"Here, girl, what do you think you're up to?" a voice called.
Jazz pressed herself against the wall and moved around onto the ledge. The shriek of the slowing train grated along her spine. The light of its headlamps picked her out on the ledge as it bulleted into the station from behind her, slow-ing, slowing...
Face sliding against filthy tiles, Jazz shuffled swiftly along the ledge, forcing herself not to imagine falling back-ward or being blown off by the wind of the passing train. If she fell beneath it, her mother would never forgive her.
The train hissed as it slowed, the front car coming toward the end of the platform, nearly adjacent to her now. The conductor would see her. Someone would be called. More people would chase her into the darkness, and then where would she hide?
Her left hand suddenly pressed against nothing. She slipped around the end of the wall onto a stretch of for-gotten platform. On the track, the train hissed a final puff as though frustrated by her survival, and then she heard the sounds of disgorging passengers and others climbing aboard. A recorded voice announced the time of the next ex-pected train and advised those getting on and off to mind the gap.
It seemed she had already been forgotten.
Jazz laughed softly and without humor. Mind the gap, indeed. Never knew when you'd find yourself falling into one of the cracks in the world. Here she was, living proof. Alice down the rabbit hole.
The train hissed again, doors closing, and started for-ward. In the light from its headlamp eyes, she stared at the iron grating before her. Beyond it lay another stretch of platform, eight feet deep and perhaps twenty long. A rusted, padlocked chain locked the gate. Some cinema action hero might have been able to snap the rust-eaten chain, but not Jasmine Towne. The train rattled past, gaining speed, and with it her pulse began to race again.
She saw the shapes of people at first, and the occasional blur of a face, but the faster it went the more those people seemed to blur into one.
The illumination from the train's interior flickered off the black iron grate, but at the upper edge of her vision was a rectangle of darkness that seemed to swallow the light. Jazz studied it, blinking at the realization that either a sec-tion of the grate had been broken away or whoever had in-stalled it had left a transom window above.
She gripped the iron bars, propped the rubber sole of one trainer against the metal, then hauled herself up. If Jazz could be said to be gifted at anything, it was climbing. Her mother had often called her a monkey for her love of scam-pering up trees and rocks and the way she could always manage to break into their town house if her mum had lost her keys. She'd thought, once upon a time, of becoming a dancer. But little girls always wanted to be ballerinas or princesses, and people like her weren't allowed dreams for very long.
Her foot slipped, but her hands found a grip on the transom. One knee banged painfully against the gate, rat-tling the chain and sending a shower of rust flaking to the platform. But she pulled herself up across the bottom bar of the transom and through to the other side like a gymnast.
She landed in a crouch and paused for a moment, listen-ing to the roar of the train fading into the distance. Light from the station reflected off the tiles on the other side of the tunnel, giving her just enough illumination to see. Voices came from beyond the wall: bored commuters talk-ing into phones and excited tourists nattering in a mixture of languages.
She stood frozen, like a rabbit caught in oncoming head-fights. And when someone shouted, Jazz bolted. As the train passed, its light had shown her the outline of a tall door, and she guessed it to be an old exit up to street level. The Underground was rife with such things, she'd read, coming up into the storage rooms and basements of chemists, mar-kets, and pubs that had once been Tube stations or buildings associated with them.
Dark shapes scurried and squealed around her feet: rats. As long as they ran away from her, not toward her, she could put up with that.
The door stood open a few inches, the frame corroded. Whatever lock had once sealed it had been broken, leaving a hole where the knob ought to be. Jazz had a strange feeling that the door had been forced closed, not open.
She reached out. The metal felt warm to the touch and pulsed with the thrum of the Underground, like a beating heart. Jazz leaned her weight against it, and it scraped open across the concrete floor.
Blinking, she waited for her eyes to adjust. The stairwell ought to have been pitch black, but a dim blue glow pro-vided light enough to see that she had been wrong. The spi-ral metal staircase did not lead toward the surface. Rather, it led deeper into the ethereal gloom.
She could go back. For a moment she considered it. But to what? The Uncles and her mother's corpse, and the mur-derous woman with Jazz on her mind? No. There would be no going back now. If she returned to the surface, it had to be far from here. If she got onto a train, it could not be at this station.
Somewhere in the underground labyrinth, there would be another way up.
****
The spiral staircase created an echo chamber, and the sound of her breathing surrounded her as Jazz started down. Such evidence of her panic forced her to calm down, to slow her breath, and soon her pulse slowed as well. Still, she heard her heartbeat much too loudly in her head.
It was at least thirty feet until the staircase ended. The blue glow brightened into silvery splashes of light from sev-eral caged bulbs, metal-wrapped cables bolted to the curved stone walls. She wondered who would come down here to replace these bulbs when they blew.
More hesitant now, Jazz stepped away from the bottom of the stairs and along a short tunnel. It emerged into a vast space that made her catch her breath. Above her was a ventilation shaft that led up to a louvered grille. Daylight filtered down, a splash of light in the false underground night. Like distant streetlamps, other vents served the same purpose in the otherwise enduring darkness of that long-abandoned station. The platform had been removed, and beneath her feet there was only dirt and broken concrete. In a far-off puddle of light, a short set of steps led up to where the platform had once been, but now they were stairs to nowhere. Without the platform, she noticed for the first time how round the tunnels were —long cylinders bored through the city's innards.
Peering along the throat of the tunnel, past the farthest splash of light, she saw only darkness. But somewhere down there, where the platform had once ended, there must be another door.
Jazz started in that direction, but as she moved beyond the first pool of light, the dirt and broken ground underfoot disappeared in the dark. She moved to the tracks and crouched to place a hand on the cold metal. Once it had been a working artery, pumping blood to the city's heart. Now it was dead. She stepped over the rail and between the tracks. Simple enough to match her stride to the carefully placed sleepers.
The sound of her movement echoed around her: scrap-ing stones, sharp breath, footsteps.
Walking into the darkness did not make her feel lost. A pool of light waited ahead and another remained behind her. She could see those areas of the tunnel well enough. Yet when she looked down at her feet she saw nothing, and even her arms seemed spectral things.
Water dripped nearby, but she could not locate its source. She studied the walls, searching for any sign of an exit. Without a way out she wouldn't get far, at least not without a torch.
Something rustled off to her left. Jazz froze, listening for it to come again. Seconds passed before she took another step, then she heard the sound again. Not a rustle, but a whisper. A voice in the darkness, speaking gibberish.
"Who is it? Who's there?" she said, flinching at the sound of her own voice.
The whispering went on and, from behind her, back toward that spiral staircase, came another voice, secretive, furtive. The Uncles or their lackeys —those dark-suited BMW men—had followed her.
"Shit," she whispered, and started moving more swiftly.
The whispers followed, but though they certainly must have seen her, no one shouted after her.