not Jasmine Towne. The train rattled past, gaining speed, and with it her pulse
began to race again.
She saw the shapes of people at first, and the occasional blur of a face, but the faster it went the
more those people seemed to blur into one.
The illumination from the train's interior flickered off the black iron grate, but at the upper edge of her
vision was a rectangle of darkness that seemed to swallow the light. Jazz studied it, blinking at the
realization that either a sec-tion of the grate had been broken away or whoever had in-stalled it had left a
transom window above.
She gripped the iron bars, propped the rubber sole of one trainer against the metal, then hauled
herself up. If Jazz could be said to be gifted at anything, it was climbing. Her mother had often called her a
monkey for her love of scam-pering up trees and rocks and the way she could always manage to break into
their town house if her mum had lost her keys. She'd thought, once upon a time, of becoming a dancer. But
little girls always wanted to be ballerinas or princesses, and people like her weren't allowed dreams for very
long.
Her foot slipped, but her hands found a grip on the transom. One knee banged painfully against the
gate, rat-tling the chain and sending a shower of rust flaking to the platform. But she pulled herself up
across the bottom bar of the transom and through to the other side like a gymnast.
She landed in a crouch and paused for a moment, listen-ing to the roar of the train fading into the
distance. Light from the station reflected off the tiles on the other side of the tunnel, giving her just enough
illumination to see. Voices came from beyond the wall: bored commuters talk-ing into phones and excited
tourists nattering in a mixture of languages.
She stood frozen, like a rabbit caught in oncoming head-fights. And when someone shouted, Jazz
bolted. As the train passed, its light had shown her the outline of a tall door, and she guessed it to be an old
exit up to street level. The Underground was rife with such things, she'd read, coming up into the storage
rooms and basements of chemists, mar-kets, and pubs that had once been Tube stations or buildings
associated with them.
Dark shapes scurried and squealed around her feet: rats. As long as they ran away from her, not
toward her, she could put up with that.
The door stood open a few inches, the frame corroded. Whatever lock had once sealed it had been
broken, leaving a hole where the knob ought to be. Jazz had a strange feeling that the door had been forced
closed, not open.
She reached out. The metal felt warm to the touch and pulsed with the thrum of the Underground,
like a beating heart. Jazz leaned her weight against it, and it scraped open across the concrete floor.
Blinking, she waited for her eyes to adjust. The stairwell ought to have been pitch black, but a dim
blue glow pro-vided light enough to see that she had been wrong. The spi-ral metal staircase did not lead
toward the surface. Rather, it led deeper into the ethereal gloom.
She could go back. For a moment she considered it. But to what? The Uncles and her mother's
corpse, and the mur-derous woman with Jazz on her mind? No. There would be no going back now. If she
returned to the surface, it had to be far from here. If she got onto a train, it could not be at this station.
Somewhere in the underground labyrinth, there would be another way up.
****
The spiral staircase created an echo chamber, and the sound of her breathing surrounded her as Jazz
started down. Such evidence of her panic forced her to calm down, to slow her breath, and soon her pulse
slowed as well. Still, she heard her heartbeat much too loudly in her head.
It was at least thirty feet until the staircase ended. The blue glow brightened into silvery splashes of
light from sev-eral caged bulbs, metal-wrapped cables bolted to the curved stone walls. She wondered who
would come down here to replace these bulbs when they blew.
More hesitant now, Jazz stepped away from the bottom of the stairs and along a short tunnel. It
emerged into a vast space that made her catch her breath. Above her was a ventilation shaft that led up to
a louvered grille. Daylight filtered down, a splash of light in the false underground night. Like distant
streetlamps, other vents served the same purpose in the otherwise enduring darkness of that
long-abandoned station. The platform had been removed, and beneath
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