“We’re gonna whoop your ass, Worcester!”

James had been checking his email on his phone as he walked out of the conference room with Jessamyn and Rosa, but looked up as the words filtered through. He glanced around for Genevieve, the captain from South Worcester County, but she was nowhere to be seen. So apparently this was directed at him.

He looked over toward where the voice had come from. A young woman was grinning at him. He should have recognized her, but her name wasn’t coming to mind. She was young, maybe twenty-four, with choppy brown hair. She was carrying a heavy backpack and a brand new energy sensor as she paused in the hallway to catch his reaction.

“Sure,” James said with a shrug. “I mean, I guess?”

The woman’s face fell. “Come on,” she said. “It’s a friendly competition.”

Something about her was very similar to Gabriella and most of James’s irritation melted away in a second. “What’s your name?” James asked.

“Connie,” she replied. “Newport County.”

She was so young, was she really a captain? But it hadn’t been even six months since Hillsborough had been scoping Amelia out for the job, so maybe James was just being old again. Instead of rolling his eyes at Connie, he tried his best to channel Gabriella’s friendly energy and held out a hand. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about instead? I’m just going to wish you the best of luck.”

Connie took it with grace as they shook hands. “Fine,” she said with a grin that made her look even younger. “Be boring. I’ll see you out there.”

She winked at him and hurried to catch up with her team as James looked around for Jessamyn and Rosa, who he’d lost in the rush. They were both actually ahead of him, waiting by the front door under a portrait of a skeleton grinning behind an old-fashioned desk. Rosa handed him the information for Park Street and he took another look. Readings above the usual level, the energy crackling in the air, but not visible. Their job was to track down the source.

“Are we thinking the source is at the station?” he asked Rosa, who shrugged again.

“Maybe?” she said. “But in that case, why is it happening at all of these stops?”

The teams had all confirmed which stations they had before leaving the conference hall and James was now attempting to work out a pattern among them. A few teams were assigned to places on the Green and Red Lines like them, with most serving two train lines. South Station, which he didn’t envy. Malden Center, which was far down the Orange Line and out of Boston proper. He’d scribbled down the names as they were said, pulling up a map of the transit system on the crawling wifi as he’d done so. There was at least one team on each subway line, so whatever was causing the energy must have spread through the entire system.

Harding didn’t expect them to finish it today, that’s what tomorrow’s session would be for. But they would all go back to that conference room to talk about what had gone well and what needed improving before today’s session was over.

It was a pretty short walk from the Foundation’s headquarters to the Park Street train station. As they stepped out into the warm April air, Rosa’s phone rang.

“Sorry,” she said, fishing it out of her bag. Then she answered and her face immediately brightened. “Hi! Yeah, everything’s going great. I miss you too.”

James hoped that the way his ears perked up wasn’t too obvious. Was that Amelia on the other end of the call? He knew she’d been too nervous to actually say anything to Rosa, but maybe she’d finally gotten up the guts. Or Rosa had made a move instead. Despite Amelia’s insistence on pushing into James’s personal life, he hadn’t gotten any details from her about it and now he felt a little guilty about not knowing. But no matter how it had happened, it was nice to hear. 

The warm sun on his face, the idea that his best friend might’ve gotten the girl, and a break in the routine made this almost a pleasant day out.

“Alright, I have to go, but I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Rosa said as she glanced down a small cobblestoned side street before crossing it. “Yeah, I can’t wait. Meet me at North Station and we’ll go from there. Alright, love you.”

The sun felt a little less warm now as James tried to remind himself that Rosa’s life was none of his business. But he knew for a fact that Amelia wasn’t going to be at North Station tomorrow night. He was the ogre that had scheduled her for what amounted to a thirty-six hour split shift. 

He glanced at Jessamyn, who didn’t seem to care one way or another, as she walked confidently down the street. This was a beautiful area, with lots of scenery and more money than God. James always liked visits to Boston, but the exorbitantly wealthy areas intimidated him in a way that made him angry with both himself and vague, unnamed others. It wasn’t a healthy way to live, but considering he spent most of his time in old suburbs like Leominster, it wasn’t something he had to confront often. 

But right now he could appreciate how the city was waking up after a long winter. Delicate blossoms spilled over window boxes, bright pinks and reds against the formal brick buildings. Outside of a coffee shop across the street, a few people were sitting at little wooden tables, sipping lattes and laughing with each other. And a terrible little dog was trying to get to James’s ankles as his owner gave an apologetic wave.

The gold dome of the State House was right ahead, and they walked down the now-busy sidewalk alongside the building. Boston Common was directly across the street, but the flow of traffic made them stop and wait for the crossing light to go off. Ahead, Park Street station was at the bottom of a large hill directly in front of them. The path leading to it cut through the busy common and Jessamyn looked down the hill toward the squat stone building where the entrance was.

