Free Silver by Steven Savile

time. He tried to see over the heads of the commuters, but one dark, long-haired woman looked very much like another dark, long-haired woman. She was cool. She wasn’t pushing her way through the press of people, she was going with it, which made her all the more difficult to spot.
    The PA system announced the impending arrival of the next southbound train in its tinny voice. He felt the ground beneath his feet begin to tremble as the subway rumbled in to the station.
    He couldn’t let her get onto it, not if he wanted to find out who the hell she was working for. He squeezed between a pin-striped suit and a mohair jacket. The air was thick with perfume, cigarette smoke and diesel fumes. A busker stood in the corner where the tunnel bent around to go beneath the tracks. His riff echoed off the yellow tiles. Ronan thought about shouting “Police!” again, but people were just as likely to close ranks to make sure he didn’t catch the woman as they were to let him through.
    She had to be hurting. The adrenalin would only take away so much of the pain. A broken wrist was a broken wrist. When her body came down from it she’d be in agony. Every bump and jostle against another commuter had to be sending another lancing pain through every nerve and fiber in her body—unless she’s loaded up on methamphetamines, he thought. It made sense. She hadn’t so much as flinched when he shattered her wrist. The thought didn’t exactly fill him with confidence. He’d come up against meth-heads in combat before—it was like trying to take down the bloody Terminator.
    Ronan pushed passed a couple of school girls in their jailbait uniforms of short, checkered skirts and too-tight blouses.
    And then he saw her.
    She was halfway down the platform, weaving her way toward the dark mouth of the tunnel at the far end. He pushed past another suit, his eyes firmly fixed on the woman’s back. The train’s headlights shone brightly, illuminating the entire platform. He felt the displaced wind hit his face as the train slowed to a stop. The doors came open. She made no attempt to board the train, she just walked on toward the end of the platform. She looked over her shoulder, and Ronan saw her face for the first time.
    She didn’t ha that crazed look of someone stoned out of her mind. She looked—and he couldn’t believe he was thinking it—beautiful. Heart-stoppingly so. She had that half-cast of the Middle Eastern territories and very sharp, very precise features. It bought her a few precious seconds while he tried to reconcile the beating he’d taken with the delicate beauty of the woman before him. She saw him and started to run.
    She reached the end of the platform as the train started to pull out. She didn’t slow down. She jumped down onto the tracks and ran into the all-enveloping darkness of the tunnel.
    He pulled the Browning and dropped to one knee, braced to fire into the mouth of the tunnel. He squeezed off a shot. The report was deafening in the confines of the tunnel, amplified by the weird acoustics. There was no accompanying grunt from the darkness. He walked toward the end of the platform.
    He could hear her stumbling footsteps as she ran blindly away from him. Those same acoustics that had turned his Browning into a roaring cannon carried the scuff and scrape of her feet on the chips of stone back to him with surprising clarity. Each sound seemed so close he ought to have been able to reach out his hand and touch her.
    Ronan stared after her into the black hole.
    The sign said four minutes until the next train was due.
    The ground beneath his feet shivered as another train rolled into the neighboring platform, scaring a rat out of its hiding place. The sleek-bodied rodent scurried across his feet and disappeared between the cracks in the wall. Ronan watched it go and lashed out at the wall in frustration. He really didn’t want to go haring off into a subway tunnel in the middle of the morning rush hour. He could