Jinx's expression tightened. "Why not?"

"You know damn well why not-they only hunt the bad ones."

"Well, he didn't look bad," Jinx said. "The big one was scary, but the other one-Jeff-he looked nice."

"Attila the Hun probably looked nice, too."

"Who?"

"Jeez," Tillie sighed. "You really did quit school, didn't you?"

Her eyes turning stormy, Jinx stood up. "And I can quit here, too! I don't have to hang around here, you know. If all you're going to do is bug me-"

"Now that's enough!" Tillie cut in. "You're too smart a girl to be talkin‘ that way, and I'm just tellin' you what you already know, anyhow. If he hadn't done something really bad, he wouldn't be down here. He ain't like us, and you know it!"

"I don't know anything!" Jinx retorted. "I'm just a dumb runaway, right?" Before Tillie could reply, Jinx grabbed her jacket-one that Tillie had found for her at the Salvation Army two weeks ago-and stormed out.

Jinx made her way through the tunnels easily, following a route she knew as well as the streets on the surface. Twenty minutes later she emerged into Riverside Park and started toward Seventy-second Street. Liz Hodges was sitting on a tiny camp stool outside her tent, but right now Jinx didn't feel like talking to Liz or anybody else. Leaving the park, she headed east on Seventy-second, then ducked down into the subway station on Broadway. Paying no attention to the transit cop who was leaning against the wall, she jumped over the turnstile and skipped down the stairs to the platform, oblivious to the cop's shouting. Coming to the platform just as the doors to an uptown train were starting to close, she wiggled on and perched nervously on the edge of a seat until the train had pulled out of the station-and out of the reach of the transit cop. Damn Tillie! How does she always know when something's wrong? Sometimes it's like she can look right into my head. Except that Tillie was only partly right-it wasn't just that Jinx had thought Jeff Converse was cute. There was something else, too.

He just didn't seem like the kind of guy the hunters would be going after.

He wasn't at all like the other guy-the one named Jagger. She hadn't liked that one at all. There was something about the way he looked at her that made her shudder. He'd killed someone, and it had been a woman.

But not Jeff. Jinx had seen a gentleness in Jeff's eyes. And yet everyone knew the men the hunters went after deserved to die-that was the whole thing about the hunt, wasn't it? The hunters were just getting rid of people who should have been executed anyway.

The train slowed to a stop at 110th Street, and Jinx found herself staring at the very spot where Bobby Gomez had mugged a woman last fall. She still wished she hadn't been hanging with Bobby that night, and after she saw what he did to the woman, she did her best to avoid him. He'd said he was just going to grab her purse. That wasn't what it had looked like to Jinx.

It had looked like he was trying to kill the woman, and he'd only stopped beating on her when she called out that someone was coming. She and Bobby disappeared into the tunnel so quickly that she hadn't even been able to tell if it was a cop who was coming down the platform. Not that it mattered-the main thing was that they'd gotten away, and Bobby hadn't actually killed the woman.

From then on Jinx stayed as far away from Bobby as she could, and when she heard he'd disappeared a few days ago, all she felt was relief-one less thing to worry about. But instinctively she still avoided the 110th Street station as much as she could.

Getting off at 116th Street, she emerged from the station on Broadway and crossed the street to the Columbia University campus. Columbia had become one of her favorite places in the city from the moment she'd stumbled across it two years ago. She could wander along its paths for hours, fantasizing about going to classes in its ornate brick buildings. Once, she almost snuck into the back of a lecture hall, but she lost her nerve at the last minute, certain that everyone would know right away that she didn't belong there and throw her out. But they couldn't throw her off the campus.

She was about to pass through the big gate onto the campus itself when she stopped. A few yards down the sidewalk a man was pushing a wheelchair in which sat a young woman.

The woman looked oddly familiar.

And she seemed to be looking back at her.

As the man pushed the woman closer, Jinx suddenly knew. It was the woman from the subway-the woman Bobby Gomez had mugged last fall!

Turning away at once, Jinx hurried through the gates and walked quickly toward the enormous quadrangle in the center of the campus, not daring to look back. If the woman recognized her and called the police-

Wanting to be as far away from the neighborhood as possible, Jinx veered off to the south, broke into a run, and kept going until she exited the campus at 114th Street. She kept going south, so freaked by seeing the woman that she skipped the nearby 110th Street station and disappeared back into the subway at 103rd.

Only when the train had rumbled off into the darkness of the tunnels did she feel really safe again.

The gnawing in Jeff's stomach told him the day had passed, so he knew that even if they found a place where they could peer out of the tunnels, the sight of daylight that had buoyed his spirits earlier would have faded into the semidarkness of a New York night. When the hunger in his belly had first begun to stir hours earlier, he'd simply ignored it-lunch was a meal he never minded missing, and before he was arrested, he'd almost given up eating it at all. But in prison, eating had become something to break up the dull monotony of the days, and though his palate had never grown fond of jail cuisine, apparently his stomach had. The small pangs of hunger he'd experienced a few hours ago had become far more insistent.

As he and Jagger retreated back into the darkness-their eyes still fixed on the tantalizing sunlight that remained out of reach-he'd been certain that they'd quickly find another way out.

There had to be hundreds of escape routes-surely they could find a storm drain emptying into the river, or a shaft leading up to a manhole in a street.

In his memory he could see dozens of gratings in the streets, in the sidewalks, in the parks-all of them leading into the maze of passageways beneath the city. Surely they'd quickly find one. It wasn't possible they were all guarded.

Was it?

Before they'd turned away from the last drop of daylight, they tried to develop a strategy. It seemed simple at the time: the hunters-whoever they were-knew they were on the West Side. So they would start working their way east. Somewhere, they would find an unguarded escape route to the surface.

They'd started east, following the plan, but after an hour, perhaps two, they lost their bearings.

At first it hadn't been too difficult to keep track of their direction-the passages seemed to be laid out on a grid that mirrored the grid of the streets above. They stayed away from the darkest areas and tried to keep to the upper levels, heeding Tillie's words about the increasing craziness of the people who lived in the lower depths. But at certain crossroads their way was blocked by knots of hard-eyed men in gangs large enough to intimidate even Jagger. The fifth time it happened, Jeff was certain that the men weren't simply blocking escape routes, but instead were steering them in a particular direction. They were being herded like cattle.

With the way up blocked, they'd finally had no choice but to burrow deeper, and it had now been hours since Jeff had had any real idea of their location, much less a plan for how to escape.

The tunnels were all starting to look alike-the one they were currently in was lined with pipes and lit every hundred yards or so by a bulb just bright enough to allow them to make their way, but dim enough to leave them deep in darkness most of the time.