Tuesday stalked along the right side of the platform, dodging T riders, following the yellow rubber edge all the way to the end. Nothing. “I don’t know what I expected,” she muttered. “Kilroy saying ‘Vincent was here’? ‘Follow to clue’?”
“Um,” said Archie, pointing over her shoulder. “That seems pretty close.”
On the other side of the tracks, spray-painted and dripping on the dirty white and gray plaster of the wall, was a black bird. Head up and stiff. Wings folded back. The very silhouette of a raven, if it were sitting, say, on a bust of Pallas above one’s chamber door. A shaky scrawl in white chalk floated above the raven’s head. She had to step closer to read it: The prince of darkness is a gentleman!
“I mean,” said Tuesday. Her pulse picked up speed. She imagined the platonic ideal of a lawyer, three-piece suit, leather attaché, leaping over the tracks with a stick of chalk and a raven stencil, shaking a can of spray paint like a maraca: Pryce’s helper. Leaving clues around the city. “We shouldn’t be worried that it seems too easy, right? Pryce wants us to follow him. He wants people to solve it. He’s not trying to hide.”
The painted raven’s beak and one spindly foot, raised, were pointing toward the dark of the tunnel, beyond the platform, where the tracks disappeared on their way to Tremont Street station.
She took a picture on her phone and sent it to Dorry.
Dorry responded in four separate texts:
O
M
F
G
“I have no idea,” said Archie, drawing Tuesday by the elbow to conspire, “what sort of security cameras are set up here, but I’m willing to make a run for it down the tracks to see what we can find.”
“I’m less worried about security cameras than I am about – well.” Tuesday rolled her head to indicate the other people milling on the platform. “We’re about to become the definition of see-something-say-something.”
“They’re not going to see or say anything,” said Archie. “Look at them. They’re zombified. We wait until another train pulls into the station and they’ll all turn to look at it like—” He whipped his head to the side. “Squirrel.”
She swallowed. She felt a little dizzy. A little too warm. A little shaky.
On the internet, when she was researching, she was fearless. She would chase the tiniest clue down any number of research rabbit holes. This was just a forty-foot walk down a dark tunnel. Where she wasn’t supposed to go, technically – but, unlike the internet, once she was gone, there would never be any trace of her. No IP data, no browser history, no nothing. Online, she left tracks. Only in the world could she actually be invisible.
This was real, and her body was reacting accordingly.
She cleared her throat. “We have options,” she said. “We should discuss them. One: we wait for a break between train cars, and we sneak down the side of the tracks. Two: one of us sneaks, and one of us distracts. And I suppose there’s a third option, where we locate the station manager and tell him what we’ve found and wait for the police to come and supervise the whole thing.”
Archie’s lips slid slowly into a grin. “I don’t want to do that,” he said.
“You are bad news,” said Tuesday. “But I don’t want to do that either.” Her heart bumped. There was a whole world underground, of access doors and unused passages, old stations and tunnels. How deep was Pryce going to ask them to go?
Five million dollars could bail her out of jail more than a few times.
She looked across the tracks at the DANGER DO NOT CROSS signs posted every ten feet. She looked at Archie. He was rocking back and forth on his limited-edition Pradas, tenting his fingers like Mr. Burns, looking more mad scientist than sexiest new capitalist. It made him hotter. Stupid hot. One step removed from filthy hot. Tuesday’s taste had always run to the Doc Browns of the world, the wild-eyed renegades and rule breakers. But Emmett Brown broke rules because he wanted to find new roads. Archie broke rules because he thought, as did so many born under a dollar sign, that the rules applied to other people. This was less attractive, philosophically.
But it wasn’t unattractive.
The metal-on-metal shriek of a train approaching on the opposite track made her decision for her.
She grabbed Archie’s hand and ran into the dark beyond the platform.
Her feet kicked up stones. She crossed over a tie with each stride. She didn’t stop until they were well inside the tunnel, far enough not to be seen from the station but not so far that the station’s ambient light couldn’t reach them. Tuesday instinctively hopped over the rail and threw herself flat against the wall, and then realized the wall must be disgusting – all the walls were black with grime, the whole place had needed a power wash for half a century – and flinched forward, her foot connecting with an empty plastic cup. It bounced up and over the rails, clear dome winking in the low light, and rolled to a rest against some kind of train machinery. A signal box, maybe, or a breaker, levers sticking up out of the ground.
She looked behind her. No klaxons. No shouting. No reflector-stripe-uniformed T personnel blinding her with a flashlight.
She let go of the air in her lungs.
“Told you,” said Archie. This time, he took her hand. “Come on,” he said. “Watch your – watch your feet. You don’t want to step on a rat.”
“New York has rats,” Tuesday said. “We have cute little mice.”
“I doubt you’d want to step on one of them either.”
She heard shuffling and then there was light, tiny but piercing, from Archie’s iPhone. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and fired up her own app.
“So we’re here,” she said. “Huh.”
“Not as magical as you’d hoped?”
Yes and no. They were a few yards away from the junction that brought the station’s twin tracks together, en route to Tremont, and the parallel rails coursed through the darkness, crossing, shining, melting together, iron arteries flowing from a metal heart. It was also full of garbage. Dunkin’ Donuts cups and Coke bottles and wrappers and plastic bags and assorted other, unnamable detritus. She felt it before she knew it was happening – a shift beneath her feet, like an earthquake’s ghost – and the train that had been pulling into the station when they made a run for it coasted down the opposite track, through the junction to points beyond, clacking through the darkness like a great green mechanical caterpillar.
She threw her phone’s light up on the wall. Dirt. More dirt. Here, a door, with an MBTA PERSONNEL ONLY sign, half open – a storage closet. Inside, buckets and tools and wires and plastic yellow CAUTION/CUIDADO signboards with graphics of flailing stick figures. Next to the door, more dirt and graffiti, all in caps: YANKEES SUCK.
“Hey!” Archie’s voice carried from ahead. “I found – I don’t know. Over here.”
Tuesday followed his voice around a corner into an alcove, clear from the path of the train, partially made of brick. Bright, clean brick. So clean it couldn’t possibly have been down in the tunnel for very long. And over the brick, someone had spray-painted more graffiti, though the sentiment was somewhat more refined than YANKEES SUCK: