Chapter 6: The Eastline

The subway entrance was three blocks away, behind a bakery with its sign still half lit in memory, and Mara counted every one of those blocks like a prayer.

She didn't tell him. That was the first decision she made, running, with the cold tearing at her lungs and the motorcycles growling somewhere behind. The woman only matters as long as she's useful. She turned it over like a stone in her hand. If she told Tobias, he'd stop. He'd fight. He'd do something stupid and noble and get himself killed, and then there'd be no door for Wren.

Better that he didn't know. Better that she was just useful.

She was good at being useful. It was the only thing she'd ever been good at.

"Left," she hissed. "Here. Down."

The stairs dropped into black. A metal gate hung half off its hinges, and she shouldered through it, and Tobias came after her, pipe in one hand, breathing hard. Mara pulled a flashlight from her pack, a little crank-up thing with a cracked lens, and thumbed it on. The beam made a weak yellow circle on the wall. The tile was green and white, stained brown where the water had come through. A poster for a car insurance company still hung there, peeling, the smiling family on it bleached to ghosts.

"Smells like a basement," Tobias said.

"It smells like a lot of things. Don't think about it."

They went down. The stairs became a corridor, and the corridor became a platform, long and empty, with the tracks running off into the dark like a throat. The sign overhead said EASTLINE in faded blue. Mara swung the light along the ceiling, checking for sagging beams, checking for the dark shapes that meant cave-ins. Somewhere up above, the engines had stopped. That was worse. It meant the Concord had gotten off their bikes.

"They'll come down after us," she said quietly. "We keep moving. The tunnel runs east for about four miles before it daylights at the old stockyard. That cuts the walk by a third."

"You know the way."

"I told you I did."

He didn't answer that. She heard him shift behind her and felt him looking, and when she turned the light he was staring at her left hand. The glove had slipped down in the run, and the scar was showing, long and pink across her palm.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Door handle. First night."

"Mar."

"It's fine. It healed." She yanked the glove back up. "That's the end of that."

"I was going to say I'm sorry," he said. "That I wasn't there."

"You couldn't have been there. You were two states away." She started walking. "It wasn't your fault."

"Okay."

"It wasn't."

"I said okay." He caught up and walked beside her, shoulder almost touching hers, the pipe hanging loose at his side. "But I'm still sorry."

She had no answer for that, so she gave him none. They stepped off the platform and down onto the tracks, the gravel loud under their boots, and walked into the tunnel together.

It was darker in there than any dark she'd known. The flashlight seemed to get swallowed after a few feet. The walls were wet and close. Pipes ran along the ceiling, sweating, dripping in a slow irregular rhythm that she could feel in her teeth. Every thirty paces or so there was a little alcove with a rusted steel door, maintenance rooms, locked tight, and past each one the air turned a little colder.

After a few minutes Tobias said, very low, "Do you remember the night we drove out to the quarry?"

"I said no Finn."

"This isn't Finn. This is before. The summer we got the old truck and it broke down and we had to sleep in the bed. You said the stars were too bright to sleep and then you slept for eleven hours and snored like a bear."

"I did not snore."

"You absolutely snored."

She almost laughed. She actually felt it start, that stupid warm wobble in her chest, and she clamped her jaw down on it. "Why are you telling me this?"

"I don't know. Because it's dark and I'm scared. Because I'd forgotten it until just now." A pause, and the drip, drip, drip of water. "I've forgotten a lot of things. I didn't notice until I started trying to remember."

That's the price, she thought. That's what the Transfigured pay. She had a sudden cold image of him standing in front of her with kind, blank eyes. She pushed it away.

"Keep walking," she said.

They walked. The tunnel bent left, then right, then dropped into a shallow dip where the water came up to their ankles, black and so cold it burned. Tobias swore under his breath. Mara didn't say anything. She was counting steps, the way she always did, one two three four, and listening past the drip to the sound behind them.

There it was. Far back. A scrape of metal on tile. Voices, tiny and echoing. A flashlight beam flickering across the curve of the wall, small as a firefly.

"They're in," she said.

"How many?"

"Enough." She cranked the flashlight harder. "Faster. Don't run, running's loud. Just walk fast."

They went on. The tunnel narrowed. The ceiling came down until Tobias had to duck, and the old rails gave way to a kind of muddy trough where the track bed had washed out. Mara kept one hand on the wall. The stone was slimy, and under her fingers she felt something cut into it, a pattern of scratches, regular, deliberate.

She angled the light.

Red paint. A big crude X, dripping down the tile, with a skull painted inside it.

Her mouth went dry.

She'd marked that herself. Eighteen months ago, in pencil, on the atlas. Eastline, deep section, raiders. She'd come down here once, early on, looking for a shortcut, and she'd gotten out of it by the skin of her teeth, and after that she'd drawn the biggest X she could and sworn never to come back. But the tunnel was the only way. The surface was crawling with Concord. She'd made her choice in about a second, running, and she'd told herself the raiders must've moved on by now.

She'd told herself a lot of things.

"Tobias," she whispered. "Stop."

"What?"

"Don't move."

He stopped. She turned the light slowly along the wall, then along the floor, where the dark water lay flat and still. And in the beam, a thin line caught the glow. A wire. A trip-line, thin as a hair, stretched ankle-high across the whole width of the tunnel.

She'd missed it. If she hadn't looked at the paint, she'd have walked straight into it.

"Okay," she breathed. "Okay. We step over, slow, and we."

Behind them, a rifle bolt clicked.

Then another. Then six more, all around, all at once, and the dark came alive with the sound of men breathing. The flashlight beam swept left and found a face. Sunken eyes. A scar through one eyebrow. A grin full of bad teeth.

Tobias hadn't even seen the wire. He was already stepping forward, and Mara lunged for his arm, too late, and his boot caught the line.

Something snapped. Something heavy swung down from the ceiling and took him in the back of the knees, and he went down hard in the freezing water with a shout. Before Mara could move, the scarred man had his knife at Tobias's throat, and four more rifles were trained on her chest.

The man looked up at her and smiled wider.

"Hello, Holloway," he said. "You've got a lot of nerve coming back here. You still owe me for the last time."