The Belly of the Beast

Ch. 38, The Necklace

The tunnel deposited me into a metal hallway, heart thundering as I sat frozen, waiting for something terrible to happen. Instead cold metal pressed up beneath me, golden globe shaped lights shone down on me, and a metal hallway stretched in both directions. But not a hallway like I knew them. Protruding from the ceiling above, then splitting and hugging the walls before disappearing into the floor, were massive roots.... that must have been from the trees above.

I'm on the level beneath the Forest Room. Level M.

The roots were a white, nearly fleshy color, like thousands of curved fingers reaching through the metal— bizarre but also beautiful in an eerie sort of way. Some were nearly as thick as my leg, others thin and branching as hair. The hallway appeared almost circular because of their mass, a strange sort of gelatinous material coating them. Lighting it all were globes suspended from a ceiling barely visible beneath the roots.

You can work and look at the same time, Z. Yaneli's stern voice came to me as I realized if the girl had shown me the way out, she could show others.

I picked a direction and ran. Even with the roots descending from the ceilings, taking up space, the hallways were bigger, the lights burning bright and golden. There was a ripe, sweet scent, almost like that of the decomposing plants in the Chute, but sweeter. Uncorrupted. As I ran I wondered if Dagger had made it out, or teamed up with the other men, before I reminded myself it didn't matter. We weren't partners anymore. In a week, the Jackal Letter Trial would start and we'd be back to trying to kill each other.

I continued to move down the vast hallways, surprised that with a single turn, the tree roots disappeared, replaced by a strange vine-like plant that grew straight out of the walls. Another turn yielded vines with leaves bigger than my head and strange gourds like vegetables. The abrupt changes continued as the next turn yeilded walls hung with clusters of small purple fruits, the globes glowing bright and hot. Grapes. I knew the name of only because Yaneli sometimes loved a book called The Grapes of Wrath, and had drawn me a picture of the fruit. I paused to pick one, a burst of sweetest exploding in my mouth. Instead of enjoying the fruit, walking beneath the bright lights brought a sense of paranoia to me. Food in the Belly was zealously guarded—men had been entered into The Letter Trials for stealing a single loaf of bread.

But here, having it grow from the walls... It seemed like unimaginable wealth. Like King Midas had walked the halls, but instead of everything turning to gold, he turned the metal into far more precious food. The farther I walked, the more often I had no name for the plants, or the vibrant shades of greens, reds and even purple leaves that covered the hallways.

So why would a Jackal ever need to be sly if they'd got food growing everywhere? Yet even though I'd passed through dozens of the wondrous hallways, I'd only seen one Jackal. The girl in the Circled Forest. And only because she'd revealed herself to me. They must be hiding from me somehow, or know that I'm coming.

Only after I passed into a hallway with massive pumpkins—which I knew from a peculiar story of a girl who used one as a carriage—did I finally hear the faint sound of voices before. Then, the flash of a person disappearing into a wall.

They're here, they just hear me coming and get out of the way. It was a strange reaction, one I didn't understand. Were they afraid of me? After a time I understood further how they avoided me: just as I stepped around the corner into a new hallway, I watched as a gap at the bottom the wall closed and realized it was a sort of door. Unlike the doors in the Belly, the doors here didn't swing wide on a hinge. Instead they slid vertically up and down—possibly as a way to keep from disturbing the plants.

As I continued I began to understand the layout of the level. It was set up like a labyrinth, with The Circled Forest at the very center. Therefore I chose tunnels that moved me further and further away from the center circle. The further I went, the darker the tunnels became, and the plants on the walls no longer bore fruit. Without any labeling, I had no way to guess their purpose, and didn't dare taste them—I also remembered a book where a masked man slipped some sort of powdered plant into another man's wine and killed him. As the hallways grew darker, the plants smaller, finally I could see the water lines that fed them. There was a sort of reassurance in the exposed piping, knowing that the water they carried came from the Belly. From home.