Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

The murmur of voices increased as the tunnel sloped downward, leading to a rough-cut hole in the wall as tall as Andie, and a scene she would never forget. As she stepped through the opening after Cal and Mani, they encountered dozens of people in terrible physical condition, squatting or lying alongside a canal of fetid water that reeked of raw sewage. After choking back a surge of bile, she held her nose to keep from gagging. The people were naked or clothed in rags, missing fingers and toes and sometimes limbs, some of their faces so misshapen they resembled squashed clay. The rounded brick tunnel was pockmarked with jagged holes, as if riddled with the same disease as the unfortunate souls it sheltered. A few of the lepers were eating rice out of bowls with dirt-encrusted hands and passing around a jug of water. Some of them were talking in small groups. Some were moaning. Some were dying.

All of them had put their hope on a sailboat that had left its harbor long, long ago.

The brackish water glistened like oil by the light of an old gas lantern propped on a stack of bricks. Mosquitoes and flies swarmed with impunity. The humidity and the unrelenting odor made Andie dizzy. At first she was afraid, but as Mani picked his way through the small crowd, she realized the poor people shrinking into the darkened recesses of the tunnel were even more afraid of them.

Mani led Andie and Cal along the raised edge of the sewer canal, into the gloom of the tunnel. As soon as they left the leper colony behind, Mani’s candle a pinprick of light in the Stygian blackness, the silt and muck deepened until Andie found herself wading up to her calves. She forced herself not to think about the filth through which she was walking.

“How far are we going?” she asked.

“Soon,” Mani replied.

“Can you be a little more specific?” Cal said in frustration.

A scream echoed in the tunnel behind them. Is the priest or the Chinese man still following us? Are they forcing one of those poor people to talk?

They passed through the tunnel as quickly as they could, hoping the Ascendants would give up the chase now that they had the Star Phone. The muck was too deep to run through, and their slow pace was maddening. Soon they heard more voices and entered a section similar to the one they had just left, filled with boil-covered cripples and misshapen lepers and even a corpse rotting away on the periphery of the colony. The sight turned her stomach. She wondered if this was how soldiers felt amid the mass carnage of a battlefield, with all the viscera and blood and existential shock of human misery laid bare, trying to stay alive while forced to philosophize in tiny out-of-time moments on the sanctity of human life.

Shockingly, a canoe was moored in the sewer canal. The vessel was made of rotting boards that barely looked seaworthy, and had a tiny motor rigged to the end with wires. Mani walked quickly toward the canoe, chattering in Hindi and waving his hands.

A young man in ripped trousers rose from the walkway beside the canoe, set down a bag of takeout food—this seemed so absurd to Andie she almost giggled—and wiped his hands on a greasy cloth. When Mani turned to point at Andie, a smirk appeared on the man’s face as he folded his arms and glanced back the way they had come. Andie’s interpretation was that he understood the danger and would use it as a bargaining tool. Yet when he turned to Andie and demanded his price for the journey in fluent but harshly accented English, it was unbelievably low.

She made a show of protest but solemnly agreed to his price, then stepped onto the canoe before she was asked, pulling Cal along with her. The man untied the vessel and started the motor. Mani jumped on as well, jabbering in the man’s ear and casting worried looks behind them. A light appeared in the hole they had entered through just as the motor sputtered and died.

Andie clenched her fists and willed the motor to restart. Now the man was casting worried looks at the tunnel himself and staring at Andie and Cal as if wondering if he should cut his losses. The light grew steadily closer. Andie gripped the side of the canoe in fear.

Finally the engine caught, and the vessel began to slither through the water. The inhabitants of the sad outpost paid them no attention as they slid into the abyss, guided by the bobbing headlamp attached to the front of the canoe. A few minutes into the journey, when the immediate threat of pursuit had receded and Andie’s adrenaline had ebbed, she leaned over and vomited. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and watched with hooded eyes as they passed two more of the subterranean colonies. On occasion, the headlamp would reveal a lone figure or a couple shuffling alone in the darkness who seemed more like lost wraiths drifting through the underworld than living human beings.

The canoe pilot informed them that the tunnels crisscrossed the city, a relic of the Raj. Manholes used to provide access every hundred feet, but the modern expansion of the city had covered most of them, leading to the need for alternative transport for the underground denizens of Kolkata. Andie wondered how lepers could afford to use the canoes on a regular basis, and how they paid the fees. Probably begging like Mani.

The more twists and turns they made through the warren of tunnels, the more relieved Andie grew. The passages all looked identical. No one was following them through that maze, and they sure as hell weren’t going to catch them on CCTV.

About half an hour into the journey, the pilot killed the engine in a flooded tunnel lit with a splash of sunlight. He