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treasures of the Earth, metals and jewels. Judging by the stairs, she was probably a
hands-on practitioner, a fabricator or artificer.
Or maybe she just had a lot of money to hire fabricators, and liked underground housing
because it was cheap. Marla couldn’t be sure. Being a stranger in this city was a
constant disadvantage. She needed some kind of scorecard to keep up with the
prominent personalities, though there were fewer of them with each passing hour, it
seemed.
The stairs went down a hundred yards, two hundred, the spiral tight enough to make her
a little dizzy, which was also probably an intentional effect, making visitors more off
balance. Marla finally sensed an opening in space, a widening of the elevator shaft into
the contours of a larger room, though even her enhanced eyes didn’t penetrate very far
into the darkness.
When she stepped off the last stair and her foot touched the concrete floor, floodlights
burst on, dazzling her painfully, overwhelming the enhanced light-receptors in her eyes.
“Nix lux!” she shouted, canceling the light spell and restoring all their eyesight to
normal. B and Rondeau were cursing and rubbing their eyes.
That’s a drawback of the spell she’d never considered. Tinkerbell lights would have
been better. She squinted, purple blots hanging in her vision as she scanned the area
around them for threats. There were none, fortunately. The moment of visual overload
had left them vulnerable to a surprise attack, but that didn’t seem to be Bethany’s
intention.
“I don’t believe it,” B said, stepping off the stairs, still rubbing one of his eyes. “It’s a
BART station.”
A blue-and-white sign on the white-tiled wall read “Tenderloin.” They were,
unmistakably, on a subway platform, a long stretch of concrete bordered by tracks. The
wall beyond the tracks lacked the ubiquitous advertising Marla had seen at other
stations, and there was no bright yellow-and-black stripe painted on the edge of the
platform to warn the clueless or visually impaired that there was a short trip to an
electrified rail just beyond, but otherwise, it could have been any of the train stations
Marla had seen since she got to the city.
“There’s even a map of the train system,” B said. “Just like the ones in all the other
stations. Except this one includes Tenderloin Station.”
Marla examined the map, which used color-coded lines to indicate the routes.
Tenderloin Station was marked with a circle, but none of the usual lines touched it. It
had its own short line, delineated in black, running a short distance and then looping in
on itself. Marla ran her finger down the map, to the bottom, where the train schedules
were usually posted, but that section was blank.
Rondeau stood on the edge of the platform, peering one way and then the other. “Do we
go in on foot?” he asked.