The London rain came down in pinprick drops as Turtle Fulton ran across Grosverner Street. He loved everything about London - the odd black taxis, the double-decker buses, some of the food. But he hated the way they drove on the wrong side of the road. He would pause, often, watching for the words "Look Left," the Os twin eyes painted on the street to remind him he wasn't in New York anymore as oncoming traffic bumped past him. A shiny Mercedes honked at him as he took a step into the rush and he scooted back. An ambulance, its wee-woo siren blaring and then receding into the distance, roared past. He'd have to wait. After all the little red man on the crosswalk sign was telling him not to risk jaywalking and he decided to listen.
Turtle kept running in place while he waited, a trick his track coach, Mr. Huff, taught him. Running in big cities was tough but Turtle loved it. It was a lot of stop and start and it forced him to break his stride every few dozen feet. But he loved seeing things from the sidewalk, loved his plodding pace that let him stop and see the intricate carvings above a pharmacy's front door or the little flowers in a climbing vine on the side of a garage. He loved learning about a city by foot.
He had run in five different cities in the past five days and he was almost done with the London leg of his journey. It was Friday and the weekend was coming. It was noon, here, which meant it was seven in the morning in New York. If he hopped on the Mytro in a few minutes he'd have plenty of time to get back to school.
Mornings were always fun for him, now, since he began riding the Mytro. He could leave at seven, take a leisurely stroll to the Mytro stop near his house and get to school minutes later - with plenty of time to spare. Or he could wake up a little earlier, change in a Mytro station so he could go on his run in a foreign city. Today he had thirty minutes before he had to be back in school in Manhattan so he had plenty of time to chew up another kilometer - that's the distance they used in Europe although, strangely, not in the UK - and rush to the Mytro station and back to school.
He yawned. Turtle had spent a long night tossing and turning - something bothered him as he lay in bed and he couldn't quite put his finger on what. The odd feeling had evaporated when he hit the London fog an hour before but he was still oddly tired. He would have to grab a nap that afternoon after he did his homework and before he visited Agata in Barcelona.
He ran past a row of brick houses with white ledges and then a bright green garden behind a high iron fence. The colors there reminded him of oregano - dark grey green with a hint of yellow. Summer was on its way but now the rain was really coming down and it was getting colder. Water beaded on his windbreaker and he decided it was getting a little too messy. If he got too soaked he'd have to change in the locker room and people would become suspicious. After all, it was bright and sunny in New York so unless he claimed to have had run through a sprinkler or a car wash he probably would have some explaining to do. He decided he would take the Oxford Circus stop and cut his losses and maybe come back when it wasn't raining.
Paul "Turtle" Fulton was skinny - he had lost about fifteen pounds in the last year thanks to his daily runs - and his grandmother called him handsome. He was shy and had black hair and a tight smile. He lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, down by the Verrazano Bridge. His parents had died when he was very young - he barely remembered them - but his grandmother told him that he had his mother's kind green eyes and his father's dark hair. His jacket, emblazoned with Manhattan Friends Track Team, was scarlet and he wore high-tech running shoes that his grandmother bought him and a pair of longer black shorts, not the short shorts that his track team made him wear. A year before he had been the worst runner on the team and now he was the best, handily beating even Nick and Nate Kincaid in practices and taking out opponents one by one in meets. He had learned a lot in the past year but he had mostly learned how to really run.
Turtle was a freshman in high school. He had spent the previous year traveling the world and eating paella in Barcelona on weekends. The winter after those adventures had been tough - lots of school work and endless boredom in his room as the weather turned - but now that school was almost over and he was about to be a sophomore, he relaxed a little bit. His grandmother was already worrying about college essays, however. He'd have to make up something life-changing to write about. He was thinking about writing about his parents. After all, he couldn't very well tell admissions officers about the thing that changed his life - the Mytro - and the girl who showed it to him, a girl named Agata.
It was raining now, heavily. The pin pricks had turned to big drops. He was approaching Oxford Circus and decided to head home. He took out his phone and brought up an app called 13. A raindrop plopped onto the screen. After typing in a four digit security code, he pressed a button marked "Find Me." In an instant directions to the nearest Mytro stop popped up. First the map pointed to the tube station entrance and then, with a swipe, showed a dotted line through the station and onto one of the platforms. Another swipe and Turtle saw a series of blurry pictures. The Mytro stop was hidden behind a small door on the main platform. He would have to be quick if he wanted to get into it without anyone seeing him.
The Mytro was a secret train system. It ran around the world instantly and it was the most amazing thing Turtle had ever seen. He first discovered it when his ex-friends Nick and Nate Kincaid showed him a Mytro stop in Central Park, in New York, and he had met his best friend, Agata when she tumbled out of a door a few minutes later. He and Agata stopped a disaster from happening in Barcelona by taking control of the Mytro for a moment, a feat that exhausted them both for almost a month, giving them a feeling like having worked out too hard while suffering from the flu.
He and Agata were now quite familiar with the Mytro. They used it to visit each other and travel the world and, most important, they had a new app that told them exactly where to go and how to find stations. It was so modern that many of the old Mytro riders - riders who met once a month at the Conductor's Guild meetings - refused to use it, depending instead on complex paper maps that had been written years before.
