He didn't know. He had no number to guide him. He only had his tiny, trembling self, and the memory of the journey. The Grease-Falls. The Warden. The leap.
He began to roll, not towards the outflow, but towards the wall. He found a rough patch of brick, a vertical ladder of microscopic crystals. He started to climb.
For a scrap of a thing, no bigger than a thimble, that noise was a lullaby.
He hit the grease and didn't slip. He stuck . Panic welled. He was a drop of water on a hydrophobic surface. He was immobile.
He came to rest on a sandbar of congealed… something. He didn’t have a word for it. He was new.
10. The memory of the number was a single, clean note.
"New blood," the oil gurgled, its voice a slow, poisonous purr. "Lost? They all get lost. Stay here. The dark is safe. The light evaporates you."
He looked at the hundred dark tunnels. Then he looked up, at the faint, watery light from the manhole cover.
The drop felt the pull of the oil's embrace. It would be easy to merge, to lose his tiny, frantic self in that oily, indifferent calm. No more counting. No more climbing.
The number was 10. He didn’t know why, but the number hummed inside him like a second heartbeat. A countdown. A destination. From the moment he’d coalesced from the spray of a leaking pipe, the number had been there: 10 . He needed to get to the 10th junction. The one where the main outflow split into a hundred tiny channels, each leading to a different, smaller pipe. Somewhere down one of those pipes, he was sure, was a way out. A way back to the light.
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