Kiara took them out of the town square through one of the intersecting roads. In just a couple minutes, they arrived at a corner building that was getting quite a bit more foot traffic in and out than others nearby. A bright green awning made of wooden slats and a large sign with a few of those strange glyphs hung over the door.

Inside was a local transportation hub, reminding Aaron of a small bus or train station from some little town in the 50s. The interior was simple — chairs and benches took up most of the space and a small ticket window sat at the rear of the lobby.

A large sign hung next to the window in the borough’s strange alphabet and several other languages, including English. It informed him the station offered travel by trolley, gondola, and — to Aaron’s surprise — some kind of Futurama-style pneumatic tube system.

“Well, I mean… we’ve got to take the tube thing,” Aaron said. “Right?”

“Time is a factor,” Kiara said, shaking her head. “The longest tubes are only about a quarter of a mile, so we’d have almost a dozen transfers along the way.”

Griffin passed a couple silver coins to the gnome behind the counter. “Four for the gondola, express to Paramount Plaza.”

“Going to see a show?” the gnome asked.

“Not today.”

“You know, the Ekwiyakink Hall of Commerce can get same-day tickets to almost any show, on or off Broadway,” the gnome offered.

There was a long pause as all four drakus exchanged glances. Aaron was delighted to hear about this service — who wouldn’t want to be able to see Broadway shows without having to plan weeks or months in advance? — but he was even more delighted to find he wasn’t alone in being delighted.

“I actually didn’t know that,” Kiara said. “Too bad we’re crunched for time.”

“We need to remember that,” Griffin added. “I mean, you live in the city…”

“I’ll write it down,” Albert said, going for his phone.

“No need, guys,” Aaron said, grabbing a pamphlet from a stand filled with them beside the ticket window. He held it up to the gnome. “Will this have all the details; prices and schedules and all that?”

“You bet indeedy,” the gnome squeaked.

Aaron pocketed the pamphlet while Griffin paid their fares. The clerk had them tap a small crystal on the counter, told them their gondola would be ready shortly, and directed them to Chamber 3. An exit along the rear wall took them out onto a platform unlike anything Aaron had seen before.

It almost looked like a platform you might see at any busy subway or light rail station. There were several ‘tracks,’ each with a strip of pavement on either side for loading and unloading. Each track, however, housed one of the different modes of travel and that’s what made it seem so odd.

The first, and closest. track was the totally amazing tube thing Aaron had wanted to try. There were a dozen of them spread across the platform, in various sizes. The tubes weren’t transparent and looked a great deal like the old pneumatic mail tubes Aaron had seen in movies — all copper and brass with intricate scrollwork — but scaled up until they were large enough to carry loads as big as a car or small truck. The doors were an ornate, ovoid metal panel that sealed the tube from the exterior. Only ten or twenty feet of the tubes were visible before they disappeared into the ceiling, so they could have passed for particularly ostentatious elevators if Aaron didn’t know what he was looking at.

The second track was a stream in a wide stone basin, fifteen or so feet across, that ran through tunnels at both ends of the platform. A twenty foot-long boat sat in the chamber, rising several feet above the waterline. It had high railings and no covering. It would have resembled the famous Venetian canal boats if not for the overlapping, articulated metal plates covering the hull or the assortment of small pipes and tubes creating a maze of connections between them. Several small piers extended about a foot over the water and a number of people — dwarves, gnomes, goblins, and orcs — were using these to step onto the gondola. Once they were boarded, the long boat shot off down the tunnel.

The final track had to be the trolley. It was empty when they arrived, but not long after the gondola disappeared down its own tunnel, a tram chugged into the station. Although smaller than the famous trolley cars Aaron was familiar with from visits to San Francisco, there were so many blatantly steampunk accessories slapped onto the car that it produced an unwarranted sense of size. The hook line that extended from the top of the car didn’t connect to an electrical cable, but a hazy blue beam of energy that was only visible for a few feet on either side of the connection.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the platform were the foot bridges that ferried passengers over each lane. A convoluted array of wires and tubes formed both framework and railing for the bridges, and panels of green light in ornate brass frames carried people and cargo in delicate filigree tracks through the arc of the bridge like an escalator. There was a series of arches over each passage, allowing multiple of these strange bridges to be in use at the same time.

