Free The Blue Light Project by Timothy Taylor

a bit of weight, but it wasn’t a diet he intended to maintain for years. Rabbit had a plan, and that plan didn’t involve living this way forever. That plan involved a garden with real vegetables, just like when he was a kid. It involved self-sufficiency and being many miles away from here. But he hadn’t reached that point in his plan quite yet.
    Now Rabbit checked his front-door locks, bolts and bars. Then he slipped out the fire-escape window and padlocked it behind him. When he climbed down to the alley, he did this in a way that would have startled anyone watching. Rabbit vaulted the top railing, six stories above the pavement, and grappled himself to the outside of the metal framework. Then he dropped, floor by floor, one fire-escape landing at a time, his feet and hands touching the rail and decking in unison, but with such lightning brevity that he looked, as he plummeted, like some kind of bouncing spider. Then the dismount, a spring and twist of the body, Rabbit sailing over a parked car and landing on the lid of a dumpster, where he rolled on his shoulder and flipped down to the pavement. Animal fluidity. One touch, balls of the feet, and off he went.
    Fifteen minutes to the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel. Rabbit had this run well clocked. East out of Stofton into the warehouse district, then across the boulevard to where the tunnel entered the hillside on
the opposite side of the valley providing a connection to the coal shuttles that serviced the river terminals. Schedules long memorized, Rabbit knew he wouldn’t meet a train tonight if he kept up the twenty-minute pace once inside.
    In he went on those short cat-like steps, designed not for speed or distance, but for control and quick changes of course and speed, something Rabbit did frequently, monkey-vaulting a park bench up onto a wall and over into a hidden alley. Or carving off sharply down a side street by making unexpected use of the walls. These were Parkour moves, although Rabbit didn’t use that term. Freesteal was what people around Rabbit called what they did: a combination of running, climbing, exploring places off-limits to the public, and leaving public art on the walls wherever they went. Freestealers were pacifists, craftier and less territorial than graffiti writers. Freestealers didn’t tag. And they didn’t steal either, unless you counted the wall space itself. The art was a gift to the cityscape so that the free eye might freely find it. And Rabbit, who wasn’t disposed to clubs or gangs or affiliations, still thought Freesteal came closer than anything else to defining how he wanted to fit into the world. Making his quiet way without confrontation, leaving his marks for those who would see.
    In the tunnel, Rabbit was keeping up a decent miler’s pace along the rails. He was in deep. Long past the graffiti that scored the entrance to the tunnel, then grew sparse as the air cooled and thinned, then vanished where the walls began to seep black, coated with the residue of diesel fumes from big turbine engines that came through at the head of the coal trains. Rabbit was now far past the point that any tagger was willing to go, into a place where the air supply seemed to tighten, where the lungs came alive with invisible motes and particles, diesel and clay, steel and creosote. Where the slick black mucus of the earth and the fungal heaviness of the soil became the actual substance of the air.

    There was no light here, natural or artificial. And Rabbit didn’t carry a flashlight either. But at forty yards in, the eye found resources it didn’t normally use and a surface glow could be detected on the rails. Rabbit followed these to the half-mile point, where a new glimmer appeared in the steel. A blue ghost cast out by a single blue light at the center of the tunnel. Here Rabbit picked up his pace and reached the middle of the tunnel in a few minutes.
    He stopped there, as he always did, staring up at the wall: not at the blue bulb