For a while he heard voices conversing entirely in Chinese, and then came the dim sensation of being physically moved, forcibly relocated to some distant place in a cart, or a wheelbarrow, or something else that held him sprawling and left his elbows bruised. After that, he didn’t hear Chinese anymore. He heard English—mostly from men, but sometimes from women.
“Yes, that’s him. A little skinnier than last I saw him, but you can’t mistake that hair.”
“Your boy said his name’s Rector. What kind of name is that?”
“No idea. He might’ve made it up, for all I know—but that’s what everyone called him.”
His eyes opened slowly, independently of each other, one slim crack at a time. The left one stuck a little. His vision cleared enough to pick out the details of a woman. She was leaning over him, her face a little too close for his comfort.
It felt familiar.
He recognized her, and realized this wasn’t the first time she’d loomed over him, wearing a similar frown. His lips parted with the same degree of difficulty as his eyelids. He tried to say her name, but only a cracking wheeze came forth.
Briar Wilkes.
Zeke’s mother.
If he’d had the energy, he might’ve recoiled. She was mean—he knew it firsthand. She’d threatened his life, limbs, and soul after Zeke had gone under the city walls; and now that Zeke was dead, she had plenty of reason to follow through on those threats. He wanted to cringe away from her, to sink farther into the thin mattress (a mattress? Yes … it was definitely a mattress) to avoid her and her inevitable wrath.
“He’s waking up.”
Briar Wilkes said, “If you can call it that. Hey, Rector, can you see me? Do you know what happened? Do you know where you are?”
He tried to shake his head, but it wouldn’t move. His best defense was a pitiful one. He quit the uphill fight to hold his eyelids open, and let them shut, so at least he couldn’t see her.
The other woman said, “It’s all that powder he’s burned up. It’s cooked his brain. Look at him, you can see he’s been using.”
“Worthless kid. Should’ve tossed him right back over the wall.”
“He reminds me of the men in the Salvation Army hospital. I told you about that, didn’t I?”
Miss Wilkes again. “How one of ’em tried to bite you?”
“That’s right. This boy, he’s not that bad yet. It’s not too late.”
“You’ve got more faith in him than I do.”
“Well, I never met him before. Could be he’ll convince me otherwise.”
The second woman had a funny accent, which Rector couldn’t place. As his mind drifted backwards, away from the scene, he wondered where she came from. Didn’t sound local, didn’t sound like one of the Chinamen. And anyway, there weren’t any Chinawomen in the city; everybody knew that.
The next time he came around enough to listen, if not to talk, the same woman was speaking. She had a nice voice, he decided. Not the worst thing he could listen to by a long shot. This time she was talking to someone else—an older man, one of the Chinese fellows. His English wasn’t great, but with some struggle from both sides, he and the woman were able to make themselves understood.
“Too much yellow in his nose.”
“I know. But sometimes, when people … it’s like when people drink too heavy and they come to depend on it. It’s hard for them to stop, and when they do, they get sick. This might be the same thing. He might be just fine when he wakes up proper.”
“Been three days.”
“His color’s better. His head’s healing up, too. Isn’t there some medicine we could try?”
“Time. Water. Tea. Boy not sick. Boy broke himself.”
“You’re probably right.”
The Chinaman added, “If not, you shoot him. Take off his head. Have enough rotters already.”
Rector didn’t stay awake long enough to hear her response. It was easier to faint dead away than to listen to any further discussion of his violent dissection.
When he came around again, no one was talking, but he knew before opening his eyes that he was not alone.
He wasn’t sure how he knew this. It was a quiet, odd sensation of sensing someone else breathing nearby, or someone else’s heartbeat ticking away just outside his hearing. His head felt clammy, inside and out—like someone had left his skull out in the rain. Every limb was numb, and deep within his ears he heard a persistent whistling that was not at all like ringing, except that it was equally irksome.
He opened one eye and blinked it.
