Lindsay knew that in a city of ten million rushing souls, chance meetings rarely happen more than once. Yet she found herself wishing that weren’t the case. True, her experience with Talon had been somewhat traumatic—the type of big-city nightmare her mother always warned about. After all, what could be more terrifying than a stranger appearing in her own room? And yet, Lindsay could not get the image of Talon out of her mind. It nagged at her like an itch out of reach.
“I saved Lindsay’s life,” Todd announced at the breakfast table the following morning. He proceeded to tell their father the complete tale, in a bungee-stretch of exaggeration.
“He was huge,” Todd said.
“Not that huge,” Lindsay corrected.
“He had these wild, psychotic eyes,” Todd said.
“Maybe because I sprayed them with pepper spray,” Lindsay reminded him.
“No telling what twisted, demented things he wanted.”
“I know what he wanted,” Lindsay mumbled.
Needless to say, Mr. Matthias had the fissure between the two upstairs hallways completed immediately, closing out forever that dark space between the walls. For the next few days, Todd was constantly reminding her how very dangerous the situation had been.
“He could have cut you up into a thousand pieces and eaten you one bite at a time,” he would say, or, “He could have sautéed your guts in garlic and olive oil.” Todd was merciless in illustrating all the ways in which she might have been ingested. Lindsay’s personal favorite was: “He could have barbecued your liver and served it up with onions.” It made Lindsay laugh because surely no cannibal in his right mind would eat liver and onions.
By the end of her first week of school, she reluctantly had to admit her landing in New York was a crash-and-burn. Her father’s schedule left him little opportunity to keep track of Lindsay’s tribulations—but he must have sensed something amiss, because he found his way into her room one night as she prepared for bed, and asked the proverbial parental question: “Is everything all right at school?”
Lindsay wondered if there was ever a kid in the history of the world who answered anything but, “Yeah, sure, fine” when the question was posed. “Yeah, sure, fine,” she told him.
He sat on the chair beside her as she read a book. Unlike Todd, he didn’t use her school supplies to clean his finger-nails. “The schoolwork’s not too hard? Kids treating you okay?” he asked.
She considered telling him the truth—that Todd had blabbed her New Year’s Eve experience throughout the hallowed halls of Icharus Academy so that Lindsay had instantly become known as “that poor girl who was attacked on New Year’s Eve” and everyone looked at her as if she would slip into some screeching flashback at any moment.
But what was the point in telling her father that? He would call the school, raise a ruckus, and it would solve nothing, because the problem wasn’t the school. It wasn’t really Todd, either.
“Things are different here,” she told him. “I’ll get used to it.” But it wasn’t just “things” that were different...she was different. In any other situation, she would have quickly exerted her own personality and shone through, but the girl who had grown under her mother’s tutelage wasn’t the girl she wanted to be anymore. The problem was, there was no image rushing in to fill that void. Nothing but the image the Icharus kids tried to pin on her.
“You should have Todd get you an appointment at Hair-On-Fire,” her father suggested. “They’ll give you one of those nuclear hair creations that will get you into the in-crowd in no time.”
Lindsay sighed and put down her book. “Maybe I’ll get a few of those chic tattoos, too.”
That started her father stammering, like someone who suddenly found himself on the wrong side of a closed window.
“I’m kidding, Dad.”
He grinned, dropping his shoulders in relief, then kissed her and left, as if something had been accomplished.
With the Icharus crew not worth the trouble, Lindsay found herself alone more often than not during those first few weeks, but she was hardly bored, because she had developed a curious hobby. She spent her free time secretly searching dark, unsafe corners for a trace of the one thing in New York that intrigued her and gave her a hint of mystery: Talon.
Though she tried to avoid it, her search eventually brought her sniffing around the subway, and as anyone can tell you, that is not a pleasant endeavor. The smell of the subway is a unique brew of select garbage fermenting in soot-sifted runoff and various bodily fluids—and when people speak of the special air of life that fills the city, they are probably imagining the smell of the subway. The Downsiders had no love of it—in fact, they had great fans that sent the stench back to the surface, where it belonged.
