through her and dread skittering down the back of her neck. She caught her
breath and stood staring back at them.
They stepped away from Harry. On the ground, the old thief coughed and spat up blood and bile. The
men watched her with a terrible malice.
"Well, now," said the man with the black tie. He reached up and pulled down his mask —most of the
gas had dis-persed—and Jazz uttered the smallest sound, a kind of whimper that she despised.
She recognized him. He had been one of the men the Uncles sometimes sent to watch over her and
her mother, to pick up groceries or do a bit of repair on the pipes or the electric. And he had been standing
outside her house, on guard, while her mother's killers had been inside. Jazz didn't know his name. In her
mind, he was simply one of the BMW men.
He took a step toward her.
"Cadge, run!" she cried.
Jazz turned, caught her foot on a railroad tie, and stum-bled. She risked one glance over her shoulder
and saw the men running. One of them tripped and fell, but the others did not hesitate.
She ran. Her breath sounded too loud in her ears, and the walls of the tunnel seemed to be closing in.
They gave chase, shouting to one another as though on a foxhunt. And Jazz knew what happened at the
end of the hunt. The cop-per stink of her mother's blood rushed back to her as though she had returned to
that death room. Her breath came faster.
Cadge ran just ahead. The only noise he made was his footfalls. As they rounded the bend, legs
pumping, dancing amid the remnants of train track, Cadge snatched up his duffel bag.
"Nowhere to run down here, kids!" one of the men called.
Jazz had been thinking almost exactly that a moment be-fore, but now she realized how wrong he
was. There were an infinite number of places to hide in the down-below. The men had beaten Harry and
scared off the others, but the United Kingdom had scattered. They'd be hiding now, like the rats these men
thought they were. Like Hattie. The girl had passed them only moments ago, but Jazz ran by the stairs she
and Cadge had come down and the door was now closed firmly. In the shadows, it looked unused.
"You're slow and old, you ugly shits!" Cadge called to their pursuers. "I hope you all have heart
attacks and die down here."
"Christ, Cadge," Jazz rasped, running, chest burning with the effort. She'd already been exhausted
when they'd walked into this chaos. What was Cadge doing?
When he glanced at her and she saw his expression in the gloom, she understood. He wasn't taunting
the men out of amusement, but to make sure they knew he and Jazz hadn't gone through that door. If one
of them opened it and found Hattie there, she was dead.
Well done, Cadge.
He started to slow, the extra burden of the duffel weigh-ing on him. Jazz glanced back and saw
they'd lengthened the distance between themselves and the thugs. She couldn't even see them now around
the bend in the tunnel —could only hear the clomping of their boots. But if Cadge slowed...
"Drop the bag," she whispered.
He shot her a look of terror. "But the torch —"
Jazz tore the duffel from his hands and let it fall to the floor of the tunnel, hoping one of the bastards
would trip on it. Cadge wanted the torch in case they had to hide some-where that the light from above
didn't filter in and where there were no electrical lights still siphoning power from the upside world. But they
couldn't afford to lose a step.
Better to live in the dark than die in the light.
Her face burned with exertion and hatred, not only for these men but for herself. The BMW man
proved it, and she'd seen that recognition in all of their eyes. They were here for her. Jazz had brought
blood and perhaps even death to Harry and his United Kingdom. Her heart tightened into a fist in her chest.
She couldn't let them catch her. The pain they would inflict on her would be terrible, but far worse would be
the knowledge that her mother had spent so many years preparing her to survive and that she had failed at
the task.
She had to live for Mum.
"Here," Cadge said.
The only light came from vent shafts twenty yards in ei-ther direction, but her eyes had become used
to the dark in the past couple of months and she saw immediately what Cadge pointed to. A small narrow
platform was set into the left side of the tunnel.
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