The Wire Hanger

Chapter Sixteen

We all hurried out behind him. I concentrated on making my footsteps as quiet as possible, even though the rational part of my brain knew that being overheard wasn’t really the biggest risk. I could hear Noah right behind me, breathing a little heavily, and while normally I would have found that annoying, tonight it was comforting. In this context, he was practically an old friend.

I couldn’t see more than four feet in any direction, with the moon behind some clouds, so I kept my eyes trained on the backpack ahead of me, which belonged to Felix. He took perfectly even, measured steps, which made things easy, except for one moment where I tripped slightly into him, my heels kicking up and catching Noah in the shins. Neither one of them complained but I could sense it coming off of Noah in waves. Well, if he remembered to tell me about it later, so be it.

From the Professor’s backyard we went through what I thought was a shed, but turned out to be a garage that opened out into a back alley. I could hear gravel crunching under my feet as we turned left and walked in a perfectly straight line. This must have been how the Bears and Tigers got here in the first place. I had never been out after curfew and was childishly amazed that the Protectors hadn’t swooped down on us immediately.

The first alley intersected with a new one, which we walked down for a few minutes. This one turned into a street, which I couldn’t believe we were going to walk down, plain as anything, with who knew how many Protectors wandering around, but instead Obadiah turned to a garage door and entered a code. The door rose, a little squeakily, onto a completely nondescript and empty garage. There was one abandoned rake leaning against the wall, but that was it. Once we were all inside, he closed it behind us, and led us to a set of cellar doors set into the backyard. I couldn’t see the house from where I was, but the smudge of it against the sky in the moonlight seemed very big and grand, even more so than the Professor’s house, which had already been the biggest house I’d ever seen.

“All right, everybody down,” said Obadiah in my ear, and he stepped aside as we all walked to the lip of the cellar door and felt our way down. I hesitated for a second longer than anyone else had, since I wasn’t hugely keen on the idea of descending steps where I couldn’t see the bottom, first of all, or more importantly, all the spiders that were doubtless ready to brush their spindly legs across my face, but behind me Noah said quietly, “It’s okay, you can do it,” and since I didn’t want him to think I was a weenie, I did, feeling for each step ahead of me as I went.

As the people ahead of me had gotten to the bottom, they’d pulled flashlights out of their backpacks and switched them on, so I did the same. Everyone’s faces glowed eerily against the walls of the cellar, which were lined with shelves groaning under the weight of pickles and preserves. I could not positively identify anything but I wasn’t sure everything was plant matter, so I didn’t look too closely.

“All right, folks,” said Obadiah, “this next stretch isn’t lit, so we’ll need to keep our flashlights out. Try not to shine them in anyone’s faces.” Someone immediately aimed theirs at his. “You’re all comedians,” he said dryly. “Noah, you pulled the hatch over us?”

“And locked,” said Noah.

“Great. Let’s keep moving. And I’m sure I don’t have to remind you to keep your voices down. These tunnels do have a tendency to echo.” Obadiah moved deeper into the cellar. I trailed along with the thin beam of my flashlight barely making a dent in the darkness. There was more shelving back there, but it was largely empty. Obadiah took hold of one shelf and pulled, and the whole wall’s worth of shelves swung forward on a hinge.

As soon as we were in the tunnels, I could feel the air had changed; it was damp and cooler, like being inside an abandoned refrigerator. I did not especially care for it but we were moving so quickly and I was so afraid of tripping that I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about what would happen if the tunnel collapsed on us. A little time. But not a lot.

We’d gone through the tunnels for about half an hour when Obadiah stopped us. Behind me, Noah was standing so close that I could feel his warm breath on the back of my neck. Obadiah said quietly, “We’re almost to the subway network. If you could all switch off your flashlights.” We did so, and were immediately plunged into pitch blackness cut only by Obadiah’s light at the front of the line. Noah grabbed my wrist. “Please follow the person in front of you carefully,” said Obadiah. “It’ll be light enough to see just around the next corner.”

I wasn’t sure what to do about Noah’s hand around my wrist; it seemed like it would be rude to call attention to it, so I just let my hand hang back as though we were all kindergarteners tied to a string. Come to think of it, that would have been a pretty smart way to go about this. But Felix was ahead of me, and I didn’t think he was really the handholding type.

As we turned a corner, the darkness lessened, as he’d said it would, and Noah dropped his hold on my wrist. I felt the cool air of the tunnel rush in against my skin in its absence. Far ahead of me was the smoky silhouette of Jezebel’s hair, filtered through the hazy orange light that was coming from a neighbouring tunnel. We walked along like this for another fifteen minutes or so; I was listening all the while for trains coming through, but none did. Up ahead Obadiah stopped at a steel door set into the wall and punched in a code at the key pad. The door slid sideways into the wall and he led us through it.

“Welcome to Bear territory,” he said once we were all inside and the door was firmly shut behind us. “Just a quick break. Drink some water. Speak to your neighbours. Whatever.”

Jezebel moved up ahead to confer with him, and I turned to Noah. “Where are we?”

“Subway tunnels,” he said, like I hadn’t heard what Obadiah had said in the first place.

“Why aren’t they running?”

“Middle of the night,” he said. “But the rumours are they still get used by the Protectors, even now. So if you hear one, it’s bad news.”

I nodded. The lights in this room were still dim, making Noah’s face look hollowed out. Still, the arrogant tilt of his head made me want to ask if he were afraid of the dark or something, but I refrained. I had been scared nearly one hundred percent of the time since leaving my school, so maybe it was best not to throw stones. “What’s in here?”

Noah shrugged. “Just one of their hidey-holes, I guess.” Jethro shuffled by and handled us both bottles of water, which we took gratefully. “The Bears are usually the ones in control of the tunnels. Even the Protectors don’t do much wandering around here. They know they’d get picked off. But they’re underground, so they get kind of a blind eye. Lots of deals with small-time black market dealers, too. That’s likely to be the most dangerous person we run into down here…some kind of renegade potato chip peddler.”

I laughed and Noah looked relieved. “I wouldn’t mind that, actually.”

“You might,” he said, a touch ominously. “Anyway, you hanging in there all right? You were probably a little scared back there.”

I opened my mouth indignantly but before I could respond Obadiah clapped his hands and said, “Five more minutes. Nobody wants to sit down?”

I looked around but didn’t see any chairs, so I just sat on the ground with my legs crossed and my thoughts grumpy until Obadiah roused us all to head back out in the network of tunnels.

“We’re close now,” he said. “About ten, fifteen minutes until we’re there.”

“Where, exactly?” I asked Jezebel, ignoring Noah to my right.

“The Centre,” she said, and tugged at the straps on her backpack. The last well-lit thing I saw before heading back into the relative darkness of the tunnels was the terrified expression on her face.