The Bronze King by Suzy McKee Charnas Page A

The subway is the kraken’s territory. It’s hiding out down there while it gathers its strength to break out onto the surface here. You know that day I was on the train with you, Val? I was taking soundings to see how strong the kraken’s hold was down there.”
    â€œWe still don’t know where Jagiello is, though,” Joel said. “The subway’s a huge system.”
    â€œWe could start at the Eighty-first Street station,” I said. “That’s Where I was when it happened.”
    â€œStart what, though?” Joel said. “And if we find it, how can we get it out? We’re talking about a bronze statue, you know? A couple of tons of metal.”
    Paavo put away the violin, which he handled as tenderly as he’d handled his own, I noticed. “That’s a nice fiddle,” he said. “With my own instrument, I could bring out something that was lost to me. But to bring this bronze horse-and-rider out of the kraken’s grip and back to its post in the park, now—I don’t know. Must be something we can do, though. Depends.”
    I was watching him, and I saw how his face got grave, and his eyes had a look as if he could see way past the Palisades and all of New Jersey and the farthest edge of the world. A cold feeling came into my chest, and I deliberately looked away because I was scared.
    The rooftop seemed suddenly very exposed and scary, and I had a wild fear that somebody—the Princes, or some friend of my mother’s—might be watching from a neighboring rooftop. But it was so chilly that nobody else was out, not even on the terraces where sometimes you see people watering their potted plants. You forget how cold it can be on the top of a sixteen-story building, without the deep canyons of the streets to cut the wind.
    We huddled in the shelter of the elevator housing and went over our escape plans again. The idea was for Paavo and Joel to get out the way they’d come in, without my doorman seeing them, as if they’d finished their dental appointment in the Fudge. I would slip out a little later and meet them on Central Park West where the explosion had happened.
    It was all ridiculously easy; that part, anyway.
    At the Eighty-first Street station, Joel paid for our tokens. We wandered along the uptown platform wondering what we were looking for.
    The only odd thing I noticed right away was a faint, funny smell in the air from the dark subway tunnel. Paavo noticed, too. He wrinkled his nose. He walked along, carrying the violin case and looking carefully at the tracks and the grates in the ceiling over the tracks, and the graffiti on the ads along the tiled walls.
    We headed down the stairs to the level of the uptown tracks. A train came in, a few people got out, a man sleeping on a bench turned over and slept some more, and the train pulled out. Joel kicked at the base of one of the steel pillars that holds up the subway ceiling, staring impatiently around.
    I turned and I saw the blue metal wall at the end of the platform, and my heart gave this boom in my ribs.
    See, most platforms end with a plain tiled wall like all the rest of the subway walls. The only place I knew of with an L -shaped blue metal wall, a partition that closed off one whole end of the platform into some kind of storage room, I guess, was up in the Ninety-sixth Street station on Central Park West. I knew because I used to get off there to visit Granny Gran, when she was still living in her own apartment on Ninety-fifth.
    The blue wall was made of painted steel with sort of raised stripes up and down it and had a blue steel door set in it with a knob and a plain flat lock, and what was it doing here at Eighty-first Street?
    Joel said, “They must have put one up here too, and you just never noticed. Or else it’s new.”
    â€œNo,” I said. “It’s the same one. It’s got the same stuff scratched into the paint.” Kids had put their