Mind the Gap (29 page)

“What the hell is that about?” she said.

Terence looked back as Uncle Mort slipped into the backseat of the BMW. The car pulled away.

“What’s what about?” Terence said.

Jazz didn’t reply. Her mind whirled. As she hurried along the street, she stole glances down alleys and into parked cars, even looked up at the windows of houses. The back of her neck burned with the feeling of being observed. Her mother had raised her to be paranoid, but she couldn’t shake the idea that this was more than her upbringing.

Why hadn’t Mort chased her? Only two possibilities presented themselves to her: either he did not want to, or he did not need to. Either way she felt confused and uneasy, even in the midst of her horror and grief about what Stevie had done and how he had paid for it.

Jazz and Terence were walking along a tree-lined street now, the houses not as opulent as in the mayor’s district but still large and imposing. At the wail of a siren, they slipped into an alley to await the passage of a speeding police car.

“Did you see it?” he asked, as they set out walking again.

“Yes,” Jazz said. Her voice sounded empty and flat. “Shot him in the head.”

“The battery!” Terence said. “Did you see the
battery
?”

Jazz frowned, thinking for a moment that perhaps Terence had lost it. But she could see the knowledge of what had happened in his face. He knew. He was not stupid.

“The battery?”

“When you saw the mayor, before Stevie killed him, did you see the battery?” They’d stopped on the street and Terence held both of her shoulders, ready to shake. If they’d wanted to attract more attention to themselves, she supposed they could have stripped and started screwing on the pavement.

“Stevie’s dead,” Jazz whispered. “He fell. I watched him fall, and—”

“Fuck it!” Terence shouted. He looked around then, shook his head, and ran a hand over his ruffled hair, as if flattening it down would smooth over the fuckup this had become. “Come on.”

As they started walking again, Jazz said, “Did you hear me? Stevie’s dead.”

“His fault,” he said.

“What?”

“And Harry’s. Harry’s more than his, I suppose. That old bastard steered him.”

They turned right into a narrow lane that led to the rear of the houses, passed several parked cars—Audis, BMWs, sporty soft-tops—then Terence vaulted a fence and held out his hands for Jazz to follow.

She hesitated, looking around. The presence of the BMWs troubled her. In her mind she could still see Mort’s smile and that casual wave.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Tube,” he said. “I have a flat in Colliers Wood; we can hole up there for a while.” He seemed distracted, never quite meeting her eyes. He was fuming, and she sensed him ready to boil over.

“I don’t know you,” she said. Terence looked at her, then away again, straining over the fence.

“Come on!” he said. “I won’t wait all day.”

Tube,
Jazz thought.
Safest place for me right now.
She was momentarily surprised at how she had come to view the Underground as safe, but there were things down there she was starting to understand more and more, and things up here she knew less and less. Her world seemed to be changing with every breath. She could fight those changes or follow.

“I believe you,” she said. “I just don’t know you anymore.” She grasped his hands and he pulled her over the fence.

As they walked, her legs hurt more and more. She had cut herself on the top of the security wall and gashed her shin on a broken roof tile but barely been aware of the injuries until now. In spots, her trousers had turned dark with blood, but her injuries were not serious; nothing a few bandages and some antibiotic cream wouldn’t cure. They hurt when she walked, but she welcomed the pain, because Stevie could not feel pain anymore, nor could Cadge or her mother. She was hurting because she was still alive, and even though she had just seen two people die, she felt a moment of utter joy, a shocking euphoria. A bee buzzed them, weeds bent beneath their feet and sprang up again, and when they reached a busy main street she looked up at clouds, colorful window boxes, and the way life filled this place.

A police car cruised by, and Terence turned her to face a bookshop window. She saw his reflection, and even there his eyes seemed dark.

“There was no battery,” Jazz said.

“We didn’t search the whole house.”

“There was nothing in the mayor’s room but the mayor.”

“That means nothing. Damn it. So close!” She knew he wanted to shout, but he whispered instead.