A secretive network of Mytro riders created the map over the past few years. When mobile phones became popular they began befgan an exhaustive - and exhausting - process of cataloging all of the Mytro stations and building new ones where they were needed. Turtle never met these secret riders - the system was huge and only a few people understood or rode the Mytro anymore - but their work was instrumental. It was, in fact, built upon the work done by Agata's father Barcelona and his assistant who studied at Oxford.
Turtle checked his Casio Pro-Trek watch. It showed the time in multiple places - New York, London, Moscow - and he saw he had plenty of time. He decided to stop for his favorite bun before he took the Mytro to school.
The bakery was near the train station. It was run by an older Middle Eastern couple - Turtle assumed they were Syrian by the flag that hung behind the counter - and they made something they called Chelsea buns. The pastries weren't terribly sweet and tasted of cinnamon and dried fruit. Turtle usually bought one before heading home. Now he turned into the shop. He took a thin paper napkin and wiped his brow - he was still sweating from the run - but he was cooling now.
The woman - an old lady with a lined face and white hair - smiled at him.
"Good to see you," she said. "Our American customer!"
Turtle smiled. "Good to see you too!" he said. She pulled a Chelsea bun out and handed it over.
"We don't have these things back home," said Turtle.
"You should try our Syrian pastry. With cheese. It's very good."
"So I'll take one Chelsea bun and one Syrian pastry then, please," he said.
She smiled and wrapped the pastry up. He had already taken a big bite of the Chelsea bun and she looked at him and smiled. Turtle blushed.
"Delicious, no?" she asked.
"Yes," he said through his big bite.
He paid from a small stash of British pounds he kept for just such an emergency and walked out the door. The pastry warmed his hands through the thin wrapper. He put the English pounds into the upper left pocket of his running jacket. The upper right pocket held Euro. Another, inside pocket held Japanese Yen and he also had a small stash of dollars. He had exchanged a lot of his savings - almost two hundred dollars worth - into various currencies so he could eat and drink weird stuff around the world. He had even tried fried crickets in Seoul, an experiment he would probably not repeat.
At Oxford Circus he stood in front of the station and checked his app. The courtyard in front of the main doors was almost empty - it wasn't quite lunchtime yet and it was past rush hour - but there were still enough smartly-dressed passengers to make it dangerous to go digging for Mytro tunnels. Turtle shook the rest of the rain off of his jacket and took a bite of Chelsea bun. He tucked the rest in his pocket for later.
He felt a rustle of fabric behind him. He turned.
"Turtle, we've been looking for you," said a small man in a trench coat and grey bowler hat. He was soaked and out of breath. "I followed as best I could, but you're a fast one. I hope there's nothing pressing you're attending to?"
Next to him stood a boy about Turtle's age wearing jeans and a windbreaker. He smiled brightly when he saw Turtle.
Turtle beamed.
"Mr. Partridge! Ehioze! Did you follow me? Where have you been?"
"Hello, my friend," said Ehioze. "I've been here, in London. I didn't want to tell you until we were settled. My family lives here now. I brought them out via the Mytro and we are slowly emptying the refugee camp in Italy, person by person, so no one notices that we all leave at once."
"That's amazing. Where are they going?" asked Turtle.
"To different countries to work," said Ehioze. "We tell families we are taking them on a truck and blindfold them. We go through the portable door and bundle them up and go with them to their new home. Then my brother or I take them off and set them right. We have a network now around the world. Many people are going to France and others are going to the Netherlands and Canada. We've even dropped some in America. We tell them we have access to amazing technology. No one knows what is happening in the camp but people are excited. We take one or two families a week. It's great fun."
"Wow. So you're getting people out?"
Ehioze smiled broadly.
"As best we can. Everyone is very happy," he said.
Mr. Partridge cleared his throat.
"Why are you two here?" asked Turtle.
"A bit of a bother, really, and a long story. The Mytratti are reforming," said Mr. Partridge. "And the Conductor's Guild is growing. Ehioze is our newest member. I came to get him and Agata told me you were in London. Ms. Banister has called a meeting and we think you should better attend tonight. It will be an important one."
He had texted Agata earlier that he would be running in London. They shared their locations regularly, mostly for safety's sake. Agata's Uncle had told them they had to watch out for each other and keep the Keys they both held safe from harm. He texted her when he traveled - even when he went from his home to school - and she did the same. It was nice to have someone looking out for him.
"When is the meeting?" asked Turtle.
"Ms. Banister hasn't said but we will keep you informed. I wanted to come with you, Turtle, back to New York. We can chat on the way?"
"Sure," said Turtle.
Ms. Banister was the new head of the Conductor's Guild, a position that was once held by Agata's Uncle, Ernesto. Ernesto had left Barcelona to begin hunting for Agata's father and hadn't returned. And so Ms. Banister, a quiet woman with long blonde hair and small, thick glasses - she looked like Mr. Partridge, in a way, Turtle always thought - became the leader of the Conductor's Guild, the Riders Of The Rails and the people who made the Mytro app and were trying to map the stops with some degree of precision.
"I need to go to school," said Turtle. "But I can help after."
"So I'll come with you to New York and we'll talk on the way," said Mr. Partridge. "I have business to attend to regardless. And when you are done we'll come back for the meeting. Let's stay quiet while we're in London, though. Loose lips, etc."
"Why?"
Mr. Partridge pursed his lips and pressed one finger against them. Quiet.
Mytratti, he whispered.
Turtle nodded and they rushed towards Oxford Circus station as the sky opened up and rain dropped buckets.