Pandaemonium by Ben Macallan Page B

train took us.
    There were maybe half a dozen people in the carriage, scattered in ones and twos with plenty of distance between them. I didn’t imagine they’d been talking much in any case, but they watched us on and didn’t say a word.
    I could feel Jacey’s distracted puzzlement, the way he knew that something more was odd here and didn’t understand what it was, one extra thing where everything was strange. I said, “This is old-style rolling stock. I don’t know how long it’s been running this line. Not quite from the days of steam, I guess, but...”
    But there would still have been steam trains overhead, at any rate, when this stock first ran, even though the carriage doors down here slid closed with a hiss of air and the train pulled away in an electric silence. The upholstery was red and green, plush velvet and leather worn to a warm softness; shaded lamps glowed against the dark of the tunnel that swallowed us.
    The carriage swayed and rattled. We found seats as far away as possible from everybody else, as everybody else had in their turn; it was probably a mathematical problem, reducible to a formula. Like tossing magnets into a dish and watching them repel each other.
    Jacey said, “Come on, then. Straight answers now. Where have you brought me, and where is this train going?”
    “It’s not about the place, it’s about the people. It’s just a short run to a station that never opened, because the line dead-ends. They wanted to call it Savoy, because it was meant to serve the hotel, and one of the exits would take you straight into the lobby, with a flunkey standing by to take your luggage; but of course anybody heading for the Savoy with luggage takes a taxi, so it was all wasted effort. We call it Stranded, because it is and we are and it’s under the Strand, ho ho.”
    “We?”
    I shrugged. “The runaways, the broken. People who’ve met the Overworld, and need a place to hide up for a while. Us.”
    He flinched. “Desi.” He was still trying that name out, learning the shape of it in his mouth, wondering if it would ever mean the shape of me. “Do we really do that much harm?”
    “What, you think you’re a boon and a blessing to men?”
    “No, but – well, no worse than the merely mortal. Kings and millionaires, industrialists, profiteers. There always have been bad people at the top, and not everyone at the top has to be bad.”
    “Oh, boy,” I said, “do you have a lot to learn.” But he was maybe ready to learn it, him with no shoes on and nothing in his pockets, nothing to fall back on: reduced to the pure essence of himself, Jacey alone. I thought he was rather nice, actually. But then, I always had. He was a little miracle, given where he came from.
    Didn’t stop him being arrogant, heedless, extravagant, self-indulgent, half a dozen other character flaws I could mention. Spoiled rotten, basically. But that really wasn’t his fault; and compared with the people whose fault it was, they really were minor sins. I might have blamed him more if he’d contrived to spoil me too, the way he’d have liked to, early on. He let me think the Overworld was all champagne and roses, all the way for everyone, the way it was for him. But his parents disabused me fairly swiftly; and then I was on a mission, I wanted to save him.
    And then I had to run and hide, and it was as much as I could do to save myself. I saw the underside of the Overworld, up close and extremely personal; and Fay turned into Desi, who was at least not so simple-minded; and now I wouldn’t try to change him if I could. Oh, there were lessons to be learned, and I’d teach them willingly, but I’d let him build them into what he had already, the man he was making of himself. By himself, I thought he was doing okay. Today, in the circumstances, I actually thought he was doing spectacularly well.
    Right now, he was getting to his feet first as the train pulled in at Savoy, even though he was the stranger here.