It was on a bench at the lonely end of the Seventy-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue station that Lindsay found a tattered old woman willing to tell her what she wanted to hear.
“So you’ve seen one of them!” the woman said, with a voice almost as ragged as her clothes.
“He came to my house. He was looking for medicine.”
The woman nodded. “They do that sometimes. So I hear.”
“They?” asked Lindsay. “Who are they?”
The woman looked around, as if someone might be lurking in the shadows, listening in. Then she leaned in close to Lindsay. “The Under-Angels,” she said. “That’s why I wait here. I’m waiting for the day they choose me and take me down to Heaven.”
Never before had a girl caused Talon so much pain. Perhaps that’s why she had left such a lasting impression on him. This Topsider. This “Lindsay.”
“Best if you leave it alone,” The Champ told Talon over a particularly brutal game of Risk. “You don’t break into someone’s house and then go asking her out to the movies.”
“The what?”
“Never mind,” answered The Champ as he proceeded to wipe out Talon’s entire Argentinean army. “Anyway, don’t they have girls your age down there?”
Talon shrugged. “Yeah...but none of them ever sprayed me with eye-poison.”
That made The Champ laugh, and his laughter made Talon angry. He would have to take it out on The Champ’s meager forces in England. “Besides, she saved my sister’s life...and I have to return her book.” He tapped his pocket, where he kept the somewhat dog-eared copy of The Time Machine he had salvaged the day he was hit by the brick.
“Those kinds of girls...” said The Champ, “they’re not looking for the likes of you.”
“So what do they look for?”
“If I knew that, do you think I’d be living at the bottom of a pool?”
Talon looked down at the playing board, studying his positioning on the landmasses. The Champ, he knew, was one of the Topside’s wise ones, but clearly he couldn’t answer every Topside mystery.
The Champ had told him that this game board was a copy of the Topside map of the world.
“Where are we?” Talon asked. “I keep forgetting.”
The Champ pointed to a spot on the board where orange met blue. “Right here,” he said. “East coast of North America.”
Talon touched the spot on the map, and then let his eyes drift to the colorful landmasses on other parts of the board.
“And how big is all the rest?”
The Champ raised his eyebrows. “Too big for you to imagine.”
Talon nodded and rolled his dice. “Someday, I will be able to imagine all this,” he said, “and when I do, she will no longer spray me in the eyes.”
High up, where inferior concrete had worn away under decades of water erosion, a shaft twisted up from the Downside, to the brownstones of Eighty-fourth Street. For a short time there had been a gateway into the world of the girl named Lindsay Matthias, but now it had been sealed with brick and cement. In spite of The Champ’s advice, Talon went there day after day, slipping away whenever he found the chance, to climb into the secret crevice between the two buildings, and listen. The voices came through faint and muffled—even when he put his ear to the cold brick—but enough sifted through for him to know Lindsay’s comings and goings. He knew she left at 7:30 every morning and didn’t return until 5:30 in the evening, after the sun had freed the sky from its burning rays. He knew that her brother’s unpleasant nature wasn’t just reserved for Talon. There was a certain melancholy in Lindsay’s conversations with her father and brother that made it clear to Talon that she longed to be somewhere else, although he wasn’t quite sure where. It brought him a deep sadness to think that she would have to live her life in the Topside—someone with a heart such as hers deserved the dignity of being Down.
These were the thoughts that wove through Talon’s mind on the day that he was caught by Railborn.
Lindsay’s home was above the untraveled wastes, at the furthest reaches of the High Perimeter—a place of ruined basements and rotting furniture that the Topside had forgotten but the Downside had not yet claimed. Talon thought he was too clever to be followed, but Railborn, as loud and obnoxious as he tended to be, could stalk with the silence of a gopher snake when he wanted to.
When Talon came down from that high crevice, Railborn was waiting for him. With a quick and painful punch to the jaw, he sent Talon sprawling. Talon was quick to react, rising from the floor and butting Railborn in the stomach, knocking him against a brick wall. Furious about this ambush, Talon was merciless in his retaliation, throwing punches long after Railborn had stopped. Finally they separated, listening to each other’s jagged breathing in the darkness.
