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Van could see better than she, so she tsk'ed to him, and he climbed out of her pocket onto her shoulder. He squeaked, telling her that he saw nothing unusual. She had brought him not just for this help, but primarily because being much smaller than she, there were crannies and pipes he could explore that she could not. On a hunt for clues, she thought that might be a useful thing.
Dropping a few feet from the bottom rung to the tunnel floor, Jeneen landed in a crouch and stayed there, turning and surveying the tunnel. It did not look so different than the last time she was here - which had been just after Opal's death. A feeling of sadness washed over her, and she blinked to clear her watering eyes. Don't think about that just now. Think about giant rats, and where they might be hiding, and who might know something they could tell you... wittingly or not.
It was too bad about the Ratkin. Time was, she would have gone to them first with this question, though they'd been iffy with her. They couldn't quite get it through their heads that a human could be mesmerized by a vampire, same as a rat could. Well, they worshipped rats, and she kept them as pets. Kind of a different world view.
Van scampered off saying he'd go look around, and Jeneen stood still waiting for his return, not wanting him to get lost. But he was back much faster than she'd expected. He scrambled into her pocket and shivered in there.
Finally after some coaxing he re-emerged and hid in the hair falling over her shoulder. "Jen, they were really anxious. And hostile. No one wanted to talk to me, even my sister told me just to get out of here, I didn't belong here anymore. What's going on?" Jeneen shook her head, not sure herself, and felt his small claws cling sharply to her neck.
She muttered a quick "sorry, didn't mean to upset your balance there," as she steadied the rat on her shoulder. He relaxed slightly and she walked on, tension making her steps bounce slightly, though they were still silent on the stone floor of the tunnels.
Her entry point had been on the Red line, fairly near the junction of Red and Green. Now she approached the intersection and Washington station, where the empty marketplace was. That would be a good place to scour for clues, she thought. The People of the Rat were often found here scavenging, but though they perhaps didn't care for her, they would not interfere with a woman with a rat on her shoulder. She thought. And she could hide from their gaze as long as she kept perfectly still, anyway. That meant to spot them before they spotted her, of course. So she was wary and Van was too.
As Jeneen walked around the periphery of Washington's market square, she noticed a small darkness on the ground. She leaned down and sniffed. Blood. Rat blood... and there was a tiny head, looked like it had been bitten right off. She closed her eyes, sickened and saddened.
It didn't look like a cat's prey... whatever it was had bitten the body right off the head, and chewed and swallowed the bones. A snake would have swallowed it whole. What would have done this... she didn't know, but maybe it explained the strangeness. Because what Van had told her was very strange - rats just didn't turn against their own. Not normally. But she realized, things were far from normal down here. She never had got Opal to tell her why they'd left the red line - and now it was too late... but maybe it was related. In the days after Opal's demise, she'd been too preoccupied with that one thing to notice the other strangenesses. Now they crept into the cracks and settled there.
She spotted the young woman first, but it wasn't a Ratspeaker. One of the Velvet Children - a pale skinned goth girl in a long sapphire blue gown. Her black hair rippled down her back. Jeneen considered whether to approach her or stay still and invisible. She decided it was worth the risk, and approached. "Hey." Jeneen had not met this particular Velvet before, she thought.
The blue velvet rustled softly, and the girl turned to Jeneen. She held out a thin pale hand - except for its utter soft smoothness, it was rather like Jeneen's own. Jeneen did not take the hand, but smiled disarmingly, and put her hands in her pockets, pretending bashfulness. "I'm Jeneen. How's it going?"
The girl smiled, looking almost predatory. "My name is Nur. How good to make your acquaintance, Jeneen. Tell me, is there anything I can do for you?" Her voice was deep, musical, and as velvety as her dress. Her name rhymed with tour, not fur.
Jeneen suppressed a shiver, like the ones that go down your spine when you stroke velvet with your hand. That's how Nur's voice felt. "Have you seen anything... unusual in here?"
Nur's smile was gently mocking. "Why, the Underground holds no unusual sights. What could you be thinking of?" Jeneen smiled back, almost a smirk, and waited. At length, the girl in sapphire velvet added, "Perhaps the most unusual sight of the evening would be to your taste?" Jeneen nodded her head, hands still in her pockets. Van peeked out timidly from under her hair. Nur reached out a slender finger to touch the black and white rat; he squeaked, and Jeneen took a step back. One had to resist the Velvets' friendly overtures; they led nowhere good. Nur frowned, looking hurt, and said, "Have you anything to trade? Pickings have been slim at the marketplace lately..." she gestured around them at the vacant space.
"I'll tell you the strangest thing I've seen of late, if you'll tell me the same." Jeneen spoke her offer in a straightforward tone, but with a bit of innocence implied. Let Nur underestimate her. The Velvet nodded her agreement. Jeneen added, putting on a bit of naive self-satisfaction, "You go first."
