Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century #1) 4

“It’s a lantern.”

“What kind?”

“A good and bright one, that the rain won’t likely put out,” she said. “Now get yourself up, boy. We need to get you up a few floors to the tower’s top, where the ship’s hanging tight. It’s a piecemeal, hodgepodge of a pirate’s thing called the Clementine. And just so you know”—she lowered her voice—“when I said that the captain’s flying a new ship, I didn’t mean it’s a brand-new craft. I mean, like as not he stole it.”

“And you’re just gonna hand me over to him?” Zeke grumbled. “I don’t like the sound of that—pirates dropping me over a wall.”

But she insisted, “They won’t give you no guff. I’ve bought ’em off good, and they know me too well to hurt you once I’ve taken their word. They won’t treat you too softly, but they won’t hurt you none worse than you’re already battered.”

Alternately motherly and general-like, the princess ushered him into the rubble of the stairwell and told him, “Come on, now. The way upstairs is more clear than it looks. Everything dumped out at the bottom, same as you.”

Zeke didn’t know how to feel as he followed her spry, sidestepping climb. There was absolutely no light except for the peculiar white gleam of Angeline’s lantern, even when they scaled a flight or two and he could see through the empty, unfinished floors how black the night was on the other side of the windows. It was dark, and so late that it’d become early.

“I left her a note, but… my mother’s going to kill me.”

The princess said, “That all depends on timing. The trick is, you’ve got to be gone long enough that she stops being mad, but starts to worry… but you don’t want to make her worry too much, otherwise she’ll tip back over to anger.”

Zeke smiled in his mask as he rose behind her. “You must have kids of your own.”

She did not smile back. Zeke knew because he did not hear an upturned twitch of her mouth when she hesitated on the next debris-littered stair and kept walking. She said, “I had a daughter once. A long time ago.”

Something in her tone kept Zeke from following up with any polite inquiries.

He huffed and puffed up after her, marveling at her energy and strength; and he found other inappropriate things to wonder and stifle. He was desperate to ask how old she was, but he bit that question back only by asking instead, “Why do you dress like a man?”

“Because I feel like it.”

“That’s weird,” he said.

She replied, “Good.” And then she said, “You can ask the other question if you want to. I know you’re wondering. You wonder it so loud I can almost hear it. It’s like listening to the crows outside.”

Zeke had no idea what any of that meant, but he wasn’t about to directly ask how long she’d walked upon the earth, so he came at it sideways. “How come there aren’t any young people here?”

“Young people?”

“Well, Rudy’s old enough to be my dad, at least. And I saw some Chinamen, but most of them looked that old or… even older. And then there’s… you. Is everyone down here…”

“Old?” she finished for him. “Keeping in mind that your idea of old and my idea of old are two different things, you’ve noticed rightly. And sure enough, there’s a reason for it. It’s an easy reason, and you could think of it yourself if you tried hard.”

He pushed a toppled beam up out of his way so he could walk past it instead of climb under it. “I’m a little busy for thinking,” he told her.

“Well ain’t that something. Too busy for thinking. Busy is when you ought to think the fastest. Otherwise, how you expect to last down here any longer than a flea lasts on a dog?” She paused on a landing and waited for him to catch up to her. Lifting the lantern and looking up and down, she said, “I hear them up there, the men on the ship. They aren’t real sweet, not any given one of them, but I think you’ll be all right. You’re willing to think on the fly, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, then tell me now, while we walk, why there aren’t hardly no kids like you down here.”

“Because…” He recalled Rudy’s mention of the Chinese men and why they had no women. “There aren’t any women here. And women usually take care of kids.”

She pretended to be offended, and said, “No women? I’m a woman if ever you saw one. We’ve got women down here.”

“But I meant young women,” he babbled, and then heard how wrong it was. “I meant, younger women than… I meant, women who might have babies. I know there aren’t no Chinese women. Rudy said so.”

