Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1)

And then she realized how much she was fooling herself. This Uncle hidden down an alley wouldn't be on his own, and soon they'd close in and — "Fuck's sake, girl, in here!"

Jazz looked into the shadows and saw the unmistakable outline of Stevie Sharpe. As she saw him, he stepped forward and grabbed her arm, guiding her into the alley and walking quickly away without saying anything. She assumed she had to follow.

They passed a pile of refuse with split bags spewing rotting food and alive with flies. Jazz held her breath and waved the flies away, but Stevie seemed unperturbed.

"What's this about?" she asked.

Stevie stopped and turned, looked over Jazz's shoulder, and then stared at her. His expression barely changed as he gave her a frank, shameless appraisal. He examined her face, her shoulders, arms, chest, down her body and legs, then back up again very, very slowly. It felt as though it went on forever. Her tingle of anticipation changed to one of dis-comfort, but then he spoke at last. She even thought she saw the ghost of a smile.

"Did good today," he said. He looked down at her pock-ets and she tapped them, assuring him she had what they had come for. "Did good." Then he gave her a casual wave, turned, and ran along the alley.

"Wait! "Jazz called.

"See you back home!" he shouted over his shoulder, and she was sure she heard a laugh as he disappeared around a corner.

Jazz hurried back onto the street, more ruffled than she had been since first emerging into the sunlight a couple of hours before. She was sure her expression would give her away — Hi, I'm a thief and I'm on the run, but not just from peo-ple I've thieved from —and she walked faster, head down as though to deflect attention.

What had that been about? There'd been no reason for Stevie to hold back and see her. Even the muttered Did good today was something that could have come much later, deep beneath the city. There had only been that look, examining her, perusing her, and, much as she liked Stevie, she still felt unsettled.

She turned a corner and a police siren suddenly blasted through the air. She gasped and almost stumbled back as the white car sped by, curious tourists staring after it, seasoned Londoners using the brief distraction to move that much faster toward their destination.

I'm getting way too damn twitchy now, she thought. The boxes and bottle in her pockets felt heavier than ever, beg-ging to attract attention even though they could not be seen. She was at least a mile from the chemist and there was no chance she'd be caught, but the sky was suddenly way too wide, the buildings too tall, and the people too likely to stop, turn to her, and say, It's her, there she is, take her!

She did not want to think about who would respond to such a call.

"Jazz?" Cadge said.

She jumped a little, then sighed. Jazz grabbed his shoul-der and pulled him close, enjoying the contact as they hugged.

"Hey," he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice. "Bit spooked," she said.

"You were late, so I started walking down this way." He pulled away and looked into her eyes, but he did not spook her like Stevie. She could only find benevolence in Cadge. "I was getting worried."

I should mention Stevie, Jazz thought. There's no reason not to, is there? But she simply shrugged and looked around, glancing up at the clear blue sky.

"Got you this." He handed her a small box, blushing, turning away as she held out her hand and accepted what-ever the gift might be.

It was a pink box with gold lettering: Beautiful.

"Said you liked it," he said.

Jazz felt tears threatening, but she held them back. She nodded, unable to speak for a few seconds, and the sharp re-ality of the box's weight and corners pinned her to the world. "Thanks," she said at last, and it came out husky and gruff.

Cadge nodded, but he could not keep the smile from his face.

"Really," Jazz said. She looked at the box again and re-membered what these boxes had looked like on her mum's dressing table, the way she'd always kept the perfume inside instead of disposing with the box and just keeping the bottle, the way she had liked the fact that however empty the bottle might be, the box always looked new. "Really, Cadge, thanks."

He nodded, face flushed. "Pleasure," he said. "Now it's time to go. We're not far from Oxford Circus here. And Harry'll be waiting for us when we go down."

"Harry?"

"Told me he'd meet us. He does that sometimes, espe-cially with someone new."

"Why?"

Cadge shrugged but looked away. "Sometimes Harry likes to talk in private."

He would not be drawn out any more, so Jazz followed Cadge along the bustling streets and into Oxford Circus Tube station. As the shadows cooled around her, she felt a calm sense of relief closing in with them.

