Lance checks the files every night. He sneaks into his father's office and looks through the folders in the antique oak desk. He accesses the files on the computer; he's got the passwords because his father was forgetful once, and left them on a slip of paper on the desk. He feels like a spy, and it makes his hands shake and his heart hammer wildly against the inside of his chest.
Then he creeps back to his room and lies breathless in his bed and tries to remember the salty, sharp taste of JC's skin and the way he sighs when Lance kisses his throat.
On Thursday, he finds something. It's just a footnote, but he pricks his ears every time he sees the word 'Genotech', so he notices. He reads and thinks, suddenly, I could do it now. I could.
"You've been going out a lot, son," Father says when Lance is putting on his coat. "I hope it won't affect your studies."
Lance has inherited Father's pale eyes, but where Lance's are merely a peculiar trait, Father has perfected an icy, penetrating stare that makes Lance feel like a bug squirming on an entomologist's pin.
"It won't," he says.
"Very well," Father says, and Lance slips out the door. His bag thumps heavily against his hip when he tries not to run down the stairs.
It's a different quiet in the tunnels, not at all like the quiet of the empty street above. The quiet here is bigger, and every sound becomes bigger, too, with the echo bouncing eagerly between the dirty walls and the wet ground and the rounded ceiling. Lance finds himself creeping along one side of the tunnel.
He never realised there were so much space down here. There are smaller tunnels forking off the big one he's in, in both directions. He has no idea where he's going.
After two hours of walking, he's starting to feel like he should be outside the city limits already. The tunnel looks exactly the same here as it did where he first came down.
He picks a side tunnel at random and turns right. It seems to slope downwards, and that's good, right, he wants to go down.
He clears his throat. "Hello?" he says, and his voice skips on the walls and turns hollow and booming and fades into the darkness outside the bowl of light from his heavy police-issue flashlight. He feels stupid, talking to himself.
The tunnel ahead of him looks the same as the tunnel behind him, and he's sure that if he twirled around a couple of times, he wouldn't know which direction he came from.
He turns around, and there's a small group of people standing thirty yards from him, in a loose formation that looks both casual and somehow, ominously military.
"Are you lost?" one of them, a short guy with curly black hair flowing down his back, says. They're all wearing dark clothes, not quite uniforms.
"I guess I am," Lance says.
"We'll take you back," the guy says and they all take a step forward. Lance takes one backward and puts up his hands.
"no, no, wait--"
"You can't be here," the guy says. He's keeping his voice low, but he's got a gun in his belt, and his friends stand in rigid poses, like police dogs waiting for a signal.
"I'm looking for JC," Lance says. "Um, JC--" and this is when it occurs to him, maybe for the first time, that he really doesn't know anything about JC. Not even his last name, or what the J and the C stand for. John or Jack or Jim, Carter or Culkin or Crane--
They're coming towards him, and he wants to run. He's always surprised by how not scary JC is, after all the stories he's heard about the sewer people, but now he realises that these are the people the stories are about, these are the people who'll kill him and leave his stripped body by a manhole at the edge of town.
He backs up even more, and the short guy nods at his companions, and they close in on him, silent and fast, and he hardly has time to turn before there are hands on his arms, holding him still.
"Don't struggle," the guy tells him, and someone slips a sack over his head. It's rough burlap and scratches his face and smells stale and mouldy, and their hands push at him like a many-legged creature, and he walks.
There are turns, left, right, and stairs down, and at a few points, they make him climb down ladders. After what feels like about twenty-four hours, but is probably no more than thirty minutes, they pull off the sack, and there's light in the hall, and brightly coloured paintings of trees and birds and fields along the walls.
In a bare room, they push him down in a chair and leave him. Someone takes his bag.
He waits and keeps himself from chewing his nails. His mother would smear Tabasco on his fingertips when he was little to keep him from doing it.
The door opens, and he hears JC's voice say, "--are you talking about? I haven't--" and he looks up and sees JC stand frozen in the doorway.
"Hey," Lance says and squeezes his shaking hands between his knees. "I have to tell you something."
He remembers Chris as a fast-talking guy with a quick grin and sarcastic humour, who'd at some point suddenly and curiously grown a tall, fluffy-haired shadow. Now he's narrow-eyed and dour, and his eyes are sharp and unforgiving, and he turns to JC the second he comes into the room and says, "are you fucking NUTS? You told him where we are?"
