Page 62 of Backpacking through Bedlam

I was still silently scanning the street when Mary came back around the corner. “Verity knows we’re going to be a while, and she’s telling Thomas not to worry,” she said, voice low. “But if anything goes wrong, I’m going for backup immediately. You get that, right? This is not going to turn into some sort of ridiculous last-stand situation where you die because you don’t want to call for backup. I wouldn’t put up with it if Verity weren’t already stretched so thin.”

“I’m here to make things easier, not start trouble,” I said, and pushed away from the wall. “Which way are we going?”

Mary turned a slow circle, then pointed. “That way.”

We started walking.

I finished my Coke and tucked the empty back into the bag before passing it to Mary. She shot me a quizzical look. I flexed my hands.

“Unless you’ve changed tactics a lot, you’re not a physical fighter,” I said. “Hopefully I won’t have to be, but if we have to extract Sally by force, I need my hands free.”

Mary grimaced. “I wish that didn’t make sense,” she said. “Fine, I’ll carry your stuff. But you could ask.”

“Sorry.”

She led us to a subway entrance, and we descended into the warm, urine-scented air. A group of transit police lounged against one of the station walls. They gave us the slow, lazy looks of people who knew they were in positions of unquestionable authority over everyone around them, and I barely managed not to bristle. Mary gave me an odd look. I shook my head.

“I don’t like apex predators, that’s all,” I said. “Keep going.”

“We’ll need to get you a MetroCard,” she said, and started toward a bank of machines, which had presumably replaced human ticket-sellers at some point. To my confusion, she walked past the first rank of them, not stopping until she reached the larger, darker-colored machines at the back.

“The little guys don’t take cash,” she explained, catching my expression. “Since you don’t have a credit card yet—you don’t have a credit card, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Since you don’t have a credit card yet, we need a machine that takes cash.”

“I thought you could use cash to pay for anything,” I said, digging in my pocket for the remains of the money I’d squirrelled away earlier.

“Technically, you can,” she said. “As long as there’s one machine that takes quarters, they can say that phasing out the majority of the cash machines isn’t a classist attack on people who don’t have stable jobs and the ability to maintain plastic money. Do not mention it to Antimony, she can rant for about an hour before she stops to catch her breath.”

“Still passionate about everything that catches her attention?”

Mary laughed. “You have no idea.” She looked at the crumpled bills in my hand—maybe thirty dollars, all told—and sighed. “May as well put it all on the card. You’ll wind up using it if you’re here for more than a few days, and a working MetroCard is never a bad investment.”

“I literally have no idea what you’re saying most of the time, and am just going along with whatever you tell me to do,” I told her, feeding the money into the machine.

Mary laughed, only a little bitterly, as she leaned past me and punched a series of buttons on the screen. “I wish you’d been that accommodating when you were a kid.”

“No, you don’t.” The machine whirred and spat out a small yellow rectangle. I pulled it loose. It wasn’t flimsy like I would have expected, being made of some material that felt like it was halfway between a photograph and a piece of cardstock.

“Don’t bend that, don’t lose it,” Mary said. “You’ll need it to get into the subway.” She dipped a hand into her pocket and produced a card of her own.

I blinked at it. She laughed.

“These things die every day,” she said. “Finding the ghost of a MetroCard isn’t hard at all.”

“I do not want to think about the theological implications of that,” I said, and followed her to the turnstile, where we swiped our cards and proceeded deeper into the subway.

Apart from the machines, nothing had really changed since the last time I was here. The other passengers were disinterested in dealing with strangers; they sat well clear of us and stared off into space, or read their books or scrolled their phones with the laser focus of people who desperately wanted to be left alone. The transit police prowled through it all like hyenas looking for a weak antelope to bring down, and the trains arrived with a screech of brakes and a great rushing of exhaust and air. The smell was better than it used to be, but that wasn’t hard.

Mary was leading the way, and for once, I was more than content to follow. She waited as several trains passed us by, before tugging me onto the 1 train heading for 34th Street. I looked at her curiously. She shrugged, and said, “Pretty sure she’s in Koreatown.”

“I don’t know where that is.” Or why Sally would have gone there, or what could have possessed her to take off the way she had, stealing the whole pizza and leaving me with nothing to tell Thomas.

“Don’t worry. I do.”

We didn’t talk after that, staying silent for the nearly twenty-minute subway ride, until she rose, and I followed, and we disembarked into a station that looked both nothing and exactly like the first one. Manhattan subway stations have that feel to them. Every one of them is unique, designed to stand out in some way from its fellows, but the essential function of the space, and the endless passage of commuters, inevitably wears it all down to the industrial bones of the system. Gray concrete and dingy tile abound.