He moved as quickly as he dared, with both arms groping in front of him. He hoped to find obstacles with his hands before he found them with his face. He found one with his shin instead. It was metal. The pain in his leg made lights flash inside his eyes. He shut them. He also shut his mouth. He didn’t cry out. He wouldn’t cry out.

Rownie felt with his hands to see what he had run into. It was a bench made out of wrought iron, curved and stylish, for important people to sit on while they waited for the railcar to take them to Northside. He crawled underneath it. It was big enough to hide him, and to keep anyone else from bumping into him in the dark.

He waited. He couldn’t hear anything except his own heartbeat and his own breathing, and he tried very hard to silence both of those things. He was sure the Grubs would be able to hear his pounding heartbeat from all the way across the station floor.

The floor was cold. It felt cold under his hands. It smelled cold, and dusty.

Rownie tried not to think about all of the possible things that might haunt the station around him. He tried not to think about diggers, especially drowned diggers, crawling up from the flooded tunnel. He tried not to think about ghouls. He tried not to think about the gearworkers who used to be sane, who used to make sense when they spoke, before the Lord Mayor of Zombay gathered them all together to make grand and glorious projects like rail stations. Now the gearworkers were all as cracked as Mr. Scrud, and nothing they said ever made sense. Rownie tried not to wonder what it was that cracked them all, and he tried not to imagine that it was still here, somewhere in the station. He tried not to imagine that he could hear it breathing. He was fairly certain that he could hear something breathing, something big, somewhere in the dark.

Many pairs of bare feet smacked the stone. The sound echoed all around him.

“Rownie-Runt!” Blotches called. It was Blotches’s voice, but the syllables sounded like Graba.

“Stop your hiding, now,” called Greasy. He spoke like Graba.

“I’ll be so much less angry if you come out,” called Stubble, his voice rising and falling the way Graba’s voice rose and fell. “I’ve got things to ask of you.”

“Come out, you Changeling thing!” Blotches shouted, his voice rusty and furious.

Rownie stayed where he was, as still as he could manage. He stopped wondering about what else might haunt the station. It was haunted by Grubs, and he didn’t think that there could be anything worse. He focused on breathing silently. He got ready to run, if he needed to run.