than he is. Gotta be a way we can trick him into a confession.”
“Stick a pin in that,” Nell said. “We’ve got a lead to follow. The road map to the Asclepion is in Aislin Kendricks’s workshop.”
Seelie held up her hand. “I had a thought on that when I was leaving the graveyard. Well, fleeing.”
“Tunnels,” Nell said. “Her workshop wasn’t in the Three Keys orphanage. It was under it. Which means it’s still there.”
“How’d you know?” Seelie said.
Tyler gestured to his laptop, sitting discarded on the edge of the futon.
“Show we watched last night, waiting for you to get back. Guy dumped a body in the storm tunnels under Vegas. Apparently, and this was news to me, the whole city’s honeycombed with underground passages.”
“And so is New York,” Nell said. “Between the subways, underground walkways, interconnected basements, no matter where you go there’s always something right under your feet. The hidden face of the city.”
She set her coffee down.
“We need an expert.”
* * *
The New York Transit Museum was built from an actual Brooklyn subway station. After the station shut down in the forties, it reopened as a wonderland for rail buffs, with its tracks sporting refurbished trains from every era of the past. Nell wondered, as she briskly strode down the steps of the entrance, how many tourists accidentally wandered in looking for a connecting stop.
Not just trains—an expanded section of the platform housed a seventies-era city bus, with an antique railcar perched on the opposite side of the tracks. They breezed past dioramas and maps, vintage signs and photographs of the city’s youth.
One map drew her eye. It was a layout of the Brooklyn underground, a tangled spaghetti bowl in a riot of color. Needle in a haystack, she thought, eyeing the knot of lines at the waterfront. One stood out: a thick black streak, running parallel to Atlantic Avenue.
“The orphanage,” she said, waving Tyler over. “That was just north of Atlantic, right?”
He ran the tip of his finger along the wall map, hovering an inch over the glass.
“And this was Smoky Hollow, just to the south. Meaning this…” He spotted a docent strolling past and caught the older man’s eye. “Excuse me, sir? Can you tell us what this black line is? It doesn’t look like it connects to anything else on the map.”
“That’s the Atlantic Avenue tunnel: not just the oldest subway line in New York, oldest in the entire world. Long Island Rail Road built it back in 1844.”
Nell and Tyler shared a glance. The timing fit.
“And it’s no longer operational?” Nell asked.
“Nah, got shut down in ’61, seventeen years after it opened. There was an investment scandal. Mass transit was booming at the time, and some robber barons were feuding over who’d make the big bucks off of the city’s rail lines. This wasn’t a subway like our modern system. It was an actual steam train.”
“In a tunnel,” Tyler said.
“In a tunnel. Passengers packed onto hard wooden benches and had smoke blowing in their faces the entire ride. Pretty miserable, by all accounts, and that’s when it was working at all. LIRR had a team of horses on standby, to pull the car when the engine conked out. You know, if you’re interested in the Atlantic Avenue tunnel, there’s somebody you need to meet.”
The docent craned his neck, hunting for someone on the far side of the platform. Then he gave a big wave.
“Tom? Tom. C’mere, these folks are asking about the tunnel.”
Nell wasn’t sure if Tom worked there or if he was just a museum regular. He was a stocky man with grandfatherly eyes that lit up like Christmas as he meandered over. Three minutes later he was leading her, Tyler, and Seelie onto one of the refurbished trains, past dangling straps and advertisements from the fifties.
“Step into my office,” he said, gesturing to the bright orange vinyl bench seats. He lowered himself into a seat on the opposite side, wincing as he rubbed his lower back. “Yeah, I can tell you all about the tunnel. Used to lead tours down there, for urban spelunkers. Not quite sanctioned by the city, but I ran a tight ship and nobody ever got hurt, so they left me alone. For a while, anyway.”
“Have you ever heard about anything…strange happening down there?” Nell asked.
Tom grinned. “When was something strange not happening down there? Oh, it was a scene. You know there were pirates in New York, back in the day? Actual honest-to-God pirates, working the East