Gale quickly settled into a routine: Twelve hours in the sewers, six hours of school, and six hours sleeping after he staggered to his room back in the Ghetto. His nominal assignment was to Precinct Seven, a long strip of utility complexes that, along with the Ghetto, formed the east edge of south Capitol. However, his work took him all over the city, and he soon admitted to himself that it suited him better than any alternative, especially when he was on Asher's crew. Not a day went by down there without some surprise, and no matter how unpleasant it might be, it kept true monotony from setting in. Classes, by comparison, would consist of sitting in a room full of bright lights that made him dizzy, casually watching Foxy to relieve the tedium while a professor spend hours meticulously explaining what he could work out for himself in half an hour of reading.
Gale and Asher descended to a flagged junction and found themselves waist deep in water. Each junction had two pipelines on each side, covered by a grate. The parallel pipelines allowed water to contnue to flow through one if the other was blocked. Asher checked the grates on the left, and Gale checked the grates on the right. "Now here's your problem," Asher said.
He turned a handle and flipped the grate sideways, revealing a mass of something plastered across the entire grate. Gale took a look, and managed not to puke. He had learned enough to be familiar with the creatures that existed in self-sustaining populations: rats, lobser-sized freshwater crustaceans, the occasional cat or dog, and fishes that could go cross-country for some distance. This was nothing like amy of them. He wasn't even sure if it was plant or animal. It looked vaguely like one of those strange marine creatures that were more like plants than an animal. He was further revolted to see the tendrils of the mass wriggle at Asher's touch. "What is it?" Gale asked.
"Exotic aquarium pet, probably Muttation," Asher said, raising an axe. "Not our department; just start chopping... We have do deal with this all the time. The snobs are always breeding new things, and flushing them when the next thing comes along. They think their pets will just go with the flow all the way to ocean. Of course, if the water system were that inefficient, every last Capitolite would've died of thirst centuries ago. Usually, they die outright from shock or stuff in the water; if they don't, they bounce around until they get stuck in a grate or flushed into a grinder."
Gale asked a question that had been digging at his mind: "The first day, you talked about a grinder getting backed up. So, what is a grinder like, and what kind of thing would jam one?"
Asher laughed. "A grinder is a huge array of machinery, big enough to go through several levels of the sewer, and their job is to turn solids into liquids. I started handling them, and believe me this is a step up. Nothing can actually jam a grinder. My trainer did a demonstration where he dropped a half-stick of nitro in one of them, and it kept running just fine. But somethimes, they back up. Usually, like I said, it means there's a block in one of the effluent lines, or, the holding tanks back at the Head don't have room for more. But sometimes, a grinder will get something big and tough enough that it will reverse, just spit whatever it is back up. Then to keep a pressurized flow, it sucks processed effluent back up, and if it isn't shunted properly, we get overflows. A lot of people had to have screwed up big time to cause the mess we cleaned up."
Pieces of the mass drifted back down the pipeline. "There. One good flush will send the lot into a grinder. A tough critter can make a go of it, but the grinders always get them sooner or later. The real old timers will tell you stories about things that were bred for the old gladiators to fight... It happened, no question. There were trap doors in the arenas for dumping dead Mutts straight into the sewers, and at the Colliseum, if a Mutt went through too many gladiators they would flood the Arena and flush it straight into a grinder. But sometimes, a Mutt escaped through the basement, or they dumped a corpse that wasn't really a corpse, and once- at least- a Mutt managed to escape from a grinder. Of course, those old timers and a lot of the new guys will say some of them are still out there but there's nothing too it. Mutts can't breed themselves, and the ones in the arena were designed with a built-in lifespan of less than three months. They're all long gone, even if the grinders didn't get them."
Gale nodded, but he was already thinking about something that made him uneasy: To get so thoroughly entangled in the crate, whatever Thing the mass had been would have had to be moving very fast... against the current.
Their next assignment was an inspection of the collection level. They went from junction to junction, flipping grates to advance. Gale took the pipe on the right, Asher took the left. His tablet showed the grid, and Asher advancing in step. As they approached the next junction, Gale halted. The screen showed a signature ahead, around the corner from the junction. This was not a rat or a crab. It was too big. It was big enough to be human.
There was a banging throgh the pipe, a signal from Asher to check if Galewas okay. He just ran ahead through waist-deep water, and the tablet showed the unknown running away. He reached the grate, and twisted and pulled a handle to turn the grate sideways. He squeezed through into the junction, and he could clearly hear more sloshing of another set of feet going down the intersecting pipeline, and the creak of a grate being turned. He turned a grate sideways, and was starting to go through when Asher caught him by the arm. He tried to protest, but only managed to sputter, "But- but-" and point down the pipeline, where a grate still stood sideways.
"Gale," Asher said, and there was a firmness in his tone that made Gale look him in the eyes. "I know." He signaled for Gale to stay, and advanced down the pipe with even strides. When he reached the pipe, he turned the handle and shut it.
"It's my fault," Asher said as he returned. "I didn't think I needed to tell you about them yet. I did tell you not to follow anything, and I hoped you would understand if it came to that. They been down here long as anybody can remember. They probably just come and go, one way or another. But there's been more of them the last year or so. Nobody's ever talked to them, but we have what you could call an unspoken arrangement: They stay out of our way, and we act like they aren't there."
Gale opened his mouth to ask the question, but Asher silenced him with a raised finger. "Don't," he said. "Don't ask, because it's none of our business. Understand? Mind your business, and you will get by." Gale nodded. He understood, all right. Tributes like himself would have nothing to lose but their lives, and they would choose death before living down here. Only the Capitol's own could be desperate enough to live as a derelict in the sewers, and what forces could drive them to that extremity were certainly far beyond anything he would ever be allowed to know. Ultimately, he really didn't care. The Capitolites were rotten, pure and simple, and anything they did to each other was simply fate dealing what they already deserved.
