"Holy fuck," Jagger whispered. "Will you look at that? We did it, man! We're out!"

Jeff recognized where they were. The southernmost end of Riverside Park was just above them. From what he could remember from the long walks he and Heather had taken through the park a lifetime ago, a high fence separated the tracks from the park itself. It was designed to keep people away from the tracks, and out of the tunnels. A fence that now served to hold them in. But the fence was hardly insurmountable. It wasn't as if they were on Rikers Island, where the prison buildings were surrounded by two fences and a no-man's-land filled with razor wire. Here, there was only a single obstacle, maybe eight or nine feet high. A few strands of barbed wire ran along its top, but he remembered watching a couple of kids slither over the fence one day to retrieve a model airplane that had lost power at the wrong moment. Though one of the kids' mothers had yelled bloody murder at her son, the boy ignored her, scaling the fence with the ease of a chimpanzee climbing the wall of an old cage in the Central Park Zoo. If those two boys could do it, so could he and Jagger.

Yet even as he told himself escape was possible, an instinct told him that something was wrong, that it couldn't be as easy as it looked. From the moment he had tried to help Cynthia Allen on that subway platform, nothing in his life had been easy.

They moved forward again, but Jagger seemed to have been infected by the same unease, and instead of rushing toward daylight, he also moved ahead more cautiously.

The view of the Hudson broadened, and they could smell fresh air from the river. Jeff drew it deep into his lungs, reveling in its sweetness. As the crisp air flushed some of the staleness of the tunnels out of his system, his sense of danger began to diminish.

Perhaps, after all, they were about to escape.

But escape to what? Even if they got out of the tunnels, the police would be searching for them. For him, at least. The guards taking him to Rikers surely would have witnessed his escape.

Unless…

What if both the driver and the guard riding shotgun had died when the van exploded?

But even if that happened, the police would have found the van's open back door. And they wouldn't have found his body. They'd know he escaped, and they'd be looking for him.

On the surface, away from the terrible darkness and claustrophobia of the maze that lay beneath the city, at least he'd have a chance. "Maybe we can do it," he whispered, not really meaning to speak out loud.

"Sure we can," Jagger replied. He threw his arm around Jeff's shoulders. "Over that fence, and we're outta here. Come on."

Moving forward, they edged closer and closer to the point where the west wall of the tunnel would end. Ten feet from their goal, Jeff cast one backward glance into the darkness- the darkness he hoped never to see again. "Okay," he said. "Let's go."

Quickening their pace, they emerged from the shadows into the late afternoon sunshine. The fence was right where Jeff remembered it. And on the other side, he saw the softball field, where he'd played a couple of times in pickup games.

Maybe thirty-five yards to the fence-fifty at most.

And then he heard a voice, low and menacing.

Mocking.

"Too bad, boys. Wrong exit."

Jeff spun around to see five derelicts indolently watching them. Their hair was shaggy and unkempt. They wore grease-stained shirts and pants and had moth-eaten knit caps on their heads.

One was sitting on the ground, leaning against a rock. Two more were lounging against the wall of the tunnel itself. Another pair were sitting in faded canvas director's chairs, one of which was missing an arm.

The man who had spoken was holding a gun-an ugly snub-nosed revolver-and pointing it at Jeff. The other four had their hands concealed in jacket pockets, and Jeff was certain that another gun was concealed in every one.

Instinctively, he looked the other way, only to see three more men, dressed as shabbily as the rest, and looking just as menacing.

The Softball field was empty, and he and Jagger were shielded from the view of any chance passerby. There was no one in sight except the eight homeless men.

Silently, Jeff and Jagger turned away from the fence and retraced their steps.

A few seconds later the darkness of the tunnel closed around them again.

Something wasn't right with Jinx. Tillie could feel it, the way she could feel it whenever one of her clan was chewing on a problem. But she wasn't about to say anything-not yet, anyway. That was why most of the kids in the tunnels were there-too much yammering from folks who didn't give a damn about them and shouldn't have even had them in the first place. And with a lot of them-including Jinx, Tillie knew-it wasn't just yammering they'd finally run away from. For many, it was a lot worse than that. Not that she ever asked them questions-better just to let them be, listen to them when they felt like talking, and not push them to open up. So instead of demanding that Jinx tell her what was wrong, she went about her business, adding the contents of the bag of groceries she'd found on the table after meeting Eve Harris in the park to the kettle of soup simmering on the back burner. She didn't know who'd left the groceries-it could have been any one of the dozens of people who'd dropped in for a meal over the last few weeks. The groceries certainly weren't what she would have called Class A, which only showed up every now and then, since the wholesale markets were all the way downtown and not much of their goods ever made it this far north. No, this stuff looked like it had come from one of the restaurants-not a real greasy spoon, but not The Four Seasons, either. Maybe one of the places along Amsterdam Avenue. There were some potatoes-barely even beginning to get soft-and a bunch of carrots that had just started to go limp. Some meat, too-and pretty good stuff-a half-eaten filet wrapped up in tinfoil that Tillie suspected had been rescued from a trash barrel down the street from wherever the steak had come from, along with a few uncooked pieces of beef and lamb that were starting to smell. Starting to smell was a long way from inedible, though, and Tillie cut the meat into bite-sized chunks and added them to the soup. By the time the vegetables went in as well, the thin soup was rapidly turning into a pretty good-smelling stew. Nobody would even notice the track rabbit that had been the only meat in the pot before this windfall arrived. After giving the kettle a stir and putting the lid back on, she turned to look at Jinx, who was sitting at the kitchen table, idly leafing through a dog-eared copy of a movie magazine.

"Gonna be a movie star?"

Jinx rolled her eyes. "Yeah, right. The day after I graduate from Columbia."

"You could do that," Tillie said, dropping into the chair opposite her.

"Sure. All I'd have to do is walk in, right?"

"So maybe you'd have to do that test-the one where you get a high school diploma."

"And then take a bunch of other tests, like the SATs, and then figure out how to pay for it. You know how much it costs?"

Tillie shrugged. "Never gave it much thought."

"It's, like, thirty thousand dollars. And that's for, like, one year. Where'm I going to get that kind of money?"

"Work?"

Jinx shrugged. "Where'm I gonna get a job that pays that good?"

Tillie pursed her lips. "So is that what's buggin‘ you?"

Jinx shook her head, but didn't get up and walk away. That told Tillie she just wanted a little push. "So what is it? A guy?" Jinx started to shake her head, but her blush gave her away. "Aha!" Tillie grinned, exposing the gap in her teeth.

"So who is it?" But even as she asked the question, Tillie remembered the way Jinx had been looking at Jeff Converse that morning, and her grin faded. "Not that guy they're huntin‘."