Chapter 8: The Price of Breathing

I wish I could tell you I had an uncanny map of the lower catacombs, and that it was mere moments before I found a ladder to the surface due to the fact I could plan for anything. That would be fiction, and I’ve written all this to tell the truth well, as much of the truth as a Rogue can stand.

It was hours long, and the adrenaline had long since burned off. Those hours were disjointed, with chaos behind me, and seemingly all around me at several points. There were a couple near-falls into levels of filth that I would not set pen to paper to describe for fear I would lose my last meal, or lose whoever reads this tale.

But somehow, some way, we made it out.

The Inspector was as exhausted as I was. Probably more so. His night had started with a beating; mine had just started with throwing a dagger poorly. But the first threads of grey replacing pitch black in the night sky was our first sight when we pulled ourselves out of an aqueduct outlet in the slums.

At that point, we collapsed onto the stone, trying to catch our breath, chests heaving from our prolonged exertion.

The air out here smelled of damp sea-salt, rotting fish, and cheap chimney smoke—the foul, beautiful scent of Totar City’s worst neighborhood. I had never inhaled anything quite so sweet in my entire life.

Beside me, the Chief Inspector lay flat on his back against the damp cobblestones, staring blankly up at the pale morning clouds. His expensive coat was ruined, torn at the shoulders and caked in dark, unmentionable sewer sludge. The left side of his face was swollen from where Harian’s enforcers had worked him over, and his breath came in jagged, wheezing gasps.

For a long time, neither of us said anything. We just lay there like two washed-up corpses waiting for the tide to go back out.