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her hands into fists. ‘I’m not doing anything to help
you
.’ She marched towards the exit, her face burning. It was that idiot’s fault that Seb had been arrested in the first place – and he had the audacity to ask for her help!
    When she got to the opening, she came to a halt. The passageway outside was shadowy and quiet. She wondered which way the underguard station was, or if it was even down there at all. She remembered Seb’s wide eyes, searching for her as he was taken away. She clenched her teeth and turned back. ‘What’s the favour?’
    The boy grinned. ‘I need you to fetch me something from another cave down here. It shouldn’t be difficult.’
    â€˜If it’s not difficult,’ Ivy said, ‘why don’t you do it yourself?’
    He put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels. ‘I wish I could, but you see . . . my name’s Valian Kaye.’
    Ivy snorted. It made sense now.
Valian Kaye
– the third suspect on the underguard’s list.
And a thief
, she recalled. That’s why he’d been in the back of the underguard’s coach. He must have been arrested.
    â€˜They’re looking for you too,’ Valian reminded her. ‘But your face isn’t as well-known as mine and you have one other advantage: you’re a mucker, and that means they can’t track you.’ He peeled off his gloves and stuffed them in his jeans pocket, flexing his fingers. ‘That should slow them down a bit.’
    Ivy’s head felt woozy. ‘A mucker? Wait. Slow down . . .’ She could feel a sharp pain behind her eyes – the kind you get when you’ve been staring at something for too long. She wondered if the effects of the bike crash were catching up with her, or if her brain was just suffering from information overload. She reached for a nearby stack of leather trunks to steady herself. The hairs on the back of her hand stood on end as heat shot through her fingers.
    Not that again . . .
    She shivered and stepped away. Of course she needed to save Seb, but she also had to find out what was going on. ‘If I go and fetch whatever it is you want,’ she said sharply, ‘then you have to tell me how to get my brother back,
and
explain about everything else – about the underguard, about ‘muckers’, about where this cave is, about why that suitcase was able to bring us down here. Do we have a deal?’
    Valian tapped his foot. ‘If I tell you all that, I’ll be breaking the law.’
    Ivy’s thoughts returned to the underguard’s
Notice to Arrest
message. ‘I doubt that’s a problem for you,’ she remarked. ‘And anyway, do you have a choice?’
    He stared at her for a long moment without breaking eye contact. Eventually he said, ‘Fine. Follow me.’
    Apart from Ivy’s footsteps, the narrow passageway leading off from the cave was unnervingly quiet. It was lit by the same glass discs and smelled faintly of incense. Ivy dragged her fingers over the grainy walls as she walked behind Valian, looking for signs of wires or plugs, but there didn’t appear to be any. With a shiver, she wondered what was powering everything if it wasn’t electricity.
    Valian looked over his shoulder and noticed her examining the walls. ‘They call this an arrivals tunnel,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole network of them down here. We’re under Blackheath, in London.’
    Ivy froze. ‘London?!’ She tried to process that. Bletchy Scrubb was six hours’ drive from London, so how had they come all that way in a . . .
    â€˜The suitcase,’ she asked. ‘How does it work?’
    Valian’s shoulders tensed. ‘I can’t tell you here. There might be an Ug waiting round the next corner. Follow me.’
    They continued in silence for another ten minutes, snaking through a labyrinth of – as far