Nur assented and described a scene of odd tranquility. "It was no more than six hours hence. I was gazing down at the running water in the storm drain that runs under the access tunnel to my new home. I was missing my old place in Orient Station... as I watched the running water below, I felt rather soothed. Then I saw stirrings in the water. A huge alligator was lifting its head and gazing around itself. What a beautiful creature, cold as the night itself, scales shining like stars. I looked into its eyes and then - something sheerly horrible. A swarm of small creatures poured over it in a wave. They ate its flesh right down to the bones, like piranhas. It was as though they were one giant creature with a thousand bodies. I've never seen rats to behave that way, never." Nur looked oddly stirred at her tale; her cheeks were flushed palely pink, more color than Jeneen had ever seen on one of her kind. "There was so much blood. It was so fast..." The Velvet gazed into the ghoul's eyes. "And now, it would be your turn to spin a tale of mystery?"
Jeneen paused, unsure what to make of Nur's story. It seemed so unreal, yet somehow she had a feeling it all tied in together. Somehow, but she had no idea how, not yet. "Kinda weird. Mine has to do with rats too. Or actually one rat. My car hit it - a forty pound specimen. It didn't look all that hurt - and the car was undamaged, not like it leaked gas all over the critter - but not five minutes later while I was still trying to figure out what the heck it was, it burst into flame and left nothing but ashes."
Nur listened, lips parted slightly, moist and soft looking, dark ruby in color. When Jeneen had finished, she asked the next, obvious question. "Your car?" Jeneen appeared an unlikely denizen of the Underground to have such a rare thing as her own automobile.
Jeneen hesitated a moment. "Well, the car I was in at the time. It wasn't actually mine."
Nur nodded, taking a step closer to Jeneen, who backed up slightly in response. Nur's pretty face took on a hurt expression momentarily. She turned abruptly and walked off, seeming to vanish into the gloom. Van squeaked a bit and Jeneen listened to his comments. He had not liked the Velvet one bit. Jeneen told him quietly, "It doesn't matter, it's not about liking her. She did give us a good piece of information." Van said he didn't like the way she had smelled. "She smelled like some kind of perfume," Jeneen replied. Van agreed.
The ghoul walked on, turning up the now-crowded Green line as she headed toward the place she and Opal used to call home. The gloom closed in a bit as she walked through tall narrow tunnels that had been intended as pedestrian walkways. She was unable to walk silently here; her steps echoed softly, though to Jeneen's ears too loud by far. She tried tiptoeing, but her ankles soon hurt too much to keep on that way.
As the passageway widened and its ceiling lowered, Jeneen stepped out onto what had been designed as a platform for repairing trains. Several single rails crisscrossed it, never having been completed. During storms, the rails were dangerous, as they grounded some of the more common lightning-strike zones, or so Opal had warned her. Jeneen had never actually seen anyone elecrocuted here. Red glows here and there were fires, lit by the inhabitants crowded around. Jeneen looked; she thought she could recognize a face here and there with no name attached, but saw no one she knew well enough to speak to. She thought better of approaching strangers - the campfires were often very clannish, with each circle wary of all the others and outright hostile to those who weren't a member of any. She picked her way through slowly and drew nothing worse than an occasional menacing glare.
Finally she reached the place she'd been heading for - and wondered why she'd come there. She knew Opal was gone; she finally decided it was a combination of habit and of a kind of visiting the gravesite feeling, where she wanted to make sure it hadn't been desecrated. It hadn't; it was just as she'd left it. Their little hideout where Jeneen had spent the last few months of Opal's existence. She turned slowly, taking it in, tears coming to her eyes and overflowing. Van squeaked in her ear, and she stroked his back gently, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. She looked around for clues, as if she had to justify to herself why she had come here. All she found that could be categorized as a clue, even with the best stretch of imagination, was the absence of something - the food Jeneen had left was still there. Not even a nibble taken out of the cheese. She took a piece of it for a snack for Van.
She left it and walked away, finally, not thinking quite clearly, on autopilot. She knew her way from here back to the surface so well she didn't need to think. Before she knew it she was on the street, and halfway back to her new home. She brushed the hair out of her eyes and continued walking.
When she arrived, it was almost sunset. The sky was starting to turn red and she sat outside on the lawn, leaning against the side of the house, watching the streaks of pink and yellow and blue and grey blend and intensify and darken as the sun went down behind the horizon. She fed Van a bit of the cheese and the quiet beauty sank into her bones and soothed the ache inside her until she felt she could walk inside. It was twilight by then, and the vampires would be waking up.
Later that night, she lay on her bed. Her roommate was out on duty. She flipped on the television, looking for something to distract her, and found one of the Star Trek movies. The Borg had taken over a whole bunch of space colonies and made them part of the "collective." Jeneen wondered if the rats, the ones Nur had described as working together like a single creature, could have been a collective like the Borg. Would their fear of a Rat Borg have been able to make the rats act so strangely? Would the creatures have been able to understand the concept? She looked at her sleeping rats. But, they weren't typical of their kind anymore, not after so much time spent as her pets. She could try it out on them anyway. Maybe when she wasn't so sleepy, she thought. She rolled over and fell asleep... in her dream, the huge rat the car had struck, instead of bursting into flame, started talking with Patrick Stewart's voice.