Once he’d caught his breath, and once the wall had resumed its seamless position behind him, Zeke asked, “What are those lights up there? What powers them? I don’t smell gas, and I don’t see smoke.”
“They are powered by the future.” It was a cryptic answer, but it was not offered with any flair or tease. “This way. I’ll arrange a room for you, and a bath. I’ll ask the doctor if we can scare up any clothes, and perhaps some food and water. You’ve had a long set of days, and they haven’t treated you kindly.”
“Thanks,” he said without meaning it. But he liked the idea of food, and he was thirstier than he’d ever been before in his life—though he hadn’t noticed until the mention of water. “This place is beautiful,” he added. “You’re right. I’m surprised. I’m… impressed.”
“It is easy for it to be beautiful. No one ever treated it like a train station. It was not finished when the Blight came. The doctor and I finished small parts of it, like this waiting area, with the materials that had already been brought for its construction. It was almost perfect, but it needed some alterations.” He pointed at the ceiling, where three giant pipes with fans were installed in a row. They were not turning at that moment, but Zeke thought that the noise of them must have been amazing when they were active.
“Is that for air?”
“Very good, yes. It’s for air. The fans only run a few hours a day, for that is all they’re needed. We bring it in from above the Blight, above the city. We run pipes and hoses up over the wall’s edge,” he said. “That’s why you can breathe in here. But we do not treat this as a living area. The rooms, kitchens, and wash areas are this way.”
Zeke followed almost eagerly, wanting to see what was next. But he noticed before he was ushered out of the gleaming room with its high ceiling and padded chairs that there was a door at the room’s far end. This door was sealed like the others, but it was also barricaded with iron crossbeams and heavy locks.
Yaozu led Zeke to a platform the size of an outhouse and pulled a low gate shut, then tugged at a handle on a chain. Again the sound of metal unfurling clanked and clicked in some echoing distance.
The platform dropped, not like the broken airship but like a gentle machine with a job to do.
Zeke grabbed the gate and held onto it.
When the platform stopped, Yaozu retracted the gate and put a hand on Zeke’s shoulder, guiding him to the right down a hallway lined with four doors on alternating sides. All of the doors were painted red, and all had a lens as big as a penny built into them—for seeing out or seeing in.
The door on the end opened without being unlocked first, a fact that Zeke noted with some confusion. Was it comforting, the impression that they did not mean to lock him in? Or was it unsettling, for he would have no assurance of privacy?
But the room itself was nicer than any he’d ever visited before, plush with thick blankets on a bed with a fat mattress, and bright from lamps that hung from the ceiling and sat on the tables beside the bed. Curtains hung long and thick from a rod on the far end of the room, which struck Zeke as strange.
He stared at them until Yaozu said, “No, of course there’s no window there. We’re now two floors underground. The doctor just likes the look of curtains. Now. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a washbasin in the corner. Make use of it. I’ll tell the doctor you’re here, and I’m sure he’ll see to your wound himself.”
Zeke washed his face in the basin, which nearly turned the water to sooty mud. When he was as clean as he was going to get, he wandered the room and touched all the pretty things he saw, which took a while. Yaozu was right; there was no window, not even a bricked-up place, on the other side of the curtains. It was merely a bare patch of wall covered in the same wallpaper as everything else.
He checked the doorknob.
It turned easily. The door opened, and Zeke poked his head out into the corridor, where he saw nothing and no one except for a few stray bits of furniture against the wall, and a carpeted runner that flowed the length of the corridor. The lifting and lowering platform was still parked, and its gate was open.
The message was clear: He was free to leave if he could figure out how, and if he wanted to. Or that’s how they wanted it to look, anyway. For all Zeke knew, once he got to the lift an alarm might sound and poisoned arrows might fire from a dozen directions at once.
He doubted it, but he didn’t doubt it enough to try anything.
And then he noticed that Yaozu had taken his mask, and he understood the situation a little bit better.
Zeke sat on the edge of the bed. It felt like something smoother and thicker than a feather mattress, and it bounced under his body when he moved. He was still very thirsty, but he’d dirtied the only water in the room. His head hurt, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He was still hungry, but he didn’t see any food handy, and when it came down to it, he was more exhausted than famished.
