When they reach the relative safety of the tunnel toward City Hall, the light from the station starts to shrink, and they’re lit only by blue and yellow lights lining the tunnel. It’s strange to walk alongside Jane without stopping, but when Jane shouts happily into the echoing dark, it’s infectious. She starts to run, and August runs after her, hair flying and the hard floor of the tracks under her shoes. It feels like she could run forever if it’s with Jane.

But Jane’s footsteps stutter abruptly to a halt.

“Oh,” she says.

August turns back to her, out of breath. “What?”

“I can’t—I don’t think I can go any farther. It’s—it feels weird. Wrong.” She touches a hand to the center of her chest, like she’s having existential heartburn. “Oh, yikes. Yeah, this is it. This is as far as I can go.”

She sits on the third rail.

“Still cool though, right?”

August nods. “Yeah, and, this is only, like, a taste. An appetizer. An amuse-bouche of freedom. We’re gonna get you the real deal.”

“I know. I believe you,” Jane says, looking at August like she means it.

August sinks down across from her, sitting gingerly on a track. She’s read that the other two rails are very lightly electrified, only enough to carry signals, so she figures she’s okay. “We can sit here for a while, if you want.”

“Yeah,” Jane says, pulling her knees up. She stretches her arms out like she’s trying to touch as much open air as she can, even in the stuffy confines of the tunnel. “Yeah, this is nice.”

“I have—” August feels around the bottom of her bag. “Um, one orange, if you want to split it.”

“Oh, yeah, please.”

August tosses it over, and she catches it smoothly.

More and more lately, August has stopped studying Jane. She’s stopped looking for clues in every expression or offhand comment, and it feels good to just see her. To listen to the sound of her low voice talking about nothing, to watch her fingers effortlessly work the orange rind, to soak in her company. August feels like one of the little packets of cream she always dumps into Jane’s coffee, steeping in sugar and warmth.

Jane piles bits of orange peel on her knee and splits the segments into halves. When August reaches out to take one, her fingertips brush the back of Jane’s hand, and she yelps and jumps backward from a short, sharp shock.

“Whoa,” Jane says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” August says, shaking out her hand. “You’re, like, conductive.”

Jane holds her fingers up in front of her face, going slightly cross-eyed to examine them. “Cool.” She glances up to see August watching her. “What?”

“You’re…” August attempts. “I just like everything about you.” She waves her hands at the smile that appears on Jane’s face. “Stop! It’s gross! What I said is gross!”

“Everything about me?” Jane teases.

“No, definitely not that shit-eating grin. Categorically hate that.”

“Oh, I think you like that the best.”

“Shut up,” August says. The darkness, she hopes, hides the blushing.

Jane laughs, popping a bit of orange into her mouth. “It is crazy, though, when you think about it.” She licks a drop of juice off her bottom lip. “You kind of know everything there is to know about me.”

August scoffs. “There’s no way that’s true.”

“It is! And I used to be so mysterious and sexy.”

“I mean, you’re literally sitting on the third rail conducting electricity right now, so, still mysterious. Now, sexy … hmm. I don’t know about that.”

Jane rolls her eyes. “Oh, fuck off.”

August laughs and dodges the orange peel Jane throws at her. “Tell me something I don’t know about you, then,” she says. “Surprise me.”

“Okay,” Jane says, “but you have to do one too.”

“You already know more about me than most people.”

“That’s a testament to you living like you’re under deep cover and can’t compromise your civilian identity, not how much you’ve told me.”

“Fine,” August relents. Jane taps her nose, and August scowls—she’s a pushover for Jane. They both know it. “You go first.”

“Okay … hmm … oh, I’ve made friends with a subway rat.”

“You’ve what?”

“Look, it gets really boring down here!” Jane says defensively. “But there’s this one white rat that hangs out on the Q sometimes. She’s so big and so fat and so round, like a gigantic steamed bun. I named her Bao.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I love her. Sometimes I give her snacks.”

“You’re a nightmare.”

“Judge all you want, but I’m the only one who’ll be spared in the inevitable Great Rat Uprising. Your turn.”

August thinks, and says, “I’ve cheated on one test my entire life. Junior year of high school. I’d been up all night going through public records with my mom, and I ran out of time to study, so I picked the lock on my teacher’s room before school, found out what the essay question was, and memorized an entire page from the book by fifth period so I could answer it.”

“God, you fucking nerd.” Jane snorts. “That’s not even cheating. That’s … being unfairly prepared.”

“Excuse me, I thought it was very edgy at the time. Your turn.”

“My mom started going gray at, like, twenty-five,” she says, “and I’m pretty sure it’s gonna happen to me too. Or at least it would have if I weren’t, you know.” She does a vague hand gesture to express the whole ineffability of being. August shoots a finger gun back.

“In fourth grade, I memorized the entire periodic table and all of the presidents and vice presidents in chronological order, and I still remember it all.”

“I saw The Exorcist opening weekend and didn’t sleep for four days.”

“I hate pickles.”

“I snore.”

“I can’t sleep if it’s too quiet.”

Jane pauses, and says, “Sometimes I wonder if I fell out of time because I never really belonged where I started and the universe is trying to tell me something.”

It’s offhand, casual, and August watches her pull off another orange segment and eat it unceremoniously, but she knows Jane. It’s not easy for her to say things like that.

She figures she can give something back.

“When I was a kid, after Katrina—you remember how I told you about the hurricane?” Jane nods. August goes on, “There was this year I got moved around to different schools until my old school reopened and we could go home. And my anxiety got … bad. Like, really bad. So, I convinced myself that, because the statistical likelihood of something happening in real life exactly the way I imagined it was so low, if I imagined the worst possible things in vivid detail, I could mathematically reduce the odds of them happening. I convinced myself that my brain had power over the probability projections of the universe. I’d lie awake at night thinking about all the worst stuff that could happen like it was my job, and I don’t know if I ever really broke the habit.”