Prologue

“Detective Crowe?” A nurse’s voice cracked. “He keeps talking about the space beneath the road. Says it’s—” Her eyes slid to the console. “Says it’s hungry.”

With every journey the city leaked. First, a staircase in Elias’s precinct hummed when he walked past; then, the municipal grid showed anomalies — power spikes centered beneath the hospital. Supplies went missing from evidence rooms and turned up months later, rearranged, with notes scrawled in a hand Elias recognized from Halden’s lab. Policemen complained of dreams of being watched by long-fingered shapes in suits. The portable’s whisper threaded through filters of the world: subterranean radio waves, a subterranean market of memories.

Chapter VI — Descent