“I thought I could knock some sense into you,” growled Railborn. “We’re done Catching, so it’s time to pull your thick skull down from the Topside and start thinking about Hunting rotation. We’ve been waiting long enough—I won’t let you ruin it for Gutta and me.”
It bothered Talon the way Railborn said “Gutta and me.” Lately, Railborn had been doing everything in his power to get Gutta to side with him in all things—as if it were the two of them against Talon. They both knew that Gutta almost always sided with Talon. This time she wasn’t, and Railborn was riding it for all it was worth.
“What I do with my free time is my business,” answered Talon.
“No, it’s not. Because if the others find out you’ve been surface-peeping, Gutta and I will be septic-deep because we didn’t stop you.”
“No one will find out,” reminded Talon, “if you don’t tell them.”
“So now you’re going to force us to be accomplices?” Railborn struck the wall in anger and stormed off.
Although Talon wished he could just leave it at that, he couldn’t. Fistfights aside, Railborn had been a true friend for longer than Talon could remember, so he caught up with him.
“Are you going to tell Gutta?” Talon asked.
“Who do you think made me go after you?”
Talon smiled. “She’s worried about me, isn’t she?”
Railborn shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “So what? If I were the one acting like a freak, she’d be worried about me, too.”
“Then maybe you should act like a freak more often.”
“Ah, shut up.”
They made their way through holes and down debris banks until they reached the well-marked, well-traveled tunnels of home, where the air was warm and the smells and sounds were numbingly familiar. “Why shouldn’t I want to know what goes on a hundred feet above my head?”
“Because it’s a hundred feet above your head!” answered Railborn. “That place is their curse, not yours.”
“And what if they’re not cursed?”
“If they’re not cursed, then why were they born on the surface? Feel sorry for them if you want, but don’t waste your time thinking about them.”
There was little sense in arguing this. Railborn spouted Downside doctrine as if it flowed through his veins, and he believed every word of it. Now that his stint at Catching was over, all thoughts of the Topside had drained out of Railborn’s mind.
“It’s like the sewers, Talon,” Railborn said, finally beginning to cool down. “We built the sewers to channel the Topside away from us. You’ve got to do that with your brain, too.”
Talon smiled in spite of himself. “That’s what I like about you, Railborn—your mind is like a sewer.”
Railborn grinned proudly. “Thanks!” he said.
But if Railborn’s mind was like a sewer, then Talon’s was a sump, collecting all those things that no one else dared to think about.
At 5:30 the following Friday evening, Lindsay walked home from the library with a high-octane motormouth by the name of Becky Peckerling.
“The kids in class are easy to remember,” insisted Becky. “Gary’s the one with those designer blue braces; Andrea’s the one with stained teeth; Rhonda’s are perfect, but that’s only because she had them capped; and Reggie has a gap between his two front teeth that he uses to spit water at people.” Becky claimed that she wanted to be a doctor someday, but everyone suspected she’d end up a dentist. “Do you think you know everyone now?”
“Yes,” lied Lindsay, picking up her pace down Third Avenue. Gridlock had reached a fever pitch, and Lindsay didn’t know which was worse: the honking of horns, or Becky’s ramblings. Becky was Icharus Academy’s one-woman welcome wagon, although few things about her were welcoming. From the very beginning Becky had glommed onto Lindsay like a barnacle to a boat, and Lindsay didn’t have the strength to scrape the poor girl off her hull. Everyone else at school kept a carefully measured distance, which was fine with Lindsay. She didn’t want to be drawn into a cliquish world of prep-school intrigue—at least not until she knew which clique was worth aligning herself with.
“Lindsay, are you listening to me? Honestly, if you want to know everybody, you’ve got to pay attention.”
Lindsay had already developed the habit of dropping by the library rather than suffering Todd’s slings and arrows at home, but the library was no sanctuary because Becky always followed, and her motormouth never ran out of gas.
