The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) (31 page)

Angeline drew the blanket back all the way, and the light from the corridor cast a wide shaft into the room. She scared up a lantern, lit it, and drew it close enough to the animal so she could get a better look.

Rector said, “That’s about the most pitiful thing I ever saw.”

“I have to agree with you there,” she nodded.

The fox’s ribs stuck out through its patchy fur, and its eyes were glassy and gold. They had an odd orange tinge to them—something unnatural and unhealthy, like the crows … except the fox did not appear otherwise well. Its tongue lolled, its eyes bugged, and its ears drooped sadly.

The princess put her hands on her hips. “First things first, then. I’ll get it some water and some food, and we’ll see if it don’t improve.”

In half an hour they’d managed all of these things, and even arranged the old blanket into something like a bed. It’d be more comfortable than the metal mesh, at any rate, and when the door was closed the room was dark and quiet. Once the fox was as comfortable as its human handlers could make it, Rector turned to Angeline and asked, “If it
does
get better, how long do you think that’ll take?”

“Don’t know. But Zeke’ll be pretty patient with it. That boy’s still finding his way. He’s trying to decide who to be, and how to become it, and that’s a difficult thing for anybody … but he’s got a kind heart in him, and that’s more than a lot of people start with.”

Rector scratched at his wrists, which still smarted dully from the Blight burns. “Well, he got picked on a lot, on the outside. It might’ve made him a little soft.”

“That’s not always how it works, you know. Or maybe you and I have a different idea of what soft means. Soft don’t always mean weak; the trees that bend are the ones that weather the storm, after all. You’re a boy from the Sound. You ought to know that. Now come on—let’s leave this little fellow alone and hope for the best. Maybe he’ll take that food and water, and maybe the air down here will clear him out.”

“It don’t work on people.”

“That fox ain’t people.” She ushered Rector out of the room and shut the door behind them both. “Peace and quiet, that’s all we can do for it.”

As if on cue, Houjin came bounding down the corridor, shouting. “Rector, are you down here? Rector?”

“Shh!” Angeline hissed.

Houjin drew up short and stopped himself with a skid. “Sorry, ma’am. I was looking for Rector.”

“So I gathered. What do you want with him?”

“It’s not me, ma’am … it’s Yaozu. He wants him for outside work. Since he knows some of the people out at the tower, and all. Besides, he says he’d rather give Rector a job than wonder what he’s up to.”

Angeline laughed, which surprised both boys. “I never said the man was a dummy, did I? You two run along and make yourselves useful.”

As the two boys ran down the hall to the stairs, Houjin asked, “What was all that about? What were you doing down here?”

“Setting up a room for myself,” Rector said. “And while I was at it, I ran into Miss Angeline, carrying that cage we put out. She caught the fox. We gave it some food and water, and left it in that empty room with the door shut.”

Houjin shook his head and reached for the stair rail. Up he climbed, and he said, “Waste of time. But it’s nice of her to try—and Zeke’ll be glad she caught it. It can be his project, when he gets finished up at Decatur.”

“Why aren’t you up there? Why’d you leave with Yaozu? Is that air captain boss of yours scared of him, or what?”

“Cly’s not scared of him,” Houjin snapped. “The captain’s trying to do what’s best for the underground. Zeke can carry things and move things up at the fort as easy as I can; but he can’t
make
things like I can.”

“What are you making?” Rector asked, partly because he was curious, and partly because he didn’t feel like managing Houjin and his bad mood.

His small question worked. A smile spread out over Huey’s face. “Yaozu had a great idea, but he didn’t know how to make it happen. So I figured it out—it was easy as pie.”

“Well, what
is
this great idea?” They reached the first floor, and Houjin was nearly at a run, so it
must
be something good.

“We’re going to take their dynamite, and use it against them.”

Houjin stopped and faced him, and held out his hands like he could make his point better if he could gesture. “How much do you know about dynamite?” he asked.

“It blows things up.”

“Right. It blows things up, but you don’t want it to blow things up while you’re standing there holding it. You want to be a
long way away
when it goes off,” he said patiently. He’d lapsed into teacher mode.