Chapter Seven

the silent tree

"Do you trust me?"

"Of course I do."

"Good. That's good. But why?"

"Because you're my mother, of course." Jazz didn't like the way her mum's conversation was going this morning. They'd started out commenting on the architecture of Oxford Street, but now they sat in the back corner of a cof-fee shop and her mother had embarked on one of her lec-tures. At least Jazz thought it was likely to turn into a lecture. It had that feel: a difficult question, followed by a few moments of silence, and soon would come her mother's sad expression and alert eyes as she started to speak of hid-den dangers, covert groups, and the risks of trying to live a normal life. Life for us can never be normal, she'd said during one of these discussions a couple of years ago, and Jazz had never forgotten that. Out of all the advice her mother had given her, it was this statement that stuck most in her mind. Sometimes she hated her mum for telling her that. Surely such harsh truths were something a girl should find out on her own?

"That's not good enough reason to trust me," her mother said. "Lots of kids trust their parents and are in-evitably betrayed by them. It's a word bandied around too readily nowadays, like love, and fate, and hate. But it's a pre-cious thing. Analyze your trust, Jazz. Study it. Does it have rough edges, or is it thoughtless and complete? Because na-ture abhors sharp edges, so something with them can't be natural."

"You'd never betray me," Jazz said firmly. She was start-ing to feel upset and anxious at the way this was going. Mum was her bedrock! Her solid pedestal from which she was starting to live life as an adult!

Her mum smiled. "No, I wouldn't. But if I was someone else, just because I never have betrayed you doesn't mean I never would."

"You're scaring me, Mum."

One of the coffee-shop staff paused by the next table, cleared away mugs and sandwich wrappers, and started pol-ishing its surface. The silence was uncomfortable, and the young girl threw them a nervous glance and hurried away, the table still smeared and dirty.

"Don't be scared," she said. "Be warned. You're the only person you can really, truly trust. You. The only one. You'll need to be careful, Jazz, as you get older. Make sure you're certain of people's intentions toward you."

"You mean boys?"

"I mean everyone." Her mother looked suddenly sad then, and Jazz was mortified when she saw tears in the woman's eyes. "You can never really know someone."

"Mum?"

She shook her head and waved Jazz away, dabbing at her eyes. "I'm fine. I'm fine." But she didn't look fine. And that brief, intense conversation about trust stayed with Jazz for a long, long time.

Harry was waiting for them below the surface, behind the grubby wall and bulky grate at the end of the station platform. He was alone. He carried two heavy torches, and he gave them to Cadge and Jazz.

He trusted them to light his way.

"A good nick today, Jazz girl?"

Jazz produced the boxes of painkillers, plasters, cough mixture, and antibiotics. She kept the Beautiful to herself.

"Nice!" Harry said. "Nice, my pets. I don't like the thought of my kids being ill, not when they're such an honest bunch."

The word honest was a strange one, Jazz thought, as ap-plied to a bunch of thieves. But it also made her proud. They might nick things, but they were all honest to one another. At least, almost all of them. The image of Stevie Sharpe hid-den in the alley shadows had failed to leave her, and being down here in the dark only seemed to make it more solid.

"It went okay," Jazz said. "Cadge had to do a runner too, but I had the stuff by then. And I left without them even sus-pecting me."

"And what did you fetch, Cadge lad?"

"Nuthin'."

Jazz frowned —she remembered him running with a box of condoms in his hand. But she kept walking and did not look at the boy.

"Nothing at all?" Harry asked.

"Dropped it," Cadge said. And I wonder how scarlet he is right now? Jazz thought. These shadows are good for hiding a lot.

They veered left into a disused tunnel, walked for a hun-dred yards, and came to an abandoned station platform. From there they made their way down an old maintenance staircase, hearing the rustle of rats retreating before the wash of their flashlights. Cockroaches scurried out of sight. In the drier tunnels, they were rarer, but in the damp, rot-ting places, cockroaches and other bugs were plentiful. Jazz forced herself not to take much notice of them.

