She jumped a little, obviously startled by our sudden appearance, then muttered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t even see you there.”
“No problem,” Mouse assured her, then turned to me and gave a subtle nod of his head. I smiled slightly, taking this as acknowledgment that – although we were trying to avoid drawing attention to ourselves – using my powers had been the right decision.
The car quickly filled up with passengers, and the press of bodies forced Mouse and me back to the very rear of the train car. At last, the chime sounded again, and the subway doors closed in the face of numerous disappointed patrons who hadn’t been able to squeeze in. A moment later, we began moving, and within seconds we entered the tunnel, quickly picking up speed as the train moved toward its next destination. Glancing through a window set in the train’s rear door, I watched as light from the platform we’d just left quickly receded into the distance.
I turned to Mouse, who – unlike me – was looking out the side windows instead.
“Scrubber room…” I heard him mutter softly. “Signal room… Communications…”
I followed his gaze, but already knew what he was doing: calling out the names of specific areas in the subway tunnel as we passed them.
Basically, the tunnel didn’t just consist of steel tracks laid down in a passageway carved through the earth. There was a narrow, railed walkway on both sides which – at discrete intervals – intersected with the entrances to various areas that provided support functions. Most subway commuters had almost no idea how much was required in terms of manpower and equipment in order to keep the trains running in a timely and efficient manner.
“Heating and cooling should be next,” Mouse stated, bringing my attention back to the task at hand. This was confirmed a few seconds later when I caught a glimpse of “HVAC” written on a door near the left-side walkway as we sped past.
“Okay, get ready…” Mouse droned. “Now!”
Telekinetically, I placed a firm grip on Mouse. At the same time, I phased us – making the two of us physically insubstantial. Then I floated about an inch into the air (lifting Mouse as well), at the same time gently moving the two of us backward.
With our momentum now the opposite that of the subway car, the result was that we phased through the rear door. A second later, we were floating in the semi-darkness of the subway tunnel, watching the train swiftly moving away from us.
Empathically, I stayed in tune with the passengers for a moment, trying to make sure that our sudden disappearance hadn’t caused any distress in those around us. Frankly speaking, I could have saved myself the trouble; I detected no more than mild surprise at our unorthodox departure. (Apparently, subway passengers adopt a mind-your-own-business mantra, although in all honesty I couldn’t be sure how many of them had actually been paying attention to us in the first place.) This reaction actually served our current purpose, but at the same time it left me slightly disheartened with respect to human nature: two guys disappear from a moving subway train, and no one’s concerned enough to raise an alarm?
“So far, so good,” Mouse muttered, bringing me back to myself.
I moved us over to the railed walkway to our left, then made us substantial again and gently set us down. At the same time, I cycled my vision through the light spectrum until I could see almost normally. On his part, Mouse donned a pair of night vision goggles that he’d obviously brought with him.
“Let’s go,” he said, heading towards a nearby set of double doors. Unlike the previous areas we had passed (which had had the names of the respective rooms written on the entryways), this one was unlabeled.
Mouse tried the handle; unsurprisingly, it was locked. I phased the door without being told, and we stepped inside. We found ourselves on a landing at the top of a set of straight stairs that descended for about thirty feet.
We hustled down to the bottom of the staircase, which opened up into a square room roughly thirty-by-thirty feet in size. There was some type of equipment pushed against a couple of the walls, but none of it was familiar to me. Straight ahead of us was the entry to a narrow corridor. Mouse pulled out his computer tablet (which he always seemed to carry with him) and began walking towards the passageway. I immediately fell into step beside him.
Several hallways seemed to branch off from the one in which we found ourselves. Apparently using his tablet as a map, Mouse began guiding us through a honeycombed network of rooms, corridors, and even tunnels (with me occasionally using my phasing ability to get us past locked doors, blocked entrances, and the like).
“What is this place?” I asked softly a few minutes later as we walked through what appeared to be an abandoned subway line.
“Subterranean tunnel,” Mouse answered with a snarky grin. “I’d have thought that was obvious.”
“Funny,” I replied sarcastically. “I meant why is it here, wise guy. Any of it, in fact. I mean, we’ve passed through a dozen places since we left the subway train that look like nobody’s visited regularly in years.”
“Yeah, well, it might shock you to know that there are scores of deserted underground sites throughout the city.”
“But again, why? It just seems weird to me to build out all these spaces and then simply abandon them.”
“There are actually lots of reasons why people would simply walk away,” Mouse declared as we left the subway line and entered a connecting passageway. “Maybe a tunnel collapsed or became too unstable to keep digging. Maybe they hit a pocket of gas or somehow lacked the ability to get fresh air far enough underground. In at least one instance, they upgraded the subway cars and then found out they wouldn’t fit with the existing platforms. And in some cases, they
