Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century #1) 4

And in her memory, the shocking, jolting, bashing fury of the Boneshaker machine was moving underneath her again, tearing down basement walls and gutting the underground, pummeling the rocks and digging, blasting, destroying everything it touched.

… She wasn‘t the only one thinking it, she knew. Everyone thought of it, every time another quake wiggled the land.

She wasn’t worried about her father’s house; it had withstood worse. And when she got there, she wasn’t even relieved to find it standing without any obvious damage. Nothing short of finding Zeke on the porch could have slowed her down.

She burst in the door and into the cold, dry interior that was every bit as empty as she’d left it. Her hand stopped at the knob to her father’s room. There was a brief instant of hesitation, a resistance to the breaking of long-established habit. Then she seized the knob and shoved it.

Inside, all was dark until she brought the lantern around. She left it on the bedside table and idly noted that the drawer was still open from where Zeke had stolen the old revolver Rector had mentioned. She wished he’d taken something else. The gun was an antique that had belonged to Maynard’s father-in-law. Maynard himself had never used it and it probably didn’t even work, but, of course, Zeke wouldn’t have known that.

Again she felt that stab of regret, and she wished she’d told him more. Something. Anything. When she got him back, then.

When she got him home, she’d tell him anything he wanted to know—any story, any fact. He could have it all if he’d just make it home alive. And maybe Briar had been a terrible mother, or maybe she’d only done the best she could. It didn’t matter now, when Zeke was in that toxic, walled-up city where undead Blight victims prowled for human flesh and criminal societies lurked at the bottom of rigged-up homes and cleaned-out basements.

But for all the things she’d botched, screwed up, lost, forgotten, lied about, or misled him on… she was going in there after him.

With one hand on each door’s handle, she whipped Maynard’s huge old wardrobe open and stood before it, a determined frown planted firmly on her face. Its false bottom lifted up when Briar popped her thumb down into a hole.

Something tight and heavy squeezed in her stomach.

There it all was, just like she’d left it years before.

She’d tried to bury these things with Maynard. At the time, she couldn’t have imagined ever wanting or needing them. But the officers had come and dug him up, and when they returned his body, it had been stripped of the things she’d used to dress him.

Six months later Briar had come home to find them in a bag, sitting in front of the door. She never did find out who’d returned them, or why. And by then, Maynard had been in the ground too long to disturb him a second time. So the artifacts of his life, the things he wore every day, had gone back into their private drawer underneath the floor of his wardrobe.

One by one she withdrew the items and set them on the bed.

The rifle. The badge. The hard leather hat. The belt with its big oval buckle, and the shoulder holster.

His overcoat hung like a ghost in the back of the four-footed closet. She grabbed it and pulled it out into the light. Black as the night outside, the wool felt trench was treated with oil to resist the rain. Its brass buttons were tarnished but securely stitched, and inside one of the pockets Briar found a pair of goggles that she’d never known he owned. She tore off her own coat and clawed her way into his.

The hat should have been a little too big, but she had a lot more hair than Maynard did, so it all worked out. The belt was too long and the ornate MW buckle was huge, but she threaded it through the loops of her pants, yanked it tight, and locked the big metal plate low on her belly.

In a back corner of the wardrobe was a plain brown trunk stuffed with ammunition, rags, and oil. Briar had never cleaned her father’s Spencer repeater, but she’d watched him do it a thousand times, so she knew the motions. She sat on the edge of his bed and copied them. When it was fresh enough that it gleamed in the low, runny lantern light, she picked up a tube of rimfire cartridges and thumbed the contents into the rifle.

At the bottom of the plain brown trunk, she found a cartridge box. Though the trunk’s lid had gathered fifteen years of dust, the contents appeared sound, so she took the box of additional ammunition and stuffed it into a satchel she spotted lying under the bed.

To the cartridges she added her father’s goggles, her old gas mask from the evacuation days, her pouch of tobacco, and the sparse contents of a coffee jar she kept behind the stove, which amounted to about twenty dollars. It wouldn’t have been that much if she hadn’t just been paid.

She didn’t count it. She already knew it wouldn’t get her very far.

As long as it got her inside the city, it would do. And if it wouldn’t, she’d think of something else.

