Tunnels 02, Deeper

cawed, with mounting conviction. "It's Sarah Jerome, ain't it?"
    Although she was in a maelstrom of confusion, Sarah did her best to rapidly assess her options. She scanned the nearby doorways, reckoning that if worse came to worst she might be able to barge her way into one of the half-ruined buildings and lose herself in the rabbit warren of passageways that lay behind them. But it didn't look good. All the doors were firmly shut or boarded up.
    She was walled in, with only two ways to go -- backward or forward. She was looking at the alleyway beyond the old hags, calculating whether to make a break and get herself back out of the Rookeries, when one of them screamed the most piercing of wails:
    "SARAH!"
    Sarah flinched with the sheer volume of the squall, and a lull descended on the whole place, an eerie, watchful silence.
    Sarah spun around, walking away from the women, knowing it would take her straight past the bearded man. So be it! She would just have to deal with him.
    As she neared him, he raised the cudgel to the height of his shoulder and Sarah prepared to fight, slipping her shawl from her head and winding it around her arm. She could have kicked herself for not bringing her knife.
    She was almost level with him when, to her astonishment and relief, he began to strike the cudgel against the lintel of the doorway and to shout her name in his gruff voice. His confederate joined with him, as did every one of the group of women behind her.
    "SARAH! SARAH! SARAH!"
    The entire place was stirring now, as if the timbers of the buildings themselves were coming to life.
    "SARAH! SARAH! SARAH!"
    The cudgel continued to beat time as people turned out from the houses and into the alleyway, more people than she believed possible. Shutters slammed back from glassless windows and faces peeked out. All Sarah could do was bow her head and keep walking.
    "SARAH! SARAH! SARAH!" came shouts thick and fast from all over, and people joined in with the beat of the cudgel, the clattering growing as metal cups or whatever else came to hand were struck against walls, windowsills, and doorjambs. It was like a jailhouse chorus, so loud that the tiles on the roofs began to resonate with the singular rhythm.
    Still gripped by panic, Sarah didn't slow her pace, but began to notice the grinning faces, infused with wonderment. Elderly men, bent double from disease, and gaunt women, the used-up people that the Colony had consigned to the scrap heap, were hailing her, shouting her name jubilantly.
    "SARAH! SARAH! SARAH!"
    Many mouths, with broken and blackened teeth, all yelling in unison. Smiling, wild, sometimes grotesque faces, but all with expressions of admiration and even affection.
    They were gathering along the way now -- Sarah couldn't believe the sheer number of people lining the route. Someone -- she didn't see who -- thrust a discolored sheet of rough paper into her hands. She glanced down at it. It was a crude etching, the sort of thing the underground press distributed to the people of the Rookeries -- she'd seen the like before.
    But this one caused Sarah's heart to skip a beat. The largest image, in the center of the sheet, was a picture of her, a few years younger than she was now, although dressed in almost identical clothes. Her face in the picture bore an anxious expression and was looking melodramatically off to one side, as if she was being pursued. It was a reasonable likeness of her. So that explained how she'd been recognized. That and the rumors, which would have most likely spread like wildfire through the Colony, that she'd been brought back by the Styx. There were four other, smaller pictures in similarly stylized roundels in each corner, but now wasn't the time to examine them.
    She folded the paper and took a deep breath. Seemingly there was nothing to fear, no threat, so she raised her head, throwing her shawl around her back, as she continued down the alleyway, the masses thronging on either side of her. She didn't acknowledge them, nor look to her left or right, but kept going as the clamor grew even more tumultuous. Wolf whistles and huge cheers and the chanted "Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!" reached the rock canopy above, their echoes falling back to earth and mingling with the uproar all around her.
    Sarah reached the narrow passageway that would lead her out through the other side of the Rookeries. Without looking back, she entered, leaving the throng behind her. But their shouts still rang in her ears, and the