Only a skeleton is left of Virgil's kingdom. For this, Jo mourns very little. The tunnels never felt like home to her, not after a life lived in the wide open mountaintops. She begged him so to go, to walk away from the bowels he'd claimed dominion over and return with her to the wild place she came from, but Virgil had never walked away from anything in his life and he refused to let the damned junkies be the first. It was only by his sheer determination and the size of his heart that this place remained alive, but when his heart stopped beating it unplugged the underground from its life support. This place is as cold and dead as her husband.
And yet now she's the one who can't leave it.
The train car they once called home is where his ghost still lives, and now she haunts it too. She feels him wrap his arms around her in the night, or maybe it's just a dream. She burns star anise and althaea leaves and calls his name into the dark. Her mourning is boundless. The ache feels as if it will never end.
She isn't sure the time of day when she steps out of the train car into the tunnels. The sun can't find its way down here, but like a cat Johai has learned to see in the dark. Her eyes are quick and her footsteps quiet on the tracks. She's on her way towards the other end of the maze of tunnels, where a skinny little junkie she's been looking after lives in a nest with four other addicts. The girl has been a hopeless case, but the North Loop's machka nwa broke both her legs last week and none of her washed-up friends have been willing to share their poison with her. Jo knows this is her best chance to get the girl clean-- when she's hobbled and helpless and can't chase the high on her own. Jo has her hand on the hilt of the knife strapped to her thigh as she walks, but it's not the only weapon she's carrying. There's a gun hidden under the drape of her shirt and a sharpened katar sheathed to her wrist. She knows that the dead things in these tunnels are hungry for company, and she is not above killing her husband's children if they try to kill her first. She proceeds with caution but never with cowardice, and when she comes around a corner and hears a sound up ahead she's not afraid so much as wisely wary. She slows in her approach, and in the dark she can see a tangled blonde head of hair bowed towards the wet ground. She hears the struggle for breath, but beyond that she hears something ragged, torn, broken in each pull of air the woman takes in. It is not just running that has exerted her, knocked the wind out of her. Jo doesn't realize yet who she is approaching, not until she's a little closer-- and then all at once, she knows the form bent double in the dark, and she draws her knife in a flash.