“I’d appreciate it if you’d call me by my name,” Harlow replied with icy anger. “I’m not Lower when we’re trying to save somebody’s life. I’m just Harlow, friend to your fiancée and the woman you are clearly obsessed with, so remember that.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied immediately, and he meant it. “I’m so fucking stressed right now, man. I don’t know which way is up anymore. With Willow, we’re just people. We’re all equal, and I get that. Again, I’m sorry.”
“No harm,” Harlow replied, and she gentled her tone. Her cheeks were hollow shadows in the glow of the instrument panel from the SUV’s dashboard, and I thought I might take her and Luke with me to my treatments. I would insist they both get access to the magic medicine Doctor Norris had at his fingertips. “Now go slow. They’ll start to guide you if you don’t go too fast.”
“The street just keeps going,” Alexander said, glancing at the GPS screen on the dash. “This isn’t a dead end.”
“It is if they want it to be,” Harlow replied. “Lowers have their secrets, many of them hidden in plain sight.”
Alexander drove just a couple of miles an hour down the narrow alleyway, and my heart was pounding a fierce rhythm that demanded he stepped on the pedal and roar the engine to life. So we could force our way into the medic’s care to save Luke because this was excruciatingly slow.
I breathed in, and the air seemed to waver. My eyes flicked back and forth of their own volition, and my body craved Norris’s medication. I felt looser somehow as if every atom in my body was beginning to lose its tight grip on its neighbor, and the spaces in between were widening.
“Are you okay?” Rome asked. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“I’m worried,” I replied, focusing on his voice to keep me knitted together.
“There,” Harlow whispered harshly and pointed. “The sequence of lights just ahead.”
I looked up from Luke to see what she was pointing at. Sure enough, a very small red light, like the tip of a laser, was blinking on and off in a seemingly random pattern. It would leap from the left and to the right and back again.
“They make no sense,” Alexander muttered, watching the light dance across the surface of building facades on either side of the narrow street. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?”
“Yes,” Harlow said. Luke groaned, and his head moved as if he was in great pain. Harlow’s head snapped back, and she winced in sympathy. “Shit, okay, hang on.”
Alexander drove ahead, slowly and steadily moving us towards the lights.
“Okay,” Harlow said at last. “They’re telling us to stop but hang on….” She waited for a beat and then continued.“Three…two…one…and stop!”
Alexander put on the brakes, and we halted. “You can understand all this?” Alexander asked. “This actually has meaning to you?”
“This is one of our secrets,” Harlow replied quietly. “I’m not going to explain it to you. I trust you, sort of, but I don’t ever want these things to get out and be weaponized against us. Lowers are constantly in danger of being eliminated, and I would never be able to handle it if I helped that happen.”
“I understand,” Alexander replied. “I wasn’t trying to get your Lower secrets. I was impressed. It’s very complicated from what I can tell, and we’ve always been told that Lowers lack the intelligence for advanced things like this. I enjoy being proven wrong.”
“Then you’ll enjoy being around me because I will prove you wrong over and over again,” Harlow said with a smile, and the two of them settled their tension and finally had a sort of truce. They would get along now, not just because of loyalty to me, but because they begrudgingly shared a mutual respect. “Okay, continue ahead, but much slower this time.”
Alexander began to move ahead, and just before we got to the end of the alley, I heard a grinding sound from outside the SUV.
“Keep moving slowly,” Harlow said, reassuring Alexander. “This is good. This means we’re in.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice tinged with nervousness. “I mean, it sounds like the world is falling apart out there.”
No sooner than he had said it, the surface of the alley opened up in front of us. It didn’t just open up as if a sinkhole had formed, but it opened as if it was hinged. The surface was the door that swung upwards, revealing a dimly lit passageway beneath the street. It was completely unexpected, a secret entrance to the Lower world below.
“Whoa,” Rome exclaimed. “I never knew this was here.”
“Shit, me neither,” Alexander agreed. “No idea at all, and I’ve been on all these streets a hundred times at least.”
“That’s the point,” Harlow replied. “If either one of you knew about it, then many more Uppers would know about it, and we’d have no secrets anymore. No safety.”
“I wish you didn’t need safety,” I said, looking down at Luke’s swollen face. My stomach clenched thinking about the things that had been done to him and to Harlow at the hands of Upper bastards. “I wish all of this would go away.”
“It’s a nice sentiment, but we know that’s not gonna happen,” Harlow replied darkly. “It’s never going to change, Willow, and right now, we don’t need your bright-eyed Upper enthusiasm. We need to face reality and get Luke the help he needs. I might add that he needs this help because of your Upper classmates and security guards.”
Guilt roiled inside of me, curling around my consciousness like a snake and squeezing tight until it pained me to reply.
“That’s why we need change, but I understand why my words aren’t helpful at the moment, Harlow,” I said. “I’m sorry, let’s keep this about Luke, and we can turn the world upside down another time.”