Rownie dodged from one cramped and narrow lane into another. He took sudden corners and curving streets. He followed the wild and roundabout logic of Southside, and he navigated by memory almost as much as by moonlight. It would have been easier to see on the wider roads, with their rare lantern lights burning above important intersections, but Rownie was more afraid of being seen than he was of tripping over something he couldn’t see. He needed to disappear. He kept to the small and unlit roads.

Guzzards squawked at him from rubbish piles in the dark. They were ornery things, large and flightless trash-picking birds, and Rownie tried to keep his distance from their squawking.

He couldn’t disappear. The Grubs were too close behind him. They ran in silence. Rownie had never known them to keep quiet, not ever, not even while sleeping.

He stumbled his way through a thick drift of dust, coughed when it peppered the back of his throat, and kept running. It felt as though he had always been running. His legs and his lungs ached. He didn’t remember what it was like to be still.

Footsteps sounded close behind him. He couldn’t outrun them. He needed to hide.

Rownie dodged left, onto a wide open street, and ran for the rusted gate of the Southside Rail Station.

At that moment he was far more afraid of Grubs than of diggers or ghouls or whatever else might be waiting for him in the station—as long as the diggers and ghouls did not look at him with Graba’s look and all of Graba’s anger.

Maybe the others would be afraid of ghouls. Maybe they wouldn’t follow him inside.

He reached the gate and squeezed through the bars. He held the end of his coat with one hand, to keep it from catching on the gate—and to keep Grubs from catching it as it trailed behind him.

For the first time since he started running, Rownie paused.

The others were not small enough to follow him through the bars. They reached the gate, and then began to climb. They did not taunt him. They did not insult him. They did not say anything at all.

Rownie ran from that silence. He pushed himself forward, through the dark of the Southside Rail Station.

The station was a vast, open space. Rownie could tell by the way sound moved through it. His feet smacked the polished stone floor. The sound went out away from him, echoed, and got lost somewhere in the open space. He tried to move quietly, but his feet still smacked against stone.

There was a tiny bit of light. The ceiling was glass, and moonlight shone dimly through its smudged surface. It made the ceiling visible, high overhead, but it did not illuminate very much beneath. Dark shapes loomed around Rownie, and he tried to avoid them.