The room was dim, but not completely dark, due to the two lanterns at opposite ends of the room. For the first time he saw it clearly enough to note a few details: a row of cabinets without doors stuffed with bottles, tinctures, bandages, and other assorted doctoring supplies; jars with peeling labels and contents the color of whiskey; a barrel of water with a tap and a bucket; rags, some folded and clean, others dirty and piled in a basket; a small crowd of unlit lanterns with mirrors to direct their light as necessary.
And in a chair against the wall a lean figure waited with sharp brown eyes and a long black ponytail. This figure leaned forward and said, “Good morning, Rector. Good afternoon, really. It’s almost dinnertime. Are you hungry? Thirsty? Do you want anything? Miss Mercy said I should get you whatever you asked for, if I could.”
On the one hand, Rector liked the sound of being given whatever he wanted. On the other, he was barely awake and rather confused. All he could muster in response was something like, “What?” And even that single word came out missing half its letters.
The other fellow left his chair and came to stand beside Rector’s bed.
“Water? Is that what you said?”
Close enough.
Rector nodded, realizing that he would like some water, yes, thank you. He struggled to lift his head off the pillow, and somehow dragged his elbow up underneath himself. “Thanks,” he mumbled as he took the offered mug. The water smelled awful and didn’t taste much better, but that only meant that it was local. The Blight gas had to be distilled out of the water for miles around Seattle to be safe, and even then it never tasted as fresh as a mountain stream … or even outhouse runoff.
Rector was used to it. He drank it down and didn’t complain. He’d had no idea how parched he’d become. He asked for more.
His companion obliged, and this time the young Chinaman sat on the foot of the bed while Rector drank down the tepid liquid. The Chinaman drew one leg up beneath himself and began to chatter.
“I’m Houjin, but people call me Huey. Mostly I stay over in Chinatown Underground, as Captain Cly calls it, but sometimes I stay here in the Vaults, too. Why did you come inside the wall? Usually people are running away from something, or running to something.”
But before Rector could respond, Houjin continued. “I mean, I didn’t run here. I came here when I was small, with my uncle. I don’t have any other family.”
“Orphan,” Rector choked out between swallows.
“Yes, both of my parents are dead. But there’s my uncle,” he repeated. “I heard your parents are dead, too. That’s why you lived in the home with the holy women, isn’t that right?”
Holy women? Rector frowned, then said, “Oh, yeah. The nuns. I lived in the Catholic home, that’s right.”
Houjin cocked his head and stared at Rector in a calculating fashion. “You must have been a baby when the Blight came.”
Rector cleared his throat. His voice was coming back. “Not sure. Don’t remember. But they tell me I’m eighteen, so I had to leave the home and make my own way.”
Nodding earnestly, Houjin said, “I’m not eighteen yet, but I make my own way.”
“You have a job?”
“I work on an airship. I’m learning to navigate, and maintain the engines. I want to be an engineer. Sometimes here in the city I work with the men at the Station, and Yaozu pays me to fix things. And sometimes I translate.”
Slowly, Rector propped himse
lf more fully upright. “You mean, Chinese to English? That kind of thing?”
“There’s more than one kind of Chinese, you know. I speak a couple of them, good enough to go back and forth. And my Portuguese is good—better than my Spanish, but I’m learning. And I’m interested in French, too. I went to New Orleans a few months ago. Lots of people there speak French.”
“You’re a regular ol’ dictionary, ain’t you?”
“I like to talk. I like to learn different ways to talk. That’s all.”
Rector felt it’d be polite to throw the younger boy a bone. “You’re real good at it. You’ve hardly got a China accent at all.”
“Captain Cly says I’ve been losing more of my accent the more time I spend on the Naamah Darling. And the longer I spend around Zeke.”
“What’s a—”
Rector almost asked what a Naamah Darling was, but two things stopped him. First, his addled brain caught up to the fact that it must be the airship on which Houjin served. Second, his attention tripped over the word Zeke. So he asked, to make sure he’d heard correctly. “Zeke?”
“Sheriff Wilkes’s son. He’s the only other person down here who isn’t old enough to be my father. He says he knew you, in the Outskirts. He’s the one who told me you’d lived in the home, with the church women.”
