Celia pulled herself up into the subway car and sat down on a plastic seat across from Daisy. The cold ached through every bit of her. She couldn’t stop shaking. Demetri walked past them and disappeared into the cabin. The train rolled in the opposite direction from the tied-up ice monsters lying on the tracks.
Soft yellow lights shone along the subway’s ceiling as the familiar motion of a train picking up speed took them through the tunnels beneath the city.
I got rescued, Celia thought, letting it warm her. She looked out the window and into the darkness. “How is this train moving?”
“Magic!” Daisy said. She jumped up and swung around one of the poles, holding on with one hand and leaning away from it. Her checkerboard face grinned and showed off a set of black and white teeth rimmed by a white upper lip and a lower black one.
Celia hugged her knees to her chin and rubbed her hands together to warm them.
Daisy stopped spinning. “I’ve been dreaming about you, Celia. Every time I close my eyes.” She stared at Celia’s forehead as though it were filled with interesting things. “Weird, scraggly dreams.”
Celia sighed and inched her knees in even closer. “Any idea what I’m supposed to decide?”
She shook her head. “In my dreams, you’re always chasing me and you’ve got some serious speed. You run track or something?”
Celia shook her head.
“It’s probably symbolic. Your destiny looms,” Daisy said, and laughed like she’d told a joke.
Celia shivered some more. She had the feeling that if she thought too much about how she was supposed to be the one who would decide how all this turned out, then she’d break into a million pieces from the pressure. She decided not to think about it.
“So how’d you find me?” Celia asked. If they hadn’t, maybe Krawl would have her by now.
Daisy pointed toward Celia’s chest.
“My heart?”
“Your ward.”
“Oh. Right.” Celia pulled out the granite ward from beneath her clothes and ran her fingers over its smooth surface.
“Demetri felt your fear, and we followed it. It wasn’t very specific: we had to guess which tunnel they’d take. We only had one stick-web. Good thing we guessed right, huh?”
Understatement of the year. “Yeah. Thanks.” Celia thought about why they would go to the effort of saving her. No one is my friend. No one likes me, she reminded herself. “Good job catching the doom girl. Now you can use me however you want.”
“Um . . . what?” Daisy asked.
“You want to control me, right?”
Daisy flopped down onto the seat across from Celia. “No. You were in trouble. So we helped you out.” She shrugged and looked down at the ground. “People always think Littles are monsters, but we didn’t choose to be this way. We can’t help it. Sometimes we do something just because it’s the right thing to do.” Daisy wouldn’t look at Celia. She played with her shoelaces, tying and retying them.
“Sorry,” Celia said. “I didn’t mean . . . it’s just . . .” She swallowed. “It’s hard to know if anyone is my friend or if all they care about is the doom girl thing.”
“Demetri wants to help you. He doesn’t want you hurt by all of this. Did you know he’s been a little happier ever since you met? I didn’t even know that was possible. It’s nice to see him a little less sad.”
Celia looked at the closed door to the cabin. She smiled, then shivered and frowned. Where was any of this going to end up?
“You’re shaking all over. Because you’re terrified of me? I won’t change you. Promise. I’m all about the self-control.” She put her hands in prayer pose, breathed deeply, and made an om sound.
“I’m really cold.”
“Oh. Right. I can make a spell to warm you up, if you want. I bet I could figure out how.”
Celia imagined spells catching on fire, exploding, or going wrong a dozen different ways inside the small train. “No thanks.”
“Cold is all those two monsters can do, but they rock it, right? One time they froze my girl Spelunk all the way through, and we had to be careful when we thawed her.”
“She didn’t die?”
Daisy shook her head. Her short black-and-white hair spun out in a wild halo. “Littles don’t get sick. Or age. Or die. Cut off an arm, and we’ll regrow it. We’re kind of awesomely invincible. Except for kids. Kids are our kryptonite. You smell, by the way.”
Celia blushed. She probably reeked from being so scared.
“Like vanilla and moonlight,” Daisy added.
Celia laughed. “You smell like saltwater taffy and the beach on a hot day,” she admitted as she touched her own cheek. Her monster mark felt warm, despite the chill in the rest of her. “The ice monsters told me all the Bigs were searching for me.”
“We’ve heard that too.”
“So where are you taking me to keep them away from me?” Celia asked.
“Your home,” Daisy said. “It’s not the best, but no place is the best right now. We’re going to set out a watch and try to keep anyone from finding you.”
“Home?” If the Littles were planning on taking her there, they really weren’t trying to control the doom girl. They were just trying to help her be safe. But then Celia thought about her apartment. The hunters knew where she lived. A Big had been on her rooftop. Demetri had left protection spells there, but it still didn’t feel safe. “Home isn’t where I should go,” Celia whispered.
Daisy tilted her checkerboard face to the side and blinked. “There’s not a lot of options: everyone is looking for you.”
“If I need to stay hidden, there’s one place the Bigs and hunters have never found, even though I bet they’ve been searching for it for decades.”
