A few steps in, we began to hear rodents scurrying along the creek bed. We could hear voices, too—echoey, unintelligible conversations that seemed to be coming from all sides of us. Our headlamps lit up the graffiti that lined the walls—spray-painted tags in bubble letters, but also stenciled images and messages. Daisy’s light lingered on one image featuring a portly rat drinking a bottle of wine with the caption, THE RAT KING KNOWS YOUR SECRETS. Another message, scrawled in what looked like white house paint, read, IT’S NOT HOW YOU DIE. IT’S WHO YOU DIE.

“This is a little creepy,” Daisy whispered.

“Why are you whispering?”

“Scared,” she whispered. “Has it been two hundred yards yet?”

“Dunno,” I said. “But I hear people up there.” I turned around and shone my light back toward the tunnel’s entrance, and a couple of middle-aged men behind us waved. “See, it’s fine.”

The creek wasn’t really a body of water anymore so much as a slow-moving puddle; I watched a rat scamper across it without ever getting its nose wet. “That was a rat,” Daisy said, her voice clenched.

“It lives here,” I said. “We’re the invaders.” We kept walking. The only light in the world seemed to be the yellow beams of headlamps and flashlights—it was almost like everyone down there had become beams of light, bouncing along the tunnel in little groups.

—

Ahead of us, I saw headlamps turning to the left, into a square side tunnel, about eight feet high. We jumped over the trickling creek, past a sign that read, A PICKETT ENGINEERING PROJECT, and into the concrete side tunnel.

You could only see the artwork by the light of headlamps and flashlights, so the paintings and photographs lining the walls seemed to come in and out of focus. To see all of Mychal’s picture, you had to stand against the opposite wall of the tunnel. It really was an amazing artwork—Prisoner 101 looked as real as anyone, but he was made from pieces of the one hundred mugshots Mychal had found of men convicted of murder and then exonerated. Even up close, I couldn’t tell that Prisoner 101 wasn’t real.

The rest of the art was cool, too—big abstract paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, an assemblage of old wooden chairs precariously stacked to the ceiling, a huge photograph of a kid jumping on a trampoline alone in a vast harvested cornfield—but Mychal’s was my favorite, and not just because I knew him.

After a while, we heard a clamor of voices approach, and the gallery became crowded. Someone had set up a stereo, and music began reverberating through the tunnel. Plastic cups were passed around, and then bottles of wine, and the place got louder and louder, and even though it was freezing down there, I started to feel sweaty, so I asked Daisy if she wanted to go for a walk.

“A walk?”

“Yeah, just, I don’t know, down the tunnel or something.”

“You want to go for a walk down the tunnel.”

“Yeah. I mean, we don’t have to.”

She pointed into the darkness beyond the reach of our headlamps. “You’re proposing that we just walk into that void.”

“Not for like a mile or anything. Just to see what there is to see.”

Daisy sighed. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go for a walk.”

—

It only took a minute for the air to feel crisper. The tunnel ahead of us was pitch-black, and it curved in a long, slow arc away from the party until we couldn’t see the light from it anymore. We could still hear the music and the people talking over it, but it felt distant, like a party you drive past.

“I don’t understand how you can be so inhumanly calm down here, fifteen feet below downtown Indianapolis, ankle deep in rat shit, but you have a panic attack when you think your finger is infected.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This just isn’t scary.”

“It objectively is,” she said.

I reached up and clicked off my headlamp. “Turn off your light,” I said.

“Hell, no.”

“Turn it off. Nothing bad will happen.” She clicked off her light, and the world went dark. I felt my eyes trying to adjust, but there was no light to adjust to. “Now you can’t see the walls, right? Can’t see the rats. Spin around a few times and you won’t know which way is in and which way is out. This is scary. Now imagine if we couldn’t talk, if we couldn’t hear each other’s breathing. Imagine if we had no sense of touch, so even if we were standing next to each other, we’d never know it.

“Imagine you’re trying to find someone, or even you’re trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You’re senseless and shapeless—you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you’re not, and you’re floating around in a body with no control. You don’t get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You’re just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That’s scary. This,” I said, and turned on the flashlight. “This is control. This is power. There may be rats and spiders and whatever the hell. But we shine the light on them, not the other way around. We know where the walls are, which way is in and which way is out. This,” I said, turning off my light again, “is what I feel like when I’m scared. This”—I turned the flashlight back on—“is a walk in the fucking park.”

We walked for a while in silence. “It’s that bad?” she asked finally.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“But then your flashlight starts working again,” she said.

“So far.”

—

As we kept walking, through the tunnel, the music behind us growing fainter, Daisy calmed down a bit. “I’m thinking of killing off Ayala,” she said. “Would you take that personally?”