Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century #1) 4

Lucy interrupted and agreed. “It was all right. He kept to himself and didn’t bother anybody, and he could be real helpful when he wanted to be. Some of the Chinamen treated him like he was some kind of magician. But,” she was quick to point out, “they didn’t treat him like that forever.”

“What changed?” Briar asked around a mouthful of apple. “And is there anything else to eat around here? I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m starving.”

“Hang on,” Swakhammer said, and he rose to a set of crates that must have functioned as cabinets. While he rummaged, Lucy continued.

“What changed was, people figured out that you could make good money off the Blight gas, if you turned it into lemon sap. And by ‘people’ I mean Doctor Minnericht himself. As I heard it, he was experimenting with it, trying to turn it into something that wasn’t so bad. Or maybe he wasn’t. Nobody knows but him.”

Swakhammer turned around with a tied-up sack. He pitched it to Briar, and it landed on the table in front of her. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Dried salmon,” he said. “What Lucy is leaving off is that Minnericht used to test it on his Chinese friends. I think he wanted them to treat it like opium. But he killed a bunch of them that way, and finally the rest of them turned on him.”

Lucy said, “Except for Yaozu. He’s Minnericht’s right-hand man, and he’s the business arm of the operation. He’s mean as a snake and—in his way—he’s smarter than Minnericht, I’d wager. The pair of them make an amazing amount of money together, running their little empire based on that nasty yellow drug, but God knows what they spend it on.”

“Down here?” Briar took a handful of salmon jerk and gnawed it. It made her even thirstier, and she was out of water, but she didn’t stop.

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Money isn’t worth much down here. People only care about things you can trade for clean water and food. And there’s still lots of houses with good stuff left for salvage. We haven’t combed over every inch of the walled innards by a long shot. All I can figure is that he’s using the money to bring in more metal, more cogs, more parts. More whatever. He can’t manufacture the stuff out of thin air, and most of the metal that’s been found up topside isn’t any good anymore.”

“Why not?”

Swakhammer answered. “Water and Blight rust it out crazy fast. You can slow it down if you oil up your metal parts good, and Minnericht has this glaze he uses—like a potter’s glaze, I guess—that keeps steel from going too brittle.”

Lucy said, “He stays out there, out on King Street—or that’s what he calls it, because he’s the king, or something. No one goes out there and looks too close, though some of the Chinamen keep homes out that way, on the edges of their old district.”

Swakhammer added, “But most of them moved for higher ground, once they got tired of being treated like rats. The point is this, Miss Wilkes: Dr. Minnericht controls almost everything that happens down here. Those airmen—Cly, Brawley, Grinstead, Winlock, Hainey, and the rest of them—they’re all subject to Minnericht. They pay him taxes, sort of, in order to take Blight out; and all the chemists who cook it in the Outskirts, they had to buy the knowledge off him.

“And the runners, and the dealers—they all owe him, too. He set them all up on consignment, saying they could pay him later out of their profits. But somehow, no one ever manages to pay him in full. He adds on interest, and fees, and tricks, and eventually everyone understands that they belong to him.”

Briar gazed down at Lucy’s lone, broken arm and said, “Even you.”

She fidgeted. “It’s been, what did I say? Thirteen, fourteen years now. And somehow, he’s never satisfied. Somehow, there’s always something else I owe him. Money, information, something like that.”

“What if you don’t give it to him?”

Her lips twisted together, hugging each other and finally parting. “He’d come and take it back.” She added fast, “And maybe you think that’s not excuse enough to let myself be owned by the old rascal, but you’ve got two good arms and I don’t have half of a good one without this machine.”

“And Swakhammer?”

He hemmed and hawed, and said, “It’s hard to live down here without certain supplies. I nearly died more times than I could count before I got this gear. And before that, I lost a brother and a nephew. Down here, things run different. Down here, we… we do things that… if people up in the Outskirts knew about them, we’d get hauled up in front of a judge. And Minnericht uses that, too. He threatens to get us all thrown out and left to the mercy of whatever law is left.”

Lucy said pointedly, “And Maynard’s dead. So there’s no one in charge out there who we’d trust as far as we could throw a horse.”

