The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) (11 page)

“Miss Mercy … the nurse, right?”

“Right. She’s twenty-four, and Sheriff Wilkes says that’s too old for Zeke, but Zeke follows her around anyway, pretending to have an interest in medicine.”

“Pretending?”

“As long as he makes himself useful, Miss Mercy doesn’t mind him. But it’s pretty obvious,” Houjin declared, reaching up for a large lever beside a big round door, “that she doesn’t like him half so much as he likes her. Hey, put your gas mask on.”

“Are we almost outside?”

“Almost. You’re all right running around under the city, most places. But not topside.”

Houjin pulled the lever and heaved his full weight onto the huge round door, shoving it outward. It slipped on perfectly quiet hinges that moved without a squeak. The door looked far too large to be moved by someone so small, but something about the angles let it swing open despite the imbalance.

“Follow me,” the kid prompted, taking a mask out of some pocket Rector hadn’t noticed.

Rector fished his own mask out of his satchel, then mumbled, “Hey, this isn’t mine. Mine got all busted up.”

“I know. That’s one of mine. Put it on.”

“Like I’ve got a choice.”

“Everyone has a choice.”

As Rector climbed up the last set of stairs (he hoped), he watched the other boy slip the mask over his face with the practiced ease of someone who did this a dozen times a day, every day. With somewhat more difficulty, Rector put his on, then went over the threshold, joining Houjin outside the vaults.

The scenery wasn’t terribly interesting—there was just a dark roof made of earth and reinforced timbers where the sky ought to be. Basement walls and building foundations disappeared upward like ordinary building fronts without windows, and the streets between them were packed and damp. The walkways were littered with barrels and buckets, stones, brooms, tracks, bricks, ladders, bird skeletons, rusting junk, and handwritten signs that advertised directions or left messages.

Houjin scanned those messages, some of which were written in Chinese, and shrugged to indicate that none of them were directed at him. “Let’s go,” he urged, his voice muffled by the filters.

Already, Rector hated the masks. They were uncomfortable and tight, and they made it hard to see and breathe.

Houjin used his foot to shove the door closed once more, locking it with a loud, low
clank
and
pop.
He explained, “It’s easier to shut it than push it open. Are you ready?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” He might’ve been grinning behind that mask, but Rector didn’t like it.

“Your first trip into the city didn’t go so great, that’s all.”

“The second time’s a charm.”

“I thought that was the
third
time.”

Rector sniffed, and caught a whiff of a sour mixture of charcoal, sweat, and mildewing leather. “Once in a while I get a second chance. I’m never lucky enough for a third.”

Down short, meandering paths and around crumbling corners, he stuck close to Houjin, who knew his way around as if he had a map burned into his brain. Rector tried hard to pay attention, to note his surroundings and let his internal map keep track of them. Sometimes he thought he had a handle on it, but other times he was sure he couldn’t have found his way back to the Vaults without a native scout and a fistful of cash.

“This place is a rabbit warren,” he complained, holding his side. “Hey, can we slow it down a little?”

“Sure. Sorry. We’re almost to the top, anyway. Catch your breath.”

“We’re near the fort?”

Houjin said, “Practically under it. I didn’t want to take you the overhead way. You were griping about the stairs, so I thought this would be easier. One more set, and then a ladder. But that’s all for now, I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Rector wondered why they’d worn their masks underground all this way, but then he noticed the tumbled walls and sunken places in the ceiling. The city was settling around them, on top of them. Slowly, he assumed—but surely. Inevitably. But for now, that dim, worrying thought was mostly tamped down or drowned out by another dim, worrying thought: Zeke was alive. And he was nearby.

Rector found himself stalling without really knowing why.

“Tell me about this fort,” he started to request, but Houjin had already gone ahead.

“Right up here. Come on!” He made a show of climbing the stairs slowly, to let Rector catch up. At the same time, it was clear that the Chinese boy was impatient. He was probably always impatient with people who were slower than him. If that was the case, Rector thought the kid must spend a great deal of time frustrated out of his gourd.

One more door waited—a double-wide portal that slid sideways on a track. Long, loose flaps of rubber were fastened around its edges, and these retreated stickily. “They’re seals,” Houjin explained. “We need new ones on this door, but the rest of the block needs some maintenance before new seals will do any good.”

