Tunnels 02, Deeper

gone deep into one of the roughest, most dangerous places you could find in the whole of the Colony -- the Rookeries. Even now she could picture Tam as he was then, his grinning, youthful visage streaked with black and his eyes shining with excitement as the two of them hared away after yet another close scrape. She missed him so much.
    She was pulled once more from her thoughts. A loud exchange in a language she couldn't understand had caught her attention. Several shops down, two workmen were leaving a cafe, its steamy windows illuminated by the striplights inside. She made a beeline for it.
    She ordered a big cup of coffee, paid for it at the counter, then took it over to a table by the window. Sipping the thin, tasteless liquid, she slipped the creased note from her pocket and slowly reread the artless handwriting. She still couldn't bring herself to accept what it said. How could Tam be dead? How could that be? As bad as things were in this Topsoil world, she'd always been able to draw small comfort from the knowledge that her brother was still alive and well in the Colony. It was like a flickering candle at the end of an incredibly long tunnel, the hope that one day she might see him again. And now even that had been taken away from her; now he was dead.
    She flipped over the note and read the other side, then read the entire letter again, shaking her head.
    The note must be wrong; Joe Waites must have been mistaken when he wrote it. How could her own son, Seth, her firstborn, who was once her pride and joy, have betrayed Tam to the Styx? Her own flesh and blood had effectively murdered her brother. And if it really was true, how could Seth have been corrupted like that? What could have driven him to do it? There was equally shocking news in the final paragraph. She read the lines over and over again, about how Seth had abducted her youngest son, forcing Cal to go with him.
    "No," she said out loud, shaking her head, refusing to accept that Seth was responsible. And there it was again: Her son was Seth , and not Will , and he couldn't be capable of any of this. Perhaps someone had tampered with the note. Perhaps someone knew about the dead mailbox. But how, and why? None of it made any sense.
    She realized her hands were trembling. She rested them hard against the table, crumpling the letter in her palms. Then she cleared a small circle in the condensation on the inside of the cafe window and peered through. It was still too early, too light, so she decided to bide her time a while longer, drawing with the corner of a paper napkin in some coffee slopped on the scratched red melamine of the tabletop. As the coffee evaporated, she simply stared down at her front, as if she'd fallen into a trance. When, several moments later, she came to with a small start, she noticed a button on her coat hanging by a thread. She tugged at it and it came away in her hand. Without thinking, she dropped it into her empty cup and then just gazed blankly at the steamed-up windows, at the vague shapes of people hurrying by.
    Finally the owner ambled over, giving the empty tables a casual swipe with his grimy dishcloth and straightening the chairs on the way. He stopped by the window and joined Sarah in looking out, then, in an offhand tone, asked if he could get her anything else. Without acknowledging him, she simply got up and made straight for the door. Angered, he snatched up her empty coffee cup and spotted the discarded button sitting in the bottom of it.
    That did it. She wasn't a regular, and she'd hogged his table, spending next to nothing.
    "Ch...!' he started to yell, but only managed the first letters of "Cheapskate" before the word shriveled on his lips.
    He'd happened to glance down at the tabletop. He blinked and shifted his head, as if the light were playing tricks on his eyes. There, staring back at him from the red melamine, was a surprisingly accomplished image.
    It was a face, some five inches square and built up from layer upon layer of dried-out coffee, as if it had been painted with tempera. But it wasn't the artistry that stopped him cold, it was the fact that the face had its mouth wrenched open in a jaw-breaking rictus of a scream. He blinked again; it was so unnerving that for several seconds he didn't move, simply stared at the image. He found it impossible to associate the quiet, mousy woman who had just left his cafe with this shocking portrayal of anguish. Quickly he covered it with his dishcloth as he