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calling themselves Americans in Lunnon, you get word to me, quick. Same if anybody gets word of Lord Zoroaster. This could be our chance at last.”
    â€œChance to do what?” one older boy demanded.
    Betsy’s green eyes flashed. “Chance to get rid of the Toffs and the tippers. Chance to be free. Chance to pull down old Nibs from his seat on the bent backs of our people.”
    â€œChance to be free,” a solemn-looking girl of fourteen or fifteen said.
    â€œChance to be free,” Betsy agreed.
    Jarvey saw the kids in the room nod to each other, heard them murmur. It wasn’t a cheer, it wasn’t a surge of enthusiasm, but it felt deep and powerful.
    And Betsy seemed satisfied. “All right,” she said in a hard, level voice. “You know what we risk. You know what we have to gain. Scatter, now, and spread the word.”
    Like a magic trick—or like the workings of a spell of art, Jarvey supposed—the thirty kids flowed away, rustling out of the basement, fading into the shadows.
    Betsy gave Jarvey a crooked grin. “And you,” she said, “I hope you’re a quick learner.”

CHAPTER 6
    Life on the Run
    At first Jarvey tried to keep count of the days that followed, but somewhere around three weeks, he stopped tracking them. One day was just like the day before, with the only changes being the number of close calls. Every single day brought too many of them.
    The new Den was in yet another narrow brick-walled alley. Both entrances to this one had been bricked up ages ago, so now it was a long, cramped room, roofed over because the eaves of the buildings on either side met overhead. From the street you’d never guess the space existed, because the brickwork that sealed it had the same crumbling, sooty appearance of the buildings to either side. Getting in and out took some trouble. You had to duck down into a storm drain—there were two of these, front door and back door, as Betsy called them—and then creep along hunched over for a hundred feet or so until you could pop up through an open drain in the center of the alley. Once a heavy barred iron grate had covered it, but the Free Folk had moved that aside.
    â€œBiggest danger’s that someone’ll notice us slipping into the drain and follow us in one day,” Betsy told everyone. “So we can’t treat this like the old Den. Two have to stay inside at all times, and if a stranger pops his head up, they take care of him.”
    Jarvey had not asked what “taking care of him” might mean. He didn’t even want to know. He began to have a strange feeling as days passed: that his old life, his real life, was just a half-forgotten dream, and that he had awakened from it into this nightmare world of no electricity, no comforts, and no family. The walled-off alley proved a bleak shelter, cold and dark, and incredibly, Jarvey thought back to the basement of the abandoned factory with a kind of regret. It had running water and light, anyway.
    The other kids were patient enough with him, and even cheerful in their strange way. Charley Dobbins, when he returned from the first Den, turned out to be a good teacher, and he personally took charge of Jarvey’s street education. They ventured out every day, and every day Jarvey saw more signs that this was not his own world. Even on clear days, no sun shone in the sky—there was just a sort of blurred brassy circle of light and warmth, many times larger than the sun he remembered. No moon pierced the gloom at night, and even the stars were strange.
    Under the metallic glare of daylight, the two of them sauntered through alleys and down back ways, armed with little squares of pasteboard that Betsy provided. These were work cards, which told the world that Jarvey and Charley were kitchen boys on the evening shift in one of the cookeries. “These’ll do for anybody but a tipper,” Charley had warned, raising his hand to