Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century #1) 4

“I… I don’t know.” Lucy clammed up, but Minnericht wasn’t finished with the subject.

He said, “Oh, I see what he was trying to do. Of course, he couldn’t have known what kind of heat the friction inside can generate, so he wouldn’t have known that this couldn’t work. Even so, I do want to meet him. I think that’d be a fair means of repayment, don’t you, Lucy?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded like she might be choking. “I don’t know if his grandfather will let him—”

“Then bring his grandfather too. The more the merrier, as they say.” But it didn’t sound merry at all to Briar, who wished that the compartment were bigger—if only so she could farther remove herself from the man’s presence.

“Miss Briar,” he said, suddenly directing his attention her way. “Could I impose upon you for a very small favor?”

She said, “Sure, ask.” Her throat was too dry to carry the message with any coolness.

He used his screwdriver to indicate a place. “Behind you, over there. If you turn around, you’ll see a box. Could you bring it to me, please? ”

The box was heavier than it looked, and she would’ve preferred to hit him over the head with it than hand it to him; but she lifted it off the table and carried it to his side. Beside him, there was a cleared space on the bench. She placed it there and backed away again.

He still did not look at her. He said, “You know, Miss Briar, I can’t bite you through this mask.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” she said.

“I’m forced to wonder what dear Lucy here has told you of me, to send you so far out of my reach. Won’t you have a seat?”

“Won’t you tell me if you’ve seen my son?”

His hand froze and the screwdriver hung midair, suspended in his grip. He dipped it again, gave it a twist, and reached for a fresh tube from the box. “I’m sorry. Were we talking about your son?”

“I believe he was mentioned.”

“Did I mention that I’d seen him?”

“No,” Briar admitted. “But you didn’t say you hadn’t. So pardon me if I get a little more direct.”

Minnericht closed the panel that exposed the insides of Lucy’s arm; she tested it, and her face registered the deepest sort of relief as it worked in all the ways she required. She singled out her fingers and pointed them as if she were counting, then bent her wrist forward, backward, and left to right.

The doctor slid sideways, pivoting on his hip to face Briar while remaining seated. “Did you ask the airmen? Captain Cly—he’s the fellow on the Naamah Darling, isn’t that right?—he sees and hears more than most men. Perhaps it’s that unnatural height of his.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Briar said, and she hated herself for being childishly rude. It wouldn’t serve her purposes, and it wouldn’t move him to help her, but there was an old pattern in play and she couldn’t find a different track. She was angry, and frightened on top of that, and in those conditions she regressed into someone she didn’t like. “I asked him, and I asked every other airman who’d give me five minutes of his time. No one’s seen hide nor hair of him, which isn’t so crazy given that he came in from the water runoff, not from the sky.”

A flicker of the gleaming, flickering blue lights behind the mask almost implied a lilted eyebrow. He said, “Then why didn’t you do likewise? Surely it would’ve made for a much less… traumatic entrance into our fine and Blighted city.”

“The earthquake the other night. It flattened the tunnel and I had to come another way. Believe me, dropping a thousand feet through a tube into a furnace wasn’t my idea of a fun time, either.”

“It’s not nearly a thousand feet,” he murmured. “It’s only a couple hundred. But that’s useful to know, about the runoff tunnel. I’ll need to get it repaired, and the sooner the better. I’m surprised that you’re the first to say something about it. I would’ve thought…”

Whatever he’d been prepared to say, he abandoned it and said instead, “I’ll make a point to have it fixed. But tell me, Miss Briar, how did you intend to leave the city? If you knew the tunnel had collapsed, what sort of exit did you plan for him?”

“Where’s my son?” she asked bluntly, again forcing that sharp change of subject.

His answer oozed with something too theatrical to be meaningful. “Whatever makes you think I know?”

“Because if you didn’t know, you would’ve said so by now. And if you know where he is, and you’re giving me this runaround, then you must want him for something—”

“Miss Briar,” he interrupted, with more volume than was strictly necessary. The force of his voice, laden with strange weights and brass bells, brought her to silence in a way that chilled her. She didn’t mean to obey him when he told her, “There’s no need for abruptness. We can talk about your son if you like, but I won’t be subject to your accusations or demands. You are now a guest in my home. So long as you act the part, you may expect to be treated accordingly.”