Daisy blinked her large eyes and shook her head. “Is that a good idea?”
Celia breathed warm air into her hands. “I’m right though, aren’t I? It’s the one place I’ll be hidden.”
Daisy shrugged. “It has thousands of wards and spells to keep it hidden, but do you really want to be the first kid to ever go to the sanctuary of the free Littles? You understand what we are, right?”
It wasn’t a great option, but it seemed better than all the others. “You are Littles, but you’re all more than that. Right?” Celia said.
Daisy sat up straighter. She grinned. “We are. We so are. Okay, I’m going to go tell the boss there’s a change of plans!” She bounded up and ran into the cabin.
The train kept moving underneath the city as Celia ached with cold and listened to the sound of Demetri and Daisy arguing. She couldn’t hear most of their words, except for Daisy saying over and over again that Celia should be able to make her own decisions.
The train slowed with the hissing and screeching of brakes. The doors slid open and a musty rodent smell filled the air. Daisy and Demetri came out of the cabin. Demetri was scowling, but Daisy flashed Celia a thumbs-up. The Little took a flashlight out of her bag, and the beam of light danced over the tiled floor and benches of an empty subway stop.
“I don’t think this is a good idea, Celia,” Demetri said.
“It’s the best place to hide,” Celia countered.
Demetri sighed and nodded.
Celia followed them off the train. She recognized this subway stop. She’d been here before, on a day when she and her mom had gone to meet her dad for lunch. It had been filled with office workers and street musicians playing violins. Now the only sound was the scrick-scrack of rats crawling up the walls. At least Celia hoped it was rats. When does life get to be normal again? she wondered as she peered into the darkness.
They followed Demetri to the elevator. He took out his yo-yo and pulsed it up and then down, closed his eyes, and whispered a word Celia couldn’t hear. A throbbing purple light brightened the station for a moment before flickering out. Demetri pressed the elevator button. It glowed green. The doors pinged and swung open. “The spell will make the elevator work for about a minute, even though there’s no power down here.”
They got in. Celia stood against the back wall of the small metal box, keeping as far away from the Littles as she could.
Daisy pressed the up button twice and then the close-the-door button four times. The buttons flared with another purple light.
The elevator carried them down.
“Down?” Celia asked.
“We spent forever digging a hole beneath the elevator and swapping out some gears and pulleys to get it to do this,” Daisy explained.
“One, two,” Demetri counted in a quiet voice.
“Three, four,” Daisy added. “Five!”
Demetri hit the red emergency button and the elevator came to a lurching halt. He worked his fingers in between the rubber stops of the doors and muscled them open. A squawking alarm sounded as the doors opened to a dirt tunnel dug through the earth. An underground breeze that smelled like dirt and metal blew at them.
“It took a long time digging this tunnel too,” Daisy said.
Celia sighed. Another pitch-black tunnel. This one was about six feet tall and had uneven dirt-and-rock walls. A trickle of something wet dripped down from the ceiling as they stepped out in a single line. Daisy went first, dancing her flashlight around so Celia could see where they were going.
Demetri was the last one out. He reached around and pressed the emergency button again. The alarm stopped, the doors slid closed, and the elevator climbed silently upward.
“The secret tunnel of the Littles, in which our intrepid heroes rescue the doom girl from a fate of torture or worse,” Daisy said, and giggled.
Demetri stayed silent, like a cold wind at Celia’s back. She walked in between the Littles, and the fact that both of them longed to touch her and turn her into a monster loomed. Was this the right thing to do? She had no idea.
The uneven ground of the tunnel lay full of baseball-sized rocks, perfect for twisting ankles. Celia did her best to keep up with Daisy, who walked like the tunnel was as smooth as a sidewalk. The walls were slimy and gross, and Celia’s hands got covered in mud every time she put out a hand to steady herself.
“You can’t tell any of the Bigs about our tunnel, okay, Celia?” Daisy said.
“I never would.”
“Or hunters,” Daisy added. “Demetri said you like running with them. Why? I mean, it’s good they fight the Bigs, but I guess you don’t know what else they do, or you wouldn’t hang with them, right?”
“I don’t want anything to do with hunters ever again,” Celia said. She remembered Ruby and Amber attacking her. The fact that they had done that ached through her, just as real as the cold. “I won’t tell anyone anything, ever. I promise.” Of everything she’d learned about the monster world so far, Demetri and his friends were the only ones who tried to never hurt anyone else. Besides, Demetri had saved her life twice now: once from the snakes, and most recently from the Bigs. She would never do anything to harm him.
The tunnel twisted and turned so many times that Celia lost all sense of direction. Finally, it ended at a brick wall with a metal ladder going up it. Daisy pulled herself up and disappeared through a small hole overhead. Celia followed and climbed. Soon the narrow hole surrounded her, scraping at her back.
“Keep going, Celia,” Demetri whispered beneath her. “We’re almost home.”