The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century)

by Cherie Priest

  “I know, I know.” Rector swallowed hard, and dragged his hand along the wall. “I just wish we were using lanterns. Or we could break out these stupid spotlights. They’re heavy, I swear to God.”

  “If we had lanterns, we’d be real easy targets.”

  “I know,” he said again. “But how far off course do you think we went?”

  “Can’t be that far.” Zeke stepped around him and put his free hand on the wall. “The wall runs in one big circle, so it’s not like we’ll get lost now. If we follow it north and east, we’ll run right into the park.”

  “That’s not the world’s most comforting thought in the world.”

  “At least we’ll know where we are.”

  What Zeke didn’t say, and Rector didn’t bring up, was that they had no idea where along the wall they were—and they had only a few hours worth of filters in their bags. If they didn’t find the breach, or the tower, or some other landmark soon, they’d be in trouble.

  Both boys knew it, and they thought about it.

  It was the only thing that kept them quiet for the next fifteen minutes.

  Fifteen minutes was long enough. It gave them time to determine that yes, this was the wall, and not a wall belonging to some oversized building; and it gave them time to get within earshot of the great breach, the broken place where poisonous air oozed out into the Washington Territory. Out near the breach the Blight thinned, becoming less dense from the leak that spooled out into the woods like sludge running down a drain. Their candlelight went farther. The boys took pains to cover the glass with their gloved hands, and then Zeke blew out his own light entirely.

  At the breach, there were people talking, but it was too quiet, too distant yet, to recognize any of the voices. “Take the tail of my jacket,” Rector whispered. “Crouch down low behind me. We don’t want to get separated.”

  “Are they from the tower?”

  “Don’t know.”

  They drew up closer, knowing that their allies ought to be approaching the big, ugly break in the wall as well—but not knowing if they’d arrived ahead of them, or if these were other men coming inside from the Outskirts to reinforce the impending fray.

  But then Rector saw lanterns, and heard a loud clang that shook the whole block. He and Zeke stopped moving, stuck right where they were with one foot up and half a breath drawn in. Then they heard, “Be careful with that!” They knew the voice.

  “It’s Huey!” Zeke said with relief.

  Huey went on to inform some unseen person, “And keep it away from the gas lamps. Keep it away from all the lamps, until I say so. We’ll need to pour it in a few minutes. Mr. Harper, do you have those pipes set up? Those hydraulics?”

  “Almost,” Mr. Harper grumbled back.

  Rector stood up straight and said, in an almost normal speaking voice, “Hey, Huey, and whoever else you got over there…”

  The sounds of guns snapping to attention stopped him short.

  He threw his hands into the air.

  “I was just going to say,” he continued, “that it’s only me and Zeke. Don’t anybody shoot us!”

  “Hey guys!” Houjin said cheerfully. Rector still couldn’t see him through the gathered murk, but when the boy’s shape emerged from the blackened fog, he recognized the gait and the general shape. “Everybody put down your guns.”

  Someone—Mr. Harper, Rector assumed—groused something about being ordered around by a schoolyard full of boys, but none of the boys in question gave a damn.

  “How much longer before it starts?” Zeke asked.

  Houjin looked anxiously up at the wall, and out through the darkness toward the tower. “Not sure, but not long. You two had better get in position.”

  Rector said, “We’re headed there now. Got sidetracked.”

  “Sidetracked?”

  “Lost,” Zeke clarified. “It’s dark.”

  “Do you know where you’re supposed to go?”

  Zeke nodded. “Roof of the old governor’s mansion. Climb up the back side, where the wall’s done fallen away, and up top we’ll find extra gas for the lights.”

  “Yaozu made you memorize that, huh?”

  “More or less.”

  “All right, then go on,” he told them almost reluctantly. “I’ve got work to do here. Be careful.”

  Rector slapped him on the shoulder. “You, too, Huey. Now, you want to point us toward this governor’s mansion?”

  “Straight up the hill, count four blocks, and it’s the big white house on the right. Can’t miss it.”

  “I could miss a city full of houses at this time of night,” Zeke said ruefully. “But I can count four blocks.”