The stairs were slippery here, layered with a thin green slime, and at the bottom of the staircase a curtain of water fell in a continuous waterfall. Harry produced a small re-tracting umbrella from his pocket, opened it up, and di-verted the water far enough for Jazz and Cadge to step through. "One of the oldest water-distribution systems in the world, down here," he said as he stepped through. "More water leaks into the ground than reaches Londoners' taps." He brushed a few droplets of water from his coat shoulders.

"Lucky for us, eh? Free water whenever we want it. I only wish they could heat some of it for us. Then life would be grander than grand, eh, Cadge?"

"Life's grand as it is, Mr. F."

"It has its moments, for sure."

Something rattled in the distance and Cadge spun around. They were at one end of a short brick-lined tunnel, and the steel door at the other end was twisted open. The noise came from beyond.

Rats? Jazz wondered. A train in the distance? She was al-ready becoming familiar with how strange the noises were down here.

"It's nothing," Harry said.

Cadge glanced at Jazz and smiled. "Really was a good nick," he said. "You're becoming an expert."

"I think she has the light hands and gentle touch of a thief, for sure," Harry said. He squeezed Jazz's shoulder. "I think you'll go far."

"I'm still not sure..." she said, but she trailed off.

"Still not sure you want to stay," Harry finished for her. "That's to be expected, and I honor that, Jazz girl. Honor it completely. If ever it's time for you to go, you'll go with our blessing. I tell that to all my kids, and I mean it."

Cadge walked ahead of them, pretending to check out the open doorway.

"I'm certainly not going yet," she said. Cadge turned around and smiled.

Something screeched in the distance. It seemed to come in from a long way off. Jazz was already learning to judge sound down here, and this one had lost many of its lower frequencies, swallowed by concrete, brickwork, and the solid rock of London's legs.

The smile froze on Cadge's face. Harry cocked his head and frowned. "Mr. F.?"

The screech came again and Harry shook his head. "No, Cadge. I think it's just metal on metal.

Something collapsing somewhere far off, maybe. Or perhaps someone else taking a secret tunnel to somewhere we don't know."

"Collapsing?" Jazz asked.

Harry nodded. "Old places down here, Jazz. And some bits are older than you believe. Sometimes it's just time to fade away."

"Sounded like a scream to me," Cadge said. "And comin' closer."

Harry shook his head again. "I've heard it often enough," he said.

"Heard what?" Jazz felt scared and excluded, and she looked back and forth from Harry to Cadge.

"Hour of Screams," Cadge said.

The phrase chilled her, the echo of Cadge's voice fading away to nothing in her ears.

"You mentioned that the other day," she said, then turned to Harry. "Cadge told me I should ask you about it, but I'd forgotten. Is that what we just heard?"

Harry frowned at Cadge. "Not at all." Then he turned to Jazz again. "Walk with us. Let's get back to the kingdom. I wanted to tell you about this in my own time, in my own way. But it seems young Cadge has preempted me."

"Sorry, Harry," Cadge said.

"Don't apologize, lad. It's good to be worried about the Hour of Screams. Good to be scared. It's something not to be trusted."

Jazz thought of her mother's advice on trust, and how precious it was, and how easily it was given out nowadays. I trust Cadge, she thought. And the idea gave her great com-fort.

As they shone their torches ahead and Harry began to talk, Jazz reached out and held the boy's hand.

"It's something we've learned to live with," Harry said, "though no one was meant to live with it. I would've told you about it earlier but, truth be told, it's been months since we've had the Hour of Screams come through. I should've warned you sooner, Jazz. I've been meaning to. Just didn't want to scare you off."

"But what is it?"

"It's a dead thing, the Hour. An old, dead thing." "I don't understand," Jazz said. "Is this about the...

echoes?"

Harry frowned, shot a glance at Cadge, and then refocused on Jazz. "You hear them too, do you, or has Cadge just been speaking out of school ?"

"I hear them," she said, thinking how strange it was to be speaking so normally about something she would have thought impossible not long ago. But her perception of the possible and the impossible had changed radically of late. "Sometimes I see things too."

He studied her. "What things?"