“He told you…?”
“We go exploring inside the city all the time, but he hurt his leg out on Denny Hill, and now everyone says we have to be more careful. You can come out with us, if you want, when you feel better. Some of the old houses up there still have valuable things inside. Useful things, anyway. Sometimes. Not always…” His voice trailed off as if he were thinking of a few things in particular, but then it picked up again. “We have to look out for rotters, and for Yaozu’s men, if we get too close to the Station and we’re not supposed to be there. But mostly if you’re quiet, nobody bothers you. And no thing bothers you, either.”
“Zeke,” Rector said again. He wasn’t sure what to add.
“He’s around—do you want me to go get him? He’s been looking in on you, hoping you’d wake up. I know Zeke didn’t have an easy time, being Blue’s son; but he said you weren’t bad to him. I know you were dealing sap out there, and that you ran around with crooks, but Zeke said you’re the one who told him how to get inside.”
“He was … he was an all right kid,” Rector said, his words still dragging. He didn’t want to ask all the obvious questions, because the answers were obvious, too. And he didn’t want to say anything stupid to this Chinaboy because even though he was just some Chinaboy, he sounded awful damn smart, and Rector had a long-standing policy of being nice to smart people, in case they could be useful to him later.
So he didn’t ask any of the things he wanted to ask. And he didn’t say any of the things that were swelling up inside his stomach, all the memories of ghosts and dreams of phantoms, and the horrible haunting he’d undergone at the hands of Zeke.
Well, he thought it was Zeke. But that wasn’t possible, was it?
Zeke is alive. Or else this kid is crazy.
He strongly suspected that Houjin wasn’t crazy. To prove it, he told Houjin, “I’d like to see Zeke, sure. It would be nice to see a familiar face.”
“Great!” he said brightly. “Maybe you’d like some food, too—does that sound good? There’s a kitchen on the next floor down. Do you want to get up and come with me? If Zeke’s not there, he’s out at the fort.”
“Hang on. Let me see.” Rector hauled his legs over the edge of the bed, knees first, then unfolded them and set his feet down on the floor. The floor was rough-hewn but it didn’t creak, and he didn’t feel any splinters against his bare toes. “My socks. They’re gone.”
This observation prompted him to look down at everything else he was wearing, in order to double-check that he was wearing anything at all.
The clothes weren’t his. He didn’t recognize them, but he wasn’t prepared to complain about them. The shirt was sewn from inexpensive blue cotton flannel, but it didn’t have any holes in it. His pants were cotton canvas, too, not wool for winter but lighter for summer—such as it was. They were brown, and there was a long seam sewn tightly across the knee where they’d split and been mended.
He was better dressed now than he was when he’d come inside the wall.
“Whose clothes are these?” he asked, patting himself down. “And where’s my bag? The one I brought with me?”
“The clothes came from the stash downstairs, where the clean and stitched-up things go. Most of the linens don’t come from salvage inside the wall, not anymore. Blight’s too hard on the fabrics, unless they’re treated with rubber or wax. So people down here—they barter, or trade. They collect.” He shrugged, and Rector got the distinct impression that Houjin was talking his way around the fact that he didn’t really know.
“And my things? All my worldly possessions? Did somebody make off with them?”
“Nobody made off with anything, except for you,” Houjin said. The faint tone of accusation wasn’t strong enough to mean anything to Rector until he added, “The satchel you took from the stopover room on Commercial is under the bed. Mr. Swakhammer says you can have it, for now. It’s one of his, but he’s got others.”
“Mr. Swakhammer?”
“Miss Mercy’s father,” Houjin said, which didn’t add much to the store of what Rector knew. “He watches the underground. Him and a few other men down here, and Miss Lucy sometimes. And Sheriff Wilkes, but you already know about her.”
“Didn’t know she was a sheriff. Never heard of a lady sheriff.”
“She took over the position from her father.”
“Her father’s been dead since the wall went up.”
