But Jaime and Tess didn’t answer Theo’s question about questions or his question about answers, because they were too busy trying to figure out what to do next. They couldn’t take a long ride just then, because it was too late in the day, and because Tess and Theo’s parents would be expecting them home for dinner. And they couldn’t go first thing in the morning either, because they had to spend another morning adding to the teetering piles of boxes and bags filling up their living room, as if Darnell Slant were a train that nobody had the power to stop.
So, it wasn’t till the next afternoon that Theo and Tess met Jaime in the lobby, and they headed for that first train. They agreed they would take the A train all the way up to the end of the line—or the beginning, depending on how you looked at it—Inwood, 207th Street. They would ride the A train down the length of Manhattan, cross into Brooklyn, stopping at Ozone Park, and then on to Rockaway Beach if they had to. And then they’d switch over to the D train and ride that whole route for as long as it took. Then G, then L, and so on. Since they had more tokens than trains to ride, they would simply offer the tokens to the Guildmen and see what happened. They had not told their parents or Mrs. Cruz the particulars of their plan, understanding that they would never be allowed to travel so far from home, from one borough to the next, through neighborhoods they didn’t know and stations they’d never been to. And they didn’t talk about what they would do if they didn’t have time to complete the routes, or if the Guildmen had no information to offer, or if they simply refused to talk, or if their answers didn’t make sense and would lead exactly nowhere, or if they were all thrown off the train and banned from riding forever.
They found seats in the front of the train and waited. The stops flew by—people getting on, people getting off—the normal ebb and flow of humanity. Tess wondered how many of them were even thinking about the train they rode, how many of them understood what a marvel it was. How it had been born in the imaginations of the Morningstarrs when most of Manhattan was forests and farms, horses and carriages, muddy trenches where pigs roamed.
And then she looked at the guildmember in his box, white apron crisp, the wheel symbol of the guild right over the man’s heart. To the Guildman’s right, there was a panel of buttons and gears and levers, but his fingers didn’t touch the mechanisms. Even seated, he seemed large and immovable, stone-faced and stony-eyed, his dark brows drawing to a sharp V shape on the ridge of his skull. Tess had her own questions: How long had he been in the guild; was it a family tradition; did his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father keep the secrets of the Underway; and what it would take to reveal them—to her or to anyone? She hoped she could ask him.
The train quickly passed Central Park, bursting out of the ground at 116th Street and onto an elevated track darning neatly in and out of the tapestry of buildings. People stood in windows of the buildings, drank coffee, laughed, and talked. She was too anxious to sit, so she stood by the doors, rested her forehead against the glass, and looked down where people walked the streets below, brown and black and yellow hair shining in the afternoon sun—168th Street, 175th, 190th. Theo tugged at his lip. Jaime held his sketchbook and pencil but the page remained blank. When the train tunneled into the earth once again and pulled into Inwood, the guildmember’s stone face rolled slowly toward Theo and Jaime and then rolled away, as if they held no more interest than the dog-sized rats that ran up and down the Underway tunnels. Tess’s eyes strayed to the white tile wall just outside the train. Laid into the tiles were the words At the start . . . at long last. She hoped so.
The train idled a few more minutes, a few people stepped on. The doors closed. The train began its journey south. Tess swallowed hard, then stumbled toward the glass booth. Nobody else in the car noticed. The Guildman ignored her. Tess pressed her hands on the glass. He looked past her.
She did what they’d all decided she would do: she offered the pile of tokens to the Guildman.
The train stopped. The people filed off; the people filed on. The train inched forward. Tess glanced back at Theo and Jaime. So, maybe their theory was wrong and the Guildman knew nothing. Or Theo and Tess and Jaime knew nothing.
The Guildman turned his stone face toward her, expressionless as the Sphinx. He opened the window and plucked a token from her palm, his fingers dry and scratchy. He said, “Your journey is just beginning.”
Tess’s heart spasmed. “What? What was that?”
But he wouldn’t look at her again, no matter how much she waved her hands. She stumbled back to Theo and Jaime.
“Now what?” Tess said.
Theo said, “We switch to the next train on the list. D. Get out at 145th.”
Tess sat next to Theo, bouncing with so much excitement that she would have bounced herself right onto the floor if Theo hadn’t gripped one of her knees. But he was gripping her knee so hard that she knew he was just as excited. A grin split Jaime’s face.
They got off at 145th Street and caught the next D train going downtown. They walked up to the first car, found seats. The Guildman in this car was as small and wiry as the one in the first had been large and beefy. His brown skin shone like oiled wood rather than stone, but his expression was just as blank and unknowable. This time, Tess didn’t wait until they hit the end of the line. She positioned herself by the glass and offered the tokens.
He opened the glass door, took a token. His brown eyes met hers. He said, “Your journey continues.”
She ran back to Theo and Jaime. “Where can we catch the G?”
Theo pulled out a pocket map and opened it across their laps. The G line was a Queens–Brooklyn line, and they would have to make a few transfers to reach it. As they traced the route, the train jerked and the map slipped to the floor.
“Is it me,” said Jaime, “or is the train going faster?”
Theo said, “They always go the same speed unless there’s some sort of emergency.”
“Feels faster,” said Jaime.
And it did. Tess’s thoughts raced through the various what-ifs—what if they went too fast to stop, what if they drove all the way down to Brazil, what if they crashed through one Underway tunnel into another, what if they burst through a wall and pitched into the sea—until Theo interrupted.
“We’ll have to get off at 53rd, transfer to the E train, go to the Court Square stop, and then catch the G there.”
It was a quick trip to 53rd. They hopped on the E train, not bothering to work their way up to the front. They took the E train across town and over to Queens and then found the G line. Unlike the trains in Manhattan, this train was strangely empty. When they arrived in the front car, there were no other passengers. Tess approached the booth and spoke to yet another wooden-faced man in a white apron, paid a token, and got the same message as the last: “Your journey continues.” She turned to go back to her seat, but the train jerked again, and she lurched into one of the poles and nearly tumbled into Jaime’s lap.
“He said the same thing the last guy did,” she said.
Theo said, “You might be right.”
“Of course I’m right,” said Tess.
“No, I meant Jaime. I think the train is going faster.”
“But this is a different train,” said Jaime.