“It’s a shame,” she said. “I was doing fine in there, but now that I’m out of the building and in the sunshine, all I want to do is sit on that bench right there and enjoy the weather.”

“Same,” Rosa said with a laugh. “I don’t remember the last time I was in Boston for something other than Foundation business.”

“I’m here fairly regularly for Foundation business too, but I’ve got family nearby,” Jessamyn said. “I once ended up calling in a case to the Suffolk county branch because the restaurant we went to for my aunt’s eightieth birthday had poltergeist activity happening while we were there. It was this little place in the North End. I wanted to help, but they said no. Even when I showed them my ID.”

She laughed and shook her head, then started to cross the street, following a sea of people onto the narrow sidewalk and into the Common. 

As James got into the Common, things felt a bit more familiar. School field trips and visiting cousins who went to school out here when he was in his twenties made it easier to figure out where he was going. 

“What do we have for equipment?” he asked. “Where’s the bag they gave us?”

“I got it in my backpack,” Rosa said. “It has an energy reader and a blank notebook.”

“No pen?”

“Of course not.”

He went into his own bag and pulled out a cheap Bic pen he’d grabbed from his car at the last minute. “I’ll file a complaint later,” he said.

“Oh,” Rosa said, “Amelia was telling me that you guys had an energy case recently. Is it anything that might be useful here?” 

James tried to think back. “I don’t think so?” he said. “Honestly, which was it?”

“Like odd energy readings in the area,” Rosa said. “I don’t remember much about it, she told me at like two in the morning when we were both on night shifts a few months ago. But I just remembered.”

“I don’t…oh, those ones.”

Right, he’d just been thinking about that back at the Foundation, hadn’t he? Gabriella tracking energy readings in the area and the way Robin had used it as busy work for her after he’d framed James for negligence on that case. The second part of that thought was always lurking somewhere in his head, ready to strike him during quiet moments. But the energy readings had been legitimate, if completely disconnected from anything the Foundation was actually interested in. 

He hadn’t checked in with Gabs lately to see if there had been any additions to her information gathering, but considering how guilty she felt about the whole thing, he’d be surprised if there was anything new to consider. 

“That wasn’t as much a case as it was a distraction technique,” James said.

He immediately wished he hadn’t, since the last thing he wanted to do was expand on that. But from how Rosa’s face softened slightly, he knew Amelia must have shared at least some of what had happened. He couldn’t even be irritated, he was just relieved that this particular conversation wasn’t going to go any further.

The Common was full of people enjoying the spring air. Two college kids were sitting on a bench nearby, eating fries from the overpriced food truck that was parked at the bottom of the hill. Groups of men gathered around benches, smoking cigarettes and laughing loudly with each other. Professional looking bikers rushed past them down the path, while kids moved more slowly on tricycles with parents chasing after. There was a fun energy out here this afternoon and James was pretty envious, more and more so with each step he took, that he had to deal with the Foundation instead.

He never came to Boston anymore. He couldn’t even blame work entirely, since the others somehow managed to have a life outside of monster hunting. Madelyn had family on the South Shore that she saw regularly. Gabriella had gone on dates throughout New Hampshire with Elliot in the months that they were dating (dumbass kid, James thought yet again. Losing someone like Gabriella over something as simple as ghosts). And Bradley had mentioned something about going out dancing in Boston, another detail of a personal life he kept mostly under wraps at work.

Maybe James should find something else. Not dancing, he was awful at it and the idea of a loud club gave him a headache. The small part of him that said he was too old to start something new battled against the larger part that said if he was going to be with the Foundation forever and nothing would change there, maybe adding checkers to the mix would make him feel less weird about the march of time.

The entrances to Park Street Station were in two small buildings made of beige stone, with stairs inside that led deep underground to the Green and Red lines of the T. A headhouse, James remembered vaguely from a cousin, Davey, who was obsessed with trains as a kid. He was pretty sure Davey worked on the London Underground these days, and honestly, good for him. Davey would probably be ecstatic about this training exercise, but James was less and less enthused with each step he took down toward the platform.

If the energy on the Common had been lighthearted and comfortable, below ground in Park Street Station, the noise was oppressive. Over the roar of the crowd, the rumble of trains, and the garbled call of arrivals, James could feel something in the air. It was an unpleasant sensation, and he wasn’t surprised to see the energy reader going off with blinking red lights and an uneven buzzing sound as Rosa turned it on right outside the turnstiles.

“Weird,” Rosa murmured as she gave it a moment to calibrate.