Rector didn’t care for being talked down to by somebody younger than him, but he was the one who’d asked, and now he had to take the explanation however he could get it. With a minimum amount of disdain, he said, “Obviously.”

“Obviously, yes. You obviously knew that.”

“Just tell me, would you?”

“Fine. In order to control it, you have a couple of choices: You can either give it a very long fuse, and light it, or you can take a very long wire, and use that wire to send the dynamite an electric spark. It’s usually generated by one of those pump boxes: You shove the plunger down, it makes a spark, the spark goes down the line, and boom! But we don’t want to use wire, and we don’t want to use a fuse.”

Rector tried to look like he was following, but he was lost. “Then what would you use?”

Houjin beamed, with a tiny, unnerving edge of mischief that was made sharper by Rector’s irritation. “Time!” He took off again, Rector trailing behind him.

“Time?”

“You heard me! Don’t ask me to explain yet, ’cause it’ll be easier to show you. But for now, you’re on dynamite duty with me—and you have to listen. I’ll show you how to take care of it without blasting yourself to pieces.”

Since this qualified as a noble goal so far as Rector was concerned, he listened hard and promised to do what he was told. Ordinarily he’d make no such vows, but the prospect of blowing himself to Kingdom Come made him infinitely more responsive to instruction.

“But why are we in such a rush?” he asked, and asked it quickly, when Houjin paused to take a breath.

“Because we’re going to the tower.”

“You told me that already. Why are we going back there, when all the action’s at the Station?”

Houjin pushed all his weight into moving the big Vault door, then stepped outside into the main body of the underground. “Because, like you said—all the action’s at the Station. Yaozu just gave the word: His spies are watching the Station and all its entrances, keeping track of the men who are planting the explosives.”

“They ain’t stopping them?”

“No, just watching for now,” he said. From out of his pocket he pulled two scraps of glass the size and shape of spectacle lenses. “Take one of these. They’re polarized. I don’t want to wear those glasses—they look crazy, and they’re too small for me. So I went back down to storage and picked up a different set.”

“Good idea.”

“Thank you.”

Slipping the scrap of glass into his pocket, Rector asked, “Why the tower, though? What are we supposed to do there?”

“Get inside, get a look around, and steal as much dynamite as we can carry. But no more than that,” he added. “We want to leave plenty inside.”

“But why
me
?”

“Why
you
?” Huey stopped and turned around, as had become his habit when he wanted to make sure Rector was paying attention. “Because if you get caught, there’s a good chance you can talk your way out of it. You know some of these men, and they know you—they might assume you were sent along by Otis Caplan or one of his people. If I were you, that’s what I’d tell them, anyway. If we get caught, that is.”

“And what would I tell them about you?”

“Tell them…” He thought about it. “Tell them I don’t speak English, but I hate Yaozu and I’m here to kill him. Or something like that.”

“You think they’ll believe it?”

Houjin shrugged and resumed his trek up the underground version of Commercial Street. “Why not? Plenty of people hate Yaozu and want to kill him. Plenty of Chinese, even, because of how he helped Minnericht be so bad to them those first few years he was inside the wall. But we won’t have to worry about it … as long as we don’t get caught.”

Twenty-three

Out in the city proper, Rector and Houjin struggled against the gloomy, curling, coiling air. Rector found that it gave him headaches if he stared too long, his eyes straining to catch every shape, every scrap of light or shadow that made it past the Blight. He grew tired from the stress of being so persistently alert. Then again, how long had it been since he’d had any sap? He’d count the days, if he could only remember them.

Houjin waved a hand in front of his own face. Behind his mask’s visor, his eyes crinkled into a frown. “It’s not always this bad,” he said.

“I know. It wasn’t this bad the other day.”

“I’m not sure what makes the difference. Maybe it’s the temperature, or how much rain we’ve gotten—or haven’t gotten. Or maybe it’s related to the air currents. We know Blight behaves differently from plain old air.”

“I really couldn’t tell you,” Rector muttered.

