Sela

A debtor filed into the bluff gaol for being inconvenient to someone inconvenient to House Vandahl, now crawling the drowned drains toward daylight — and stalled in the high galleries, too afraid of the dark's last stretch to finish the climb.

Sela owed a debt to a man who owed a debt to the House; that is all it takes in the Undertow — to be inconvenient to someone inconvenient to Vandahl. No trial. They do not bother. They open the lid and forget the smell. She found the drain-route out that the warden left open and climbed most of it, and there she has stopped, in the high galleries where the wind comes down from the mouth carrying the taste of grass and a town that does not know she is under it. She keeps telling her feet to make the last stretch and they will not. She asks whoever passes to tell someone up there, in the light, that people are in the dark below the gaol on the hill — and to go, and not look back for her sake.