Soon they entered another station platform and jumped down into the track well. Zoya prayed that Tavik would lose her during the change between stations. On they ran for what felt like ages. She caught her second wind and the stitch in her side faded.
“How much farther?” she asked, but Leonid didn’t respond.
She heard a splash from ahead and her foot came down in icy cold water up to her ankle.
“Don’t worry,” Leonid said. “It’s not deep.”
The light from the lamp rippled from dark water covering the floor of the tunnel for as far as she could see.
“What is this?” she hissed, fearing to raise her voice in case the mobsters might hear her.
Leonid thrust his chin forward as if to say, You’ll see, and waded ahead. Zoya’s boots squelched in the shallow water, every step sending a shiver of pain through her bruised knee. Their feet splashing through the water sounded loud to her ears, and the tunnel filled with a dank and earthy smell.
Zoya felt drained of energy. As she sloshed forward, she pulled small chunks of bread and cheese from her pocket and chewed them.
“We’re going under the river now,” Leonid whispered.
There was another tunnel collapse ahead, this one nearly blocking the entire passage. Water dripped from overhead and in some places small torrents pattered down the wall.
“It’s going to fall in on us!” she said.
Leonid shook his head. “It’s been like this for years.”
“What are you going to do when it gives out and the river comes down?”
He shrugged and headed for the left side of the tunnel, where there was just enough room to squeeze through the blockage.
Zoya looked back again and gave an involuntary squeak when she saw how close the bobbing light now appeared. “They’re getting too close!”
Leonid shrugged again. “Once we pass this collapse, it’s not much farther. Watch the pipe.”
Without the warning, Zoya might have impaled herself on a narrow, rusty pipe jutting up from the rubble. She carefully stepped around it and sighed as the tunnel opened up ahead. They splashed on through the water and a few minutes later came again to dry tunnel. Several rats scurried amongst a scattering of bones along the far wall.
“How far did you say?” Zoya asked.
“Maybe twenty minutes at this pace.”
“I thought you said it was close?”
Another shrug. “That is close.”
“Where are we going? Another station?”
Leonid nodded. “You aren’t going to like it. Tis a haunted place.”
Zoya had seen far too many dead people to believe in the supernatural. “What does that mean? Ghosts?”
Leonid didn’t respond except to jog a little faster.
Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, Marcus’s feet plowed into cold water. The entire run through the tunnel, he had ticked off in his mind the number of new ways he had been terrified this day and tried to number the excuses he had for giving up the chase. Now he added to his list the feel of ice cold water pouring into his shoes while running through a dark underground tunnel. He groaned and then groaned again as he saw the light he had been following grow dimmer ahead. He had come so close to losing it altogether when they had changed stations, but he had managed to keep glimpsing the faint light ahead even as he had struggled up dark, unmoving escalators and stairs.
Every bone in his body felt bruised and he felt as if acid were rushing through his bloodstream. Just give it up. Retrace your steps and go sleep for a week in the apartment. Yet again the image of Zoya’s pouting smile and warm brown eyes asserted itself in his head, and he knew he couldn’t give up on her, regardless of how terrible he felt.
His father’s last words returned to him, and he scowled at the memory. What makes you think you’ll be able to help her? Those men are trained killers, and they have guns. He kicked at the water and splashed onward. You see one pretty face and you’re willing to throw your life away like a love-struck teen? He shook his head. No, he may have only just met Zoya today, but he’d experienced more — and more intensely — with her in this short time than he had ever experienced in his life.
A sharp rock stabbed into his foot and Marcus hobbled close to the wall and braced his back against it to allow his free hand to massage the injured sole. Whatever it was, at least it hadn’t punctured through the shoe. He was so tired that he was having trouble even holding up the torch. The thought of giving up rose up through the chatter in his head again, always in his father’s voice. Mentally he shoved the thought away with all the violence he could muster. He gritted his teeth and set off after the distantly bobbing light.
It was the smell that told Zoya they were getting close, the same faint whiff of corruption that she smelled in the morgue every day at work.
“There is death ahead,” she said.
“I told you that you wouldn’t like it,” Leonid replied.
They trotted on for several more minutes until the light from the lamp showed the tunnel give way to a broad darkness, and Zoya knew they had come to the station.
“What station—?” She squealed as she tripped and landed hard on something both soft and hard. Her hand closed around a sticklike object, and opening her eyes she found herself staring in the dim light directly into the empty sockets of a human skull. Now she screamed and scrambled backward, her hands shoving at rib bones until she collapsed against Leonid’s legs.
“It’s Polyanka station,” he said.
Zoya glared up at him, then grabbed his arm and pulled herself shakily to her feet. In the dim light she saw a neat row of skeletal corpses laid out along the track in rotting sleeping bags or blankets. “What is this?” she whispered, a hysterical note in her voice.
“Come,” he said and stepped over the bodies as he headed for a set of wooden steps leading up to the platform.
Something’s missing, she thought. She had nearly grown accustomed to the cold metal of the gun gouging her skin of her lower back, but that feeling was gone now. Her hand encountered nothing but her waistband when she reached for the weapon. It must have fallen out when I tripped. The idea of being without a weapon with Tavik on her tail terrified her, but trying to scrounge through corpses in almost total darkness seemed even worse. I don’t have time for this!
Zoya looked back down the tunnel but couldn’t see any sign of her pursuers. Calm down, she told herself, and tried to get her breathing under control. She watched Leonid step up onto the makeshift stairs and was surprised when they didn’t collapse. Taking another deep breath, she carefully stepped around the bodies and followed Leonid up the creaking steps to the platform. She gasped when she saw that many more of the corpses were splayed out in the station. They were huddled in small groups around the pillars. It smelled like a charnel house, but faintly enough that she knew these people had died long ago. The only sound was a rustling so low that at first she thought she might be imagining it, until she spotted the red gleam of the lamplight reflected from the eyes of several rats.
Zoya caught Leonid by the arm. “What happened here?”
He shrugged off her hand and knelt by the nearest body. “Look,” he muttered, lifting something near the skull. Zoya edged closer and a small metallic box implanted in the left side of the skull, the slot interface, and a tiny wire ran from the slot toward the nearby pillar.
“Meshing did this?” She thought back to what she had seen at the station near her apartment. There had been Mesh addicts there, but there had also been people to tend to them. “Where were their minders?”