tube and the lights faded above us. I followed, not knowing if I was vindicated or disappointed.
“Where are all the people?” I wondered. “And the vampires?”
“The humans who are awake are all working,” Kanin said. “Keeping the electrical grid up and running, managing the remains of the sewer systems, repairing broken machinery. That’s why the vampires look for those who are talented or knowledgeable or skilled and take them into the city—they need them to keep it running. They also have humans to man their factories, clean and repair their buildings, and grow the food needed for the rest of the population. The rest of them, guards, thralls, pets and concubines, serve them in other ways.”
“But … everyone can’t be working.”
“True,” Kanin agreed. “Everyone else is behind closed, locked doors, keeping off the streets and out of sight as much as they can. They are much closer to the monsters than the people of the Fringe, and they have just as much reason to be afraid.”
“Wow,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Wouldn’t everyone back home be surprised to learn how it really is up there.”
Kanin didn’t say anything to that, and we traveled in silence for a while.
He finally stopped at a steel ladder that went up to a metal grate on the ceiling. Pushing it aside with the ease of vampire strength, he climbed through the hole and beckoned me to follow.
“Where are we now?” I asked, trailing him down another long cement hallway. At the end of this one, we hit a rusty metal door, locked, of course, but Kanin put his shoulder to the metal and bashed it open.
“We,” he replied, stepping back for me to take in my surroundings, “are in the basement storage of the city’s old museum.”
I gazed around in wonder. We were standing at the edge of the largest room I’d ever seen in my life, a warehouse of cement and steel that stretched farther than even my vampire vision reached. Rusting metal shelves created a labyrinth of aisles, hundreds of narrow corridors that vanished into the back of the room. The contents of those shelves were covered in sheets or stored in wooden boxes, wrapped in a thick film of spiderwebs and dust. If I took in a breath I could smell the choking stench of mold and fungi, growing everywhere, but surprisingly, the shelves seemed fairly intact.
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