So that answered one question: why the extra caution was in order.

Now to answer another one. The big one.

Now to confirm for himself that he
hadn’t
been haunted by some scrappy kid he’d once known, because that kid wasn’t dead.

He did his best to hide his creeping, almost choking reluctance. He didn’t want Houjin to know how badly he feared confirming the truth—that his own mind had been toying with him all this time. So he did his best to scramble up in the other boy’s wake, making a fumbling mess of it, but getting up to the surface all the same.

Houjin indicated a ladder that had been nailed, braced, and repeatedly affixed to a wall that didn’t seem overly inclined to hold it. “The captain says we’re putting in stairs here, soon. But for now, this is all we have. After you.” He gestured grandly.

“Naw, you can…” Rector began, then caught himself and felt a stab of self-hatred. This was stupid, wasn’t it? Nothing to be afraid of, except for the possibility that his mind was betraying him, caving in on itself like the city inside the wall. He shook it off. “All right, I’ll go first.”

The rungs were rough yet slippery under his bare hands. He wished he’d thought about gloves, but it was too late for that, and now he’d have to deal with it. His heels skidded but caught behind him. He pushed on against exhaustion and weakness, fumbling with his cane up the ladder and into a small, square room.

A watery glow soaked in through the windows, none of which had any glass in them. Along with the light came a faint sense of the world being discolored. The air was yellowed like old paper; it was a sepia substance, one Rector thought he could reach out and touch.

Houjin popped up, stepped off the ladder, and sighed. “Oh look—the sun’s out,” he announced.

The Northwest had many days when the sun rose but nobody saw it, courtesy of the cloud layer. The compressed fog of the Blight exaggerated this gloom, filtering every scrap of light and turning it to murk.

“And I think it’s warming up.”

“I think you’re right,” Rector agreed. It definitely wasn’t freezing, and Rector was only a little cool without a coat. That was the best he could say of it.

Houjin began a monologue of copious explanations which Rector half listened to and half ignored. “This is Fort Decatur. It’s one of the oldest parts of the city, where all the white people holed up when there was trouble with the native people.”

Rector thought of Angeline, who’d clearly made herself at home. “I guess they don’t have trouble with them anymore.”

“Why would they? The Duwamish all left, except for Angeline. But here we are. These days, Captain Cly is using the fort to start off a proper set of docks.”

“As opposed to an improper set?”

“You know what I mean: someplace regular ships can come and go, not just sap-runners or pirates that can hover around or drop down air vents. The captain says that when he’s done, we’ll get mail and everything.”

“You can’t get mail right now?”

Houjin flashed him a look which, even through his visor, evidenced concern that Rector might’ve bruised his brain worse than previously feared. “Do you see a post office?”

“I do not,” Rector admitted, resenting the look and its implications.

“Anyway, come on outside. I’ll introduce you around.”

“Outside” was achieved by stepping through a doorframe that had no more door than the windows had glass. Beyond this exit the air was brighter and the milky gray sun was more pronounced. For the first time since falling down the chuckhole, Rector didn’t feel like he needed a lantern.

He blinked against this new light, weak though it was, and surveyed the scene with his usual measured uncertainty.

He saw no way out of the fort except the hole from whence he’d emerged. This was worth remarking on because the fort was—as far as he could see through the chalky gloom—ringed entirely with enormous tree trunks braced side by side and sealed with chinking.

The fort was not precisely rectangular. One wall was curved, and a second one had an indentation like it’d been built around something, but he couldn’t see what that might’ve been. And in the center of this ungeometric, courtyard-style space, two dirigibles were docked. Neither one looked like it belonged to any official nation, army, or custom, which told Rector that they were pirate ships. Both were fixed to a totem pole that must’ve been carved from a tree bigger than any he’d ever laid eyes on. Pieces of the pole were rotting off, dissolving to squishy mulch around the edges, but enough of the impressive log remained intact to keep the two airships bobbing gently a few feet off the earth.

Houjin saw him observing the operation, and said, “That pole won’t last, but it doesn’t have to. See?” He pointed at the nearest corner, where a great knot of right angles took shape through the fog. “Pipework docks, almost finished.”

