“Maybe you’re right, maybe Grandpa does have the key. Maybe it’s with his other stuff, the stuff you didn’t take. If you leave us down here, you’ll never know,” Theo said.
Edgar said, “Technically, you’re not much of a poker player. Plus, I have more powerful tools at the archives.” He pulled a blanket and a smaller parcel from his pack, tossed them to the ground. “Some food and water. The blanket should cover the three of you.”
“But this makes no sense!” Tess shouted. “You’ll get in trouble! My mom will arrest you!”
Edgar Wellington said, “No one will get in trouble. You won’t remember what happened.”
“What are you talking about?” said Tess. “Of course we’ll remember!”
“There are certain drugs that can interfere with that. You’ll be fine.”
THUD, THUD, THUD.
Every brain cell in Jaime’s head screamed that they had to get out, all of them, now. He said, “Except for the fact that this tunnel is going to collapse. Look, let’s all go. You can use your drugs or whatever to erase our memories once we’re up there. But we need to go, we all need to go.”
Edgar took a few steps backward. A flicker of uncertainty passed over his face, then was gone. “The tunnel is solid. It’s stood since 1844, and it will stand another day or two. I’m going to seal it temporarily, but I’ll come back for you.”
“Wait!” yelled Tess.
And then the wall exploded behind them. They hit the ground and put their arms over their heads. Edgar stayed on his feet and grunted when a stone hit him in the shoulder. He staggered. Coughing, waving away the clouds of grit, he turned toward the opening in the now-crumbling wall behind them. A giant metal machine looked right back them, black as a train, but not a train.
Because trains didn’t have mouths.
“Get up, get up,” Jaime bellowed, scrambling to his feet and shoving at Tess and Theo. Theo got up, but Tess didn’t move. The great black machine lurched forward, saw-toothed mandibles clanging, legs churning, a segmented body almost wide enough to fill the entire tunnel. A loud clanking filled Jaime’s ears and rang in his brain. He and Theo pulled at Tess’s arms, but she was heavy and limp. A trickle of blood traced across her brow where a rock or something must have hit her. They tried to push her, to roll her, but the machine was coming. It was coming.
Jaime wasn’t a superhero boy, but he flung Tess’s arm over his shoulder and hefted her off the ground. And she wasn’t a skinny little chicken wing at all—she was heavy as fourteen bags of cement, forty bags; but Theo took hold of her feet and they staggered over to the hole in the wall where they’d found the suitcase and ducked through it.
Edgar—stunned by the sight of the beast erupting from the back wall, the train that was not at all a train—ran for the stairs. And the beast undulated after him, nimble as a whale in the ocean. The black expanse of the beast’s carapace filled their view. They heard a scream. Jaime risked a peek through the opening and saw that there were jaws on the hind end, just as vicious as the ones on the front.
And then, and then, the beast stopped moving, its honed black plates rippling to a halt. It raised its mandibles, and Jaime could have sworn it was tasting the air. It scrabbled back from where it came, marching through the opening in the wall and plunging into the blackness and beyond.
They sat in the dark of the chamber, panting, feeling the reverberation of the beast as it tunneled under Brooklyn on its way to wherever such beasts went.
“The explosives must have woken that monster up,” said Jaime.
“A digging machine,” said Theo. “We always thought the Morningstarrs used the cut-and-cover method to dig the tunnels for the Underway but could never figure out how they completed the work so fast. There were stories, but . . .”
“The stories were true,” said Jaime.
Theo’s eyes were glazed and shocked. “Do you think he’s dead?”
“Wait here,” said Jaime. “There’s a flashlight over there.” He hefted himself through the hole and walked cautiously over to the flashlight. He picked up the light and shone it toward the entrance of the tunnel. He had walked only a few steps when there was a new noise.
The tapping of numerous tiny feet.
Four Rollers clicked and clacked toward the dark form of Edgar Wellington slumped on the ground. Whatever he had done, or almost done, Jaime didn’t want to see him Rolled like garbage. But instead of turning around, they backed up, and two of the Rollers heaved the limp form onto the backs of the other two. And then the four Rollers made a solemn procession through the tunnel, past Theo and Tess and Jaime, and out the way the giant beast had gone, vanishing into the underbelly of the city.
Jaime didn’t know what to feel. His chest was like the tunnel, dark and filled with rubble. This was not the way it was supposed to go; this was not the way things were supposed to be. Things like this happened in comic books and movies, not in real life. He couldn’t imagine what Theo was feeling. That was a man they thought they could trust. A friend.
Jaime tried to see into the tunnel the beast had made. “Where do you think they took him?”
Theo’s voice was high and thin. “I wonder if we’ll ever know.”
“Come on,” Jaime said. “We have to get your sister out of here.”
They tried to wake her, but it was no use. They picked her up again and started back toward the entrance of the tunnel. The suitcase lay on the ground, half buried in a pile of rocks. So, it hadn’t been crushed; it hadn’t been scooped up with Edgar’s body. Jaime hooked it with his foot, flipped it up onto his wrist, but could feel no happiness, just a grim satisfaction that made him wonder about the world, that made him wonder about himself.
They got moving again. The ground felt unsteady, his knees bending this way and that. More strange rumbling sounded throughout the tunnel. Thunderstorm? No, they were too deep to hear a storm. The earth beneath his feet seemed to hum somehow. Small stones dropped from the walls next to them.
Jaime said, “My feet are vibrating.”
“I don’t know if this tunnel is stable anymore.”
“Maybe that one monster isn’t the only monster down here,” Jaime said. “Hurry.”