  Before they left, a Chinese messenger came running up to Houjin. He had a lantern in his hand, and sweat had dampened his shirt. His mask’s visor was filled with condensation, and his eyes were wide. He rattled off something fast that Rector didn’t understand, but Houjin made a snappy reply and then translated the highlights.

  “The Station men are setting up the pump boxes now. Rector, Zeke—you’d better run!”

  Faster than they should have, Rector and Zeke tripped and stumbled through the shadowed city, using only Rector’s candles and their wits to maneuver around dead and fallen trees, over uneven paving stones, up and down curbs, and past the first block …

  Second block …

  Third block.

  By the third block they had to blow out Rector’s candles, too; they were too close to the tower, and they knew it. They could hear the men out there, and once they were closer to block four, they could see the glow of still fires and gas jets illuminating the top floor where the men had been working.

  Rector smacked into a barrier, let out a surprised grunt, and flipped forward before Zeke could let go of his jacket. The smaller boy fell forward, too—over a low ironwork fence that snagged his pants. They tore with a ripping sound that seemed ungodly loud. But when they held their breaths and listened, no one asked where it’d come from, and the noise of workers in the tower did not change its timbre or tempo.

  “A fence!” Zeke whispered.

  “Yeah, I know! Get offa me!”

  “Sorry.”

  The fence was barely hip-height and made of cast iron; it had collapsed beneath them immediately following its assault on Zeke’s pants. It was hard and sharp and covered in rust, but it didn’t pose any real barrier to the yard, or the enormous house within it.

  The boys collected themselves and stood on the lawn. A big lawn. Once, it was no doubt lush and green and landscaped. Now it was a flat expanse of nothing, leading up to a huge white blob that turned out to be not a house, but merely a porch. The porch had columns bigger than many of the houses Rector had ever seen.

  “This has to be it,” he said.

  Zeke nodded, which Rector only barely saw. “Come on. Around back, they said.”

  But Rector heard something coming up fast, headed right at them. He grabbed for Zeke, missed him, and instead gave him a hard shove that sent him facedown into the brittle, gruesome grass. Zeke began to protest, but Rector threw a hand over his mouth—crushing the boy’s mask against his face.

  “Shh!” he commanded.

  Zeke came to the immediate and well-advised decision to not fight, but to lie there as still as possible. It worked out well. Not three seconds after he’d hit the dirt, a man came dashing up past them—right past the mangled fence. The man was carrying a lantern that swayed and jerked in his hands as he ran, casting dramatic spears of light up into the fog and through the skeletal tree limbs that overshadowed everything near the park.

  “Caplan! Westie!” he cried out.

  Rector cringed, fearing for a moment that they’d been spotted after all … but no.

  “Something’s wrong!” he shouted toward the tower. Then he added, “It’s me, don’t nobody shoot!” which was absolutely the wisest way to approach anybody in Seattle, these days. “Something’s wrong downtown!”

  From the top of the tower
, somebody hollered back. “What’s going on? I don’t see no fire! I didn’t hear no dynamite!”

  “No sir, the Station’s still standing!”

  “What do you mean it’s…?” Swearing followed, and the sound of someone descending the brittle metal stairs.

  “It’s starting,” Zeke said in a muffled grunt.

  Rector pulled his hand away from Zeke’s mask. “It started already. We gotta go.”

  They picked themselves up and took half a dozen seconds to relight their candles. Then they ran, guarding the little flames with their palms. Behind them came the rising noise and clatter of men whose plans had been thwarted.

  As promised, the back of the house had fallen down altogether, exposing three stories and a convenient set of stairs that started just above ground level. The boys pulled themselves quickly along the stairs and scrambled up, up, and up that third staircase, then up another set to the wide, flat roof.

  From there, the city looked strange; it looked blanketed rather than poisoned. They could even make out the moon above, and its cool, shimmering light gave them just a hint of where everything around them was located. Still, Rector kept his eyes on his candle. He moved carefully, and reached a hand back to grab Zeke’s shirt. “Stay close to me now. This roof is straight, but it might not be sound.”

