her. But without light...
Yet there was light.
"Can't be," she whispered. The bulbs in that stairwell off the main station had been a surprise enough.
But who in their right mind would keep a light burning down here?
Hands on the walls of the narrow stairwell, she started down, counting steps. Only the dimmest glow
came up from below, and she felt blind. She probed with her foot before each step. The twenty-first step
was broken. A piece of stone crumbled away under her heel and she slipped, one leg shooting out in front
of her, hands flailing for purchase. Her head struck the steps and pain exploded in the back of her skull.
Hissing, she squeezed her eyes closed and saw a cas-cade of stars.
"Fucking hell," she muttered through clenched teeth, reaching around to gingerly touch the back of
her head. She winced at the pain, and her fingers came away sticky. In the dark, her blood was black, but
she knew the feel of it. She knew the rusted-metal smell of it. Jazz had become inti-mate with that odor
today and would never forget it.
By the twenty-seventh step, the light had brightened considerably.
The thirty-third was the last.
At the foot of the steps, an orange power cable ran along the ground. To her right she could see
several more dan-gling from the open circular vent —an answer to the mystery up above. But this was
nothing official. Someone had jerry-rigged the cables, used that old vent to steal power from the surface.
Deep Level Shelter 7-K was operational, but Jazz had no idea what it was being used as shelter
from. This place had never been a Tube station. It was round, just as the train tunnels were, but the way
the ceiling arched in a half circle, she wondered if there was more shelter space under the floor, making up
the bottom half of the circle. The tunnel might have been two hundred feet long. Work lights hung from
hooks all along its length, connected by black or or-ange cables. At least half of them were out and had not
been replaced. There were crates and boxes all along the walls, as well as mattresses stacked with
blankets. Metal shelves and cabinets that appeared to have been part of the original de-sign lined one wall,
and she could see bottles and cans of stored foods. As she moved closer, she confirmed her suspi-cions
that these were not ancient supplies but far more re-cent ones. A bit dusty, but they had been put up within
the last year or so.
Her gaze froze on one shelf. A trio of black heavy-duty torches were neatly lined up. She grabbed
one and turned it on. Nothing. That didn't make sense. Organized people — whoever had made use of the
shelter—wouldn't have the torches as backup lights without keeping batteries. She searched the rest of the
shelves, then opened the nearest cabinet and found what she was looking for. An entire box of batteries.
Jazz loaded up one of the heavy torches and flicked it on. Despite the lights that already burned in the
place, the bright beam thrown by the torch thrilled her. The hidden people who had used this shelter could
not have rigged the entire tunnel system with lights. There would be many dark passages underground. If
she meant to find her way out, far from home and the Uncles, the torch would guide her.
"Hello?" she called, suddenly nervous that the hidden people, likely thieves themselves, would attack
her for thiev-ery. She feared them, but they needed blankets and torches and canned beans; therefore, they
were flesh and blood. Not phantoms.
"Anyone here? Hello?"
Her only answer was the echo of her own voice.
Jazz glanced around again and wondered what these people had run from, why they were hiding, and
if they meant to hide forever.
"Mum," she whispered, hidden away far beneath the city. Her tears began to flow and she put a hand
over her eyes. At last the fear that had driven her gave way to grief.
"Oh, Christ. Mum."
Shaking with exhaustion now that adrenaline had left her, mind awhirl with mourning and ghosts and
hopeless-ness, she made it to the nearest mattress and collapsed there. Jazz held the torch like a teddy,
drew a blanket over herself, and pulled her knees up tight, as she did on the coldest win-ter nights.
In silence, buried in the grave of another era, she cried for her mother and herself.
Chapter Three
flesh and blood
Her dead mother's whispering woke her up.
Jazz jerked upright, and for a few seconds she thought she was still dreaming. She was surrounded
by a pressing darkness, lessened here and there by dusty bulbs hanging suspended from a
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