of archaic gods.
They raced through corridors and courtyards and chambers, down short flights of stone steps. At last
Terence drew them to a halt. Jazz shook her hand loose from his, si-multaneously relieved and disappointed
at the loss of con-tact. Without the feel of his hand in hers, she felt alone. The weight of the entire city hung
over her.
Terence fished in his pocket and withdrew an object. Jazz narrowed her eyes, trying to make out
what it was. He snapped it open and gave it a flick, and a tiny flame blos-somed to life. A lighter. What did
he need with that when he had a torch?
He dropped it into a narrow gutter to the left of the door they had just stepped through, and a small
rivulet of oil ignited. A line of fire raced along the perimeter of the circu-lar room, a ring of flame that
illuminated the vast chamber and threw dancing shadows on the high, domed ceiling.
Alan Whitcomb's apparatus filled the center of the chamber.
Jazz caught her breath. "You've been building it down here all along?"
"I couldn't do it aboveground. They would have found me eventually. And this was my father's
intention from the start, to use it down here in what was once the heart of the city."
In the flickering firelight, she stared at the massive con-traption. It sat awaiting its final component,
the battery that would bring it to life.
"They're not far behind us," Terence warned.
"I know that!"
The visions she had seen in the tunnels above were fresh in her mind. Whitcomb had prepared all of
the parts of the apparatus. She had seen him testing the gears and levers in his occult laboratory.
Taking a deep breath, she approached the apparatus. She could see the levers where she was
supposed to put her feet, the metal braces that would hold her arms, the bracket that would close upon her
chest. The ghosts had not only given up the secrets of Jazz's past. They had shown her what they required
of her.
"I don't understand," she said, wrapping her hand around a cold metal pipe that made up part of the
apparatus. It thrummed in her hand like the rails in one of the Tube tunnels, alive with distant power. "You
rebuilt this thing, but you didn't know the battery was a person?"
He shook his head. "I knew someone had to operate it from the inside. I've strapped myself in a
hundred times, try-ing different power sources. There are connections for out-side power; I suppose he left
them intact only to test the apparatus, but I always presumed the battery would attach there. How could I
have known the battery would be a hu-man? Who could have imagined it?"
Jazz took a deep breath. Trembling, she gazed up at the gauges and bars and steam valves of the
apparatus. When Terence put a hand on her shoulder, she did not turn to meet his gaze.
"What will happen to me?" she asked.
Down there in the cold heart of the city, the only sound was the crackling of the flames that lit the
chamber. Then Jazz heard approaching voices and footfalls and knew that they were out of time.
Terence did not reply. That was good. If he'd said any-thing other than I don't know, it would have
been a lie, and the time for lying was over.
Jazz grabbed hold of two thick pipes and stepped up into the apparatus. It began to hum.
Chapter Twenty
off the rails
The ghosts had been waiting for her. As Jazz locked herself into the apparatus —even before she
began to put her weight on the levers beneath her feet—apparitions began to mani-fest in the fire ring and
in the shadows of the domed ceiling above her. Phantoms of all eras faded in, as though they'd been there
all along but were only now revealing them-selves. Victorian ladies and newsboys drifted alongside the
starving specters of Shadwell thieves and the madmen of Bedlam. Yet there were so many others, clad in
the garb of wartime and peacetime alike, from centuries of London's life. None of the spirits seemed to
notice one another, nor did they pay any attention at all to Jazz. They simply waited.
The beams of half a dozen torches approached from be-yond the chamber. Figures stepped through
the firelight, more substantial than the ghosts. Josephine Blackwood raised a hand and pointed at Jazz,
shouting something —per-haps a command. Jazz could not hear her. She felt as though she were drifting
far away, and when she looked down she saw that the levers had been slowly released by her weight.
Gauges spun. Gears began to clank, and steam hissed from release valves. Terence had prepared
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