  “Might not? More like probably ain’t. The back wall didn’t hold up, did it? That doesn’t bode well for the roof.”

  “Hang close. I don’t want to pull you out of a hole.”

  “Like Huey pulled you—”

  “Can it.”

  “Sorry. You’re right. I don’t want to fall in a hole.”

  Rector found the roof’s edge with his eyes only inches before his feet would’ve found it the hard way. “Stop!” he said—a little too loud, but Zeke obeyed. “Here. The edge is right here. Let’s put our stuff down and set up before things get crazy.”

  With relief and exhaustion, they dropped the heavy packs that contained the big gaslights and all their accoutrements. Only once had they been shown how the lights were assembled, but it wasn’t as complicated as it sounded. While they worked by one small bubble of candlelight, they eavesdropped on the tower from behind a row of long-dead shrubs.

  “All of them? At once?”

  Rector said, “That’s Otis, I think.”

  “It must be something with the gas, or something. Messing with the wires.”

  Zeke asked, “Who’s that?” and Rector answered, “I don’t know.”

  “That’s one goddamn hell of a coincidence!”

  The clattering of descending footsteps echoed like the banging of gongs, and Otis Caplan’s lantern lit up the small windows as he passed each one. When he reached the bottom floor he kicked the gate open and stomped out into the yard, shouting for various lieutenants and henchmen. Some followed him down the tower, down the stairs—and some charged up from Millionaire’s Row, coming up the wide streets with their lanterns held high and a great deal of complaining.

  “What are you all doing back here?” he demanded.

  “Sabotage!”

  “What?”

  “Someone sabotaged our sabotage! All of it! There’s fighting down at the Station right now—they opened fire on us! They came right for us!”

  “They were waiting for us! They knew we was coming!”

  Zeke whispered to Rector, “You all ready to go?”

  “Yep. How about you?”

  “All I gotta do is flip the switch.”

  “Me, too.” Then Rector asked, “How do we know when to turn ’em on?”

  “Huey said we’d know.”

  Down in the open space, at the circle in front of the tower where all the streets met, Otis Caplan was furious. His light swung back and forth in his hand, as though he’d love for someone to come close enough to beat with it. He stalked toward the men, some of whom were bleeding and ragged, and a few of whom were wheezing like maybe their masks weren’t working quite right.

  “Where’s everybody else?” he demanded.

  “Still there. Or dead!”

  “That’s horseshit, and I won’t hear it!”

  “But, sir!”

  “It’s horseshit! Those damn Station monkeys and that yellow-headed, slant-eyed son of a bitch—”

  Whatever else he had to say about Yaozu, he didn’t get to finish it.

  Behind him, a bell began to ring—the chime of a wake-up call. It jingled for two full seconds, giving everyone present just enough time to wonder what the hell was going on before the tower exploded.

  It blasted outward and upward, a cascade of bricks blooming and billowing, flung from their foundations. Twisted, melted metal hurtled in 360 degrees, flattening whatever the bricks missed on their first wave and slicing trees into kindling. The bricks smashed any windows within a hundred yards, including those on the old governor’s mansion; they gusted inward, a million little daggers glittering in the resulting fire.

  And there was plenty of fire.

  As the conical tower roof slapped down upon the park in peeling, shriveled pieces the size of horses, the still in the tower spread burning fuel in every direction—and everything close had sparked, and some of the sparks had caught.

  Rector and Zeke looked up to see a dozen flickers of flame licking dead trees, downed walls, and the brittle shrubbery that once had decorated the manicured lawns. Only then did it occur to Rector that it hadn’t rained in a week, at least. Maybe two.

  He grinned. “Zeke, guess what: Summer’s here.”

  “Must be, otherwise none of that shit would light.”

  “Speaking of light … I think this is where we come in.” Rector cranked the little switch to turn on his spotlight, forgetting that the thing had been aiming straight up into his face. It came on with the brilliance of a dozen suns. He instantly dropped it—but Zeke caught it. “Jesus Christ!” Rector swore. “I can’t see!”

