Pandaemonium by Ben Macallan Page B

the cavern of his skull. Still seeing the world as it was and as it would be, her twin curse; still unable to change a thing.
    I didn’t know, I couldn’t guess what song she would sing for herself, but I thought it was probably going around and around in her head now, the most vicious of earworms, chewing and chewing as it went.
    There may be a thousand songs all called ‘Cassandra.’ Perhaps it was a medley.
    There was nothing I could say, to ease her. Nothing true. She knew the truth. That was her trouble in a nutshell, and it always would be.
    I’d barely even hesitated, when our eyes met; just long enough to know her – him! – and to know how lost he was.
    Just enough for Jacey to feel it through the hand he still held, and to check in his turn and glance around; which was just time enough for me to recover, and nod, and move on.
    A little tug had stopped him; another brought him back to my side again as we negotiated our way along the platform, around one nest and another. Some people had hung screens around their beds or built walls of cardboard boxes, some mock of privacy that everyone respected. I didn’t need to tell Jacey; he stepped as lightly as I did myself, with that same trick of seeming not to see.
    At the far end of the platform were the stairs going down to the track, which we ignored. Also, there was a service door propped open.
    “I don’t know if this was always the plan,” I said, “or if it cropped up in the digging. Maybe it was just accidental, someone hadn’t done the survey right and they broke through without warning and everybody blushed; but –”
    But beyond the service door was a plain brick corridor that must run parallel to the tunnel proper, and must presumably give access to it through the various businesslike iron-framed doors we could see spaced out as far as the light reached ahead, until a curve cut it off.
    Closer at hand, though, and on the other side of the corridor was another door. It didn’t promise much, maybe – it was plain wood and unadorned – but neither did it have the unappealing utility of the tunnel doors. And it was oddly warm to the touch when I laid my palm against it, and there was an inviting lamp on a bracket overhead. All in all, there was enough to say that something a little unexpected lay this way, without opening up at all what that might be. Like finding Narnia at the back of the wardrobe, and all those fur coats not having a thing to say about it.
    I pushed the door open, and a billow of steam came out.
    Jacey grunted. “What is this, the boiler-room? I’m not scrubbing down with a bucket drawn from the copper, girl...”
    He didn’t need to scrub down at all, he was freshly showered; and in any case his nose was better than that, he could smell that it was no industrial furnace pumping out that fragrant steam.
    I didn’t think either one of us would know Bay Rum if we smelled it, but I was fairly sure that was what we were smelling.
    I said, “Not quite the boiler-room, no” – and ushered him through into what was, quite clearly, a boiler-room. Just, not for any Tube station or anything like it, except that this too was tiled floor to ceiling. Here the tiles were all white, and the boilers sat in the middle of the floor like gauche strangers in a private club, not knowing quite what to do with themselves; and there were benches and niches around the walls that all spoke about a different purpose before these great boilers came to squat and their fat black pipes broke through all the walls, and...
    “It looks like a Turkish bath,” Jacey said slowly. “Or it used to, before.”
    “Smart boy.” In olden days, I would have kissed him for reward. Not now. Not nowhere near now. Though I still kept hold of his hand. “It is a Turkish bath. This used to be the sweat-room, until the diggers broke through. With or without notice, I don’t know. But they must have wanted to keep the connection; maybe they figured that gentlemen