5.

Silence. All around him, the great city was still and silent, looming over Nowar like a deep stone forest. Nowar felt very small and very alone as he explored the strange, silent city. Silent. And yet not precisely silent, not exactly. Deep and low sometimes softer, sometimes a little more intense, Nowar feel, at the bottoms of his feet and in his stomach, he felt rather than heart the thrum and rumble of powerful but distant machinery.

The underground city seemed to be empty. There was no sign of any habitation --and what sort of people would have lived her, so deep in the under dark? There was no sign of life --the everyday things you normally see but don't notice, which tell you that people are around. No cars, no bicycles, no garbage, no posters on the walls, no advertisements, no decoration of any kind, just smooth grey, softly glowing stone. Doors and been left ajar, windows gaped open, and here and there the buildings had cracks running up them, or the facades were starting to crumble.

Nowar went into one building that looked structurally intact. It was an old clock tower, with hand on a large light-grey face pointing to symbols (maybe numbers?) that Nowar didn't recognize. It was the tallest building in the immediate neighborhood, it's parapets loomed above the rest of the city.

Nowar climbed the staircase that spiraled up the inside of the tower, climbed until he was dizzy. The handrail on the stairs was too short for comfort, and the higher he climbed, the further and more deadly the drop on his right side became.

He passed through a room full of machinery, giant cogwheels and shafts and pendulums all still and silent as if they had never ever moved, as if they had been carved in place. It felt like the whole underground world was holding it's breath. Finally, the narrow stone stairs opened up onto the roof of the tower, a small bare square space about the size of Nowar's own living room, protected from the sheer drop by a low, crenellated parapet, too low for Nowar's liking. It wold be only too easy to stumble over the low wall and fall --how far? Hundreds of feet-- onto the smooth stone street below. It wold not be a fall that one would survive. Nowar stayed well away from the edge.

He looked out over the skyline. From here Nowar could see that it was not a large city, not in terms of area. It was just densely packed, like a miniature underground Manhattan crammed into a huge cave.

Every now and then, at home in Bone Bridge, a squirrel or chipmunk would find it's way into the attic of Nowar's house, and make a frenzied rustling sound up above the ceilings. It was a sound like this that Nowar heard all of a sudden and close behind him, the first real sound he'd heard other than his own footsteps since he'd gone down the secret tunnel in the Budsurry playground.

Nowar spun around. He thought he might have seen a flash of furtive movement in the corner of his eye, but there was nothing there now. Silence, except for the constant deep low mechanical throb.

Nothing. Nothing was there on the clocktower rooftop. His backpack, with his lunch and all his supplies was gone. Nowar had set it down on the stone floor, intending to eat a sandwich, for he was getting quite hungry. Now the backpack was gone, with no sign that it had ever been there at all.