“This is so steampunk,” Aaron said.

“Gnomes,” Albert shrugged, as if nothing more had to be said.

They stepped onto one of the larger bridge platforms and were carried to the gondola platform, where a seacraft much smaller than the last one was drifting to a stop in the water.

“Express to Paramount Plaza!” a gnome sitting on a tiny poop deck in the aft of the vessel called to them.

The gondola ride turned out to be a novel experience, but it wasn’t all that exciting in the end. They floated at a decent pace down a series of tunnels, regularly taking small turn-offs meant to bypass the various waystations. The tunnels were lit by mystic lights lining either side of the arched ceiling, but they were no more impressive than neon or LED strips would be.

It’s like a giant water-slide that someone tried to discofy, Aaron thought.

After ten minutes, the gondola left the isolated tunnels and stopped at a waystation very like the one they’d just left. It coasted to a stop at a platform, where Aaron and his protectors stepped off and made their way to this new settlement of the hidden borough. The settlement didn’t seem as large as the other, but that illusion was dispelled when they reached the town square.

Three things stood out to Aaron as they crossed the plaza: the buildings in this settlement were much taller, easily twice as high as the first settlement they passed through; the majority of businesses were bars and restaurants; and, there were quite a few humans among the crowd.

“This place is rather lively,” Aaron observed.

“It’s the Theatre District hub,” Albert said. “The only settlement that interacts with the topside more is Wall Street.”

The trio of protectors knew their way around and before long they were at another one of Ekwiyakin’s gates, although this one was also different from the last.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The area between the internal and external gates was more like the town plaza in miniature than the lethal choke point of the previous gate. It was dozens of feet long and several hundred wide.

A good deal of the space had been devoted to the business of Ekwiyakink, with cargo being moved on dollies or carts and people standing in orderly lines to speak with clerks in teller windows.

Even more of the space had been taken over for socializing, however. People milled around in little pockets, talking about their favorite shows, restaurants, even which performers were sleeping with which other performers. Or director. Or writer. Or techie. And so on.

Rather than fight the blazer-wearing tide of theatre geeks looking to schmooze, the citizens of Ekwiyaking had leaned into it. All the bars and restaurants in the settlement fit the theme, but there were also individual vendors circulating through the crowd hawking a variety of drinks, snacks, and other wares. Aaron was sorely tempted to buy a glossy magazine titled Monsters of the Industry: Celebrated Eidolons of Stage & Screen.

Passing through the gate was a straightforward affair and it let them out into a plain concrete tunnel. That then led to a four-way intersection with signs directing them to three different exits; they read: McHale’s; Church; and, Gershwin.

“Okay, we didn’t take the silly tubes, but we’ve gotta go to the Gershwin, right?” Aaron asked.

“It’s not… well, you’ll see,” Griffin said.

Kiara sucked on her teeth. “Church is closer to the car.”

“Gershwin is the best option for our needs,” Albert said. “A group of five came out of the gate about a minute behind us and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Aaron didn’t know how Albert could possibly know that, but neither Griffin or Kiara gave any indication they doubted his assessment. That settled the matter and they took the tunnel marked for the Gershwin, moving at a quick pace but not quite jogging.

“You’re thinking we use the garage?” Griffin asked Albert.

The small man nodded. “We need to get aggressive and quick or we’ll wind up boxed in.”

Kiara groaned. “That garage has been trash since they changed management.”

“Trash with shit employees,” Griffin agreed. “That’s our good fortune.”

The tunnel ended at a plain concrete wall. Albert touched one of those small identification crystals embedded in a simple metal panel, but the wall remained resolutely wall-like.

“Are we trapped?” Aaron asked, trying to sound untroubled, though not entirely successfully.

Albert shook his head. “Nah, the exits just take longer to open; the enchantment checks to make sure there’s no normies around to ask questions.”

No sooner had Albert finished explaining than the outline of a door appeared, as if graven into the wall itself. The wall still looked solid, save for the deep groove forming the outline, but Albert walked right through it so there had to be some kind of illusory magic involved.

The door opened into a hallway that, judging by the cinder block chic and ugly green floor, was reserved for maintenance people and emergency exits. The four drakus emerged near the end of this passage, about fifteen feet from an exterior door covered in various warning signs for the building staff. Griffin went through first.

