Ascending the Boneyard (10 page)

I start fake keying the words “save it” over and over again on my phone, but when I look down at the screen, the low-battery icon is flashing in the corner. I shut down all the apps, pop out the earbud, and lean forward in the seat.

“Can I charge up?”

“Anything you want, potato chip.”

Haze reaches back, takes the phone and charger from me, plugs it all in. I almost can't believe the cigarette lighter still works in this crap car.

Only now my hands are twitchy. No keypad, no music, no Snipe page, no way to check messages. And five hundred miles to go.

I close my eyes. Why the hell wasn't the old man at Goofy Golf with Devin? How could he just disappear like that, not even leave a note? Wouldn't he know? Wouldn't he know that would trip my shit in the worst possible way? After my mom and Stan . . . You don't just up and leave without—

I replay the conversation with the commandos over and over in my mind. What did I miss? Were there secret plans, messages, hints I should have taken note of?
We think you can be of help to us.
If that's the case, where
are
they?

My head jerks against the tattered seat back. I sit up, look around, scratch a rogue itch.

“Hey,” I say to no one in particular. “Hand me my phone.”

Elan is the one who pops it out, charger and all, and I immediately check the wall screen, where the Day-Glo numbers pulse neon green at me.

Sweat starts sheeting down my back.

Midnight.

It's already midnight.

That can't be. When I handed my phone to Haze, it said ten to four. No way that was eight hours ago.

I bolt upright in the seat, pivot toward the window, then each of the other windows, but no matter where I look, it's all the same darkness.

“Haze!” I call out.

His head wobbles off the back of the seat. “Wha—?”

I recant. Everything's
not
right with the world. In fact, it would be accurate to say that something here is very, very wrong.

“Where are we?” I ask.

Elan's smile reflects back at me through the rearview mirror, her teeth glowing in the light of a massive full moon.

“You mean, are we there yet?”

“Are we
where
yet?” I'm testing her. I know it. She knows it. Haze . . . whatever. Waking up is not his forte.

Elan hasn't answered my question, so I press against the window, squint to get a look at the full-frontal urban assault: honking horns, sirens, traffic. The night spasms to life around us, puking up neon and humanity everywhere I look.

“Are we
here
yet,” she corrects me. “And the answer is, yes.”

I don't know how Haze and I both sawed enough z's to get from Ohio to New York, assuming we are, in fact,
in
New York, without even noticing the extensive passage of time. That alone is enough to roll me, especially since Haze is a natural-born conspiracy theorist and I already know he doesn't trust this girl.

My own mistrust increases exponentially as the city presses its grimy face against the windows of the car.

“This is where I drop you boys off,” she says, winding her way through a tangle of crowded streets.

I kick another glance out the window, absorb the sheer volume of bodies and machinery and high-rises and steam and neon and rebar and asphalt.

The commandos had better chime in here soon.

“Off you go,” she says. “The universe abhors a vacuum, you know. Once you leave home, you have to turn up somewhere.”

Haze and I stagger out of her decrepit little car, and as we step onto the curb, I remember about the UnderGround, the City Hall Station.

I turn, call out, “Wait, where's the—”

But the Big Apple has already taken a bite out of the night, and just like that, both the girl and the car are gone.

7.5

I'm not sure
why the commandos would send an UnderWorld hostage to me and then have her drive off without being saved.

So, fine, this isn't a salvation mission. But why have Elan show up just in the nick of time and take us exactly where we needed to go, and then, just before I could think of how to help her,
poof
?

Gone.

8

Haze's mirror-eyed
rage bears down on me with an intensity I am not expecting.

“It's really no sweat,” I say, wiping beads of perspiration off my upper lip. “We just need to find the—”

“It took us
fifteen minutes
to get from Ohio to New York,” he cuts in. “How is that no sweat?”

“No, it didn't.” I flip up the bottoms of the yellow goggles to let them defog. “It only seems like it because we were sleeping.”

“Exactly. Sleeping. Both of us.
For nine hours.
”

“You have
narcolepsy
, Haze.” It's true. He does. Haze has some kind of stress-induced narcolepsy. Why
I
stayed asleep for the better part of five hundred miles is still pretty sketch.

