grounds, and there were plenty
of other people living under London, the home-less and disenfranchised and mad. They kept away from
oth-ers as much as possible, keeping their own location secret to avoid the theft of food or supplies. When
Jazz passed others in the Underground, she usually ignored them the way Harry had taught her, but
sometimes she couldn't help giving a smile or a wave or a quick hello, just to let those lost people know
there were those who hadn't forgotten them, who still saw them and acknowledged their existence.
They were harmless, mostly. But Harry often alluded to other, less normal inhabitants beneath the
city. One night around a fire he'd told them all the story about a tribe of peo-ple who had lived down here
since the 1800s, and how their descendants were born down here and had never seen day-light. Hear a
scratch, he'd said, see a face at the bottom of some un-plumbed pit, and it's likely one of them. She'd
asked him afterward whether he'd said it to scare them, and he'd paused for a while, looking at her. Then
he'd smiled and nodded. Of course, Jazz girl, he'd said.
She'd believed him then because she needed to, but now she was not so sure.
She walked on, along a narrow access tunnel between a subterranean room and a shaft that housed
an old metal lad-der. She checked the shaft before descending —
(no pale face down there staring up with milky, sightless eyes)
—and then carefully lowered herself down.
And here it was. The bottom of the shaft widened in a bell shape, and its base was a dozen steps
across. One quarter of it opened onto an old brick-lined cavern, its use long since lost to time. But opposite
this opening was the bricked-in doorway.
Something back there, Jazz thought. Something not dead. It was the same notion she'd had the
very first time they'd come this way, all of them following Harry in those painful, con-fused hours after
giving Cadge to the river. Then she'd not had time to pause but had turned away from the old opening and
walked on. Now, as every time since, she stopped to look.
She remembered what Cadge had said about that other metal door that had held her fascination.
Never know what you 're gonna find behind a door down here. Well, once there had been a doorway
here, and somebody had seen fit to brick it up. They had brought all those materials down here —bricks,
sand, cement—and worked in these cramped, uncomfortable conditions to fill the opening perfectly.
Jazz felt as if she could walk straight through the bricks. She tried, but they were solid and damp.
Something scurried away up the wall, its many-limbed escape scratching at her hearing.
She turned her back on the wall and walked away. It wasn't easy. Maybe it was just because it was
a mystery, and sometimes mysteries can exert a powerful influence.
Jazz went on, leaving that strange place behind.
Ten minutes later she found the room of alcoves. It was a long, thin room, the ceiling blank concrete
instead of the usual vaulted brick, and along the wall to her left were five al-coves. The door she wanted
—the one that led to the back en-trance of the Palace—was in the middle one.
It was open, of course. Harry and the others were ex-pecting her and Stevie, eager to hear their
report. If all was good —and she would make sure it was—there was a job for them to pull in less than
twenty-four hours.
Harry said the Palace was an old nuclear shelter from the 1960s. There was a big steel door at the
entrance that was wedged open, completely immovable. Inside were a series of rooms, a dozen in total, set
in two levels around a round cen-tral space, which served as their main gathering area. The largest of these
rooms was filled with a hundred shelves of inedible tinned and dried food. They'd opened a few of the tins
out of curiosity and found a powdery substance inside, which perhaps had once been soup or beef stew or
Spam. They hadn't tried any more.
Jazz wasn't convinced. Search though they had, they had not found any sign of a plant room to draw
in or process fresh air. The atmosphere down here was heavy and damp at best, but surely in a nuclear war
they'd rely on more than the depth of this place to ensure the air was uncontaminated? Neither was there a
control or communications center, which she'd seen in documentaries about the shelters built by the
govern-ment through the late fifties and sixties. She'd asked her mum about who would go down there if
there