“What about the dead girl?” one of the soldiers asked.
“Such a pity, such a waste,” Caul said, clucking his tongue. “I should have liked to dine on her soul. It’s got no taste on its own, the peculiar soul,” he said, addressing us. “Its natural consistency is a bit gelatinous and pasty, really, but whipped together with a soup?on of remoulade and spread upon white meat, it’s quite palatable.”
Then he laughed, very loudly, for a long time.
As they led us away, one by one, over the wide collapsible bridge, I felt a familiar twinge in my gut—faint but strengthening, slow but quickening—the hollowgast, unfrozen now, coming slowly back to life.
*
Ten soldiers marched us out of the loop at gunpoint, past the carnival tents and sideshows and gaping carnival-goers, down the rats’ warren of alleys with their stalls and vendors and ragamuffin kids staring after us, into the disguising room, past the piles of cast-off clothes we’d left behind, and down into the underground. The soldiers prodded us along, barking at us to keep quiet (though no one had said a word in minutes), to keep our heads down and stay in line or be pistol-whipped.
Caul was no longer with us—he had stayed behind with the larger contingent of soldiers to “mop up,” which I think meant scouring the loop for hiders and stragglers. The last time we saw him, he was pulling on a pair of modern boots and an army jacket and told us he was absolutely sick of our faces but would see us “on the other side,” whatever that meant.
We passed through the changeover, and forward in time again—but not to a version of the tunnels I recognized. The tracks and ties were all metal now, and the lights in the tunnels were different, not red incandescents but flickering fluorescent tubes that glowed a sickly green. Then we came out of the tunnel and onto the platform, and I understood why: we were no longer in the nineteenth century, nor even the twentieth. The crowd of sheltering refugees was gone now; the station nearly deserted. The circular staircase we’d come down was gone, too, replaced by an escalator. A scrolling LED screen hung above the platform: TIME TO NEXT TRAIN: 2 MINUTES. On the wall was a poster for a movie I’d seen earlier in the summer, just before my grandfather died.
We’d left 1940 behind. I was back in the present.
A few of the kids took note of this with looks of surprise and fear, as if afraid they would age forward in a matter of minutes, but for most of them I think the shock of our sudden captivity was not about to be trumped by an unexpected trip to the present; they were worried about having their souls extracted, not about developing gray hair and liver spots.
The soldiers corralled us in the middle of the platform to wait for the train. Hard shoes clicked toward us. I risked a look over my shoulder and saw a policeman coming. Behind him, stepping off the escalator, were three more.
“Hey!” Enoch shouted. “Policeman, over here!”
A soldier punched Enoch in the gut, and he doubled over.
“Everything good here?” said the closest policeman.
“They’ve taken us prisoner!” said Bronwyn. “They aren’t really soldiers, they’re—”
And then she got a punch to the gut, too, though it didn’t seem to hurt her. What stopped her from saying more was the policeman himself, who took off his mirrored sunglasses to reveal stark white eyes. Bronwyn shrank back.
“A bit of advice,” the policeman said. “No help is coming to you. We are everywhere. Accept that, and this will all be easier.”
Normals were starting to fill the station. The soldiers pressed in on us from all sides, keeping their weapons hidden.
A train hissed into the station, filled with people. Its electric doors whooshed open and a glut of passengers spilled out. The soldiers began pushing us toward the nearest car, the policemen going ahead to scatter what few passengers remained inside. “Find another car!” they barked. “Get out!” The passengers grumbled but complied. But there were more people behind us on the platform, trying to push into the car, and a few of the soldiers who’d been ringing us had to break away to stop them. And then there was just enough confusion—the doors trying to close but the police holding them open until a warning alarm began to sound; the soldiers shoving us forward so hard that Enoch tripped, sending other children tripping over him in a chain reaction—that the folding man, whose wrists were so skinny he’d been able to slip his cuffs, decided to make a break for it, and ran.