The subway station is a jar of hot air, a yellowing chamber halving away at the sides. Kierk, trying to look casual in his shorts and sweated-through T-shirt, descends into a thing organic with heat and grime. The hot air down here hasn’t been cut by the rain, so he’s flash sweating and it feels like he’s breathing inches away from a pot of boiling water in this stuffy annex that empties out into just a few turnstiles. He imagines Atif coming thundering down here drunk, lightning like shuttering camera flashes behind him as he stumbled from one side to the other, a hand went out, caught the wall by the staircase, lingered on the spot that Kierk’s glance lingers on now.

Kierk leans over the turnstiles with their blinking green lights, looking out. He doesn’t have his wallet, so he cocks his ear for sound, hears nothing, looks behind him, then backs up a good ten feet and sprints forward and hops over one of the turnstiles with the ease of a former track captain.

The platform he emerges onto extends far to his right, only eight feet wide, a thin curving line all the way to the end, and is devoid of all but a single figure, a homeless man wearing a tan trench coat and a red baseball cap, slumped down. Across the crisscrossing black beams and dark tracks on the opposite side, isolated as if on a distant moon, a few forms sit on benches.

It’s even hotter here on the platform. Wiping his forehead, Kierk turns and begins walking down the long curving platform. He realizes why it’s so empty: it must be 105 degrees down here. Nobody in their right mind would be down here if they could avoid it. He wonders—if he had heatstroke now on this deserted platform and collapsed, how long it would take for that lady on the opposite side to notice and call the EMTs. How ironic would it be if he cooked his brain like a pan of sizzling eggs just feet away from where Atif had bit it just hours before—what the fuck would anybody make of that? He almost laughs, but pants instead, thinking about everything Carmen had said, but now the emptiness and the heat adds a dimension of seriousness to her claims. He looks warily behind him to the lonely turnstiles. The air is subterranean here, a thing made of ground-up earth, fresh from the city’s granite bowels, and Kierk could detect the aural stink of decomposition, but thinks he is probably imagining it. He wonders where along the track Atif’s body had been obliterated—kinetic energy deposited on a scale that would do nauseating things to a rag-doll entity like a human body. The remainder of it would be smeared the length of the track. How did they even clean that up? Hoses? Spear up all the bits and pieces with trash pickers?