The Wire Hanger

Chapter Twenty-nine

Esau, mercifully, shut up by the time we’d gotten through the back door. He’d been peppering Jezebel, and then me when she’d gotten annoyed with him, with questions, but now that we were out after curfew, his demeanor had improved. It also helped that Jezebel had told him in no uncertain terms that he was only along because they needed an extra person in case the rest of us died, what with the rest of the crew busy with the broadcast, and that shut up him quite effectively.

            I had to admit I didn’t love him being along. I was the one who had been there first – who had met Jezebel and Noah and the Professor first, had been to the house first, had snuck through gardens and alleyways and underground passages first. I hadn’t had anything all to myself before, and even this one thing only lasted for a few days before my twin came along, gallumphing through the alley with his big, noisy feet, seeing everything I had seen and laying claim to it. Much as I wanted everything to be over, I couldn’t help but wish I still had something that was only mine.

            Though I guessed he wouldn’t be interested in Noah. Now there was a thought.

            Our path, led by Jezebel, followed much the same route as the time we’d gone to the Centre for the failed breakout. I kept thinking about Delilah – her hair spread out on the floor of the subway station when her scarf came off as she fell; the widening pool of blood where she lay, where we left her; how her name had barely been mentioned in the Professor’s house since. Collateral damage, the Professor had said. So then, what were we? What kind of people were these?

            I could sense Esau’s unease as we crept through the tunnels, flattening ourselves against the wall as a subway train went by. Its lights flickered over us and the sound was so deafening I couldn’t think. It looked more crowded than it had been the last time I saw one, packed to the gills with Protectors on their way…somewhere. The grander tactical maneuvers were of no interest to me. I had gotten into this with one aim only: to find my my mother and to bring her home. With every step through the damp, rat-infested tunnels, I knew I was getting closer.

            When at last we’d gotten to Lower Queen, Felix, Jezebel, Esau and I all gathered in a huddle in the middle of the roughed-in platform. “Not far now,” said Jezebel in a hushed voice. She’d borrowed the earpieces from Obadiah, but kept whispering nonetheless. “But we’re going to have to go into the tunnels from here.”

            “Isn’t that where we were?” asked Esau.

            Felix shook his head. “This time it’s tunnels that, strictly speaking, don’t exist.”

            “Which means they’re not so well kept up,” said Jezebel. She grinned. “I hope we all wore our serious boots. Ready?” She jumped over the side of the platform, where there was space for a track, but no metal had ever been laid down. As Felix had enumerated in great detail, there was a plan to run trains through here, to take off some of the load of the growing population, but the plan fell through. There were half-built transportation hubs all over the city, he’d said; they could never make up their minds. But this was the one of greatest tactical use for us.

            Jezebel switched on her headlamp and marched off towards what looked like nothingness. The tunnels to Lower Queen had never been completed, and whatever had been started had been filled in with cement and then bricked over. But with Jezebel walking away, the rest of us had no choice but to hop down. My feet immediately sank half an inch in mud and grime. There was concrete beneath it, laid down hundreds of years ago, but that was cracking apart and the earth was taking it back. Garbage was everywhere, probably from the odd transient who’d stumbled in, or from whatever missions had taken place previously. I couldn’t help but think of stepping on the skeleton of the great shark in the old aquarium; goodness knew what I’d be stepping on here.

            I had a headlamp as well, borrowed from the house, but it wasn’t nearly so powerful as Jezebel’s, so I hurried to keep up. Her headlamp was like a tractor beam, sweeping from side to side as she marched forward. Then we came to the bricked-up wall blocking off the rest of the tunnel. She paused, pressing at bricks here and there, until she found a loose one and pulled it out. From there she snaked her hand through the wall, tugging at something she found behind it, and a whole section of brick large enough to crawl through swung away. It was similar to the false shelving in the backyard we’d used to enter the tunnel system in the first place, and I wondered if the same person had designed it.

            “Geronimo,” Jezebel whispered, her voice full of glee. I gingerly climbed in after her, letting Felix and Esau fend for themselves. I was glad to be as small as I was; it was a tight fit through the hole, and beyond it was not much better. The tunnel looked like it had been dug out with shovels. It was a far cry from the relatively spacious tunnels we’d used twenty minutes earlier. I could stand upright, as could Esau, but Jezebel and Felix had to duck their heads and crouch at parts. There were no lights, no escape routes, and no even flooring. Someone had laid down boards for us to walk on, for which I was grateful as it kept us out of the worst of the muck, but these were uneven and loose, so that every time someone else stepped on the back of one, the front end would pop up. Felix had swung the false brick door back in place after us, and I felt a rising sense of claustrophobia. What if the ceiling caved it? We wouldn’t be found for a hundred more years.

            “Just keep looking forward,” Jezebel whispered, as if she could read my thoughts. “It’s not far, I promise.” So onward we marched through the eerie silence. I found the quiet briefly reassuring when I realized that it meant I wasn’t hearing the squeak and scuttle of rats, but then I thought that even the rats didn’t want to be down here, and that did not make me feel better at all. With only the light of the headlamps to guide us, it was as though we were boring our way through the earth ourselves. We plodded forward; it was much slower going than it had been before, due to the quality of the tunnel and the need for Jezebel and Felix to crouch down awkwardly.

Then at last Jezebel stopped us. “It’s somewhere here, but I need you to be very quiet. We have to listen for it.”

I didn’t know what we were listening for, but I fell obediently silent. It seemed to me that Esau was breathing much louder than was necessary. At first all I could hear was the oppressive quiet of the tunnels, as though someone were holding up a shell to my ear so I could hear the long-vanished lake. But gradually I became aware of something else – a tinny buzzing, like a faulty electric light, or a child’s toy left on and forgotten under a bed. I edged closer to the sound, trying not to make any noise with my feet as I shuffled. Esau cast me a confused look. It seemed to be coming from portion of the tunnel wall, which didn’t make any sense to me, but I waved Jezebel over anyway.

“I hear something,” I said. “Kind of a buzzing?”

She looked at me, but I couldn’t tell what kind of a face she was making because her headlamp was blinding me. “Sorry,” she said, flipping it up. The effect was that she became a comical human flashlight. “I can’t hear anything.”

Then Esau said, “No, I can hear it too.”

“Felix?” asked Jezebel.

He furrowed his brow. “Maybe? It’s hard to tell.”

Jezebel put a hand to her forehead, as though she’d just realized she’d left the oven on at home. “Of course. It’s too high. Only younger people can hear it.”

Esau and I looked at each other, baffled.

“You lose the ability to hear certain frequencies as you age,” said Jezebel. Felix huffed indignantly. “Good thing we brought you kids along.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not this was a compliment, but it didn’t matter. Jezebel pressed at the wall where we’d said we could hear the sound, and a panel slid away noiselessly. This one we had to crawl through on our hands and knees. Through the entryway was, surprise, another tunnel, this one even smaller; all of us had to crawl forward. I started to wonder about oxygen, but before I could start to panic, we turned a corner and I saw pale light shining down from above.