  Zeke laughed. “Me either, hardly. Give your eyes a minute, and turn that damn thing around!”

  Blindly, Rector fumbled the light away from Zeke; he heard the sizzle of leather and thanked heaven for Fang’s old gloves, even in their terrible condition, and he swung the light toward where the tower used to be. As his eyes adjusted, his lamp joined Zeke’s beam, and the light of the two hissing, portable gas lamps with their heavy mirrors joined the glimmer of the growing fires along the trees. The ring of dead fauna spit and hissed, glowing warmly. It shined upon a scene of confusion … which was swiftly becoming a scene of pandemonium.

  All the men who were able rose from the ground, crawling to their feet or simply crawling away. Otis Caplan was down for the count and maybe longer, but two of his men tugged at him—drawing him up and away from the smoldering rubble of the tower. They hoisted him, and he dangled—slung between them, a dead weight.

  And then someone started shooting.

  At the edge of the woodwork Chinese men and Station men waited, and Doornails, too. Rector and Zeke knew it, even though they couldn’t see them—and it was their job to make sure the tower men didn’t see them, either. The spotlights flashed and swung; the boys aimed at the tower men, blinding and revealing them as they tried to flee, or tried to mount their defense.

  They had nowhere left to retreat to.

  They were in the open, and there was far more light than anyone expected, though the fire was running out of fuel as it backed up to the wall. It fizzled and petered, but some of the bigger trees still burned, and gobs of brick fell from their branches, raining down on the heads of anyone unfortunate enough to hide below them.

  The tower men shot back, and they struggled to rally. But there weren’t enough of them left, and there weren’t any places to hide except maybe … the big mansions. They could mount a defense from a place as huge as the governor’s old place.

  This dawned on Rector right around the time it dawned on a few of the brighter survivors. Rector pointed his spotlight down at those who ran toward him, and he told Zeke to do the same. “Hit
them with it! Don’t let them get inside!”

  “These aren’t guns! We can’t shoot them and keep them away!” Zeke protested, even as he followed Rector’s suggestion.

  “Pretend they are. Hit them in the face and keep them blinded—make ’em easy to see!”

  And then, he prayed, maybe some of the Station men or the Doornails will pick them off before they reach us and kill us both.

  Three men fell to bullets before they arrived at the house’s big black door. Seven more were behind them, and they missed the lights, dodged the bullets, and reached the columned front porch. Soon the boys heard the loud thunk of someone beating on a solid wood door, knocking it hard, shoving it with shoulders and kicking it with heavy boots.

  “Shit!” Zeke said. “Can’t hit ’em with the lights from here!”

  “Not like this,” Rector admitted. He stood up, balanced his spotlight on the edge, and said, “But maybe like this.” And he shoved it over the side. It crashed down to the porch and through it, shattering somewhere below and showering the men with glass—but otherwise not hurting them, or so Rector thought.

  Zeke followed suit, tossing his light over the side and listening for the smashing of timbers, roofing tiles, and maybe men’s heads. But his didn’t even break through the porch, and Rector grabbed him by the arm. “They don’t know the back’s fallen down. We have to get out before they get in!”

  Now, with the fires and the shouting, there was plenty of light and noise to navigate by. The boys dashed back across the roof with their packs, so much lighter without those spotlights, and they half fell, half skidded down the stairs until they had dirt and dead grass beneath their feet again. At the front of the house, they heard the old door shatter.

  “Where do we go now?” Zeke asked, nearly in a panic when he realized they weren’t alone down there—that men were running back and forth around them, some of them friends, some of them foes. “We’ll get shot!”

  “We can’t stay here, or we’ll get shot anyway! Or burned up,” Rector added, as if the second option were a better one. “Back to the crack in the wall—they know us there.”

  “But that’s where the rest of these men are going…” Zeke pointed out, and it was probably true—Rector could see that now. The ones who weren’t holed up shooting inside the hulking white mansion were making a beeline for the exit, a strategy that wasn’t altogether idiotic, in Rector’s considered opinion. So what the heck—he figured he’d join them.