As they crossed Third Avenue, Lindsay’s attention was drawn to a rain gutter in the curb across the street. She could swear she saw someone looking out at her. Normally she would chalk it up to her imagination, but recent events made such a sighting much more plausible. She continued across the street, careful not to let on what she had seen.
“Lindsay, do you hear me?” droned Becky. “Hello, Earth to Lindsay.”
Now they stood just above the metal ridge where she had seen the pair of lurking eyes. If she was going to make her move, she had to do it now.
“Excuse me, Becky.” Lindsay got down on the ground and peeked into the slit in the curb...
...Only to be faced with the surprised eyes of Talon. Ha! She knew it!
“Why are you following me?” she asked, her ear to the asphalt and her face pressing into the rain gutter. “How long have you been watching me? Do you have a problem? Do I have to call the police?”
Caught red-handed, Talon just stammered.
Becky, not catching any of this, cackled her fool barnacle head off, but Lindsay didn’t take her eyes off Talon for fear that he might disappear into the shadows again. Talon did try to back away, but couldn’t—and for good reason. Whatever else that metallic vest of his was good for, it was excellent for snaring large clumps of long hair—enough hair in this case to make them inseparable. As Talon backed away, Lindsay was pulled into the drain up to her neck.
“Ow!” shouted Lindsay. “Stop it! Stop it now!”
“I can’t!”
It was one of those no-win situations. The angrier Lindsay got, the harder Talon tried to pull away, but he only succeeded in pulling Lindsay deeper and deeper into the narrow slit of the drain until she was in up to her waist. With her hips painfully wedged in the ten-inch-wide slit, Lindsay found herself wearing Third Avenue like a tight-fitting skirt.
“Lindsay!” yelled Becky, who obviously had not seen Talon. “What are you doing down there? Come out now! The light’s changed!”
But it was no use. All Lindsay could do was kick her legs futilely against the potholed asphalt.
“There’s a bus coming!” shouted Becky.
It was the horror in Talon’s eyes that made Lindsay panic. In the Book of Unpleasant Deaths, being run over by a bus while stuck in a rain gutter ranked right up there with midair collisions and fast-food snipers.
Talon gripped her tightly under her armpits. “This is going to hurt a bit,” he said. “I’m sorry.” And then he tugged on her three times until her hips finally squeezed through and she fell headfirst into the five-foot-high concrete chamber. A brake squealed, Becky screamed, and when Lindsay looked up, a big black tire rested where her thighs had been a moment before.
Talon let loose a breath of relief.
For an instant Lindsay was furious at him for putting her in this predicament, but then she realized that he had also just saved her life. The feelings of fury and gratitude canceled each other out, leaving Lindsay numb.
They stood there awkwardly in the half-light of the drain, Lindsay’s body aching from her curious birth into this place. While Becky continued to scream up above, Talon stepped closer to Lindsay—but only so he could work her hair free from his metallic vest.
“My grandmother made it for me,” Talon said. “It’s kind of useless, but I’ve got to wear it, you know?”
Lindsay nodded. “I’ve got a sweater like that.”
Becky was now crouched in the gutter next to the worn wheel of the bus, peering into the drain. Lindsay stepped back so she couldn’t be seen.
“Lindsay? Lindsay, are you there?”
Lindsay turned her attention to Talon. “How’s your sister?” she asked.
“Better,” said Talon. “Your medicine worked.”
“I’m glad.”
He studied her for a moment. “You look different.”
“I lost the gator-tail,” she told him. It occurred to her that, had she kept it, her hair never would have gotten caught in his vest, and she never would have been dragged into the storm drain. She wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that.
“Lindsay, I can’t see you!” whined Becky. “Are you all right down there?”
Lindsay’s eyes had become accustomed enough to the dark to catch the glint of Talon’s eyes as he watched her. She saw her own curiosity reflected back at her.
Meanwhile, up above, Becky Peckerling found herself caught in a nasty little dilemma: How was she going to convince people that her friend had just dived headfirst into a storm drain? That sort of claim never flew, and people would likely think she was some weirdo. Even now, as she hung her head upside down off the edge of the curb to peer in, she noticed people staring at her strangely. “Lindsay? Are you alive down there?”