“I don't think narcolepsy explains a nine-hour nap,” he says.

“You don't think what we've been through today qualifies as an ordeal?”

Something knocks against my shoe as we walk, derailing my train of thought.

I sidestep it to see what it is, and the city floods my head, bending light and sound into unrecognizable shards and fractals.

I reach down good and slow, clamp it between the tips of two fingers.

It's the drink cup. Not
a
drink cup.
The
drink cup. From the go-kart track. The one I buried the bird in behind our trailer in Sandusky, Ohio. And yeah, I know there must be a trillion green and yellow drink cups in the Big Apple.

But how many of them still have a blackbird feather inside?

I stare into the mangled cup, gawk at its contents.

“That's foul,” Haze says.

My heart beats out tribal drum chants as I pull it out, flip it between my fingers a couple of times.

learn to fly

fly away

As Haze scouts out our surroundings, I quick stash the feather before he notices. It's definitely the strangest item on my Trade Screen, but there must be some reason to have it, or else why would it have been put there?

I turn the drink cup over, looking for the words I already know I'll see.

Subway. City Hall Station.

Motor City pumps tinny and low into my left ear. The sharp riff of the guitar solo on their heavy-metal anthem pierces through my brain waves as a siren wails in the near distance, and it occurs to me: this isn't an address. It's an instruction.

I pull up SnipeSearch on my phone.

“What are you looking for?” Haze asks.

I show him the address on the cup, and he flinches in disgust.

“Throw that thing away, man.”

We stumble along, following the landmarks and reading the warnings that come up on the page about how the station is closed to the general public, how you have to make an appointment to tour the tunnels, and how it would be a massive breach of security to go down there unaccompanied by the proper authorities, since the station is situated right under City Hall.

And then, just off to one side, I spot the entrance.

Of course, it's surrounded by a soaring chain-link fence and a gate that's dead-bolted with several Magnum-grade padlocks.

Haze goes slack in front of the gate. “Well, this steams.”

“There's gotta be a way in,” I say, mostly to myself.

“I just want to clarify that we're not meant to go down there. You know that, right?”

I don't blame him. He doesn't understand how important any of this is, that going underground is mission critical. He doesn't know how any of this works; he's never technically been to the Boneyard before.

But I have. And I know there's got to be a way in, an on-ramp, as Elan called it.

“Even if we do get in, we won't be able to see anything down there, Tosh. Not even the rats running across our feet, and that's saying something because New York rats weigh ten pounds apiece.”

Point taken.

I dig into my bag for a penlight I can't find, my fingers brushing against the feather instead. A fat knot of exhaust fumes and urban funk sticks in my throat, refusing to be swallowed away. I have to get down there. No plan B, no alternative route. It's UnderGround or mission failure. Period.

A text message buzzes at me, and I'm so sure it's the commandos with instructions for how to break in that I open the app without thinking.

The world below will weep blood,
it says. There's an attachment, of course. It's the cockroach.

A low groan cuts loose from my gut. Turk seems to know my every move. I'm starting to wonder how it'll ever matter if I crack the tunnel code; that bastard will always be able to stay ahead of me.

Clearly, I'm not getting an assist here. I'm sure the commandos brought me this far courtesy of Elan, but telling me about
the world below
isn't much help. I'll have to figure out how to go UnderGround myself.

I pace the length of the fence.

“Dead bolts,” Haze says. “Doesn't that just figure.”

Roundhouse would have something in his bag he could use for bolt cutters. What do I have? Socks and underwear and a gum pack with a note inside.

I stop midpace, scan the length of the fence again, quicker this time.

sneak in

That's what her note said.

I pull at the fence. It's secured every few feet with wire ties, but I tug the length of it in the direction of the gate, and there, just at the end, it gives.

The corner isn't secured.

Haze and I stare at each other in disbelief.
Easy,
I'm thinking.
Way too easy.
I'm this close to chickening out when the next message comes through.

The end is near.

And then one more:

Save it.

9