The ladder is long and the hole is deep.  Sloan’s a few rungs below me, and she calls out as we go.  “Don’t look down,” is the first thing she says, her deep voice echoing around us.  “Trust your feet, you’ll be fine.”

I don’t know if I trust my feet, but I trust Bayan, and he trusts Sloan.  After a few minutes of going down, she says, “Your next rung is to the right.”

My foot hangs in the air for a moment, and then I move it over.  She’s right; so is the ladder, and then it keeps going down.  A few minutes later, she says, “To the right again.”

And then a few minutes later, “To the left.”

And then I hear her hop down onto solid ground, and I finally look down.  I have a few rungs left, and then I join her.  “Okay.”

“Alright,” she says with a smile.  “Almost there.”

We’re in the middle of a tunnel, small and concrete, and dark, very dark.  My eyes adjust after a moment, and I see Sloan.  She gestures for me to follow her, and we go.  The ceiling of the tunnel begins to get shorter, and we both have to duck our heads to keep going.  After a little ways of going, she says, “Don’t step here.”

I stop, looking down at the ground.  Sloan reaches up above her and hits the ceiling, and then hits it in another spot, and dust rains down.  She shifts a tile out of the way, and then suddenly the beam of a flashlight sweeps across me.  Then she aims it at the ground, and I see small plants poking out of cracks in the walls and the floor.  She points it forward, and I see the plants covering the floor for as far as the light goes.   

“What is that?” I ask, and she sighs.  “Gympie.  We think.  And it’s very toxic.  If it touches you, you could die.”

“What?” I say in shock, and she shrugs.  “Trust me.  But we have to go through it to get to Penny, so follow me, and be careful.  I’ve done this before.”

And she grasps the flashlight in her fist and reaches out so that it’s shining down on our feet at an angle.  She steps lightly in between two of the plants, and then takes a big step to put her toes on a clear space again, and looks back at me.

You’ve got to be kidding me.  I follow her, gingerly stepping between two of the plants, and she moves forward to the next clear spot.  I take her place.  And we go, one after the other, the small circle of the light from the flashlight illuminating just our feet as we go.  The plants are everywhere, they don’t look too bad, they just look like leaves of a tree, but Sloan is taking too much precaution for me to be any measure of comfortable.  After a few minutes she says, “You good?”

“Fine,” I say softly.  “How did all this get here?”

“No idea,” she says, taking another big step forward to the next small clearing.  “But it’s a good electric fence of our own, of sorts.”

I manage a smile, and we continue in silence.  Finally she leaps from her little spot and shines the flashlight back for me, and I take the last step through the gympie.  I breathe out a sigh of relief, and she smiles a little.  “Okay,” she says softly.  “Stay here.  I’ll go get Nua, and then we can go.”

And so I’m left alone in the dark, as she dances away through the gympie plants.  The air is heavy and wet and I reach out to touch the wall near me in the darkness.  I take a deep breath, and hear something echoing down the tunnel.  It’s nothing, I tell myself, a bug or a rat or something, it’s fine.  Bayan wouldn’t send us anywhere we wouldn’t be safe.  At least nowhere that’s less safe than Miss Lilly’s house.  Even if we have to walk through a forest of poison plants to get there.

Just a few minutes, she said, and I count to sixty, and then I count to sixty again.  My eyes are adjusting, and I can see the plants in front of me.  I glance down the tunnel, trying to figure out what’s behind me, but I can’t.  Finally after what seems like hours, the light comes around the corner again, and I see Sloan, leading Nua one step at a time.  

She jumps out of the gympie again, and then Nua does, and he puts the bag down on the ground and wraps his arms around me.  I squeeze him back, tight as I can, and then he takes a deep breath.  Sloan is just waiting, and he picks up the bag again and puts it on his shoulder.  “Okay.”

“Okay?” she asks, and I nod.  “Let’s go.”

“We’re almost there,” she says with a smile, as she hits the ceiling again.  This time she gets the right cracked concrete tile on the first try, and she slides the flashlight up into the hole and puts it back.  “All the hard parts are done.  Now we walk.”

And we walk.  The tunnel gets taller, thankfully, and then it gets wider.  Soon Nua and I can walk next to each other comfortably with space between us and on either side, and it keeps getting bigger.  We keep going, and the concrete turns to dirt under our feet.  We turn one corner, and then another, the ceiling rising curved above us.  She keeps looking back over her shoulder at us, as if making sure we’re still following her down the road.

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Is it a road?  The ground is tightly packed dirt, but I can see bits of metal mixed in.  Nua grasps my hand as we go, adjusting the bag on his shoulder.  The first tent surprises us; a lantern sits outside of it, casting a light glow on the walls.  And then another one pops up, on the other side of the road.  A shopping cart sits outside of it, full of blankets and clothes and other cloth things.  And then we come across more and more makeshift shelters: real tents, blankets propped up with sticks, tiny wooden structures, and on and on.  They become more and more tightly packed together until it’s hard to tell where one ends and another starts; they’re all small and dirty and there’s no light down here except the occasional lantern or flashlight, perched on the side of the road or balanced precariously on top of one of the structures.  Eyes peek out to look at us as we pass; someone comes down the road towards us and then slips into a tent a little ways ahead.  Sloan looks back at us, and sees us looking.  She stops, and turns, waiting for us to catch up, and then gestures around us.  “Welcome to Tent City.”

I can feel Nua’s fingers squeezing around mine, and he says quietly, “What is this place?”

“I just told you,” says Sloan, dropping her arms and turning around.  “Tent City.”

