The major time-touring gates all lay in the Commons, of course, a vast area of twisting balconies, insane staircases and ramps, and all the glitter of high-class shops and restaurants that even the most discriminating of billionaires could wish to find themselves surrounded with. But because Commons followed the twists and turns of the immense cavern, there was no straight shot or even line-of-sight view from one end to the other. And station Residential snaked back into even more remote corners and crannies, with apartments tucked in like cells in a beehive designed by LSD-doped honeybees.
The underpinnings of the station descended multiple stories into the mountain’s rocky heart, where the nitty-gritty, daily business of keeping a small city operational was carried out. Machinery driven by a miniature atomic pile hummed in the rocky silence. The trickle and rush of running water from natural underground streams and waterfalls could be heard in the sepulchral darkness beyond the station’s heating, cooling, and waste-disposal plants. Down here, anybody could hide anything for a period of many months, if not years.
Margo had realized long ago that Shangri-La Station was immense. She just hadn’t realized how big it really was. Not until Skeeter Jackson led them down circuitous, narrow tunnels into a maze he clearly knew as well as Margo knew the route from Kit’s palatial apartment to her library cubicle. Equally clearly, Skeeter had taken full advantage of this rat’s maze to pull swift disappearing acts from station security and irate tourists he’d fleeced, conned, or just plain robbed.