Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

past human occupation—fast-food wrappers, crack pipes, old newspapers—made her feel as if ghosts filled the silence around her, watching with spectral eyes from the steps leading to the surface, leaning on the pillars and steel girders, waiting for the darkness to devour her when the light failed.

She also found herself wishing Cal were with her. With a snarl, she pushed the sentiment away, slowing to a jog as she passed the station, breathing heavily as she recalled Zawadi’s instructions.

Fifty yards past the edge of the platform . . . an ouroboros at chest level disguised among the graffiti . . . Push on the symbol, and a door will open.

There! She saw the graffiti, a frenetic scrawl of names and crude shapes and gang symbols that would have been visible from a train window. It took her a minute of searching by the dim light of the flashlight, but then she found it: an O the size of her palm, formed by a slender blue dragon swallowing its own tail.

A train coughed far overhead. After a furtive glance behind her, she pushed on the ouroboros and waited. Nothing. She used both hands and pushed harder. This time a square section of the wall hinged open, about the size of her hand, exposing a stainless steel keypad. With trembling fingers, she input the nine-digit code Zawadi had given her.

An entire section of the wall swung inward, causing her to gape as it revealed a hidden tunnel. She slipped through the door and closed it. The seams in the wall were invisible from both sides.

The new tunnel was as narrow as a broom closet and made of polished concrete. Though far more modern, it reminded her of the tunnel inside the Archiginnasio in Bologna. She had the sudden horrible thought that if Zawadi’s codes didn’t work, or if someone locked Andie in there, she would die in that concrete tomb, alone in the dark when her flashlight failed and the rats came to feed.

Shaking off her fear, she made sure to follow Zawadi’s instructions precisely, making three more turns and passing half a dozen intersections before she came to a set of stairs that led to a landing with another keypad and a set of iron rungs bolted into the wall. At the bottom on the keypad, 36-m4 was imprinted in trim white letters.

My God, how many of these are there?

She input the same nine-digit code. This time a portion of the ceiling above the iron rungs swung downward. After listening for sounds from above, she gripped her flashlight and crawled through the hole, emerging into a musty storeroom filled with wooden crates.

Cobwebs glistened in the corners as her light probed the room. It looked as if no one had entered in years.

She closed the trapdoor and made her way to a basement hallway with faded blue carpet. To her left, at the end of the hall, she saw a set of stairs. She hurried forward, thinking about what to say if anyone found her.

After climbing to the second landing in the stairwell, she found a door with an emergency exit sign. She cringed as she leaned on the crash bar. No alarm sounded, and when the door opened to the outside, her dilated eyes squinted in the afternoon light.

She killed her flashlight. As expected, she found herself looking at a tract of wooded parkland with a little lake on her left. She placed a stone at the bottom of the door, leaving it cracked in case she needed to return. She then jogged quickly away, following a gravel path that merged onto a larger one sprinkled with people. The summer air was sultry, the foliage dense and green. No one paid her any attention as she turned to regard the gray sandstone château with peaks and turrets she had just exited. If she didn’t know better, she would have guessed the miniature castle was located somewhere in western Europe.

Turning in the other direction, she spied a familiar, awe-inspiring skyline over the tops of the trees. Now she knew for certain she was standing in front of Belvedere Castle in New York City, right in the heart of Central Park.

The footpath connected to a paved pedestrian road—the Seventy-Ninth Street Transverse—that dissected the park and led right to the Museum of Natural History. Before resuming her jog, she took an oversize Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt out of her backpack and pulled up the hood. She ran with her head down, already sweating in the heat and nervous that she looked out of place in the hoodie.

But it was better than showing her face.

As unnerving as her flight through subterranean New York had been, her jog through the city in broad daylight was worse. Still, there were no cameras inside the park. No one had followed her through the tunnels. With any luck, she could find what she needed in the museum and leave New York the same way she arrived, with no one the wiser.

And if the Star Phone puzzle led her to another location in the city, well, she would deal with that when the need arose.

After emerging from the western side of the park and bearing left, she found herself standing in front of a handsome four-story Beaux-Arts building that swallowed an entire block. As with the V&A Museum in London, a stone inscription greeted her above the arched entrance.

TRUTH      KNOWLEDGE      VISION

Spying a set of cameras, she kept her head bowed as she walked into an entry hall featuring the skeleton of a dinosaur rearing on its hind legs, the serpentine head reaching halfway to the rotunda soaring high overhead.

Once her back was to the cameras, she lowered her hood and smiled at the guard on her way through security. Both phones were in her pocket. She stored her backpack in a locker, pulled her hood up, and hurried through the museum, keeping an eye out for anyone suspicious but knowing speed was her best ally.

During multiple layovers on the flight from