Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century #1) 4

So she understood, but that didn’t mean she liked it, and that didn’t mean she liked the red-haired beanpole of a boy who answered her loud and impatient summons.

She pushed her way past a nun in a heavy gray habit and cornered Rector, whose eyes were too big and too earnest to be innocent of anything.

“You,” she began with a finger aimed high, up under his chin. “You know where my son is, and you’re going to tell me, or I’m going tear your ears off and feed them to you, you dirty little poison-pushing wharf kitten.” All of it came out without rising into the territory of yelling, but every word was as heavy as a hammer.

“Sister Claire?” he whimpered. He’d retreated as far as he could and there was nowhere left for him to go.

Briar shot Sister Claire a look that would’ve rusted metal, and returned her attention to Rector. “If I have to ask twice, you will regret it for the rest of your life—however long that may be.”

“But I don’t know. I don’t. I don’t know,” he stammered.

“But you can guess, I bet, and it would probably be a very good guess, and so help me if I don’t hear some guesses coming out of your mouth I will do you great and terrible bodily harm, and there isn’t a nun or a priest or anyone else in a God-given uniform who will recognize you when I’m finished. The angels will weep when they see what’s left of you. Now, talk.”

His frantic stare went wildly back and forth between Briar, the openmouthed Sister Claire, and a priest who had just entered the room.

Briar caught on just in time to keep from punching the boy in the gut.

“I see, all right.” He didn’t want to talk about business in front of his landlords.

She seized his arm and pulled him forward, saying over her shoulder, “Pardon me, Sister and Father, but this young man and I are going to have a little talk. We won’t be but a moment, and I promise, you’ll have him back before bedtime.” And then, under her breath as she led the kid out into the stairwell, “Kindly keep in mind, Mr. Wreck’em, that I made no promises about your condition when I return you.”

“I heard, I heard,” he said. He bounced off a corner and tripped over a stair as Briar pulled him down.

She didn’t know where she was leading him, but it was dark and quiet, and only a pair of tiny wall lamps and Briar’s lantern kept the stairs from being impossible to navigate.

Down by the basement there was a narrow spot behind the steps.

She jerked Rector to a halt and forced him to face her. “Here we are,” she told him in a growl made to terrorize a bear. “No one else to hear. You talk, and you talk fast. I want to know where Zeke went, and I want to know now.”

Rector shuddered and slapped at her hand, trying to peel her fingers off of his slender bicep. But she didn’t let go. Instead, she squeezed harder, until he made a sharp whine and rallied enough nerve to twist himself out of her grasp.

“All he wants is to prove that Leviticus wasn’t crazy or a crook!”

“What makes him think he can do that? And how could he even begin such a task?”

The boy said, with far more caution than innocence would merit, “He might’ve heard a rumor from someplace.”

“What rumor? From whereplace?”

“There were stories about a ledger, weren’t there? Didn’t Blue say that the Russians paid him to do something funny with the test?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Levi said that. But there was never any proof. And if there was proof, you couldn’t prove it by me—because he never showed it to anyone.”

“Not even you?”

“Especially not me,” she said. “He never told me a thing about what he was doing in that laboratory, with those machines. He sure as hell never shared any of the money details.”

“But you were his wife!”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. She’d never figured out for certain if her husband had kept so quiet because he didn’t trust her, or because he thought she was stupid. It was likely a bit of both.

“Look, ma’am, you must have known Zeke was wondering when he started asking questions about it.”

Briar hit the stair rail with her free hand. “He never asked any questions! Never once, not since he was a little boy, has he asked about Levi.” And she added, more quietly, “But he’d been asking about Maynard.”

Rector was still staring, still cornered, still backed as far away from Briar as he could get. This was the point where he ought to have interjected something helpful, but he stayed quiet until she brought her fist back around and hit the metal rail again.

“Don’t,” he said, holding out his hands. “Ma’am, don’t… don’t do that. He’ll be fine, you know. He’s a smart guy. He knows his way around, and he knows about Maynard, so he’ll be all right.”

“What do you mean by that? He knows about Maynard? Everybody knows about Maynard.”