“Yes, but some of the people he freed from jail when the Blight came helped set up the underground. Half the people down here are outlaws, and the other half are outcasts; they like the idea of a lawman who was fair to everyone. And now, Miss Briar is Sheriff Wilkes.” He changed the subject on a dime. “So, do you feel up to coming upstairs? I can always go get Zeke and bring him back, or bring you food if you’re still too weak to manage.”
“I’m not too weak to manage anything,” Rector insisted, though his knees threatened to argue with him. He pushed against them, attempting to leverage himself upright. The first attempt failed. He sat back down and covered for the foible by reaching under the bed to grab his bag. His next effort to rise successfully propelled him into a wobbly, but upright, stance.
“Do you want a cane or a crutch? Something to lean on?”
“Goddamn, you’re helpful. Are you always like this?”
Houjin smiled. It was a peculiar smile. It told Rector that he’d said too much. “I can get you food and water, but only if you can’t get it yourself,” he said carefully.
Rector’s vision spun. He reached out for the headboard and steadied himself.
“Don’t pretend.”
“Don’t pretend what?” Rector asked crossly.
“Don’t pretend you’re sicker than you really are. And don’t pretend you’re any less sick, either. If Miss Mercy sees you, she’ll know. She’ll either send you back to bed, or kick you right out of it.”
“I’m not pretending anything, I’m just getting my feet underneath me. Give me a second, would you? Your Miss Mercy sounds like a holy terror.”
Houjin shook his head. “No, she’s just hard to fool. And while I’m thinking about it, I’ll definitely get you a cane. We have some left over from when Mr. Swakhammer was hurt last year.” He went to one of the cabinets, opened it, and rummaged through several apparatuses that Rector couldn’t identify. Before long, he retrieved a sturdy, polished staff of reddish wood. He almost tossed it toward Rector, who was still teetering, but changed his mind at the last moment and handed it over instead.
“Jesus, Swakhammer must be huge. This thing could hold up a horse.”
“Mr. Swakhammer is a big man. Everyone who lives here is either big and stron
g, or small and fast. Try the cane. See how it feels.”
“It’s fine,” Rector said, testing his weight against the stick and finding that it could easily hold up three or four of him. “A little heavy.” He took a few steps and his legs quivered slightly, but he liked the feeling of being upright. “Let me ask you, Huey—it was Huey, right?”
“Or Houjin.”
“Huey, got it. Tell me, is there a chamber pot?”
“There’s a pot, but there’s also an inside-outhouse down the hall—or, that’s what Miss Lucy calls it. This way.” He pointed out the door and to the right. “It’s not far. There’s a basin in there, too, if you want to clean up a bit.” Houjin said it like a hint.
Rector took it like one. “All right, that sounds fine. Could I talk you into getting me one more cup of water while I’m down there?”
“I’ll dip one out.”
“Thanks,” Rector said over his shoulder. The trip down the hall was slower than he’d have liked, but every step felt like an accomplishment. When he’d finished in the inside-outhouse he returned to what he’d started thinking of as the “sickroom,” and drank one last draught of water before following Houjin in the other direction.
“Where are we going, again?” he wanted to know.
“Kitchen.”
“But we’re underground, ain’t we?”
Houjin nodded, then paused to let Rector catch up. He walked as fast as he talked, unless he remembered not to. “The kitchen has vents up to the topside, and we have a stove or two for cooking, but people don’t use them often. Sometimes Miss Lucy does, and brings food down to Maynard’s for her customers. But usually meals are cold, unless people want to go to Chinatown. We cook there all the time.”
“Never had any China food.”
“You wouldn’t want to walk there, not in your shape. And the carts running between them … they’re mostly for supplies, not people. I have an idea about that, though…” he said. He almost picked up his pace, as if his bright idea were fuel that moved him even more swiftly, but remembered Rector in time to keep from launching down the corridor like a firecracker. “I think we should use pump cars down here, like they do on the railroads above. We have a few, but not enough to keep a regular set of routes.”
The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) Page 7