Jaime
The funny thing about time was that when you were running out of it, it only seemed to go faster. Not that long ago, it had felt like they had weeks to figure out the Cipher, and now Jaime felt the ticking of the clock in his bones. Even Edgar Wellington seemed to feel it. After they’d read everything they could find about the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, even found an old engineering survey of the tunnel, Edgar decided that they were as prepared as they could be, and they’d just have to take a chance, especially if Mr. Stoop was desperate enough to go to Long Island to pump the twins’ poor, sick grandfather for information, as the twins had claimed.
“We need to stay ahead of these people,” said Edgar, jaw set. “They will not win.”
He convinced Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann and Mima that a sleepover at the archives would be great for the kids and a nice break for the grown-ups. Since they needed to wait till at least midnight before going to Brooklyn, they passed the time telling more stories of the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel. It was filled with poisonous gas! (Not true.) It was filled with albino alligators! (Maybe one or two but that was a long time ago.) It was filled with ghosts! (Please.) It was filled with rats! (Likely.) After the stories, they packed up some equipment: flashlights; water; a screwdriver; a crowbar; a set of lock picks; a ladder that collapsed into the size of a serving tray; a whole bunch of other tools that not even Theo could identify. Uncle Edgar said that the tunnel should be safe enough, but that you couldn’t be too careful.
A little after midnight, they headed out. No cabs this time; the society had its own van. Twenty minutes later, they were parking. The streets of Brooklyn were busy enough. As Jaime had said, this was New York City, and there were always people around. But it was also true that the people of New York were good at minding their own business and excellent at refusing to be surprised. Want to perform Shakespeare on the Underway in your bathing suit? Eh. Want to dress up like a toucan and tap-dance in the park? Whatever. Roller-skate through the department store? Don’t let the security guards catch you. Want to hold a philosophical debate with a piece of Swiss cheese, make a mask out of peach pits, stick raisins up your nose? Looks pointless/painful/ugly, but it’s your cheese/face/nose.
Sure enough, when Edgar went to the middle of the street and set up a bunch of traffic cones around the manhole, the cabs and cars simply swerved around him, the people on the sidewalks barely sparing a glance. Edgar waved the kids over. They ran across the street, barely avoiding a man on a unicycle flying a flag that said, WHAT GOOD IS A STORY YOU ONLY WANT TO READ ONCE? Edgar levered up the manhole cover. He pressed a button on the side of the ladder and it shot down into the darkness with a snap.
“Wow,” said Jaime. “That’s some Batman stuff right there.”
“Let’s hope it all works,” Uncle Edgar said. “Now, who wants to go first?”
They all wanted to go first. Three games of rock-paper-scissors later, Jaime went in.
He hit the floor and then stepped through an opening that had been broken into the concrete wall. Another dusty, ladderlike stairwell—this one not as steep—led into the tunnel. The tunnel itself looked like, well, a 2,500-foot-long tunnel that had been built in 1844. Back at the archives, they had read Walt Whitman aloud:
The Tunnel, dark as the grave, cold, damp, silent. How beautiful look earth and heaven again, as we emerge from the gloom! It might not be unprofitable, now and then, to send us mortals—the dissatisfied ones, at least, and that’s a large proportion—into some tunnel of several days’ journey. We’d perhaps grumble less, afterward.
Jaime wouldn’t grumble at all if they found something. He’d seen Slant’s workers setting up wire fences, cordoning off 354 W. 73rd Street, getting it ready for the wrecking ball, whenever that would come. He hoped they could stop it in time. But he wasn’t sure he could stop anything else: Mima’s sadness; the fact that they had to leave 354 W. 73rd Street. They were too far gone now, one foot out of the door, a deposit on the apartment in Hoboken, a new job for Mima, a new school for Jaime. But maybe saving their own homes wasn’t the point anymore. Maybe the point was to save a piece of history. At least, that was what he told himself.
He rubbed his arms to warm them, and then his nose. Sneezed. Said, “I thought this place would be spookier.”
“It would be if the stories were true,” Theo said. “Ghosts. Pirates. The pirates were supposed to have an entrance to the tunnel from a bar nearby, guarded by a pair of seven-foot-tall Turks with scimitars.”
Jaime said, “Turks with scimitars would be awesome.”
Edgar said, “So, according to the survey we found, there are a few things buried down here. A twenty-foot-long metallic structure between the middle and the south side of Atlantic Avenue, which the engineer thought was a steam engine or some sort of digging machine. There’s a smaller geophysical anomaly on the northern side.”
“What do they think the smaller anomaly is?” Theo said.
Edgar shrugged. “No idea. They didn’t dig because the government pulled the funds and permission. Closed everything up indefinitely.”
“I wonder if that’s what we’re looking for,” Tess said.
“We won’t know till we get there,” Edgar said. “Come on. Let’s head to the other end. Keep your eyes open.”
They walked. The floor of the tunnel was dirt, with large rocks here and there. The lights bounced off the stone walls, illuminating writing that had been carved into the surface:
Lynch put first electric light in this subway.
“Subway? Not Underway?” said Tess.
“Weird,” said Jaime, and scribbled it in his sketchbook, right next to an imaginary seven-foot-tall Turk. It was hard to sketch in the dark, but he did it anyway, quick lines that limned his thoughts.
They found the remnants of an old phone, with a long coiled cord and a rotary dial. Jaime picked up the handle and pretended to talk to John Wilkes Booth. Tess took the phone and pretended to talk to the ghosts until Edgar told them to quit fooling around.
They reached the end of the tunnel, a pile of debris in front of a wall. “This is where the locomotive is supposed to be hidden. And over there”—he pointed the beam of his light—“is where the other anomaly is located.”
He took the pack off his back and unzipped it, removing various tools. He pulled out a silver cylinder the size of a drinking glass and popped off the cap, exposing a bit an inch in diameter.
“A drill?” said Theo.
“Not just any drill. The Morningstarrs designed it. This little darling could drill through cobalt plates if we needed it to.” He put the tip of the drill against the wall and started up the machine. A high-pitched whine echoed through the tunnel, dust puffing in the air like a cloud. After about five minutes, Edgar turned off the drill, blew on the new hole.