She looked along the street and saw the familiar Tube symbol above the pavement.
Almost there,
she thought. They walked on. Jazz thought about linking arms to give them the look of a couple, but Terence was frowning at the ground as he walked now, arms swinging by his side and lips pursed in concentration. When they reached the Tube station, he turned right and paused at the ticket machine, buying two Travelcards for them. He handed one to Jazz, passed through the turnstile, and started down the stairs. Jazz followed. He seemed to be moving without giving thought to where he was going, and right now that suited her well. She’d happily get lost down here forever.

She wondered whether Harry knew what had happened. Probably not, but he had his ways and means.

They waited on a crowded platform, Terence still staring down at his feet but no longer frowning. His face now seemed blank.

When the train arrived, he got on without looking to see whether Jazz followed. She almost did not. But as the doors started to slide shut she jumped on, eager to stay close to Terence simply because she still felt vulnerable. They’d be searching for her, now more than ever before. The way Mort had smiled at her—he’d seemed so confident he had her—worried her deeply. Had he really known they would break into the mayor’s? Had he known they were searching for the battery there? And what else did he know?

Terence might be ignoring her, but the last thing she wanted was to be alone.

He had sat down, and he swayed in time with the train’s motion. Jazz hung on to a strap, and when they stopped at the next station and there was a spare seat, she sat down beside him. He glanced at her, then stared, and he smiled. It did not look good on his face. It was the smile of someone with nothing to live for.

She leaned in close. “There
was
no battery,” she said. “Just him in that room and—”

“There was no battery
ever,
” Terence said. “Not in that house. Taken a while to figure that out. That’s not like me.”

Jazz sat back and looked at the man across from her. He was about Harry’s age, smart, and he stared at her feet as the train shook and shimmied its way through the tunnels.
No battery ever,
she thought, and she remembered Stevie aiming through the door at the mayor as the man tried magic. She’d thought he was laughing for a moment, but Stevie had rarely had any laughter in him. So dour for a boy his age. So serious.

“Harry,” she said. “He set it all up.”

Terence laughed, a little too loud for her liking. He drew a few stares. “Harry!” he said. “Yeah, Harry.” He leaned in close. “I hate being used,” he said, quieter and in his real voice. She’d always thought that beneath the outward veneer he could be dangerous, and those words were as threatening as any Jazz had ever heard.

“He never meant for Stevie to die, though,” she said.

Terence shrugged. “Bad luck, that’s all.”

“You don’t care?” She turned to face him, smelling his breath and looking straight into his eyes.

Terence raised an eyebrow. “Really? No. In the scheme of things—”

“You’re a machine. That’s it for you, isn’t it? The scheme of things.”

“Yes,” he said. “What I’m doing is
serious,
Jazz. I’m not playing games here. Not messing around like your Harry and his precious United fucking Kingdom.” He kept his voice low, but he was more solemn than she had ever seen him. No flirty smiles now, no calm assurance. This was Terence at his most basic. She didn’t like it one bit.

“People are dead,” she said.

He shrugged again. “Everyone dies.”

The train began to slow. Jazz didn’t even know which station it was, but she knew she would be getting off. And if Terence tried to stop her, she’d scream for help, and everyone on the carriage would be on him.

“If that’s the case, why still seek revenge for your dead father?” She stood and held on to a strap, swaying left and right as the train ground to a halt. For a second she thought he was going to call her back. But he was too proud for that, too angry.

As the train pulled away, Terence smiled at her, and Jazz knew that she would see him again.

She caught the next train, got off three stops along, and caught another, staggering her journey in an effort to lose any potential pursuers. Mort’s smile still lingered in her mind. And the sight of Stevie falling. She felt alone and lost, shielded somewhat by the weight of the ground around her but assaulted by the stares of a thousand strangers. Her cut legs were hurting like a bastard now that the shock was wearing off, and more than once she thought about her journey through that oak tree to the wall. How she had made it, she had no clue. Something must have guided her feet, steered her hands, breathed luck into every step she took down through the tree and over the wall.

Every time she closed her eyes for more than a blink, she heard Stevie’s head hitting the stone patio.

