“I’m trying to help, you stupid kid. I knew it was you,” he added as he took a step back, letting Zeke escape the laboratory and step back into the hall. “I knew it had to be you.”
“Congratulations. You were right,” Zeke said.
There was only one unopened door left. He started toward it, but Jeremiah stopped him. “It’s a storage closet. He wouldn’t be keeping her there. My guess is, he took her down one more level, where his living quarters are” he said.
“These aren’t the living quarters?”
“No. These are the guest quarters.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Yeah, I’ve been here before. Where do you think I got this gear? Get on the lift.”
“You know how to work it?”
Jeremiah didn’t respond except to stomp up to the platform and jerk the gate aside. He held it open for Zeke, who had to run to keep up; the lift was dropping before the boy could land both feet inside it.
While the lift shook and descended, Zeke asked, “What’s going on? No one will tell me what’s going on.”
“What’s going on”—Jeremiah reached up to tug on a lever that must’ve been a brake—“is that we’ve had it up to here with that goddamned deranged doctor.”
“But why? Why now?”
Jeremiah shook his head crankily. “Now’s as good a time as any, ain’t it? We’ve let him treat us like dogs for years, and we’ve taken it, and taken it, and taken it. But now he’s taken Maynard’s girl, and there’s not a Doornail or scrapper down here who’ll stand for that kind of horseshit.”
Zeke felt a surge of real relief, and real gratitude, on top of it. “You really are here to help my mom?”
“She was only down here trying to find you. He could’ve left her out of it, and left you both alone. Obviously,” he said, leaning his weight on the lever and drawing the lift to a stop, “he didn’t. Neither of you ought to be here, but you are. And that’s not right.”
He shoved the gate aside with such force that it broke and dangled.
Zeke kicked his way past it and into yet another hallway lined with carpets, lights, and doors. He could smell a fire burning somewhere. There was a warm and homey scent around its edges, like the burning of hickory logs in a fireplace.
“Where are we? What is this? Mother? Mother, are you down here? Can you hear me?”
Upstairs, something awful happened in one crashing, crushing blast that made Zeke think of the tower when it’d been smashed by the Clementine. He felt that same shuddering immediacy, and being down underneath the world only made the fear worse. The ceiling cracked above him, and the dust of crawlspaces and riggings rained down.
“What was that?” Zeke demanded.
“How the hell would I know?”
A growling roar hummed upstairs in the wake of the explosion, and even Zeke—who had been thinking it’d be a shame if he left the city without ever seeing a rotter—could guess what the sound was.
“Rotters.” Jeremiah said. “A lot of them. I thought the downstairs was better reinforced than this. I thought that was the point of all these levels. I guess Minnericht doesn’t know everything after all, eh? I’d better get upstairs and hold them.”
“You’re going to hold them off? By yourself?”
“Some of Minnericht’s boys might join in; they don’t want to wind up rotter shit any more than I do, and most of ’em are only here because they’re paid to be. By the way, if you hear a big boom in a few minutes, don’t get too worked up about it.”
“What does that mean?” Zeke demanded.
Jeremiah was already back on the lift, thumbing through the levers in search of the right one. He said, “Stay here and look for your mother. She might need help.”
Zeke ran to the edge of the lift and asked, “And then what do I do? Where do we go, when I find her?”
“Up,” the armored man said. “And out—however you can. Things are going to get worse down here before they get better. The rotters moved faster than our boys thought they would. Go back to the Vaults, maybe—or go to the tower and wait for the next ship.”
And then the lift jerked, and lurched, and carried Jeremiah up into the ceiling until even the tips of his toes were gone. Zeke was alone again.
But there were more doors to open, and his mother was missing, so at least he had something to take his mind off the commotion upstairs. The door at the end of the room was open, and since that door represented the path of least resistance—or fastest access—the boy barreled towards it and shoved it inward.
Here was the source of the smoke smell: a brick fireplace with smoldering logs turning the room a golden orange. A blocky black desk squatted in the middle of the floor, atop an Oriental rug with dragons embroidered into the corners. Behind the desk was a fat leather chair with an overstuffed seat, and in front of the desk were two other chairs. Zeke had never been in anybody’s office before and he didn’t know what the point of it might be; but it was a beautiful room, and warm. If it had a bed, it would be a perfect place to live.
