Firewalker (Worldwalker 2)

“’Cause it’s wicked fun?” Una offered.

“Well, okay. So there are two reasons,” Rowan admitted.

“Hey, Lily. Just imagine you’re buck naked and shakin’ it on a cloudy night,” Breakfast said cheerfully.

“I’ll try, Breakfast,” Lily said, her voice only wavering a little. “Are we there yet?”

“Almost,” Una answered. “I can see the bottom.”

“What’s down there?” Tristan asked.

“A concrete thingamajig,” Una said uncertainly. “It could be a platform.”

Lily could feel it getting warmer as they descended. The smell of earth was replaced by the smell of steam and grease, peppered with bursts of ozone and recycled air. Not too far off, Lily could hear the unmistakable double-tap thud of a train moving down the tracks and the muffled squeal of metal on metal. She felt Rowan finally let go of some of the tension he’d been carrying for days. He was still on guard, but no longer on edge like a hunted animal. As Rowan relaxed, so did Lily.

“Una and Breakfast—go down and scout around. Don’t go far, though,” Rowan warned. “And try to avoid being seen. Your clothes are mostly cotton, which is a very expensive material here.”

“No way,” Una said disbelievingly.

“Cotton needs a lot of land to grow. And with the Woven, land is a precious thing. So keep your heads down, okay? There are some desperate people down in the train tunnels, and I don’t want you to get robbed.”

Lily calmed herself enough to peel her face away from Rowan’s chest and watched as Una and Breakfast reached the bottom and went off in separate directions. It was only a few minutes before she heard Una’s voice in her head, although barely. The concrete walls of the subway didn’t block her connection to her claimed as profoundly as granite did, but the soil here contained enough quartz to interfere.

It looks like a deserted platform. It’s safe to come down.

“Una says it’s safe,” Lily repeated.

Rowan, Lily, and Tristan descended the rest of the way and came to what appeared to be a service tunnel. They climbed through a knocked-out hole in the wall and found themselves next to Breakfast and Una on what looked like a deserted subway stop. The walls were tiled with an intricate pattern in a style akin to art deco. The name of the stop, rendered in black-and-white inlay, was RANCH FOUR.

“I saw something like this once,” Una said. “There was a show about the New York City subway system, and they had pictures of stops on the line that never opened or that had closed years ago. It was so cool. It was like looking back in time.”

“Ranch Four?” Tristan said. “What’s that?”

“They have animal ranches outside the cities in this world. They raise luxury meats for rich people on them,” Lily said distastefully.

“Before this ranch was even built it was overrun by Woven. That was decades ago, though,” Rowan said in a faraway voice. He looked at Lily, his brow furrowed. “How did you know about the ranches?”

Lily thought fast. “Tristan told me about them. The other Tristan,” she answered, looking away. It wasn’t totally a lie, either. “He said the ranches were work camps for criminals and poor people.”

“The Covens round up homeless citizens a few times a year to give them jobs,” he said, adding heavy sarcasm to the second half of his sentence. “The ranches are one of the places they send them.”

“Sounds like slave labor,” Breakfast said.

“The Covens can’t take away a person’s citizenship and banish them to the Outlands unless they’ve committed a serious crime, and the cities are only so big. Housing is expensive in walled cities that only have so much space. The poor have nowhere to go. A lot of them come to the underground train tunnels to hide from the guards.” Rowan ran his hand across a bit of graffiti that had been painted near the hole they’d climbed through to get from the service tunnel into the station. “This station belongs to a gang.”

“Where are they?” Tristan said. He looked around. There were no sleeping bags or piles of personal items—no sign that anyone lived down here. Tristan’s face suddenly froze. “Woven?” he whispered.

Rowan shook his head, perplexed and looking around like Tristan. “No. Woven don’t come into the train tunnels.”

“Why?” Lily blurted out.

“I don’t know, Lily. They just don’t.”

“Okay, that’s ridiculous,” she said, exasperated. “Hasn’t anyone in this world thought that maybe it was a tad weird that Woven don’t go down in the tunnels? What? Are they superstitious or something?”

Rowan shrugged. “The Woven do what they do, and I don’t know anyone who’s ever stopped to ask them why they do it. We’re usually too busy trying to kill them.”

Lily leaned back, struck by a thought. “That’s the problem,” she said musingly. She waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Forget it,” she said, and changed the subject before Rowan could pick up on what she was thinking and get agitated. “So where’d the gang go?”