The man shrugged. “You might be surprised. We get a lot of stragglers from the Outskirts coming in here, looking to steal or barter, or learn how to process the Blight for sap. Course, most of ’em don’t live too long.”
Even through her visor, the man saw Briar’s eyes narrow. He quickly added, “I don’t mean your kid didn’t make it; that’s not what I’m saying. He only got here yesterday?”
“Yesterday.”
“Well, if he’s lived this long he might be all right. I haven’t seen him, but that doesn’t mean he ain’t here. How’d you get inside?”
“I hitched a ride with a sky captain.”
“Which one?”
“Look.” She stopped him with a worn-out wave of her hand. “Can we talk? Can we do this somewhere else? I need to get out of this mask,” she pleaded. “Please, is there somewhere I can breathe? I can’t breathe.”
He took her face in his hand and turned it this way and that, examining her mask. “That’s an old model. A good model, sure. But if your filters are clogging up, it don’t matter how good it is. All right. Let’s go downstairs. We’ve got a sealed pod here in the bank, and a connector to the underground roads.”
The man led her downstairs, not holding her hand or dragging her, but waiting when she lagged behind.
At the entrance to the main hallway, where there were no windows to let in any light, an oil lantern had been left beside the door. The man took it, set it alight, and held it up to brighten the way to the basement.
While Briar watched his big, bobbing back stomp through the halls and down the stairs, she told him, “Thank you. I should’ve said so sooner, but thank you, for helping me out down there.”
“Just doing my job,” he said.
“So you’re the Seattle welcome wagon?”
He shook his head. “No, but I keep my eyes open for noisy newcomers like yourself. Most of the kids, they slip in easy and keep their mouths shut. But when I hear gunshots and things breaking, I’ve got to come take a look.” The lantern’s flame wavered. He shook the light to swirl the oil. “Sometimes it’s somebody we don’t want here and don’t need here. Sometimes it’s a little woman with a big gun. It’s something new every day.”
At the first floor there was a door with all its loose bits sealed by pitch—and treated leather flaps around every crack.
“Here we go. When I open the door, you move quick and get inside.” He handed her the lantern. “I’ll be right behind you. We just try to keep the door shut, if you get my meaning.”
“Got it,” she said, and took the lantern.
From a pants pocket he withdrew a ring with a dozen black iron keys. He picked the one he wanted and pushed it through a rubber seal where Briar wouldn’t have thought to put a lock; but he turned the key and a mechanism clicked, and the door loosened when he bent his elbow.
“Count of three. One, two… three.” He tugged the latch and the door sucked outward with a pop.
Briar sidestepped her way into more darkness, and as promised, the man in the armor darted in behind her, then swiped the door back into its seal and locked it behind them.
“A little farther,” he said.
He took the lantern again and led the way, through some leather and rubber flaps hanging down in strips, and down another short corridor. The corridor ended in a strange-looking door that looked more like a cloth screen than an ordinary barricade. It was fitted with the same treated flaps around its edges to create the seal that the other underground doors all shared; but this one was porous.
Briar pushed her ear to the door and she could feel air moving through it.
“Look out. And same rules as before—be quick. One, two… three.”
He didn’t need to unlock anything this time. The door slid sideways on a track, retreating into the wall with a squeak of its seals.
She jumped around it and into the next chamber, where candles were slowly melting down to stumps upon a table. Around the table six unoccupied chairs were pushed up close, and behind them there were more crates, more candles, and another corridor with the rustling leather curtains she’d come to expect.
The man wrestled with the door and finally snapped it into position.
He crossed to the far side of the room, where he began to remove his loosened armor. “Don’t take off the mask quite yet. Give it a minute,” he said, “but make yourself at home.” The plated arm sheaths clattered as he folded them and set them down on the table. His tubular noise gun—Daisy—also sounded heavy when he plunked it down beside the protective garment.
“You thirsty?” he asked.
She said, “Yes,” in a dry whisper.
“We’ve got water down here. It isn’t very good water, but it’s wet. Got plenty of beer, too. You like beer?”
“Sure.”
“Go ahead and take off the mask now, if you want. Maybe it’s just superstitious of me, but I don’t like to whip mine off until I’ve had the filter door closed for a minute.” He reached inside one of the crates labeled STONEWARE and pulled out a mug. In the corner was a fat brown barrel. He popped the lid off and dipped out a mug full of water.