She had trouble acknowledging what had happened, though in reality it was startlingly, brutally simple: Harry had used them all to get his revenge upon the mayor for Cadge’s death. Terence’s suggestion that the battery could have been at the mayor’s residence had seeded a plan in Harry’s mind, and his offer to help Terence steal it was the perfect cover. He’d done his walk-by, and whether or not he truly had the power to sense magic, he’d likely felt nothing. Getting in had all been about Stevie and his gun. They couldn’t have done it without Terence’s gadgets to disable the alarms, and Harry had known that Terence would not have gone in without Jazz.

She’d almost died. If Stevie hadn’t grabbed her as she rolled down that roof, it would have been her head making that awful splitting sound as it struck the mayor’s patio. It would have been her body resting in some shallow grave, or being eaten by pigs, or however else the BMW men would get rid of Stevie’s remains. She would have been dead if it weren’t for Stevie, and Harry was obviously prepared to have that on his conscience.

She had nowhere else to go. She had to stay down here, away from the glare of the sun and the searching men dressed in suits and ties. Away from Mort’s knowing smile.

And besides, something was drawing her down. It was more than the sense of safety afforded her when she was down in the Tube stations, more than the feeling of coming home, which she had tried to deny for a long time but which resounded through her every cell. This was something as inexplicable as magnetism.

When she came to a part of the Underground she recognized, she waited until the platform was all but deserted, then entered the tunnel. She walked quickly along to where she knew there would be an opening, silently counting down to when the next train would come through. Blown tiles crumbled beneath her feet like dried shed skin. Water dripped from a broken main in the ground above. It was warm as blood. Rats squealed, and she wondered if they could smell
her
blood.

She shook her head and cursed, trying to drive down such morbid thoughts. She heard a sound in the distance like a hundred people moaning in unison, and at first she froze, expecting an Hour of Screams. She did not
fear
it. Old death was nothing to be afraid of. But it was a train, and she quickened her step until she found the opening.

Through doors, along dank corridors, across unused lines, and through excavations long forgotten by anyone else, Jazz made her way down. At one point she paused at a ruined door, suddenly feeling the need to turn left where there was no opening. She stared at the curved wall there, closing her eyes and feeling the draw even stronger than before, and when she looked again she could make out the different shades of cement. Picking up a fallen brick from back along the corridor, she bashed at the wall a few times. Cement came away, wet and rotten. She exposed two areas of contrasting brickwork, one old, the other even older, and the oldest area seemed to describe the shape of a doorway.

“What’s beyond?” she whispered. Her voice was very loud, and she realized that question must have been asked down here a million times before. The Underground was an escape, never a home, and anyone living down here was simply borrowing the space from something else.

She went on, and at one point she heard a sound behind her, metal against stone. She stopped and held her breath, hunkered down in the darkness and listening for a repeat of the sound. But there was nothing. There were always strange noises down here, some of which could be explained, many that could not. She supposed such mysteries always came with ghosts.

She found one of the United Kingdom’s torch stores and welcomed the light to guide her down. Upon reaching the grand arched entrance to the Palace, she started crying, and try as she might she could not hold back the tears. When amorphous shapes appeared before her, she dropped the torch and held out her hands, welcoming them in, not knowing whether they were alive or dead and not really caring.

“Stevie’s dead,” she said. Her voice was cool and blank, despite the tears.

Harry stepped back as though she’d slapped him in the face. She heard gasps of shock from the others—Hattie, Leela, Gob—and she tried not to look their way, because she knew she’d see her own grief mirrored there.

“He did what you sent him to do, like a good little servant, and then they chased us and killed him. He saved me first…He stopped me from…” She held her face in her hands and cried some more, and when Harry touched the back of her neck, she shrugged him off and walked across the subterranean room.

“I never meant for this,” Harry said. “He went with a task, but I never meant for this.” He was being careful what he said, and Jazz realized he didn’t want everyone else to know how he and Stevie had conspired. It would taint the kids’ opinion of him, knowing he was a murderer by intention. At first she closed her eyes and tried to judge how heavy that knowledge would be, unshared. Did she have the right to shatter their illusions of their savior?