“You said you’re all right, right, yeah? No need for help?” he said earnestly, like someone, Whalen, but not him.

“I did?” she said. She could feel her face betray her, twisting and sweaty, her eyes two flushed toilets.

“Did you?” he asked, somewhat flirtatiously, which left her exhausted and ill.

“I’m all right,” she said, willing a smile, an expression not attainable by those on the doorstep of losing their minds.

“Cute,” he said, nodding his head toward Will.

She waved him away, and he retreated, no doubt convinced of her madness. That was what they wanted anyway: a functional madwoman, crazy enough to excite, not too crazy to be a burden. He turned back and said something else, and she realized then that he had no idea that he was as intangible as smoke. She let loose an enormous current of breath and blew him away before feeling herself stagger. She set her bags on the floor and yearned to join them there, but gravity had become a villain. She could feel death—real, cold death—snapping at her ankles like a black lapdog that could tear her to pieces with needle teeth if she fell. A thought stood up in her mind: go under here, and you will die or awake crazy. Crazy enough for them to take Will.

From her.

Her son.

A mere whiff of this notion sent the dimensions of the tunnel sliding together. Her balance vacated her, wracking her with tremors of such ferocity they seemed to originate outside her. Sound ran together like the paint of children. The light died. Spots bloomed like mold in her vision. She peered into the tunnel and saw that it was the blackened esophagus of a giant, a monster. She knew then that she had been swallowed, as her brother and father had been in another life that was still hers, whether she’d left it behind or not. The platform crowded again. Another train, a throb of steel and glass, the lewd screech of wheels, a symphony of hissing and chuffing. Did it ever stop?

Time slow as poured honey. She’d sat down but had not died. Will was awake now, fighting the straps, mewling in his stroller, the sound recalling his birth: all that breathing, an ocean of air through her, and his first breath—not breath—gasp, how greedily he’d come. Mercifully, she undid his buckle, and he stepped free from his bondage, plodding forward out into the empty platform, unsteady, half-made.

Suddenly she looked down to watch a slow-motion darkness bloom in her dress, the accompanying release, the patter of urine on the platform. She considered wiping it with one of the diapers in her bag. No worry, when the tunnel was filled with fire, everything would dry and the city would crumble like dead paper and the sky would blow with cinder. She heard a rumbling and didn’t know which train it was, Charlie’s or her own. Boys loved trains. Why was that? The noise? The speed? The single-mindedness? Why wasn’t hers here? They’d been walking today, in the heat, so long ago now. She had a son, didn’t she? Yes. Blond. Not wholly blond. Hair like wood grain, the tint of wheat. She’d misplaced him, but he resolved before her now on the platform. A rushing thing close behind him.

Perhaps, she thought breezily, it would be better if she crawled over the edge and into the track bed. Put herself in the clank of gear and wheel, down where her brother was. How would its thunder register in her chest, where on her body would the kiss of wheel and track come? How insignificant those on the platform would look.

She watched this perplexing, curious shape stumble onward near the edge of the tracks, right to where she’d been standing so recently, mesmerized by the noisy mechanics and the searing lights and the dark tunnel, and, yes, of course she would lift herself from the tile and go to him, scoop him to her breast, protect him. This was her duty.

She was a mother. His mother. But even though she was a mother, his mother, she would not go to him, could not protect him. She would fail at this, as she had failed to protect her brother, because she would remain here, in her lair, burrowed, sapped, doomed, because this weakness had always lived in her, disguised, hiding like septic marrow in her bones, as it had lived in her brother, taken her brother. She fought to rise but couldn’t and knew balance would never again return, that her name would be the sound of her own weeping. She’d been pierced by the lion’s jaws, because the jaws had finally closed.

What did it matter that this helpless morsel of boy had that day spent an uncountable time mere inches from the yellow line, silhouetted by the pure, apocalyptic motion of a train blasting through the station, his hair a wildfire of gold, his jostling cheeks iridescent, before turning to toddle back toward her and plop down at her feet as if nothing of consequence had transpired while she’d sat frozen in panic. It was what she couldn’t do that had ended her life that day. She’d failed him so thoroughly, so completely, as she had her brother, and now here he was, imperiled once again. Right now your son is in grave danger, said that strange man on her doorstep, who seemed so much more menacing in retrospect.

And here she was, trapped in her bedroom, preparing to fail him again.

24

“Nice of you to return my boat, Corpsey,” the Butler said as he crushed Will around his arms from behind. “For a while I thought you and your little crewmate were going to perform your best submarine imitation out there.”

Will kicked his legs wildly in the air and yelped. Titus grew stern and spit on the ground and had put up his big fists to advance on Butler when from behind Claymore appeared like a phantom and drove him flat across the back with his shovel. Titus collapsed as though his body had momentarily teleported from his clothes. He lay in the pigeon droppings, heaped, breathing shattered.

Will struggled to retrieve his garrote, but his arms remained pinned. Then the Butler seized his wrists and offered up his hands to Claymore, who bungee-corded them behind his back. When the job was done, the Butler let go, and Will took a jumping kick at Claymore, who dodged it easily.

“Careful there,” Butler said, tapping at Will’s Helmet with his own sharpened shovel. “When my friend here loses his temper, he doesn’t find it for two weeks.”

Titus was bound and hauled to his feet. They dragged Will and Titus through the elevator’s lower catacombs to the iron staircase. “Up,” Claymore growled, kicking Will in the flank.

As they climbed, Titus was soon drowning in the clogged pond of himself, coughing and retching and sucking voluminous gasps that never were sufficient to sate him. Will’s thoughts turned to Angela grinding out coughs in her hospital bed, to his mother hyperventilating on the kitchen floor. At last they crested the stairs and passed through the Distribution Floor, where Will and Jonah’s skateboard ramps sat unused like monuments of a fallen civilization, a world Will now doubted he’d ever inhabit again.

“It’s a clever security system, Corpsey,” the Butler said out on the walkway, swinging open the boiler door with a rusty peal. “But we found your hidey hole all the same. Thanks to a mutual friend of ours,” he said to Will with a grin.

With his hands bound behind him, Will was pushed onto his face in the ash and was spitting it out when he came through the other side into the workhouse. There Will saw another of Butler’s men, the one pushing the wheelbarrow that day, watching over Jonah, who was bungee-corded to a chair, his head dipped, bangs hanging in his face like a fox tail.

When they were all inside, the Butler took out a small bottle of amber fluid and had a long slug. Claymore walloped Titus again across the back and he buckled to the floor near his pallet bed.

“Don’t,” Will said, nearly sobbing. “He can’t breathe.”

“Oh, he’s used to it,” said Claymore, unwinding Will’s wrists in front of Jonah, who looked up to Will and offered a weak smile. “Doesn’t take care of himself is his problem.”