Chapter 4: Hidden Hatch
1266 Words
Rotation came early in the week, and with it, Faris's reprieve from the ceremony.
No sermons. No chants. Only filter fan whir and the constant drip of condensation into catchment bowls. Down here, below the algae chambers, the world was sane—green metrics, clean inputs, clear results. Nothing sacred. Nothing mystical.
Just work.
He reset his mask and leaned over alongside Basin 9A. The algae bloom seemed anemic again, clinging by threads to the nutrient film draped across the basin's surface. This same tank had produced ten liters a week last year. Now? Under five.
He checked the readings, double-checked with his tablet, then blinked twice.
No anomaly detected.
System at optimal parameters.
"Liar," he said.
Faris was sensible enough not to trust system readings. He realized the pressure lines were re-routed—someone had changed the flow network. But no matter how many times he tried to backtrack the override, the logs came back blanked.
Bent over still, he stretched to reach the cleaning pole and began skimming the algae layer. His gloved hand was in rhythmic motion, scraping sludge off the inner walls. The soothing gurgle of the recycler filled the silence.
Then—clang.
The pole struck something.
Not the rounded inner lip of the basin, but metal. Flat. Hollow.
He stiffened.
Leaned in closer.
There, barely to one side of the drainage seam in the corner, half-hidden under a cluster of dry microflora, was a panel. Blunt. Strengthened. Rectangular. Certainly not part of the original design.
Faris swept more garbage away. The panel was secured by a rusty padlock. He frowned. No one used padlocks anymore—not here. Not in a dome where the world breathed on biometric or clearance tag screens. Padlocks were an anachronistic thing, of a past day. A less frenetic one.
He looked down the corridor. No one.
He crouched in and tracked the contours. Welded tight against the basin wall, the hatch featured no hinges to spot. Simply a rusted handle, dented as though it had been kicked—a hard one—at least once.
Faris's brain skittered along too quickly for his liking.
It wasn't on any schematic.
It wasn't in his clearance package.
And it wasn't here last year.
He touched his tablet and called up ancient blueprints from the Old Maintenance Logs archives—before the Ration Era. The original vault layouts, when his father had synchronized fluid checks. Before the League, before the Cathedral, before water became worship.
There it was. A brief note. Tunnel Delta-4. Retired after the Reclamation Riots.
His father had told him of that period—whispered warning stories. Of how the men had pilfered water. Smuggled it through backflow vents and shattered waste shafts. Of how there had been a complete system of tunnels, secret and winding, that had been sealed by the League.
"Those tunnels are accursed now," his father had whispered once, in the years of drought before he disappeared. "They exhale the dead."
Faris had giggled then, as a child. But now, on his knees before this hatch, it was not amusing.
He stood, cleaned his gloves, and looked again about the deserted corridor.
He must open it.
But he could not afford to be discovered.
---
That evening, Faris didn't sleep.
The hatch kept revolving in his mind. So did the voice of his father. And the rumors of the parched sectors that nobody was allowed to venture into. Of vanishments. Of League officials who never came back from "deep vault inspections.".
He waited until third shift, when the water curfew sent most of Sector 3 into darkness. The dome lights softened to amber, bathing all in that warm light. He snatched a pry tool, a torch, and a can of lube-gel from the equipment shed—standard issue, traceless.
Then he made his way out of the maintenance quarter and down through the subfloor.
The basin corridor was dark now, red emergency slits the sole illumination. He ran, his heart battering. At the concealed hatch, it greeted him like an old boil: unsightly, neglected, silently decaying.
Got down on his knees.
Spray the padlock with lube-gel.
Waited.
Then inserted the pry tool.
The lock creaked open faintly.
Faris blinked, surprised at how easily it had given. As if someone had intended it to be found—but not anyone specifically.
He breathed, took the handle in his hand, and pulled.
The panel creaked open with the whine of rusty steel unsealed from silence.
A whoosh of stale air met him—warm, sour, with a metallic trace. The stench of old circuits and stagnant water.
Outside the hatch, a tunnel. Smooth. Slightly pitched. Through it ran crumbling copper wire and shattered ceramic tiles. It descended like the gullet of a well.
Faris hesitated.
Then stepped in.
---
The fall was steep, walls slick with condensation. His beam of light skipped over groups of pipes and rotting cables, a few still humming feebly. Tags of old inspections clung to wall bolts at irregular intervals, pale with age:
DELTA-4: Clean Water Outflow — 23.04.108 P.R.E.
He knelt to examine one, brushing aside mildew. "PRE." Pre-Ration Era. Over fifty cycles ago.
Deeper still, he dug more.
Footprints. Old, yes—but human.
And not his father's size. These were small, new. Light.
Faris's chest tightened.
Someone had been here recently.
He picked up speed, not to slip. The grade smoothed out into an opening as large as a hydroprocessor tank. Through the chamber, ranks of old filtration tanks stood like halted giants. Some had been ripped open—hollowed out. Wires yanked from their sheathing. Console screens broken.
And hung on the near wall, covered by a layer of shredded insulation?
A portable coolant unit. Powered up.
Brand new.
He scanned the room. His light caught something sparkling—an emblem on a case.
The Independent Engineers' Guild. Shattered cycles ago. Renamed "Water Dissidents" by the League.
He hunched, his heart thumping.
They were meant to be gone. Erased. Purged.
But here—in the darkness of the algae vaults—they had returned.
And the tunnels his father used to reclaim?
They were active again.
---
He sensed the whisper before detecting the light.
Footsteps.
Voices.
Flustered, Faris extinguished his torch and pressed himself against the wall.
The hatch had creaked open again.
Two figures emerged.
A child—tall, swift, short braided hair. And a step behind her, a grizzled man with a cough.
"Can't stay," she panted. "They were after us. I don't know if we lost them."
"We have to put it up now," the man coughed. "The public must see the diverted flows. The stolen reserves. If we wait—"
A ringing c***k cut him off—the beat of boots on metal behind them.
A League patrol.
She cursed, grasped the man's hand. They vanished down another tunnel Faris had not seen—half-consumed, but serviceable.
The memory of the datapad in her palm was the last thing he recalled.
Blue screen. Running code.
Faris's vision reeled.
Redirected currents.
Pilfered buffers.
So it was real.
The League was not rationing. It was hoarding.
---
He lay there until the boots receded.
Then he crawled out the hatch, shutting the hatch behind him, and slid silently back down the basin corridor as a ghost gliding between rocks.
He didn't sleep that night either.
But he did dream.
Of tunnels.
Of codes in secret.
And of a voice that hadn't spoken in years—his father's—saying:
"The truth is buried, son. But it still breathes."
---
- Writer
