of her mother's bedroom. She opened them wide, staring across
the tracks at the grubby tiles, the colorful advertisements, breathing too fast. The questions had begun
—who were the Uncles, really, and why had they done it? But they were not new questions to Jazz. She
had been asking versions of them for most of her life.
Someone shouted. She glanced along the platform. A mother held the hands of her two girls, twins
about six years old. An old man with long silver hair and an enormous nose leaned with great dignity upon a
cane. Beyond them, among a sea of tourists and business suits, she saw a flash of dark jacket, moving
quickly.
"Here, love." A hand landed on her shoulder. "Everything all right?"
Jazz opened her mouth to scream but no sound emerged. She stood paralyzed for a few frantic
seconds, and then she bolted to the right, toward the end of the platform. Colliding with an old biddy in a
frumpy dress, she didn't wait to apologize. A teenage boy got in her way, one hand out as though he might
try to stop her. She shot him an el-bow to the chest and kept going.
"Mad fucking cow!" he called after her.
Her face flushed with heat as her heart thundered in her chest. She darted in and out of the crowd,
knocking over shopping bags and bumping briefcases.
"What's happening?" someone shouted.
"Who is that?"
"Don't push, don't shovel"
Jazz felt the ripples of unease spread across the platform, all originating from her. A fine way to stay
hidden, she thought, but she could not help running. She thought of shouting Bomb! but people would panic
and some would get hurt, and she could not bear that on her conscience.
She burst from the crowd to find herself alone at the end of the platform, tile walls to her right and
straight ahead and the train tracks to her left. If the Uncles really had come down here after her, they
would be on her in seconds. Her skin prickled with the attention of strangers' eyes, as though the tiles
themselves observed her.
A ledge jutted twelve inches from the wall, a lip of con-crete that continued past the end of the
platform as though the wall had not always been there. Desperation drove her forward. The cry of metal
upon metal and the screech of brakes approached from behind, and a great gust of wind blew along the
tracks. The train's arrival imminent, she put one hand on the wall and hung her head out over the tracks. In
the gloom of the tunnel, she saw that the wall went on perhaps six feet and then there was an opening
where the platform seemed to continue. In the darkness, she thought she could make out some kind of
metal grate —the sort of thing they used to partition off unused areas of the Underground.
"Here, girl, what do you think you're up to?" a voice called.
Jazz pressed herself against the wall and moved around onto the ledge. The shriek of the slowing
train grated along her spine. The light of its headlamps picked her out on the ledge as it bulleted into the
station from behind her, slow-ing, slowing...
Face sliding against filthy tiles, Jazz shuffled swiftly along the ledge, forcing herself not to imagine
falling back-ward or being blown off by the wind of the passing train. If she fell beneath it, her mother
would never forgive her.
The train hissed as it slowed, the front car coming toward the end of the platform, nearly adjacent to
her now. The conductor would see her. Someone would be called. More people would chase her into the
darkness, and then where would she hide?
Her left hand suddenly pressed against nothing. She slipped around the end of the wall onto a stretch
of for-gotten platform. On the track, the train hissed a final puff as though frustrated by her survival, and
then she heard the sounds of disgorging passengers and others climbing aboard. A recorded voice
announced the time of the next ex-pected train and advised those getting on and off to mind the gap.
It seemed she had already been forgotten.
Jazz laughed softly and without humor. Mind the gap, indeed. Never knew when you'd find yourself
falling into one of the cracks in the world. Here she was, living proof. Alice down the rabbit hole.
The train hissed again, doors closing, and started for-ward. In the light from its headlamp eyes, she
stared at the iron grating before her. Beyond it lay another stretch of platform, eight feet deep and perhaps
twenty long. A rusted, padlocked chain locked the gate. Some cinema action hero might have been able to
snap the rust-eaten chain, but
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