Swakhammer came back around to his original idea. “But if you could tell us for sure it he’s Blue, then people would have a little leverage back against him. You understand?”

Briar tipped her mug upside down and let the last drops of water fall down into her mouth. She set it down hard. “Here’s a crazy question,” she said. “Has anyone tried asking him? I mean, couldn’t someone just walk right up to him and say, ‘Is Minnericht your real name, or might you be a certain Leviticus Blue?’ ”

“I’ll get you some more,” Swakhammer said. He reached for her mug and she handed it over.

He left the room and Lucy said, “Sure, people’ve tried it. He won’t confirm or deny anything. He’s happy to let the rumor grow and spread. He wants to keep us all under his thumb, and the less we know about him—and the more scared of him we are—the happier he stays.”

“He sounds like a real peach,” Briar said. “And I’m still sure he’s not Levi, but it sounds like they’re cut from the same cloth. I don’t mind going down there with you, Lucy. Maybe he won’t even know who I am. You said he didn’t come here until after the walls went up, so maybe he’s not local.”

Swakhammer returned bearing a full mug of water, and behind him came an older Chinese man with his hands folded politely behind his back. Swakhammer said, “Here’s your water, Miss Wilkes, and here’s a message, Miss Lucy. You talk to him. I can’t make heads or tails out of what he’s saying.”

Lucy rattled off an invitation to sit or talk, and the man spoke in a string of syllables that no one present but Lucy could follow. At the end of his spiel she thanked him and he left as quietly as he’d entered.

“Well?” Swakhammer said.

Lucy stood. “He said he just came back from the east tunnel and main blockade down at Maynard’s. He says there’s a mark left out there, a big black hand plain as day. And we all know what that means.”

Briar looked at them questioningly.

So Swakhammer told her, “It means the doctor is taking credit for his handiwork. He wants us to know that the rotters were a special gift from him.”

Nineteen

Ears ringing, Zeke kicked against the hatch until it was wide enough for him to squeeze himself out into the city, which was exactly where he didn’t want to be. But all things being equal, he’d rather be outside in the Blight than inside with the airmen, who were slowly unfastening themselves from their belted seats and moaning or fussing as they patted themselves down.

The silent and inscrutable Fang was nowhere to be seen, until Zeke located him standing beside the captain and looking back at Zeke with one eye.

The captain said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“It’s been fun, but it’s time for me to get going,” Zeke said, trying to come across as droll and not shaken. He thought it’d make a great line to leave them with, but the hatch wasn’t quite clear enough to permit him to pass. He shoved his feet against it, using his legs as levers.

The captain unfolded himself from his leaning seat and murmured something to Fang, who nodded. Then the captain asked, “What’s your name, boy?”

Zeke didn’t answer. He scaled the lip of the hatch, leaving bloody handprints on every spot he touched.

“Boy? Fang, grab him, he’s hurt—boy?”

But Zeke was already out. He leaped to the ground and shoved his shoulders back against the door, jamming it shut only temporarily, but long enough for him to stumble into a run across the compound.

Behind him, from inside the belly of the crippled ship, Zeke could’ve sworn that he heard someone call his name.

But that was ridiculous. He’d never told them what it was.

It must’ve been something else they cried after him, some other word that his ears took to be his name in a fit of confusion.

He swiveled his head left and right, and his vision swam, though the sights told him almost nothing. There were walls—the city walls, he thought at first—but no, these were smaller and made of great, mushy logs with pointed tops; and the spots between them had been cemented with something else, so they presented a uniform front.

Someone on the ship had said something about a fort.

He racked his brains to recall his maps and remembered something about Decatur, where settlers used to hole up against the locals during times of trouble. Was this it?

The log walls that surrounded him looked like they could be punched down in a pinch. They’d been standing and rotting in the wet, poisonous air for a hundred years, or that’s what Zeke guessed in his addled state. A hundred years and they were crumbling to spongy splinters but still standing—and there weren’t any handholds anywhere he could see.

Around him the Blight-fog clumped and cluttered the air, and he could not see more than a few feet in any direction. He was panting again, losing control of his measured breathing inside the mask, and wheezing against the filters. The seals made his face itch, and every gasp he drew tasted like bile and whatever he’d last eaten.