Through the curtains in her father’s bedroom, the sun was on the verge of rising—and that meant she would be late for work, had she intended to go. It’d been ten years since she’d missed a day, but on this occasion they’d have to forgive her or fire her, whichever they preferred.

But she wasn’t coming in.

She had a ferry to catch—over to Bainbridge Island, where the airships docked and fueled for legitimate business. If the smugglers with their contraband didn’t also originate from the island across the Sound, then surely one of them could point her in the right direction.

She dumped the rifle into the holster that slung over her back, shrugged her way into the satchel, and closed her father’s wardrobe. Then she closed his house, and left it dark and empty.

Seven

By the time Briar reached the ferry, daylight was as full as it was going to get. The sky was coated in a mold-gray film, but there was sun enough filtering through the clouds that she could see a tree-covered island across the water.

Here and there a dome-shaped thing would rise above the trees. Even at this distance, she could see the airships docked and waiting for crews or cargo.

The ferry creaked and dipped when she stepped onto it. There were few other passengers at such an early hour, and she was the only woman. Wind swept off the waves and tugged at her hat, but she held it down, low over her eyes. If anyone recognized her, no one bothered her. Maybe it was the rifle, and maybe it was the way she stood, feet apart with her hands on the rail.

Maybe nobody cared.

Most of her fellow passengers were sailors of one kind or another. Folks on this island either worked the airships or the boats at the pier, because when an airship unloaded on the island, some other means of transport had to take it over the water and into town.

It had never occurred to her to wonder why there were no airship docks any closer to the Outskirts, but now she did wonder, and she could make a guess or two. The rambling, sketchy conclusions she drew bolstered her hopes that they kept away from the public eye for shady reasons. As far as she was concerned, the shadier the better.

After over an hour of bobbing awkwardly across the tide, the creaky, white-painted ferry tied itself to the docks on the far shore.

Side by side the landing areas were pressed up against one another—the wooden piers with their brittle armor of barnacles down at the water line, and the cleared-out lots with great iron pipes that jutted up, out, and back down deep into the earth. A dozen airships in varying states of repair and quality were moored to the pipes, affixed via sets of brass lobster-claw clips as big as barrels.

The ships themselves came in assorted designs. Some were little more than hot air balloons with baskets held up low and close to the balloon’s underbelly; and some were more impressive, with buckets that looked like the hull of a water-running vessel—but built onto a hydrogen tank and propelled with steam thrusters.

Briar had never been to Bainbridge. Unsure of where to start, she stood in the middle of a landing where even the tradesmen were only just beginning to bustle. She watched as the crews arrived and as men shifted cargo from bucket to cart, and then from cart to boat.

The process wasn’t smooth, but it managed to move the incoming products from air to water in a quickly clicking cycle.

Before long, one of the smaller airships gave a lurch, and two crewmembers slid down the mooring ropes to disengage the docking clips. The clasps unhinged and swung free, and the men scrambled back up the ropes into the bucket. From there, they reeled the clips up to the vessel’s edge and hung them around the exterior.

An older man in a captain’s hat paused near Briar to light a pipe.

She asked him, “Excuse me, but which of these ships is going closest to the Seattle wall?”

He gave her a knobby-browed glare over the pipe, summing her up as he sucked at the stem. He said, “You’re on the wrong side of the island for that kind of question, missy.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you should take that road there.” And he used the pipe to point at a muddy, flattened trail that disappeared back through the trees. “Walk as far as it’ll take you. You might find someone who can answer you better.”

She hesitated, her arm on her satchel because she felt the need to hold something. Another airship was unlocking itself from the pipework dock, and a new one was hovering over the lot. On the side of the airborne ship she saw a name painted, and then she realized it was a company name, not a ship name.

“Ma’am,” the man called to her.

Briar returned her attention to him and caught the way his gaze flicked from her belt buckle to her eyes.

He continued. “The island’s not that big. It won’t take you long to find your way over to the… alternate commercial row, if that’s what you’re looking to do.”

She thanked him, considered the muddy stretch of semi-road, and said, “You’re very kind.”

He replied, “No, but I do my best to be fair.”

Someone nearby called a name, and the man in the hat responded to it with a wave and a nod. Briar looked at the trail again and noticed that no one else was walking it.

She wasn’t sure if nonchalance or outright sneaking was called for, so she tried to meld the two into a quiet retreat that took her up a slight hill and out to the overgrown path with its deep ruts.