He put it down in front of Briar.
She gave the water a greedy look, but the man hadn’t removed his mask yet, and she didn’t want to go first.
He caught on and reached for the straps that held the elaborate contraption around his head. It slid down to his chest with a sliding scrape of leather being stretched and loosened, revealing a plain, wide face that was neither kind nor unkind. It was an intelligent face, with wild brown eyebrows and a flat nose, plus a pair of full lips that were smashed close against his teeth.
“There you go,” he said of his own reveal. “No prettier, but a damn sight lighter.”
Without the mechanical mask’s assistance, his voice was still low, but perfectly human.
“Jeremiah Swakhammer, at your service, ma’am. Welcome to the underground.”
Twelve
Rudy shuffled in a loping, lopsided walk that was faster than it looked. Through the crushing, smelly pressure of the mask Zeke wheezed and puffed to keep up; he struggled to suck in air through filters that had grown somewhat clogged since he’d first entered the city, and he fought with his own skin as it was pulled, stretched, and rubbed raw by the unyielding seal around his face.
“Wait,” he breathed.
“No,” Rudy replied. “No time to wait.”
He shambled on. Behind them, Zeke was certain he heard a new, rising commotion that came from anger, or grief. He heard the cacophony of consonants and unfamiliar vowels and the shouting, howling, screaming agreement of other voices from other men.
Zeke knew they’d been discovered—or, as he told himself, that Rudy’s violence had been discovered. But Zeke hadn’t done anything wrong, had he? The rules were different here, weren’t they? And all’s fair in war and self-defense, wasn’t it?
But in the back of his mind a small foreign man with glasses was bleeding and confused, and then dead for no reason at all except that he’d once been alive.
The tunnels seemed more winding and the darkness seemed more oppressive as he tagged along behind his guide, whom he viewed with increasing suspicion. He even found himself wishing the princess would come back, whomever she was. Maybe he could get a question or two in edgewise. Maybe she wouldn’t throw knives at him. Maybe she wasn’t dead.
He hoped she wasn’t dead.
But he could still hear, when he thought about it, the rumbling thunder of the ceiling and walls folding in upon themselves and filling all the air space between them, and he wondered if she’d been able to escape. He consoled himself by remembering that she was old, and no one gets to be that old without being smart and strong. It gave him an odd pang, one that he couldn’t place as he watched the hobbling escape of the man in front of him.
Rudy turned around and said, “You coming, or not?”
“I’m coming.”
“Then stick with me. I can’t carry your ass, and I’m bleeding again. I can’t do everything for the both of us.”
“Where are we going?” Zeke asked, and he hated the sound of the begging that he heard from inside his mask.
“Back, same as before. Down, and then up.”
“We’re still going up the hill? You’re still taking me to Denny Hill?”
Rudy said, “I told you I was, and I will. But there ain’t no direct way between two spots in this city, and I’m real sorry if I’m not making the trip as spotless as you’d like. Forgive me, for Chrissake. I didn’t plan to get stuck with a knife or nothing. Plans change, junior. Detours happen. This is one of them.”
“This is?”
“Yeah, this is. Right here,” Rudy said, stopping beneath a skylight and pointing at a stack of boxes topped precariously with a ladder. Where the ladder terminated against the ceiling, a round door was locked into place. “We’re going up. And it might be bad, I’m warning you now.”
“All right,” Zeke said, even though it wasn’t all right, not even a little bit. He was having trouble breathing—more trouble with every passing footstep, because he could not catch his breath and there was nowhere to rest.
“Remember what I told you about the rotters?”
“I remember.” Zeke nodded, even though Rudy was facing away from him and didn’t see it.
“No matter how terrible you’ve got them pictured,” Rudy said, “seeing them is twice as bad. Now you listen.” He turned around and wagged his finger in Zeke’s face. “These things move fast—faster than you’d think, to look at them. They can run, and they bite. And anything they bite has to get cut off, or else you die. Do you understand?”
Zeke confessed, “Not really.”
“Well, you’ve got about a minute and a half to wrap your head around it, because we’re going up before those vicious old slant-eyes catch up and kill us just for standing here. So here’s the rules—keep quiet, keep close, and if we’re spotted, climb like a goddamned monkey.”