Chapter Seven
The air was unfamiliar in this area; thick with the strong smell of countless chemicals, yet thin and insufficient at the same time. No care had been taken to install air domes here. The empty streets echoed dully as the pair passed building after abandoned building, their breath coming in shorter, sharp bursts now.
"If we don't find this safe place of yours soon, we might as well just give up," the girl muttered to her companion.
"It's near...I can tell," he replied hoarsely.
"Oh yeah? And how's that?"
"I can feel it...it's whispering to us. Listen!"
She looked at him blankly. It wasn't the first time she'd questioned his sanity since they'd began their journey. Still, she felt she should humour him. She struck an exaggerated pose of concentration and raised her hand to her ear.
"Wait!" she cried suddenly, "I do hear something! I hear...I hear the sound of precious air being sucked out of us during every minute we waste standing here trying to hear bloody whispers that don't exist!"
She took hold of her companion's arm and, to his protest, began dragging him through the otherwise silent streets. It wasn't soon before both runaways found themselves struggling for air, their chests tightening as their movements stole the last precious breaths from their lungs. The girl slumped to the ground, gasping, but the boy, still caught in her strong grasp, found himself wrenched sideways and headlong towards a mound of rubble and metal railings bent backwards like broken fingers. He stumbled and tripped as his arm finally released itself from the girl's hold. And he fell.
"Hey!" The girl attempted to cry, while all the sound that she emitted was a tiny, hoarse squeak. She crouched, motionless, aghast, staring at the place where the boy had fallen. Yet she could not see him. Dizzily, she dragged herself closer to the rubble, and then over it. She found herself gazing through a thick layer of swirling dust into a dark chasm; as she strained to see through the blackness, she heard a cough and a triumphant yell.
"Told you we were close! Underground! I told you I heard it!" She heard scrabbling, and could only assume that he had pulled himself to his feet, and was performing some sort of over-enthusiastic free-style dance. She supposed he must be good at dancing, really...just not of the Ga Ga kind, and not in public.
The darkness was absolute in the tunnels below the ground, but the air was clear and, surprisingly, there was enough of it. Neither youth was struggling for breath as they made their way carefully through the echoing labyrinth, their fingers on the cold, unusually smooth walls guiding their way.
"Why are the tunnels so straight?" The girl asked her companion suddenly, "And why aren't the walls uneven?"
He had been silent throughout the duration of the journey, embarassed by the way he'd let himself go when he'd first discovered the hole in the ground. Yet now he cleared his throat and began to speak.
"These aren't ordinary caves, you know," he told her, "I don't think they're even really caves at all. It's what the people before us called the Underground. They used it a lot in the last century...they had trains running down here."
He could see the girl's baffled expression even through the blackness, and hastily explained, lest she should think him insane once again.
"Trains...well, you know. Like Air-Buses, but they ran on rails instead of pressured air. The rails'll still be here, I bet they will. We can find them later. Anyway, those before us used the Underground as a transport system. That's why the tunnels only go straight, and why the walls are so smooth... They had stations - all underground, of course - where you could get on and off the trains. Stations with posters all over them and buskers and stairs that ran on electricity! Escalighters, they were called, weren't they?"
The girl shook her head dubiously. It all sounded a bit pretentious - electric stairs, and those things called posters - what would this strange boy come up with next?
"My guess," he continued, his voice now loud with excitement, "is that we've got to come to one of these stations sooner or later. Then we can see everything - the posters, the ticket machines, the platforms - and if it's a nice enough station, we might as well start making it feel like home!"
"You mean we're gonna have to live down here?" The girl cried, suddenly indignant, "alone?"
As the darkness gradually became less intense, her companion attempted to conceal his expression of hurt. Instead, he set his face into a puzzled frown as if to question the flicker of a glow that seemed to be emerging from around a corner. They shuffled cautiously forward, silent now, and a little scared. This could be the station they had been waiting for; or it could be a trap.
