Listen as hard as she might, she couldn’t hear anyone following behind her; so she slowed down and tried to catch her breath while she glared from corner to corner at the boxes with their stenciled labels. It was hard, though, to gather her calm. She forced the air through the filters and dragged it through her mouth in a demanding, drawn-out gasp, but there wasn’t enough to satisfy, no matter how much she fought. And she didn’t dare remove the mask, not yet—not when her goal was to find her way out into the streets, into the thick of the gas. She read the labels on the boxes like the words were a mantra.
“Linen. Processed pitch. Eight-penny nails. Two-quart bottles, glass.”
Behind her there were voices now, maybe the same ones and maybe different ones.
A big wood door with glass cutout panels had been buttressed and sealed with thick black patches of pitch. Briar shoved her shoulder against it. It didn’t budge, not even to squeak or flex. To the door’s left, there was a window that had received similar treatment. It was covered with sheets of thin wood that had been thoroughly sealed around its edges and along its seams.
To the right of the door there was another counter. Behind it, there were stairs leading down into yet more darkness, with yet more candles glimmering above them.
Even around the ambient swish and press of the mask moving against her hair, Briar could hear footsteps. The voices were getting louder, but there was nowhere else to run or hide. She could go back into the corridor stuffed with onrushing Chinamen, or she could head down the stairs and take her chances with whatever may wait at the bottom.
“Down,” she said into the mask. “All right, down.” And she half stumbled, half skipped down the crooked, creaking stairwell.
Ten
Down through the old hotel next door to the bakery, Zeke followed Rudy and his one dim candle. Once they got to the basement they took another tunnel lined with pipes and brickwork. They were going lower—Zeke could feel the grade declining by feet at a time. The descent seemed to take hours. He finally felt compelled to ask, “I thought we were going up the hill?”
“We’ll get there,” Rudy told him. “It’s like I said, sometimes you’ve got to go down in order to go up.”
“But I thought it was mostly houses where they lived. My mother said it was just a neighborhood, and she told me about some of their neighbors. We keep going underneath all these big places—these hotels and things.”
“That wasn’t a hotel we just went through,” Rudy said. “It was a church.”
“It’s hard to tell from the underside of it,” Zeke complained. “When do we get to take off these masks, anyway? I thought there was supposed to be clean air down here someplace. That’s what my buddy Rector told me.”
Rudy said, “Hush. Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
They stood together, perfectly still, under the street and between a tunnel’s worth of walls that were wet with mold and muck. Above, a skylight of glass tiles allowed enough light to see down into the corridor, and Zeke was astonished to conclude that it must already be morning. These skylights dotted the underground chambers, but between them there were places where the darkness overcame everything, creating nooks where the tunnels were as black as ink. Rudy and Zeke stepped between these patches of darkness as if the shadows made safe places, where no one could see them and nothing could touch them.
Here and there, a drip of water would ping and splash its way to the earth. Up above, there was sometimes a rattle of something moving far away, out of reach. But Zeke heard nothing closer.
“What am I listening for?” he asked.
Rudy’s eyes narrowed behind his visor. “For a second there, I thought someone was following us. We can take our masks off soon. We’re working our way—”
“Along the hill. Yeah. You said.”
“I was going to say,” Rudy growled, “that we’re working our way toward a part of town where there’s a little action. We’ve got to cut through it, and when we do, we’ll hit the sealed quarters. And then you can take off your mask.”
“So people still live there, at the hill?”
“Yes. Sure they do. Yes,” he said again, but his voice died away and he was listening again for something else.
“What’s wrong? Are there rotters?” Zeke asked, and started fumbling for his bag.
Rudy shook his head and said, “I don’t think so. But something’s wrong.”
“Someone’s following us?”
“Hush up,” he said fiercely. “Something’s wrong.”
Zeke saw it first, the deliberate outline that flowed away from the nearest shadowed patch where nothing could see and nothing could touch them. It did not move so much as it formed, from a vague shape approximately his own size into something with edges—something with clothes, and the white-sharp glint of a button catching the light from the next skylight over.
It came into focus from the shoes up; he detected the curve of boots and the crumpled wrinkles of slouched pants and flexed knees straightening as if to stand. The cuffs of a jacket, the seams of a shirt, and finally a profile that was as jarring as it was distinct.