They stood on a street corner that wasn’t marked, but since Houjin seemed confident of his location, Rector didn’t worry about it. Not very much, anyway. He made a point to stick close, that was all—especially in the dismal not-daylight there in the too-quiet outer blocks. Sticking close was common sense, it wasn’t chicken.

Thoughtfully, Houjin said, “Maybe I should study it.”

“Do it on your own time, buddy. Which way’s the tower again? I can’t see for shit.”

“This way.”

“I don’t see it.”

Houjin’s voice took on the tone of someone who is trying, in a calculated fashion, to keep from yelling. “I know you can’t see it, but
I
know where it is. Trust me, and be quiet.”

Rector didn’t like being told to be quiet, but he knew it was a good idea, so with a mighty
harrumph
he managed to keep his mouth shut for another five minutes. At no point during those five minutes did he grab for the back of Houjin’s jacket, strong though the temptation became.

When he feared he was falling behind, he said, “A guy could disappear in this stuff, and nobody’d ever find him,” assuming that Houjin would either stop walking or reply.

Softly, Houjin said, “That’s why people come here, as often as not. To disappear.”

Rector hustled to catch up to the other boy’s voice as it trailed through the gas. “Like that nurse?”

Huey paused, and Rector came up beside him, trying not to wheeze, but glad for the brief break. “What? Miss Mercy? I don’t understand.”

“You and Zeke said something about a train, and everybody disappearing.”

“But all those other people didn’t disappear inside here. They just … disappeared. Except for her. She’s been trying to find them, trying to figure out what happened to everybody.”

“Why?”

“Because there were rotters. Outside Seattle.”

“Rotters on a train?”

Houjin’s words took on that tense, impatient quality again. “No, not rotters on a train. But rotters outside the city—all the way out in the Utah Territory, up in the mountains. Miss Mercy thinks they were made when an airship crashed down in Texas.”

Rector had no idea how far away Texas was from Utah, or how far Utah was from Seattle. Quite a ways, he suspected, but he didn’t want to sound dumb, so he didn’t ask.

Houjin resumed walking. Rector kept pace this time, since the way was wide enough to accommodate them both. The streets were not clean, but they lacked the usual thick, wind-heaped detritus of the busier blocks, so the boys’ boots made less noise than their chatter as they crept up the hill.

“How does that work?” Rector asked. “How does an airship in Texas make rotters in Utah?” He was almost proud of himself for how un-dumb that sounded.

“The airship was carrying Blight concentrate for processing down in Mexico. It crashed right on top of people, and turned them. Just like that. Just like the sap does, if you use it too long…”

“Hey!”

“What? I’m not accusing you of anything—only pointing out the connection. The sap kills people the same way as the gas, but it takes a lot longer. And Miss Mercy’s seen lots of drug users at the end of their lives, on the battlefields and in the hospitals. She probably knows more about it, from more angles, than anyone in the world. But when she tried to reach the people from the
Dreadnought
 … it was like they’d never existed.”

Rector didn’t like the sound of that, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. “Or like someone took them away?”

“That’s one theory. That’s
her
theory, anyway. She thinks somebody important wants to keep the sap running, and keep the soldiers stocked up.”

“Why the hell would anybody want to do that?”

Houjin shrugged. “It usually comes down to money.”

“Money,” Rector echoed thoughtfully.

His companion drew up to a sudden stop, smacking him across the chest with his arm to get his attention.

A faint hum rumbled overhead. Nothing too loud, nothing too close.

Rector guessed, “Is that one of the pump rooms?”

“No, look higher. It’s the
Naamah Darling,
see?”

He couldn’t see a damn thing, so he grunted noncommittally.

Huey continued, “I bet they’re testing out the steering repairs. That’s why they’re out here, so they can take the ship low without hitting anything.”

“Except the wall.”

“Captain Cly won’t hit the wall.”

“Even if Zeke’s on board, getting in the way?”

With a snort, Houjin said, “Probably not even then.” He might’ve added something else, but the noise up above changed suddenly, slightly. A loud clapping sound. An engine revving higher. A twist in the ship’s direction that brought it almost immediately overhead.

“Is something happening?” Rector wanted to know, primarily because an airship falling on his head wasn’t high on his wish list of afternoon activities.