Because no one was looking, he walked around the far side of the desk and opened its top drawer. Inside he found papers written in a language he didn’t understand. The second drawer—a deeper one, with a lock that wasn’t fastened—held something more interesting.
At first he thought it was his imagination that the satchel looked familiar. He wanted to believe he’d seen it before, on his mother’s shoulder, but he couldn’t be certain at a glance, so he opened it and jammed his hands inside. His swift rummaging revealed ammunition, goggles, and a mask, none of which he’d ever seen before. And then he found the badge with its ragged MW initials and his mother’s tobacco pouch, untouched for days, and he knew that nothing in the bag belonged to the doctor.
He reached down and scooped it up. When he bent to shove the drawer shut, he saw a rifle stashed under the desk, where it couldn’t be seen except from behind the tall-backed chair where Zeke probably wasn’t supposed to sit.
He snatched the rifle, too.
The room was empty and quiet, except for the flickering chatter of the fireplace. Zeke left it that way and charged back into the hall with his treasures.
There was a door across the way, but Zeke couldn’t open it. He beat against it with Rudy’s warped cane, but when the knob broke it simply fell off, and whatever braced the other side held firm. He flung his weight against it enough times to bruise his shoulder. Nothing budged. But there were other doors to be opened, and he could come back to that one if it came down to it.
The next one across the hall opened into an empty bedroom. And the one next door to it failed to open at all, until Zeke bashed the knob into fragments with the butt end of the cane. The lock tried to hold, but the boy could kick like a mule—and within half a minute the frame splintered, and the door opened violently.
Twenty-six
Briar dreamed of earthquakes and machines so huge that they mowed down cities. Somewhere, at the edge of the things she could hear, she detected the sound of gunfire and something else—or maybe nothing else, because whatever it was, it didn’t come again. Somewhere else it was soft and the lights were turned down low, and the bed was deep enough to cradle a family of four.
It smelled like dust and kerosene, and old flowers dried and left in a vase beside a basin.
Levi was there. He asked her, “You never did tell him, did you?”
From the bed, where her eyes were so heavy she could hardly hold them open, Briar said, “I never told him anything. But I will, as soon as I can.”
“Really?” He did not look convinced; he looked amused.
He was wearing the thick linen apron he often wore in the laboratory workshop, and it was covered by a light coat that went down to his knees. His boots were unlaced, as usual, as if it never occurred to him to fix them. Around his forehead a set of conjoined monocles was strapped, wearing a groove into the skin that never fully went away.
She was too tired to object when he came to sit on the edge of the bed. He looked exactly how she last remembered him, and he was smiling, as if everything was all right and nothing had ever been wrong. She told him, “Really. I’m going to tell him, no matter what it costs me. I’m tired of keeping all these secrets. I can’t keep them all anymore. And I won’t.”
“You won’t?” He reached for her hand, but she didn’t let him take it.
She rolled over onto her side, facing away from him and clutching at her stomach. “What do you want?” she asked him. “What are you even doing here?”
He said, “Dreaming, I think. Same as you. Look, my love. We meet here—if nowhere else.”
“Then this is a dream,” she said, and a sick feeling spread through her stomach like acid. “For a minute I thought it wasn’t.”
“It might be the only thing you ever did right,” he said, moving neither toward nor away from her. His weight on the edge of the bed bowed the mattress and made her feel as if she were rolling or falling into his space.
“What? Not telling him?”
“If you had, you might’ve lost him before now.”
“I haven’t lost him,” she said. “I just can’t find him.”
Levi shook his head. She could feel the motion of it, though she couldn’t see him. “He’s found what he wanted, and you’ll never get him home again. He wanted facts. He wanted a father.”
“You’re dead,” she told him, as if he did not know.
“You won’t convince him of it.”
She crushed her eyes closed and buried her head in the pillow, which almost wanted to smother her with its musty, warm odor. “I won’t have to convince him, if I show him.”
“You’re a fool. The same fool you always were.”
She said, “Better a live fool than a dead—”
“Mother,” he said.