“Well, what do you know? Rudy told you the truth about something. He was right there, yes. There ain’t no Chinawomen here in the city, or if there are, I ain’t seen them. But I tell you what, I know of at least one other woman who lives down here. She’s a one-armed bar-keep named Lucy O’Gunning, and one arm or many, she’ll break down doors or men or rotters. She’s a tough old bird,” Angeline said with no small trace of admiration. “But saying that, I should also say, she’s old enough to be my daughter. And she’s old enough to be your mother—or maybe even your grandmother. So keep thinking, boy. Why aren’t there any young folks here?”

“Give me a hint,” he begged, chasing after her, up the next clogged and dusty flight of stairs. He didn’t know how many they’d scaled, but he was tired and he didn’t want to climb any farther. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t slowing down, and she was the one with the light, so he tagged along behind.

“You want a hint, all right. How long ago did the walls go up?”

“Fifteen years,” he said. “Give or take a couple of months. Momma said they were finished on the day I was born.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s how I heard it,” he swore.

And he began to think of how many years fifteen was, if you weren’t a baby to start with. He thought about how old his mother had been—barely twenty, fifteen years ago. He tried, speaking slowly as he worked to breathe against his mask and his exhaustion, “Most of the folks in here, have they been here all this time?”

“Most of them, yep.”

“So if they were grown men—and women,” he added fast, “in their twenties and thirties… now they’re all in their thirties and forties, at least.”

She stopped and swung the light around, nearly clapping him in the forehead. “There you go! Good boy. Good thinking, even while you’re panting like a puppy.” After a thoughtful pause she added, “I hear there’s a couple of boys down in Chinatown, brought inside by their dads or uncles. Orphans, some of them might be. I don’t know. And Minnericht, since that’s what he calls himself—he’s been known to bring down a younger crew once in a while. But you got to understand, most people who didn’t start out down here… they can’t get used to it. They don’t stay long. I can’t say as I blame them.”

“Me either,” he said, and he wished hard for three wishes—the very first of which would send him home, should the universe be so kind. He was worn out, and nauseous from the filtered, stinking air, and his skin was smudged raw around all its edges. The face of the murdered Chinese man kept flitting through his mind when he shut his eyes, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near the body—not even within the same city walls.

“Soon,” Angeline promised him.

“Soon?”

“Soon, you’ll be out and on your way home.”

His eyes narrowed behind his visor and he said, “Can you read people’s thoughts or something?”

She said, “No. But I read people pretty good.”

Zeke could hear a background hum then, above him and off to the left—the banging din of tools against steel and the hoarse swearing of unhappy men in protective masks. Every now and again the building would quiver as if it’d been struck again, and each of these shocks made Zeke grab for the wall to steady himself. Rudy was right about two things. There were no women in Chinatown, and there were no rails in the unfinished tower.

“Miss Angeline?” he broached, and around the next corner the world grew a few shades lighter, or he thought it did.

“What is it?” she asked. “We’re almost there. See? The windows are more broken, and what’s left of the moonlight’s coming inside. We’re right up close to where they crashed against the side of this old place.”

“That’s fine. I was just wondering. Rudy wouldn’t say, and you haven’t mentioned—who’s this Dr. Minnericht you’ve both been talking about?”

The princess didn’t quite stop, but she jerked and shuddered, like she’d seen a ghost or a murder. Something in her posture tightened and coiled. She looked like a skinny-armed clock wound up too tight and ready to break.

She said, “That ain’t his name.”

And she turned around to him, again almost hitting him with her lantern, for she didn’t know how close he trailed in her wake. Even inside the mask her face was a shadowbox of canyons and peaks; her hawk’s-beak nose and deep-set, slightly slanted eyes made a map of someone’s anger.

With her free hand she grabbed Zeke’s shoulder and pulled him close, until the warm white light was almost a burn against his face. She shook him and pulled him near, and she said, “If something goes wrong, perhaps you ought to know—we’re in his land, in this part of the city. If hell comes for us with a handbasket and a one-way ticket and you don’t make this ship, or if you fall, and if he finds you, you may as well be prepared for him.”

Upstairs the men were swearing louder, speaking in English with a world’s assortment of accents. Zeke tried not to hear them, and tried not to see the cavernous wrinkles in the princess’s leather face. But he was transfixed by her rage, and he couldn’t move, even to disentangle his stare from hers.