Zeke’s breath caught in his throat, and it was warning enough for Rudy to swivel on his one good heel.
The boy thought it was strange, the way his guide lifted the cane again like it was a weapon; but then he pointed it at the shape against the wall and squeezed some mechanism in its handle. The resulting explosion was every bit as loud, violent, and damaging as any gunshot Zeke had ever heard—which was admittedly not too many.
The shattering clatter of sound and lead rocked the corridor, and the profile ducked away. “Goddammit! Fired too fast!” he swore.
Rudy flipped a lever on his cane with his thumb and pumped it, then aimed again, searching the darkness for the intruder, who had not fallen. Zeke did his best to hide behind the other man as he aimed this way, and that way, and forward, and to each side.
Zeke was breathless and half-deafened by the firearm’s concussion. “I saw it!” he squealed. “It was right there! Was that a rotter?”
“No, and hush your mouth! Rollers don’t—” he was cut off by a whistling clink and the sound of something sharply metal carving a sudden, forceful slot into mushy bricks. Then he saw it, beside Rudy’s head. A smallish blade with a leather-wrapped handle had landed very close—so close that, given a second or two to ooze, Rudy’s ear began to slowly bleed.
“Angeline, that’s you, ain’t it?” he barked. And then he said lower, “And now I see you better, and if you move, I’ll ventilate your insides, I swear to God. Come on out, now. You come out here where I can see you.”
“What kind of fool do you take me for?” The speaker had a strange voice and a strange accent. Zeke couldn’t place either one.
Rudy said, “The kind of fool who’d like to live another hour. And don’t you get all uppity with me, Princess. You shouldn’t have worn your brother’s buttons if you planned to fight in the dark. I can see the light shining on them,” he told her. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the jacket shimmered and dropped to the ground.
“Son of a bitch!” Rudy shrieked and swayed with his cane. He grabbed Zeke and yanked him backward, into the next black patch where no downward dripping sunlight drizzled.
They hunkered there together and listened for footsteps or motion, but heard nothing until the other unseen speaker said, “Where are you taking that boy, Rudy? What are you going to do with him?”
Zeke thought she sounded as if she were hoarse, or as if her throat had been somehow wounded. Her voice was gummy and harsh, like her tonsils were coated in tar.
“That’s no concern of yours, Princess,” he said.
Zeke tried not to ask, but he couldn’t stop himself from wondering aloud, “Princess?”
“Boy?” said the woman. “Boy, if you’ve got a lick of sense you’ll let that old deserter be. He’ll take you no place good and no place safe.”
“He’s taking me home!” Zeke insisted to the dark.
“He’s taking you to your death, or worse. He’s taking you to his boss, hoping to trade you for favors. And unless you live down under the old train station that never was, then you’re not going home no time soon, no how.”
“Angeline, you say another word and I’m going to shoot!” Rudy declared.
“Do it,” she dared. “We both know that old stick won’t hold more than two rounds at once. So take another shot. I’ve got blades enough to turn you into a colander, but I won’t need that many to slow you down permanent.”
“I’m talking to a princess?” Zeke asked again.
Rudy cuffed him across the mouth with something firm and bony wrapped in fabric—Zeke figured it was an elbow, but he couldn’t see and he had to assume. His mouth began to seep blood between his teeth. He clutched his face and mumbled every bad word he knew.
“Walk away, Angeline. This ain’t no concern of yours.”
“I know where you’re going, and that boy doesn’t. That makes it my concern. You sell your own soul if that’s what you’ve got in mind, but you don’t drag nobody else down with you. I won’t have it. I especially won’t have you leading that boy down into no-man’s-land.”
“That boy?” Zeke said through his fingers. “I’ve got a name, lady.”
“I know. It’s Ezekiel Blue, though your momma calls you Wilkes. I heard you telling him, up on the roof.”
Rudy all but shouted, “I’m looking out for him!”
“You’re taking him to—”
“I’m taking him someplace safe! I’m just doing what he asked!”
Another knife hissed through the darkness, from shadow to shadow, and it landed close enough to Rudy that he yelped. Zeke didn’t hear it connect with the wall behind them. A second knife followed close behind, but it smashed against the bricks. Before a third could join it, Rudy fired, but aimed up instead of out by accident or surprise.