He pulled his feet up onto the bed without removing his shoes. He curled his knees up and hugged at the nearest pillow, and he closed his eyes.
Twenty
Briar left to wash up, and when she returned, Lucy was sitting in a chair with her arm laid out on a table. The arm was surrounded by bolts, gears, and screws. A Chinese boy who couldn’t have been a week older than Ezekiel was rooting around in Lucy’s wrist joint with an oilcan and a long pair of tweezers.
He looked up at Briar through an elaborate pair of spectacles with adjustable, interlocking lenses attached at the corners.
“Briar!” Lucy said happily, though she was careful not to jostle the arm. “This here is Huojin, but I call him Huey and he doesn’t seem to mind it.”
He said, “No, ma’am.”
“Hello… Huey,” Briar said to him. “How’s her arm coming along?”
He aimed his forehead back down at the splayed machinery so that the lenses would show the work space better. “Not bad. Not great. The arm is a fine machine, but I didn’t invent it or build it. I have to feel my way around it,” he said. His English came glazed with an accent, but it was not very thick and he was quite understandable. “If f had the copper tubes I need, I think I could make it work just right again. But I had to improvise.”
“ ‘Improvise,’ did you hear that?” Lucy laughed. “He reads English out of books. And when he was a little thing, he used to practice it on all of us folks down here. Now he talks a damn sight better than most of the men I know.”
Briar wondered what Huey had been doing down in the underground as a small child. She nearly asked, but then she thought it might not be any business of hers, so she didn’t. She said, “Well, I’m glad he’s here working on you. Can you tell me more about that mark outside of Maynard’s? What does it mean?”
Lucy shook her head. “It means that Minnericht likes to mark his territory like a dog, pissing all over it. I wonder what his gripe was with Maynard’s? He’s left us alone for a while; maybe he just figured it was time to stir things up to keep us paying attention. Or maybe Squiddy still owes him.”
Briar said, “Mr. Swakhammer thought maybe one of Minnericht’s men saw me. Maybe the doctor’s mad that I went down to Maynard’s without visiting him first.”
Lucy didn’t respond. She pretended to watch Huey as he closed up the panel on her arm and sealed it back into place. Finally she said, “That’s possible. He’s got eyes just about everyplace, damn him. And he couldn’t just knock on the door or leave a note, God no. Instead he’s got to send down the dead, soften us up, and maybe pick off a man or two in order to make a statement. I wonder how he’d like it if we went down to the station and popped his locks. Let him deal with the dead in his own home space. It’d be an act of war. And maybe we could use an act of war.”
Huey wrapped up his work and tightened the last screw. He leaned back and pulled the heavy glass contraption off of his forehead. The straps stuck around his ears and then came loose with a snap. “All done, Mrs. O’Gunning. I wish I could fix it up better for you, but that’s the best I can do.”
“Sweetheart, it’s just amazing, and I can’t thank you enough. Anything you want, anything you need—you let me know. Next time the airmen come through town, I can put in a request.”
“More books?” he asked.
“More books. As many books as they’ll carry for you,” she swore. The boy thought for a moment and then said, “When will the Naamah Darling come back again? Do you know?”
“I’m sorry sweetheart, but I couldn’t say. Why? You want to leave a message for Fang?”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “I would like some books in Chinese, and he would know where to get them. He’d know which books are good, I think.”
“Consider it done. I’ll stop by the tower on Tuesday, and ask around for you.” She carefully ruffled her fingers in his hair, and although they were stiff, the gesture came across as friendly as she meant it. “You’re a good one, Huey. A fine boy, and a smart one.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and with a bow, he excused himself back into the halls of the Vaults.
Briar said, “He sure does talk good.”
“I wish I could take credit for it, but I can’t. I just gave him what I had and let him learn it all himself.” She twisted the arm left and right, and up and down. “You know,” she said, “I think this’ll be fine for a while. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to go to Minnericht after all?” Briar asked.
Lucy said, “Maybe, maybe not. Let me give this a few hours and see how it goes. What about you? Are you still interested in going all the way out to King Street to meet him?”
She said, “I think so, yes. Besides, if Mr. Swakhammer’s right, you can’t hide me forever. He knows I’m down here someplace, and he’ll keep trying to flush me out if I don’t go introduce myself. I don’t want to make any trouble for you, Lucy.”
