The Colony Book 2: Revolution

Chapter 5-1

Chapter 5

In all my life, I had never heard of a monorail running under the Colony. The Code didn’t mention it, and neither did anything I’d seen in the Archives. Obviously the tunnels were no longer in use, but were they even still there?

Sinda didn’t know. As she led us down the other length of hallway, following the tracks beside us, she admitted, “No one’s ever bothered going that way, really. The lights don’t work, so it’s dark as hell, so if you think the bridge is scary…”

She trailed off and I glanced back, into the impenetrable maw gaping behind us. Kyer’s hand tightened in mine.

“We should take a look some time,” he murmured.

He was right. The people who lived here might be afraid of the bridge, but we weren’t. We’d come across it, after all.

But Sinda shook her head. “Stupid idea. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. How are you going to pick your way over broken tiles and busted pipes, rotted track, who knows what else? And that’s probably where all the rats hide out. Down there in the dark, away from us.”

“You’re just saying that,” I said, but my voice sounded shaky and unsure to my own ears, and I knew it sounded wimpy to Sinda’s because she gave me a smug little grin over her shoulder.

We walked single-file down the platform, which had narrowed as it followed the tracks. The lights above us guttered from time to time, but for the most part, they shone with a sickly yellow light. As we followed Sinda, she explained there was a generator that controlled the lighting underground. The setup took a lot of fuel, which they used to be able to find hidden in wells under gas stations and such, but over the years, their resources had deteriorated and they now had to travel farther each time they needed to replenish.

Kyer was behind me, out of sight, but every now and then he would squeeze my hand, a reaction to something Sinda said. I knew he didn’t understand most of it. Maybe if we had visited the Electric Center back at the Colony, it might have made more sense, but that was one of the trips scheduled for later in our schooling, and we didn’t really know much about how lighting worked beyond brightening as you entered a room or dimming as you left.

The setup in the subway seemed counterproductive, to be honest. The lights seemed to run all the time. When I glanced beyond Sinda, I saw a well-lit platform as far as it stretched. Wouldn’t they consume less fuel if they only turned on sections of the tunnels when they needed to be used?

But I suspected Sinda wouldn’t be able to answer those questions, and in the short time we’d been with her, I had noticed she had a bad habit of denouncing anything she didn’t know. If I asked why they didn’t conserve their fuel, I risked getting called stupid again, or some weird variation of it, and I didn’t relish that happening.

Still, as we walked, we were hemmed in by the wall on one side and the open track on the other, and it seemed stupid to me that such expanses should be lit when no one was around. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Why don’t you just turn out the lights when you aren’t using them?” I asked.

Sinda flipped her hair over her shoulder. “It isn’t that simple,” she said.

Kyer muttered into my ear, “Of course it isn’t. Why would it be?”

I stifled a snicker.

“For starters,” Sinda said, throwing us a dark look, “if they turned out the lights, we wouldn’t be able to see where we’re going.”

I told her, “In the Colony, we have a system set up so the lights sense when we come into a room—”

“In the Colony,” Sinda mimicked in a high, sing-song voice.

I glanced over my shoulder at Kyer. “What?”

Sinda stopped and, hand on her hip, whirled to face us. “If you guys had everything so great in the Colony, why’d you bother leaving in the first place?”