They stepped out onto a narrow, one-way street. The big man’s comment about the exit not quite being the Gershwin made sense immediately; the exit from the hidden borough brought them out of a building made of limestone brick, but next to it — literally two or three steps from the door — were the loading doors and stage entrance to the Gershwin Theatre. Beyond this sleek black wall of painted wood, the marquee of the theatre hung over a wide entrance for a parking garage.

Griffin wasted no time leading them down that entrance lane, which ran through the entire building. He strolled up to someone wearing a different colored vest from the other valets. This stranger, probably a garage supervisor, regarded the big man coolly — until Griffin held up a folded hundred dollar bill.

“We need to get some stuff before our show,” Griffin said in a voice so laden with arrogance and condescension it bordered on caricature. “If memory serves you have some obnoxious one-person-at-a-time policy but I simply don’t care about that and I don’t feel like being everyone’s porter, so…”

He looked down his nose at the valet, wiggling the cash between his fingers. “I rather think my friends and I, as a collective, can manage to find our car and make our way back out in time for our dinner reservation, don’t you?”

Aaron resisted the (very) strong urge to cringe at Griffin’s ‘rich guy’ persona. A thought, unbidden but familiar, popped into his head: Shit, man. I believe you’d get your ass kicked saying something like that.

Then again, Aaron had a stable office job. It wasn’t like he made big money, but his bills were paid and the only months he worried about cash is when he’d splurged too much on dumb crap.

Actually, he thought, at the lowest points in my life, I would’ve probably eaten shit and grinned for a hundred bucks.

The valet seemed to be of a similar mind. He took the money with a shrug and pointed to an access door.

“Knock yourself out, chief,” he said, before going back about his business.

And just like that, they were through a door and heading down some stairs into a valet parking garage they hadn’t parked in.

“How long?” Kiara asked.

“I give it about two minutes until they’re on us,” Albert answered. “Maybe three.”

Aaron’s heartbeat was starting to pick up and it wasn’t from the brisk walk through Ekwiyakink. He double-checked that his wand was still in the pocket of his hoodie, finding some reassurance in being armed. It seemed they had failed to fully lose the people who had followed them to the subway or, barring that, picked up another tail somehow. He couldn’t be sure what other secret passages and places were hidden in New York, but he didn’t think they were going into a parking garage with the intent to try shaking this new group.

They moved through the garage with purpose. Although Aaron’s guardians kept their heads on swivels for any possible ambush, they were also on the lookout for something specific.

At each new level, they stopped just long enough for Albert to poke his head out of the stairwell and scan their immediate surroundings. He didn’t find what he was looking for until the fourth level of the subterranean garage. When he did, their group moved quickly.

In seconds, Albert was kneeling in front of a steel door not far from the stairwell. He pulled out a small plastic device that looked like a glue gun with a long metal needle protruding from the tip then slipped an L-shaped piece of metal and the needle into the lock. Each time he pulled the long trigger, the gun made a loud click! After a few of these clicks, the lock turned and Albert pulled the door open.

“Snap gun,” the small man said with a wink and a wheezy laugh. “Good as magic and just as quick.”

“Sixty seconds,” Griffin said.

Kiara pulled Aaron through the newly opened door. He found himself in a maintenance room, barely bigger than a closet. The only thing in the cramped space were pipes in various sizes running up the walls.

Albert, missing his characteristic smirk, gave them a grim nod and closed the door on them.

“What now?” Aaron asked, his voice uncharacteristically hushed.

“Now, we turn the tables,” Kiara said. “Take out your wand; better to use that than trying some childhood karate against trained killers.”

Aaron had tried a few martial arts in middle and high school — thankyouverymuch! — but Kiara made a good point so he kept his mouth shut. Human bodies were extremely vulnerable to serious injury, so any knock-down, drag-out fight was a crapshoot. Not only could luck beat skill, it could cripple, main, or even kill it.

Only this wasn’t a fight between humans; or not regular humans, at any rate. Aaron might possess immense, metal-bending strength and be nearly impervious to normal weapons — and he hadn’t completely accepted that just yet — but the people after him might be just as strong. And he knew from experience they didn’t use purely mundane weapons.

He drew his wand and waited.