I smile a little, glancing at him, and then we keep going.  We come to an intersection; Sloan goes left without thinking.  We must have been walking for a mile or more by this point; there must be hundreds of people here.  Sloan knows exactly where we are; she must have lived here for a while.  People smile at her as we pass, someone calls her name and she waves.  Finally we come to one big four-way intersection, with a few makeshift buildings constructed in the middle.  But over them I can see the tunnel continuing to stretch further back, and the tunnels running perpendicular off the left and right sides.  Even in the middle of the night there are people wandering, sitting, tending small fires and leading the smoke away from their tents.  I suppose they don’t really care what time of day it is down here.  And Sloan goes to the building in the middle of the huge space, jerking her head for us to follow.  No one pays us any mind.  Someone walks between us and Sloan, and we let them pass, and then we go.  

“Penny,” says Sloan, knocking on the little piece of wood that I assume is supposed to be a door.  There’s someone inside, and he turns to us, and Nua says, “Holy shit.”

I’m thinking the same thing, but I don’t know what to say.  My breath catches in my throat.  Penny just smiles a little, and says, “Striking, isn’t it?”

Neither of us can answer.  Penny just looks at Sloan and says, “Can you get her?” and Sloan nods, leaving us alone with him.  He’s tall and he’s skinny and his face is almost just like Ava’s, except his nose is a little smaller and his eyes a bit father apart, but everything else is exactly the same.

“You must be Aber and Nua,” he says after a moment.  “I’m assuming that, because based on your faces I’m assuming you know my sister.”

“Yeah,” I say slowly.  “And based on your face I’m assuming you’re her twin.”

Penny looks at me, and then laughs.  “Yeah.  Welcome to Tent City.”

“Yeah, everyone keeps saying that,” says Nua faintly.  He finally drops my hand and rubs his face, the bag still on his shoulder, and then says, “Can you explain?”

Penny takes a deep breath, leaning his head back, and his hair falls in front of his eyes.  He shakes it out in a very Ava-like way, and then says, “Come here.”

And so we go over to the table that he was leaning over when we came in.  On it, unfurled across the whole thing, is a hand-made map of all the tunnels that we have just gone through.  “You came in here.”

He points to a spot on the map marked with an x, and when I look at the rest of the map there are a few, scattered across.  Penny draws a line with his finger, from the x along the paths until there’s a turn upwards that goes right the big circle in the middle.  “Southwest entrance, north avenue, Tent City.”  He puts his hand on the circle in the middle.  “This whole thing, all these tunnels?  Abandoned train rails.”

“Train rails?” asks Nua in surprise.  He looks at the map, and then says, “Why are they abandoned?”

“No one’s used them in a while,” says Penny.  “The trains that used to run here, the subway, it’s old-fashioned.  They’ve had better ones now for decades, the ones that run above ground.”

“We’ve been on those,” I murmur, and Penny looks at me, and smiles.  “Yeah.  They started using the above-ground trains a while ago, after it became too hard to maintain them down here, and after people stopped using cars, anyway.  These tunnels have been here, though, this whole time.  And a while ago, a few people, running away from their families, they found them.  And here we are.”

“Here we are,” whispers Nua.  He looks up at Penny again, who smiles softly.  “You’re safe now.  I promise.”

And for the first time since we left Miss Lilly’s house the knot in the pit of my stomach subsides, and I press my fists into my eyes and smile.  “Oh, my god.”

“You alright?” asks Nua, and I nod.  “Yeah.”

And then the knot comes back, and I look up at him, and at Penny.  “We have to get Bayan, though.”

Something flashes across Penny’s face, and he nods.  “I know.  He sent you here, right?

Nua nods too.  “Your sister told us to find you.”

“Hm,” he says, grinning slightly.  “I’m not surprised.  She’s idealistic.”

It must be a slip of the tongue, but hearing him speak about her in the present tense makes my heart clench.  Nua looks at me, noticing the same thing, and I wonder suddenly if Penny even knows his twin is dead.  He interrupts our thoughts, though, before we can say anything.  “Did you live in that huge beach house?”

“Yes,” says Nua, nodding again, and Penny sighs, smiling slightly.  “Yeah.  Our mother moved us there when my sister started to get sick, and then she, you know, sold me away.  But it did seem to do wonders for her lungs, didn’t it?”

I raise my eyebrows.  He doesn’t know.  Nua swallows.  “Penny.”

“Well, other than the forced marriages, I presume,” he says, gesturing to us, and stands up to fiddle with something behind him on the table.  Nua glances at me, but before he can speak, I blurt out, “She’s dead.”

Penny whirls around to look at me, his eyes widening in surprise.  Nua swallows again, taking a slight step back, and I stare at him.  But after a moment he just laughs.

I blink, glancing at Nua, but he looks just as confused as I do.  Penny grins wider, which is not the reaction I was expecting, his eyes darting away.  Then he looks back to me and says, “Well, if hell is a place, I’m guessing doesn’t get any worse than this.”

“I like how you assume,” says a quiet voice from behind us, “that I’d go to hell.”

I know that voice, that high, light, slightly raspy voice that holds the pain of a thousand lives and loves lost, that voice I thought I would never hear again.  Nua and I whirl around, both our jaws dropping open, and Penny laughs at the sight of us.  

She’s leaning against the doorframe the way she does, her slender arms crossed in front of her chest, and her blonde hair bounces as she looks up.  

No one speaks for a solid half-minute, and then she says gently, “Hello, boys.”

I gape at her.  Nua does the same.  

Ava grins slightly.  “I’m afraid you’re not quite as widowed as you thought.”