Lucy’s breaths were coming in quick, asthmatic squeezes that counted the time like a second hand on a pocket watch. She still hadn’t risen from her seat on the bench, and now she looked positively unable to. The barkeep’s skin was nearly green with fear, and Briar thought that she might vomit at any moment.

But she didn’t, not then. She held herself upright and dry, and she said, “Please, I think—Briar, I think—let’s all stay calm. There’s nothing to be short about. We’re guests; it’s like he said.”

“I heard him.”

“Then I’d ask you, for my sake, to accept his hospitality. He says you can talk, and he’ll let you talk. I’m only asking you—in a motherly way, if you don’t mind it—to mind your manners.”

It wasn’t motherly at all, the way she was suggesting restraint. It was the trembling attempt of a child trying to appease two bickering parents.

Briar swallowed whatever else she was going to say. It took her a moment; she was forcing down a great knot of things she wanted to shout. And then she said, with words she’d measured as neatly as buttonholes, “I’d appreciate the chance to speak with you, yes. Whether it’s here in your home, as a guest, or elsewhere, I have no preference. But I only came here for one thing—not to make friends, or to be a pleasant guest. I came here to find my boy, and until I do, you’ll have to forgive me if my attention lies somewhere other than my manners.”

The blue lights behind his mask—those flame-bright nubs that stood in place of his eyes—did not blink or waver. He said, “I understand, and my forgiveness surely follows.” And immediately afterward, a gentle pinging noise sounded from his chest.

For one irrational, delirious moment Briar thought it must be his heart, a carved or assembled thing without a soul or a drop of blood; but he reached into a pocket to remove a round gold watch, checked its face, and made a small grunt.

“Ladies, I see that it’s getting late. Please allow me to offer you quarters for the evening. It won’t be the Vaults, but you might find it suitable, regardless.”

“No!” Lucy said, too fast and too loud. “No, we couldn’t impose on you like that. We’ll just be heading on our way.”

Briar argued, “Lucy, I’m staying until he tells me what he knows about Zeke. And I’ll stay as a guest if that’s how he wants it. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” she added. She looked into Lucy’s eyes with what she hoped was a meaningful gaze, and she said softly, “I won’t take it personal if you want to see your own way home, now that you’re all fixed up.”

It wasn’t just fear Briar saw on Lucy’s face. Suspicion crept there too, and curiosity too strong to be extinguished even by terror. “I won’t leave you here alone,” she said. “And anyway, I don’t want to go back by myself.”

“But you could, if it came to that. I’m happy for your company,” Briar said, “but I wouldn’t ask you to stick around if you don’t want to.”

Minnericht rose from the stool and assumed his full height once again. Briar was closer to him now, and she couldn’t decide, or couldn’t remember, if his height: was the same as Levi’s—or if he was shaped the same way.

He said, “Actually, come to think of it, Lucy—I have a bit of an errand I’d like for you to run.”

“You already said you wanted me to bring Huey out here, and that would pay you for fixing the arm.” She did not sound even remotely charmed by the prospect.

“And I note you made me no such promise or agreement,” he said with some displeasure. “But that’s neither here nor there. You’ll bring him here, or you’ll wish you’d done so later. I thought you valued Maynard’s, Miss Lucy. I thought it was worth something to you. Worth preserving, if nothing else.”

“Don’t be a bastard,” she spit, her own manners forgotten in the face of his unveiled threats.

“I’ll be a bastard and worse, if it pleases me.”

Briar thought she could see some curtain being drawn aside; she could see one mask sliding slowly away, even as the one he wore seemed bolted onto his very skeleton. He said, “Tomorrow or the next day, you’ll bring me Huey so that we can discuss tinkering and other assorted things; and tonight, you will go out to my fort.”

“Decatur?” Lucy asked, as if the prospect honestly surprised her. Briar did not like his claim to the place.

“Yes, I want you to go there and deliver a message for me,” he declared. “We have more unexpected guests inside our walls than just your friend here, and I want to make sure they understand their place.”

“And what place is that?” Lucy asked.