“What’s that?” Jessamyn asked.

“It’s just strange that they’d set up a training exercise in a busy city like this,” Rosa said. “It doesn’t seem like something the city would be up for, especially in the stations. People have things to do.”

“I was thinking that too,” Jessamyn said. “It’s…a lot.”

She pressed her wallet against the payment sensor on the turnstile, and it opened for her. Dammit, James hadn’t even thought of the fact he was going to have to pay train fare in order to solve this. Bradley was going to be so thrilled to submit a reimbursement request for the equivalent of a single train fare. And he didn’t even have a receipt, so he’d have to figure that out.

Around them, Green Line trains rolled through the station on multiple tracks. James looked around, trying to get oriented. There were two Green Line platforms down here, but he couldn’t see a clear way to get to the other platform, where trains were on their way to locations like Government Center and North Station. But around them in this half of the station, multiple lines were heading westbound. They could start there, then find a way over if necessary.

“Maybe they made an agreement or something?” James suggested. “It’s not like the Foundation doesn’t have connections.”

The other two didn’t seem thoroughly convinced, but he remembered all those times a whispered conversation with law enforcement or hospital security suddenly had things going the way the Foundation wanted them to. “It could be,” Rosa said. “Wait, hang on.”

An E line train trundled into the station as Rosa held the energy sensor out in front of her. It crackled, then shut off. “Oh, here’s something fun,” she said as she whacked the side of the energy reader to get the flickering screen back to life. “Look, it’s getting stronger as we get toward the tunnel.”

“Oh, great,” James said as he eyed the intricate mural on the wall behind the C line train rolling out of the station. “So we’re taking a stroll through the train tunnel?”

“Not if those guys have anything to do with it.”

Jessamyn pointed toward a couple of MBTA transit police, who were clearly watching the group. James took in the young, muscular men, obviously bored with the job they’d been given. He looked from their gun holsters to the women beside him, and down to the blinking energy reader. “Do we risk it?”

“Not for the Foundation’s sake, we don’t,” Jessamyn said firmly. “They want us going through subway tunnels, they can get the state involved properly.”

“But maybe they already are,” James argued lightly as he leaned forward to peer down the darkened tunnel. “If we’re working for the Foundation, don’t they usually have ties with the city and state offices?”

“Yeah, but not enough to delay service by having a few people go into a tunnel, stop traffic, and get some training in,” Jessamyn said. “Plus, Eyebrows said specifically not to disrupt the trains. I don’t think we even think about doing it.”

Despite Jessamyn and his own better angels, James was tempted to do it anyway. Not just because he’d always secretly wanted to walk through subway tunnels, but also because it seemed like the fastest way to solve the Foundation’s stupid little puzzle and be done with it. But maybe this was part of the test, all of them being able to work together despite always being in charge back home. But the decision was made for them as a cop finally came over.

“How’s it going?” he said smoothly, looking at all three of them in turn.

Jessamyn looked at him coolly and the cop looked over at the device in Rosa’s hand. “Can I help you all with something?”

“We’re with the Foundation,” James said.

He’d hoped that would be enough to get him off their case, especially since they’d been sent down here specifically. But the cop just raised an eyebrow. “What Foundation?”

This was new. “They didn’t tell you?” Rosa asked.

The cop shook his head. “We don’t have anything about a Foundation doing work down here today,” he said. “And you know you’re not allowed in those tunnels. Common sense, guys. You could get killed.”

“It’s for work,” James said. “They didn’t contact you at all? Could they have gone to someone else to set it up?” 

“No,” the cop said, some of the easiness gone from his voice. “So take your…whatever that is, and get on out of here.”

“It’s just a camera,” Rosa lied.

“Doesn’t matter, you’re making people nervous,” the cop said. “Get moving.”

A scream on the other platform interrupted the useless argument that James was already forming. The cop immediately dropped what he was saying as he hurried toward the source of the sound. 

There was an injured woman on the other side of the station, crumpled on the floor with what appeared to be a burn on her forehead. James couldn’t see too clearly through the wall full of advertisements between them, but he could see two other transit cops making their way over to her. She was sitting up with the assistance of some people around her and seemed to be talking. 

James wanted to go to her, but something about the way the cop they’d been talking to was eyeing him right now made it clear this wasn’t Foundation business. Or, if it was, not the kind that had been cleared by City Hall. Jessamyn caught his eye and shook her head.

“The energy reading spiked just now,” Rosa said, taking a screenshot on the reader’s small screen. “These are definitely connected.”

“Yeah, but if we go over there, we’re going to get arrested,” Jessamyn said. “Let’s just keep moving and stay out of sight as best we can.”

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CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 6