Fleeing from them, she dashes into a London subway station - The Underground. In a desperate attempt to lose her pursuers, she jumps on the tracks and dashes into a tunnel. It's here that she stumbles upon the hidden world beneath the city's streets. Among the physical beings, she is sheltered by the Fagan-like Harry Fowler who provides a home for a flock of teenaged petty thieves and pickpockets. After telling them her story, she is accepted among them and is delighted to discover she has a flair for the "work" they do to survive. She's quickly accepted into the "family," who call themselves the United Kingdom.
Even underground she can't escape the men who killed her mother, though, and they track her to the United Kingdom's lair - where one of her new friends is killed and Harry is brutally beaten. Jazz only escapes because it seems like the city itself comes to her rescue.
Early on, Jazz had discovered she had a certain affinity for the spirits that allowed her not only to see, but to hear them, as well. Every so often the built up emotions of all the spirits living underground gather together to form a wind that screams with the sound of their anguish. Although horrible because of her friend's murder, it's because of the attack on her and her friends that Jazz finds out the secret about her Uncles, and what was behind the murder of her mother.
Harry, and everybody else in the United Kingdom, including Jazz, wants to exact revenge on those who killed their friend. When they discover the mayor of London made promises in the press to clean up "those nest of rats that live beneath the streets of our fair city," Harry concocts a plan to rob people he knows to be friends of the mayor. It's on the second of these jobs that Jazz interrupts Terence as he's robbing the same house. She also discovers a photo of all her Uncles in this house - a photo that was taken by Harry Fowler and in which she recognizes the face of her father staring back at her.








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