Alright, scratch that, then. Walker, can you breach it?”

Ethan felt the door for a second. “I mean, I can, but it’s the same issue. I’d need a lot of juice.”

Miles pushed off the wall. “We’re wastin’ time jawin’ ’round like this. I say fuck it. Find the weakest spot and bust through. That port’s buried under rock and concrete – if they can still sniff us out through all that, then hell, the op’s cooked anyway.”

“Yeah, seriously,” Mack said. “If only we had, like, an angle grinder or a water jet or something. This’d be over in ten minutes.”

“Yeah, and a cold beer and a helicopter while we’re at it,” Miles said.

Mack shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

Cole had been turning the problem over while the rest of the team talked, but Mack’s comment about water jets really struck something. He’d seen it done industrially back home, where shops used high-pressure streams thin enough to slice through steel plate like it wasn’t even there. The whole thing worked because forcing water through a narrow enough opening made it fast enough to erode damn near anything. In theory, the magic required to pressurize a stream like that should be a fraction of whatever cutting spell Graves had mentioned. The only question was whether magic could replicate what a waterjet did back home.

He turned to the group. “What if we cut through it with water?”

His guys got it – or at least got that he was going somewhere with it. The Celdornians, not so much.

“Forgive me, Captain – water?” Graves frowned. “I do not see how that is to breach it.”

“It will if you move it fast enough,” Cole said. He turned to the Celdornians. “Imagine you’ve got a waterskin. What happens when you squeeze it? The water shoots out fast, right? And if you make the hole smaller, it comes out even faster.”

The Celdornians nodded along.

“Now imagine you keep going. Smaller hole, more pressure, over and over. Back home, there are machines that do exactly that – force water through a gap about as wide as a hair. By the time it comes out the other end, the stream is moving fast enough to cut through solid steel.”

“So here’s what I’m thinking.” Cole raised a hand and formed a small barrier – fully enclosed, about the size of a fist. “You fill something like this with water, leave one small opening—” he opened a pinhole at the base, “—and then squeeze.”

He compressed the barrier slowly and uniformly. “Water’s got nowhere to go except through the hole. The smaller the hole, the faster it comes out. Get it tight enough and you’ve got a stream that’ll cut through that weld like it’s not even there.”

Graves studied the barrier in Cole’s hand for a moment, then looked at the welded seam. “The expenditure would be far less – of that I am confident. It surely demands far less of the caster than tearing the metal apart by force.” He went quiet for a moment. “I have not attempted the like before, nor do I know any who have. But if the water behaves as you say, I see no reason it should fail.”

Elina and Vale affirmed their understanding as well.

“Now, our only problem is water,” Cole said. “We don’t have much in the canteens, and I’d rather not burn through our drinking supply.”

“Nor need we,” Vale responded right away. “There is water enough above, and these shops are hardly wanting for vessels.”

“Yeah, that’s true. Alright, let’s do that.”

It didn’t take long to find the containers they needed. Elina came back from an abandoned florist’s shop carrying two glass vases, each about a gallon in capacity, dusty but perfectly intact.

Cole gave each a soft blast of air to clear out the dust, then handed them off to Mack and Miles. “Here. Vale, watch their backs.”

They headed back up to the surface, vases in hand.

After about five minutes, they returned with full vases.

Cole got to work first. He siphoned a ball of water and formed a barrier around it – enclosed, tight, pinhole at the base – then started compressing. The stream came out wide at first, but all it took was narrowing the aperture until it was powerful enough to hiss against the metal. From there, it was just a matter of running it along the line.

The work was slow and draining – kind of like shaving his balls, but with less drastic consequences if he lost focus. After a few minutes he swapped out for Mack, who swapped for Ethan, who swapped for Miles. Whoever wasn’t cutting held security.

When his guys rotated off, the Celdornians picked it up without much trouble. Naturally, they had some things to say about the creative use of magic, plus the realization that this spell could be used offensively. But once their moment of astonishment had passed, they put in good work.

It took around twenty minutes of that before the last stretch of seam finally gave way. The door groaned, leaned, and slammed flat onto the landing with a bang that made Cole’s ears ring. Shit, it sounded like a whole fucking car crash.

Cole threw a fist up and drew his cutlass, fully expecting the entire tunnel system to wake up and come looking for them.

But, somehow, nothing stirred. Shocking as that was, he wasn’t about to question it. He waved the team forward before their luck had a chance to change its mind.

Three steps into the stairwell, something hit the back of Cole’s throat hard enough to make him gag. It was rot, and it permeated everything. He’d been around enough dead things to know when decomposition was still active, and this was definitely still active.

Which meant something had been alive down here. Recently.

And if something had gotten in, there must have been other access points elsewhere, be it ones the Istraynians had missed or natural cracks in the infrastructure. On the one hand, that was potentially useful to know. On the other, it meant the entire network from here on out could be filled to the brim with hostiles.

Elina touched his arm and cast something as they descended – a small pocket of clean air that settled around the two of them like a veil. Cole hadn’t even asked for it, but he appreciated it all the same. Everyone else followed along with their own air pockets.

“There is more mana here than there ought to be,” she said quietly. “Our magic should evade notice amid all this, I think.” She did not at once release his arm. “Yet this mana must proceed from something, and I think it not a thing we should seek to encounter.”

Great. Still, being able to cast with less restraint meant they could handle problems without their hands tied behind their backs. He’d take the tradeoff.

They reached the platform after two flights of stairs. It was wider than he’d expected, tracks sunk into channels on either side, a broad central walkway running between them. The columns continued down here, holding up well despite the passage of time. The whole level had the same time-capsule quality as the concourse – sealed, pristine, unmarred by anything except whatever had been leaving bones and shit around.

They moved onto the walkway in a low file, Cole on point. The footing was solid, but the edges were hard to make out even with NODs, and the last thing he needed was someone rolling an ankle in a subway trench.

They’d just passed a set of benches near the platform edge when Cole’s boot crunched on something – almost like a dried leaf.

He looked down and found bones, likely from small animals. Rats, maybe? The pieces were scattered along the base of the platform wall, every one of them picked clean, with some of the larger ones cracked open. A few of the smaller skeletons were just gone from the ribcage up, crushed flat or missing pieces entirely. Clearly, they didn’t die of natural causes.

The bone clusters continued along the walkway, trailing in the same direction Cole needed to go – south, toward the interchange.

That was about when the chittering started. Rapid clicks emerged from somewhere ahead, echoing off the walls from enough directions that Cole couldn’t get a fix on any of them. He wanted to say it sounded like rats, but rat chittering wasn’t supposed to have a deep-ass pitch like this.

Cole raised his cutlass and pulled dust and loose debris from the ground into a spread of stone projectiles, condensing them into a hovering array at his side.

“Possible contact ahead. Keep to swords and magic. Go loud only if we need to.”