“Almost,” said someone behind them.

Rector swiveled with surprise, but Houjin just bobbed his head to acknowledge the newcomer. Without looking, he said, “That’s Kirby Troost. He’s the
Naamah Darling
’s engineer.” Then he turned to Troost and asked, “Is Zeke up here?”

“Yeah, he’s over by the Chinatown entrance.”

Rector and Kirby Troost sized up one another from a cautious distance. Troost was a smallish man, shorter than Rector by several inches, and he was wearing a mask, so there wasn’t much else to be said about him. But there was a posture to him, a forced casualness that Rector recognized and immediately mistrusted. He knew that posture, and often wore it himself. It was the posture of someone who’s up to something.

Troost said, “You must be the kid who went down the chuckhole.”

“That’s me.”

Neither one of them moved, or even blinked.

Houjin looked back and forth between them, sensing that something was afoot and he wasn’t a part of it. Rector could’ve told him, if he’d had the vocabulary to do so, that this is what happens when two shysters recognize each other.

But he didn’t have the words, and couldn’t have explained it even though he knew it somewhere deep in his core. So rather than bring it up, he said to Houjin, “Let’s go find Zeke, huh?”

“See you later, Troost!” Houjin declared over his shoulder, for he’d already taken off toward the corner the engineer had indicated.

Troost and Rector exchanged a wary nod, then Rector stepped back into Houjin’s familiar wake.

As he tagged along through the greasy-feeling fog, more details of the fort became clear. Along one wall was an overhang with boxes beneath it, sheltered from the damp overhead, if not the damp that pervaded the air. Beside the small room above the ladder, Rector spied a stack of cleanly split lumber coated with lacquer to keep it from disintegrating in the toxic air. Here and there, machines and machine parts were stored or stopped mid-process, though what they were for, Rector didn’t know.

He used these things, these little distractions, to keep himself from hyperventilating inside his mask. He focused on the improvements large and small; and the canvas, and pitch, and lined-up hammers and boxes of nails; and the mention of the Chinatown entrance, because that meant there was another way out of this fort—a place which suddenly felt very small and very close, even though it was so large that he couldn’t see the farthest walls and edges.

And then, a few yards ahead, Houjin drew up short in front of an elongated lean-to. “Hey Zeke, guess who’s up?” he said. The rustling, clinking noise inside the lean-to came to a halt.

“Really?” The voice was amazingly familiar for having said so little.

“He’s beat-up and slow, but he’ll live. Rector, you coming?”

“Right behind you.”

He took a deep breath. It stung, and it filled his throat with the taste of rubber and powdery black filters. He exhaled the breath and used it to whisper, “No ghosts.” The words echoed around inside the mask, and his warm, dank breath made the visor briefly foggy.

Ezekiel Wilkes climbed out from the interior of the lean-to.

He struggled over a stack of crates and stepped into the open with a wrench in his hand. There was a gas mask covering most of his face, just like everybody else, but Rector would’ve known him anywhere. Still skinnier than he ought to be, and still wearing a shock of ratty brown hair that would never lie down, Zeke might’ve been a smidge taller than the last time Rector had seen him, but maybe not. His eyes were the same, crinkled around the corners from too much defensive laughter. The Outskirts hadn’t been kind to this kid, the son of the man who’d destroyed the city. Rector hoped the Underground liked him better.

Zeke’s eyes lit up at the sight of a familiar face. “Rector! Hot damn, I never thought I’d see
you
inside here.”

He scrambled the rest of the way out of the lean-to, a structure which was deeper and more cluttered than it appeared at first glance. Zeke jabbed the wrench into his belt and hesitated. Finally he thrust out a hand and seized Rector’s, pumping it up and down like he’d found a long-lost brother.

Much to Rector’s surprise, his supernatural unease about this meeting evaporated, only to be replaced with something equally bad: a deep-seated sense of embarrassment that he would’ve been hard-pressed to explain. He didn’t deserve this welcome, not from a kid he’d sent off to die. Not from a kid he’d never treated well, even if others had treated him worse. Not from a kid he’d never even liked that much, and had mostly tolerated out of a dull sense of pity.