“This is where I leave you,” Rat-man says. He has swung his lower body back into the hole. I can tell he’s desperate to get out of the sun and go back to safety.
“Thank you,” I say. The words seem stupidly insufficient, but I can’t think of any others.
The rat-man nods and is about to swing himself down the ladder when Julian stops him.
“We didn’t get your name,” Julian says.
The rat-man’s lips twitch into a smile. “I don’t have one,” he says.
Julian looks startled. “Everyone has a name,” he says.
“Not anymore,” the rat-man says with that twitchy smile. “Names don’t mean a thing anymore. The past is dead.”
The past is dead. Raven’s refrain. It makes my throat go dry. I am not so different from these underground people after all.
“Be careful,” the rat-man says, and his eyes go unfocused again. “They’re always watching.”
Then he drops down into the hole. A second later the iron cover slides into place.
For a moment, Julian and I stand in silence, staring at each other.
“We did it,” Julian says finally, smiling at me. He is standing a little ways down the platform, the sun streaking his hair with white and gold. A bird darts across the sky behind him, a fast-moving shadow against the blue. There are small white flowers pushing up between the cracks in the platform.
Suddenly I find that I am crying. I am sobbing with gratitude and relief. We made it out, and the sun is still shining, and the world still exists.
“Hey.” Julian comes over to me. He hesitates for a second, then reaches out and rubs my back, moving his hand in slow circles. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, Lena.”
I shake my head. I want to tell him that I know, and that’s why I’m crying, but I can’t speak. He pulls me into him and I cry into his T-shirt and we stand there like that, in the sun, in the outside world, where these things are illegal. And all around us there is silence, except for the occasional twittering of birds, and the rustle of pigeons around the empty platform.
Finally I pull away. For a second I think I see movement behind him, in the shadows beyond one of the station’s old stairwells, but then I’m sure I’ve only imagined it. The light is unrelenting. I can’t imagine what I must look like right now. Despite the fact that the underground people have cleaned and treated Julian’s wounds, his face is still patterned with bruises, a multicolored patchwork. I’m sure I look just as bad, if not worse.
Belowground, we’ve been allies; friends. Aboveground, I’m not sure what we are, and I feel uneasy.
Thankfully, he breaks the tension. “So you know where we are?” he says.
I nod. “I know where we can get help from—from my people.”
To his credit, he doesn’t flinch. “Let’s go, then,” he says.
He follows me down into the tracks. We startle the pigeons from their roost, and they whirl up around us, a blurry, feathered hurricane. We pick our way over the train tracks and onto the high grass beyond it, bleached pale from the sun and still sheathed in frost. The ground is hard and webbed with ice, although here, too, there is evidence of spring growth: small, curled buds of green, a few early flowers scattered among the dirt.
The sun is warm on our necks, but the wind is icy. I wish I had something warmer than a sweatshirt. The cold reaches right through the cotton, grabs on to my insides, and pulls.
Finally the landscape becomes familiar. The sun draws stark shadows on the ground—towering, splintered shapes of bombed-out buildings. We pass an old street sign, doubled over, that once pointed the way to Columbia Avenue. Columbia Avenue is now nothing more than broken slabs of concrete, and frozen grass, and a carpet of minuscule shards of glass, shattered into a reflective dust.
“Here it is,” I say. “Right up here.” I start jogging. The entrance to the homestead is no more than twenty yards away, beyond a twist in the road.
And yet, there’s another feeling drilling through me: some inner alarm sounding quietly. Convenient. That’s the word that keeps floating through my mind. Convenient that we ended up so close to the homestead; convenient that the tunnels led us here. Too convenient to be a coincidence.
I push away the thought.
We turn the corner and there it is. Just like that, all my concerns get whipped away on a surge of joy. Julian stops, but I go straight up to the door, recharged, full of energy. Most homesteads—at least the ones I’ve seen—have been built out of hidden places: basements and cellars and bomb shelters and bank vaults that remained intact during the blitz. We have populated them like insects reclaiming the land.
But this homestead was built long after the blitz was over. Raven told me it was one of the very first homesteads, and the headquarters of the first ragtag group of resisters, who scavenged for materials and built a quasi-house, a weird patchwork structure made from timber, concrete, stone, and metal. The whole place has a junky look, a Frankenstein facade, like it shouldn’t possibly be standing.
But stand it does.