She saw only darkness, until Lindsay took a step forward. “I’m all right,” she said calmly.
“Thank goodness. I thought you were unconscious, or had a concussion or—”
“Becky, I really think I’d like to be alone for a while, okay?”
Becky opened her mouth, then closed it again, finding herself entirely speechless. Although she had never told Lindsay, Becky’s life was filled with a long list of people who did drastic things to escape her company—but this was the first time anyone had climbed down a storm drain to get away from her. “Oh,” said Becky. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Well...do you want your book bag?”
“You can keep it for me.”
“Okay then...good-bye.” Becky rose to her feet, lingered a moment, and then meandered away, not sure whether to feel insulted or impressed by her own ability to move people to extremes.
Becky’s departure left Talon and Lindsay very much alone, in spite of the hordes of people marching past just a few inches above their heads—and it struck Lindsay how easy it was to slip into one of the many invisible corners of life.
“Why were you watching me?” she asked again.
Talon reached into his back pocket. “To give you this.” He handed her the tattered copy of The Time Machine. “I liked it,” he said. “I thought it was funny.”
“Funny?”
“Yes. The way he made the Morlocks, who lived Downside, the ugly ones, and made all the Topsiders beautiful, when everyone knows it’s the other way around. I like this Hugg Wells.”
“It’s H. G.,” she corrected, “not Hugg.”
“Maybe I could meet him someday.”
“Not likely—he’s dead.”
Talon took a step back. “I’m sorry.”
Lindsay couldn’t help but smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not like we were close or anything.”
And then she reached into her jacket and pulled out from one of the many compartments a worn sock, which she had laundered more than once before she would dare put it in her pocket.
“You left it,” she said, and then realized how odd it would seem to him that she was traveling around with his sock. The fact was, she hadn’t dared leave it at home for fear that Todd would discover it while rifling through her things and she’d have to explain it. Lindsay had kept it as a kind of trophy, commemorating her first official traumatic New York experience.
Talon refused to take it back. “No,” he said, “I didn’t forget it; it was payment for the medicine. It’s customary to leave it in the dryer, but there wasn’t time.”
“You paid me with a sock?”
Talon stiffened a bit. “Hey—do you think socks like that grow on walls? That’s a sturdy weave!”
“I’m sorry,” said Lindsay. “It’s a wonderful sock. Thank you.”
And she put it back into her pocket, finding herself oddly pleased that she wouldn’t be parting with it.
“Maybe...Maybe I could help you,” offered Lindsay. “I could help find you a place to live.”
“I already have one.”
“No, I mean a real place. With carpeted floors, and nice furniture, and windows...”
“Why would I want windows?”
Lindsay sighed. “Listen, forget I asked, okay?”
“Would you like to see where I live?” Talon asked impulsively. “Would you like to see the Downside?”
The question caught Lindsay off guard. It wasn’t so much what he’d said, but the way he’d said it—in a potent whisper as if it were dangerous beyond words. And what had he called it? The Downside? It certainly sounded like more than just some tiny niche.
“Would you like to show me?”
Talon shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him in the least, but they both knew that it did. “If you want to,” he said.
Lindsay looked to the narrow slit that led back up to Third Avenue. Up above, the world went about its business. Feet shuffled past, but they already seemed distant to Lindsay. She was in no great hurry to climb back into the tumultuous mobs. Then she turned to look down, into the narrow shaft in the corner of the concrete chamber, where a rusty ladder disappeared into darkness.
Surely there were a million reasons not to go, but those reasons felt less important with each passing second. All her life she had lived in fear that her world would be invaded by dark unknowns. Well, it already had. Her mother was off in the wilds half a world away, leaving her with a workaholic father she barely knew and a Neanderthal “brother” who defined himself by his dislike of others.
Lindsay was scared—not of anything coming in through her window, but of the things that were already inside. She was terrified of being a victim of her own life.
At this moment, it seemed the only way out...was down.
She took Talon’s hand, surprised by her own boldness. “Take me there,” she said, and as they descended down those rust-mangled rungs, she realized that she didn’t care in the least if she ever came back.