"I’m at the Gallery, Mum."
The background noise of the call changed abruptly, and then her mother’s voice came clearer, no longer on the hands-free set. "You’re where?"
"The Art Gallery of New South Wales," Madeleine said, making the lie resigned, apologetic, with no hint of dark and bruises, of broken things and dust. "I was waiting here till Tyler’s plane got in."
"You…" The word trailed away on a small shaking note, as unlike Victoria Cost as it was possible to be.
"I’m probably safer than you," Madeleine said, to fill the silence, to hear something other than that strangled word. Her eyes stung and she had to swallow, to work to make her voice sound casual, a little guilty, a touch disbelieving, as if she couldn’t credit the idea of black towers or bio-weapon attacks. "I’m in the Asian art section – it doesn’t even have windows. Are the animals okay?"
"That damn painting," Madeleine’s mother said. "You – Madeleine, why do you always…"
"Is Dad home?"
"He’s on his way." Her mother’s voice was regaining its usual brisk pace. "You stay where you are. Don’t go to have a look outside. Find the door to that section and shut it. Don’t worry about what the Gallery staff say. Stay as far away from outside doors and windows as possible, for as long as you can. Even when the air seems clear, use something to cover your mouth and nose. The roads are going insane, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get in to where you are, but I’ll call you back when there’s news and you can head to Tyler’s. You’ve still got that pass-key?"
"Yes, Mum." The familiar reeling off of instructions helped Madeleine conjure a shadow of a smile, made it possible to respond with the right note of weary patience.
"Good. I’ll call you when it sounds like it’s safer for you to head to Tyler’s. Or if it looks like you should try to spend the night there. Don’t let anyone try to make you leave before it’s clear."
"I won’t. Mum…"
But her mother had hung up. Madeleine laughed, then coughed, and gingerly levered herself into a sitting position. Her back and head did not love her, but her mother did, even if they’d had a lot of trouble talking to each other the last few years. Now all she had to do was overcome a little matter of collapsed exits, and get herself down to Tyler’s.
And then? She could pretend to her mother all she liked, but whatever the dust did, Madeleine was surely going to find out. She must have exceeded any minimum dose a thousand times over. Breathed it, swallowed it, had it in her eyes, ground it into her skin.
But that only made her want a bath, to clean herself off, to not be this filthy, fumbling, near-blind creature. "If you want B, finish A," her goal-oriented mother was always saying, and just now that was advice Madeleine was willing to take. Time to get out.
"But first check for other people," Madeleine reminded herself, and sighed.
Lifting her phone, she used it again as a torch, surveying a dim landscape of severed support pillars, broken stairs, and deceptively soft mounds below a wall of stars. Her train had departed as she’d walked up the stairs, and both platforms – what remained of them short of the wall of stars – stood empty. In the middle of the day the station had been far from busy, but there’d been a few people about. She could start with the small control rooms where the station staff retreated after signalling trains to depart, and the elevator–
No, not the elevator. Nothing could be alive in that compressed wedge of glass and metal.
The platform control rooms were double-entrance boxes, not much larger than the elevator. Madeleine headed left, focusing on the nearest doorway: a dark, empty square. A phone began to ring as she approached, and Madeleine edged into the room to a jaunty proclamation of I’m Too Sexy. A man lay near-buried in the dust, sprawled face-down across the threshold of the far doorway. Madeleine couldn’t see any blood, any obvious injury, but the layer of dust didn’t seem disturbed by any rise or fall of chest.
As the phone switched to screaming about messages, she made herself touch his shoulder, shake him, press her fingers to his throat, but chose not to turn him over, to discover what had left him so still. Instead, she moved to the edge of the platform, raising her phone to peer up at the shadowy curve above and the darkness which swallowed the track in either direction.
"Anyone there?" Madeleine called. "Hell–" A new spasm of coughing ripped through her, reviving the pounding in her head. It was impossible not to kick up fresh clouds of dust as she waded through it, and inhaling sharply had been a definite mistake.
If anyone was going to call for help, they would have done so already. All she could hear was falling water. Best to be methodical.
Reluctant to go near the starry wall again, Madeleine merely peered along the shortened platform, then turned to begin picking her way in the other direction. Almost immediately a rounded shape turned under her foot and she nearly went down, dropping her phone into a drift which glowed and sparkled unexpectedly.
"Welcome to the Glitter Mines," Madeleine muttered, digging to retrieve her phone and then investigate what she’d stood on. A scatter of soft drinks, escapees from a tumbled vending machine. That was serendipity, and Madeleine immediately picked up the nearest bottle and twisted the cap. The contents erupted into her face, but even a sticky orange bath was better than dust on dust, and she gulped down the remainder, till her throat no longer felt coated. Discarding the bottle, she wiped her phone, then tucked a few spare drinks into her backpack.
Moving more cautiously, she decided to follow the very edge of the platform, since little of the rubble had reached the track itself, and the curved arch above it was still intact. The platform extended further than the central connecting section, and she walked all the way down to the end and peered along the track as it disappeared into the tunnel to Circular Quay.
No visible damage, and far less dust. The twin overhead lines which powered Sydney trains seemed intact, though she supposed they must be severed by the starry wall. It would be easy for her to climb down and walk out, but she still had a lot of area to check.
About to turn away, Madeleine caught sight of a depression in the dust and, disbelieving, angled her phone for a better look. Footprints. Barely visible, since another layer of pale powder had settled on top, but definitely footprints. Three, maybe four people, had climbed down to the tracks here.
She wasn’t angry at being left. People were like that. And it released her from further searching.
The drop to the track was nearly as tall as Madeleine, but it wasn’t difficult to lower herself off the edge to the chunky gravel which surrounded the rails. Then she hesitated at the mouth of the tunnel, trying to see more than a few feet along the track before turning to stare back at distant pinpricks, remembering the feel of velvet beneath her fingertips, and then the jolt. Her hands weren’t damaged.
"Focus." Now was the time for getting out, not speculating.
Madeleine began to walk, holding her phone up high in case of something more unexpected than dust. The area between the rails was easy to walk on, with only stray lumps of clinker to look out for, and she followed the gentle curve until the only sign of dust were sprinkles which may have come from those who’d gone before her. Stopping to study a dusty print, she suddenly found her coating of grime intolerable.
Shedding her backpack, Madeleine pulled loose the wooden pin she used to hold her crinkle-curling brown hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, and ran her fingers through it over and over, showering an enormous amount of dust onto the rails. She was wearing a strappy sun dress, chosen because of Tyler, and not something she’d ordinarily wear while painting. Shaking and patting it with her hands added to the cloud around her, and she moved a few metres further before trying to beat her backpack clean.