Shadowcry by Jenna Burtenshaw Page B

sloping tunnel that carried the train underground. They were gaining speed, darkness swamped the carriage, and the horn sounded again, echoing deafeningly from the walls as they swallowed the train. After that there was only the smell of smoke and choking heat as the lanterns flickered out.
    The walls hugged dangerously close to the carriages and the ceiling was just high enough to allow the engine’s chimney to pass through. Kate’s eyes stung in the hot smoke as the train rolled deeper underground, beneath the river, beneath the city walls, and down toward the oldest foundations of the city. The screams of the prisoners sounded distant and unearthly. The train shivered so violently it felt as if it could fall apart at any moment, and still the tunnel continued curling down. Metal ground against metal, the brakes squealed, and the train slowed. Then the tunnel widened, soft firelight spread from a redbricked ceiling hung with lanterns and the mighty engine rumbled along the last few feet before coming to a final bone-juddering stop.
    The wardens wasted no time. The sound of sliding doors shook through the train, and raised voices carried through the air. But they were not prisoners’ voices Kate could hear. They were loud, confident, and they were all shouting at once. Silas threw open the carriage door and what Kate saw beyond it was as unexpected as it was terrifying.
    The train had stopped at a station built into a cavern of earth that looked as though it was being held up by buildings from the past. The damp walls were a mass of stone pillars, half-ruined walls, statues, doorways, and arches positioned in places no one would ever be able to use them. Some jutted out at odd angles halfway up the sides of the cavern, half buried in the mud, and others were squashed on top of one another like layers in a cake. It looked as though someone had taken chunks of broken buildings and pushed them into the cavern walls, letting them sink in before the earth had hardened permanently around them.
    Outside the train was a wide stone platform divided in two by a high wooden fence. The right-hand side was for the wardens and prisoners being taken off the train, and the left side was filled with people shouting at them, waving pouches of coins, and craning their necks to get a good look inside the carriages before anyone was brought out.
    â€œTailors!” shouted a woman, her shrill voice carrying above the rest. “I’ll pay five gold for a seasoned stitcher, two for an apprentice.”
    â€œHousekeepers!” barked a man beside her. “Four gold apiece for a strong woman and boy!”
    â€œDancers!”
    â€œBuilders!”
    â€œBakers!”
    â€œServants!”
    And so it went on. A rage of voices, all desperate to buy the prisoners as they would buy animals at a market. Offers were made, bids were argued and increased, and all the while cages were wheeled out of the carriages and the people of Morvane were fed into the belly of Fume one by one.
    No daylight poured in to brighten the station. Braziers spat and hissed along the ceiling, arranged in line like a fiery spine, and there were two torch-lit exits to the left of the platform: one for the crowd and one with a fenced path leading to it from the prisoners’ side.
    Kate pressed her back against her bars, trying to stay out of the crowd’s sight, but not before she had spotted something else waiting on the opposite side of the platform. A second train, sitting on a parallel track. Kate had never heard of a second train existing in Albion. Its engine was barely half the size of the Night Train’s. It looked newer and more carefully pieced together, with carriages built like huge metal crates, its doors barred and its engine’s metal skin shining a deep dark red.
    Most of the male prisoners were not for sale, and they were pulled straight on to the red train, to the groans and disappointed shouts of the onlooking crowd. Kate