The tunnel smelled old.
The walls glistened with moisture that Momo tried not to think about, his shoes slipping on algae-slick concrete as they moved deeper into the abandoned subway line.
The girl's phone cast a light, cutting through darkness so thick it seemed to resist the light. Her footsteps were careful and barely making sound. Momo followed a few paces behind, his breath coming shallow in the cold air.
They passed graffiti that had been painted over graffiti, crude drawings of the marks that appeared on skin like brands from something beyond comprehension.
The girl stopped.
Her light found a section of wall where the concrete had crumbled away, revealing a hole just wide enough for a person to squeeze through. The edges were jagged, recently disturbed—chips of concrete scattered on the ground, pale against the grime.
"Here," she said.
Momo stared at the opening. Beyond it, only darkness.
"What's in there?"
She didn't answer. Just crouched down and started crawling through.
For a moment, Momo considered not following. Considered turning around, climbing back up to the street, going home to his room full of theories that never led anywhere. But his feet moved before the thought finished forming, and then he was on his hands and knees, feeling sharp edges scrape against his back as he pushed through.
The space beyond was tighter than he'd expected. The ceiling pressed down, forcing them to crawl on their stomachs, elbows digging into dust that tasted like centuries. His heart hammered against the concrete beneath him.
Water dripped somewhere in the darkness.
Then the space opened.
---
They emerged into a chamber that shouldn't exist.
Momo pulled himself through the final gap and stood, his legs unsteady. The girl swept her phone light across the space, revealing walls that curved into a vaulted ceiling maybe fifteen feet above. Old tile, cracked and stained, covered the surfaces—remnants of infrastructure from before the Migration, when people still built things meant to last.
But it was what covered the tiles that made Momo's skin crawl.
Candles sat in pools of their own wax, melted down to stubs and left in rough circles across the floor. Papers were pinned to the walls with rusted nails, their corners curling, covered in handwriting too small to read from where he stood. And everywhere—on every surface, in every available space—symbols had been drawn in what looked like paint, or chalk, or something darker.
They weren't random. They were deliberate, obsessive, covering the walls in patterns that almost made sense but didn't quite resolve into meaning. Some resembled the migration marks he'd studied, but wrong somehow—inverted, or incomplete, or combined in ways that felt like violations of some unspoken rule.
The air was colder here. Still. As if nothing had moved in this space for a very long time, and now that they had entered, everything was watching to see what they would do.
"What the heck is this place?," Momo whispered.
The girl moved deeper into the chamber, her light catching on more details. Footprints in the dust—multiple sets, different sizes, all relatively recent. A plastic water bottle, empty, the label faded but readable. Cigarette butts ground into the tile.
People had been here. Recently. Regularly.
"Last night," the girl said, her voice flat. "I was out walking. Smoking, actually."
Momo turned to look at her. She was maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen at most, dark circles under those mismatched eyes making her look older and younger at the same time. Smoking at her age, in this world, wasn't shocking—just sad. One more small surrender to the knowledge that tomorrow might not matter.
"I saw people," she continued, running her light along the walls. "Three, maybe four. They were sneaking down into the subway like they didn't want to be seen. I followed them."
"At night? Alone?" Momo's voice came out without his intention.
She shrugged, not looking at him. "What's the worst that happens?"
Momo didn't answer, he regretted acting like he cares. However, both knew the answer to what happens at night.
Since the Migration began—since humanity realized it was being sorted into categories of worthy and unworthy, marked and unmarked—something fundamental had broken. Not just in society, but in people themselves. The rules that held civilization together only worked when everyone believed in a future. When that future evaporated, so did everything else.
The unmarked had fractured into tribes of despair. Cultists who thought ritual sacrifice might earn them marks. Murderers who killed for reasons that stopped making sense years ago. Scavengers who took what they didn't even need because ownership was a concept that required time, and time was running out.
Going out at night was suicide. Especially alone. Especially for a girl her age. Yet she'd done it. Probably Regularly.
She had crawled through these tunnels in the dark, following strangers into the buried places of the city, just to see where they went.
Momo studied her in the dim light, trying to understand. But her expression gave nothing away—just that same exhausted detachment, as if she'd already decided her life wasn't worth protecting anymore.
---
He turned his attention to the walls.
Up close, the symbols were even more disturbing. They'd been drawn with multiple implements—marker, paint, what might have been blood in some places, though Momo didn't let himself think about that too hard. Diagrams sprawled across entire sections, circles and arrows connecting different marks in sequences that looked mathematical, almost algorithmic.
Notes were pinned everywhere, covered in dense handwriting. Some were in code—simple substitution ciphers that Momo recognized from his own research. Others were just incomprehensible, streams of numbers and abbreviations that meant nothing to him.
But one section of wall drew his attention like gravity.
The symbols there were different—more precise, more controlled. They'd been painted in white, stark against the dingy tile, arranged in a pattern that made something in Momo's chest tighten. He'd seen variations of this before, in the photographs of marked individuals, but never quite like this. Never assembled with such... intention.
And above them, in bold letters painted with uneven, almost manic strokes in latin words:
FOUND IT
Momo's pulse quickened. His hands were shaking—he could feel them trembling as he flashed his phone light closer to see better.
"What do you think?" the girl asked.
She was watching him closely. He could feel her gaze even without looking. At school, before everyone stopped going, they'd called him Crazy Worm.
"It's a clue," Momo said quietly, his eyes tracing the patterns. "Just a clue. But..."
He moved closer, his light illuminating details he'd missed. Small notations in the margins. Dates, maybe. Coordinates. The remnants of someone's obsessive work, left behind like a message in a bottle.
"We should document this," he continued, already getting his phone ready to take photos. "Everything. Every symbol, every note. And maybe—" He paused, thinking. "Maybe leave a camera. Something small, hidden. To record who comes back."
The girl nodded slowly. "You think they'll come back?"
"People who work like this?" Momo gestured at the walls. "They always come back. They can't help it."
He knew because he was the same way. Had been, for years. Chasing patterns that dissolved the moment he thought he understood them, following threads that led nowhere except deeper into his own obsession.
But this was different. This wasn't just theory scrawled in a notebook that no one would ever read. This was real. Physical. Left by people who'd found something worth marking on a wall in permanent paint.
Beneath the fear—because yes, he was afraid, standing in this cold chamber with its watching silence—something else stirred. The same hunger that had kept him awake for years, that had driven him to cover his walls with research no one else cared about.
Curiosity. Obsession. Maybe destiny.
---
He was taking photos of the final section when the flashlight beam caught something that hadn't been there before.
Or had it?
Momo froze, his phone halfway to his face. The symbol on the far wall, partially hidden behind a support column—he'd swept his light past that spot a dozen times, but now...
Now it looked different. The lines seemed darker, more defined, as if they were still wet.
"Hey," the girl said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Did you hear that?"
Momo listened. The dripping water. Their breathing. And beneath it, almost imperceptible—
A scraping sound. Metal on concrete. Very faint. Coming from somewhere deeper in the tunnels.
The girl's light jerked toward the source, illuminating nothing but more darkness beyond the chamber's entrance.
"Let's get out of here," she breathed.
But Momo couldn't move. His eyes were locked on those words painted across the wall, stark in latin words and absolute in their declaration:
IT'S ALL PART OF THERE PLAN
What plan? What had they discovered down here in the dark, beneath a dying city, while the rest of the world waited for divine judgment?
The scraping sound came again, closer now.
The girl grabbed his arm. "Momo."
The warmth he felt made him let her pull him toward the hole in the wall, toward the tight crawlspace that led back to the tunnels, back to the world above.
End of Chapter 2