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gunshot. The head exploded as if it were a ripe pumpkin. Brains and blood smothered the back wall of the nook, and the lumpy body slumped forward. This time it remained still.
    Gerry looked back at Petal and Gabe. Petal flashed him another wolfish grin. Gabe’s eyes grew wide with surprise. They clearly underestimated him. Good. It was best to keep them from knowing too much. They’d have to wait to find out what he was really capable of.
    “Let’s go flush these demons, then. The quicker we get out, the quicker I can get back to my family.” He wasn’t sure if that was entirely possible. But right now, he’d cling to anything to avoid admitting it was completely hopeless.
    Petal and Gabe glanced at each other briefly, sharing an unspoken message, before filling a backpack with bottles of water and food rations sealed in vacuum graphene foil from the kitchen cabinets. Gabe took the pack and headed to a section of the wall inside an alcove opposite Mike’s corpse.
    Pushing against a particular area, Gabe stood back as the wall moved inwards, revealing a dark gap.
    Petal took Gerry’s elbow and beckoned him to follow Gabe down a flight of stairs.
    As they descended, it occurred to Gerry that these weren’t regular stairs. They were motionless escalators. They were heading into an old, disused subway station. The smell of carbon dust and body odour clung to the air still.
    The three of them stood on the platform, waiting.
    Gerry was about to ask how they would leave the City when a rush of air and whirr of electric motors answered it for him.
    “A train? Are you guys for real?”
    Gabe grinned at him. “Man, there’s so much you don’t know.”
    “Tell me about it,” Gerry said, trying to stop his mind from spinning as each perception of the world was stripped away like an onion skin. “How is this even possible? I thought all these kinds of vehicles were out of action since the Cataclysm?”
    “The Family like you to believe that everything was destroyed,” Petal said. “They wanna make you think it all begins and ends with the Dome, but it don’t. There’s a world out there, Gez. It’s messed up, dangerous, exciting and a hundred other things, but it ain’t empty.”
    “How do they even allow this to run?”
    “What makes ya think they even know about it?” Gabe said. “Listen, man, they built this city on top of an existing town. An old traditional Mongolian town that was on the up-and-up. A few transport links here, a few developments there. You get the idea. But when the war finished and they built the Dome, they left a few relics here, like this train and the tunnel.”
    “But how is it running?”
    “Hackers, engineers, people with a vested interest in staying off the grid,” Petal said. “This old train line was still connected to the power grid. It took just a little bit of modification on our part to reroute the signals so that they wouldn’t notice the power usage.”
    Gerry looked at the fuse box on the side of the stairwell. The case hung open, and various wires rose from the electronics and snaked up into the ceiling, where a number of tiles hung loose. “They must know,” Gerry said, not believing this could be going on under the Family’s nose.
    “Not this, they don’t,” Petal added. “But don’t think they don’t necessarily know that some of this stuff goes on, Gez. It suits them to have something else going on outside the Dome.”
    “Suits them?”
    “Yeah, think about it. This Dome is one great big test lab. You need stuff to test against, right?”
    Gerry shook his head, still unsure what to believe. He couldn’t believe that the Family would deceive them that far. With the control over the population, they didn’t need to. But then need and want weren’t necessarily the same thing.
    Gabe approached the train, pressed a button on the outside of the carriage, and the door slid back. Gabe stood aside with his arms open. “Welcome to Salvation Train Service,” he