Mind the Gap by Christopher Golden Page A

natural.”
    “You’d never betray me,” Jazz said firmly. She was starting to feel upset and anxious at the way this was going.
Mum was her bedrock! Her solid pedestal from which she was starting to live life as an adult!
    Her mum smiled. “No, I wouldn’t. But if I was someone else, just because I never have betrayed you doesn’t mean I never would.”
    “You’re scaring me, Mum.”
    One of the coffee-shop staff paused by the next table, cleared away mugs and sandwich wrappers, and started polishing its surface. The silence was uncomfortable, and the young girl threw them a nervous glance and hurried away, the table still smeared and dirty.
    “Don’t be scared,” she said. “Be warned. You’re the only person you can really, truly trust.
You.
The
only
one. You’ll need to be careful, Jazz, as you get older. Make sure you’re certain of people’s intentions toward you.”
    “You mean boys?”
    “I mean everyone.” Her mother looked suddenly sad then, and Jazz was mortified when she saw tears in the woman’s eyes. “You can never really know someone.”
    “Mum?”
    She shook her head and waved Jazz away, dabbing at her eyes. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” But she didn’t look fine. And that brief, intense conversation about trust stayed with Jazz for a long, long time.
             
    Harry was waiting for them below the surface, behind the grubby wall and bulky grate at the end of the station platform. He was alone. He carried two heavy torches, and he gave them to Cadge and Jazz. He trusted them to light his way.
    “A good nick today, Jazz girl?”
    Jazz produced the boxes of painkillers, plasters, cough mixture, and antibiotics. She kept the Beautiful to herself.
    “Nice!” Harry said. “Nice, my pets. I don’t like the thought of my kids being ill, not when they’re such an
honest
bunch.”
    The word
honest
was a strange one, Jazz thought, as applied to a bunch of thieves. But it also made her proud. They might nick things, but they were all honest to one another. At least,
almost
all of them. The image of Stevie Sharpe hidden in the alley shadows had failed to leave her, and being down here in the dark only seemed to make it more solid.
    “It went okay,” Jazz said. “Cadge had to do a runner too, but I had the stuff by then. And I left without them even suspecting me.”
    “And what did
you
fetch, Cadge lad?”
    “Nuthin’.”
    Jazz frowned—she remembered him running with a box of condoms in his hand. But she kept walking and did not look at the boy.
    “Nothing at all?” Harry asked.
    “Dropped it,” Cadge said.
And I wonder how scarlet he is right now?
Jazz thought.
These shadows are good for hiding a lot.
    They veered left into a disused tunnel, walked for a hundred yards, and came to an abandoned station platform. From there they made their way down an old maintenance staircase, hearing the rustle of rats retreating before the wash of their flashlights. Cockroaches scurried out of sight. In the drier tunnels, they were rarer, but in the damp, rotting places, cockroaches and other bugs were plentiful. Jazz forced herself not to take much notice of them.
    The stairs were slippery here, layered with a thin green slime, and at the bottom of the staircase a curtain of water fell in a continuous waterfall. Harry produced a small retracting umbrella from his pocket, opened it up, and diverted the water far enough for Jazz and Cadge to step through. “One of the oldest water-distribution systems in the world, down here,” he said as he stepped through. “More water leaks into the ground than reaches Londoners’ taps.” He brushed a few droplets of water from his coat shoulders. “Lucky for us, eh? Free water whenever we want it. I only wish they could heat some of it for us. Then life would be grander than grand, eh, Cadge?”
    “Life’s grand as it is, Mr. F.”
    “It has its moments, for sure.”
    Something rattled in the distance and Cadge spun around. They were at one