Hattie, Stevie, and Jazz had known about it. A rib had scraped his lung, he said, and
however much they begged, he refused to go aboveground to find a doctor. It was almost as if, once he
depended on someone other than himself again, his time down here would be finished.
Jazz descended out of the sunlight and into the station. She moved far along the platform and waited
beside one of the chocolate vending machines that no one ever seemed to use, and when the train arrived
she dashed on first. She was lucky to find a seat, and she stared down at her shoes as they rattled away
into the tunnels.
As she traveled, she thought about what she had seen. Had that really been Mort? She had already
decided it was, but there was always the possibility that she'd been mistaken. Her mother's words about
coincidence and chance came back to her, but her mother was dead, and it was up to Jazz now to translate
events. If it was Mort, then he was connected to Mayor Bromwell somehow, and that meant the Uncles
were as well. What that meant... she was not sure. But Harry had chosen this house —the third posh place
they'd have hit in as many weeks—for a reason: revenge.
Maybe the time had come to double up on vengeance.
When she got off the train, she stood on the platform for a minute, fumbling in her pockets for
change and pretending to use the chocolate machine. When the platform was empty, she dashed to the end,
slipped over its edge, and headed into the tunnel.
The first time she'd come this way after the United Kingdom had moved, the first thirty yards had
scared the crap out of her. She was very conscious of the train tracks close to her left foot, and she knew
that if a train came along she'd be done for. Even if there was just room for her to press against the wall,
the suction of the train's passing would pull her into it, and she'd be battered between train and wall before
being deposited on the tracks. Maybe people would see her, maybe they wouldn't, but either way they'd
never reach her before the next train came along to finish her off.
Timing, Switch had said. He never spoke much, and after almost three months this was the first
thing he'd said directly to Jazz. Off the train, down, thirty yards to the door. Find it, get in, you're
okay. Miss it, you're fucked. He'd stared at her, grubby face revealed by ghostly torchlight. Don't miss it.
She walked quickly, running her right hand along the wall and counting her steps. She heard a sound
in the distance, a screech and squeal, and for a second she feared it was the Hour of Screams coming in
again. But then she remembered how close she was to the surface. The Hour only swept through the
lower, more remote levels. Places, Marco had told her, where living people shouldn't be.
She found the steel hatch, grabbed its edge, and pulled. Once through the gap in the wall, she closed
the hatch and breathed out.
Away from the station, away from the line, she still had a long way to go. Their new home was
deeper than before. She only hoped it would be safer.
The clank of metal doors, the dust of abandoned tunnels, the flicker of uncertain lights, scampering
rats and the tickle of spiders, damp walls and leaking domed brick ceilings —all were becoming familiar to
Jazz. Worst were the cockroaches, which always seemed to scuttle just at the edges of any light. Once
she'd stepped into a nest of them; she'd become more careful since. The United Kingdom kept several
torches hid-den in an alcove close to the surface, and she took one now and made her way back down to
their new shelter. It had been built for royalty, and so they'd started calling it the Palace.
As long as Jazz didn't have to call it home, any name was fine with her.
The Palace was more comfortable than Deep Level Shelter 7-K, and sometimes when the air was
right they could hear faint, unidentifiable music coming in from somewhere high above, down pipes perhaps,
or through a fault in the ground.
But she was distracting herself. She was almost there, and she knew that soon she would have to
pass the wall.
It wasn't that it spooked her. Not really. But she was still getting used to the Underground, the nooks
and crannies, and the idea of miles of abandoned tunnels and places never seen by anyone alive. The
United Kingdom had made some of these places their homes and haunting
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