"He's got something to tell you," JC says patiently, and strokes Chris' shoulder gently. Lance has to force his hands from curling into fists.
"What?" Chris says and turns to Lance. "What do you know?"
Lance swallows and says, "Someone's notified Genotech that their property has turned up in Pen 46. There was a short report, I've got the print--"
"Fuck," Chris says frantically, "fuck, fuck, fuck--"
"Chris, wait," JC says and puts his hands on his shoulders, leans in. Lance looks down. "Let him finish. We have to make plans. Okay?"
"But--"
"Plans."
Chris pushes against JC, and Lance wants to yell at him to stop bitching and for fuck's sake, stop making JC look at him with concerned eyes. Instead he pulls the crumpled paper from under his shirt, takes a breath and says, "Prisoner 445B-900-G79 is Justin, I double-checked. He shares a cell with prisoner 984A-900-TT9, Nickolas Carter."
They don't react; JC is still holding Chris' shoulders. Lance clears his throat. "Carter," he says. "Nick Carter? Doesn't ring a bell?"
"Should it?" Chris says curtly.
"It was all over the news five years ago--"
"We don't get the news here," JC says, "or in the camps."
Lance looks back at his paper. His hands are leaving sweat smudges on the white surface. "Carter's father was head of the genetic research labs at Genotech."
"Oh, sonofabitch," Chris mutters. "I'll fuckin--"
"He'd recognise Justin. He wouldn't hesitate to use the knowledge. I think--" but he never gets to finish his sentence, because Chris twirls around, wild-eyed and punches the wall so hard Lance feels it in his own knuckles.
JC puts his hands over his face like a frightened child, and Chris swears loudly, desperately. His hand is dripping blood on the concrete. Lance wants to do something but can't seem to move. He has no idea how they handle things down here. He has no idea what Chris means to JC.
JC's hands fall from his face. "Chris--" he says.
"Shut up," Chris snaps, and now Lance moves, gets out of his chair, his legs moving independently of his thoughts, and he almost reaches Chris before JC's hands are on his shoulders, JC's voice whispers in his ear,
"Don't--"
"Sorry," Lance says and stops staring at Chris. After a little while, the door slams.
"He's so afraid," JC says softly and Lance nods.
"I know. I know." He leans closer to JC, so close that he can smell JC's skin, that smell that's not clean but not unpleasant, either. "I had to tell you, I thought. I don't know if there's any way to get him out, but I thought I'd--"
"Thank you," JC says and kisses him, just briefly, and it's a little hard to breathe. Lance is suddenly too aware of how deep down they are; not that he knows how deep the sewer system goes, but he can feel the weight of the earth and concrete and rock above him. It's like being blind, somehow, not seeing the sky, no windows, no doors that open into the outdoors, no trees or flowers or anything.
"We can go to my room," JC says. His hands are gentle on Lance's shoulders, and he's warm and beautiful and welcoming. And he looks happy, the way a man on his dying bed can be happy if a nightingale sings outside his window.
There are no nightingales here, either. I can't, he thinks. I can't. I can't.
"I have to get back," Lance says. I can't, I can't, I can't.
JC lets go of him and takes a step back. "Okay," he says and rubs his neck. "Okay. I'll take you up."
His bag lies abandoned in a corner. "I brought you some. Um. Some stuff," he says and pushes it into JC's lap. JC looks down at it. "It's, um. Stuff. Underwear and, um. Shampoo and razors. Things. I figured you didn't have that much stuff. I thought. Um."
JC looks at him, and Lance feels his face heat. JC looks tired and there are dark circles under his eyes. He's pale. They're all pale down here, even Chris, who shouldn't be pale, not with his colouring. JC is ghost-white and Chris is sallow, and Lance remembers that Justin's skin was a perfect pale rose and cream colour.
"Thank you," JC says. "We don't."
JC doesn't come all the way up. He stops and says, "Just keep going down this one and you'll come to the main tunnel. Just pick any exit."
Lance kisses him, and when he starts walking and looks over his shoulder, JC waves at him without smiling.
He climbs into his room through the window, and the note he left for his parents is still on his desk. He burns it in the fireplace in the sitting room and doesn't cry.
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