He nodded, bringing his hands back down and closer to his chest, ready to defend himself if it came to that. “But Zeke’s his grandson, and people will look out for him. Not, well…” He stopped himself, and started again. “Not all the people everywhere, but where he’s going, what he’s doing—the kind of folks he’s likely to meet? All those people, they know about Maynard, and they’ll look after him.”

“All those people where?” she asked, and the last word came out with a gulp of anguish, because she knew—even though it was impossible, and crazy. She knew where, even though it didn’t make any sense at all.

“He’s gone… He went…” Rector lifted his index finger and pointed in the general direction of the old city.

It took every ounce of willpower Briar could summon to keep from cracking the boy across the face; she didn’t have enough left over to keep herself from shouting, too. “How would he do that? And what does he plan to do when he gets over the wall and he can’t breathe, or see—”

Rector’s hands were up again, and he’d found enough nerve to step forward. “Ma’am, you have to stop shouting. You have to stop.”

“—and there’s no one there but the leftover, locked-in, shambling rotters who will grab him and kill him—”

“Ma’am!” he said loud enough to interrupt, and almost loud enough to get himself kicked. But it stopped her tirade, just for a beat, and it was long enough for him to blurt out, “People live in there!”

What felt like a long stretch of silence followed. Briar asked, “What did you say?”

Trembling, retreating again, stopping when his shoulders pressed against the bricks, he said, “People live there. Inside.”

She swallowed hard. “How many people?”

“Not very many. But more than you might expect. Folks who know about them call ’em Doornails, ’cause they’re dead to the rest of the world.”

“But how… ?” She rocked her head back and forth. “That’s not possible; it can’t be. There’s no air in the city. No food, no sun, no—”

“Hell, ma’am. There’s no sun out here, either. And the air, they found a way around that, too. They sealed off some of the buildings and they pump it down from up top—from over the side of the wall, where the air’s clean enough to breathe. If you ever hiked all the way around it, you’d see the tubes sticking up on the far side of the city.”

“But why would anyone do that? Why go to all the trouble?” And then a horrible thought flickered through her mind and tumbled out of her mouth. “Please tell me they aren’t trapped in there!”

Rector laughed nervously. “No, no ma’am. They aren’t trapped. They just…” He lifted his shoulders into a shrug. “They stayed.”

“Why?” she demanded in a short warble of near-hysteria.

He tried again to hush her, patting the air with his hand, begging her for a lower voice and a quieter exchange. “Some of ’em didn’t want to leave their homes. Some of ’em got stuck, and some of them thought it’d all blow over.”

But he was leaving part of it out; she could tell it from his new burst of nervousness. “And the rest of them?” she asked.

The boy dropped his voice to a harsh whisper. “It’s the sap, ma’am. Where do you think it all comes from, anyway?”

“I know it comes from the gas,” she grumbled. “I’m not a fool.”

“Never said you were, ma’am. But how do you think people get the gas in the first place? Do you know how much sicksand the Outskirts produce? A lot, that’s how much. More than anybody could ever make just from boiling it out of the rainwater.”

Briar had to admit, that’s how she’d assumed people made the drug—either that, or from the waste cast off by the Waterworks. No one seemed to know what became of the containers of processed Blight resin after it was barreled up to cool. She’d always suspected that it was swiped to be sold on some market or another, but Rector insisted otherwise. “It doesn’t come from what you folks cook out of the groundwater at the ’works, either. I’ve known a chemist or two who got a hand on that mess, but he said you couldn’t do anything with it. He said it was useless, just poison.”

“And lemon sap is something better?”

“Lemon sap, God,” he blasphemed with a sneer of derision. “That’s what the old folks call it, sure.”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t care what you kids call it, I know what it is when I see it—and I’ve seen it do worse to people than poison them. If my father were still alive he’d…” She didn’t know how to finish. “He would’ve never stood for it,” she said weakly.

“Maynard’s dead, ma’am. And maybe he wouldn’t have liked to know it, I couldn’t say, but he’s the closest thing to a patron saint that some of us have got.”