Briar stretched her chest to take a deep breath inside her mask, and she grimaced at the musty gray taste of the air she drew. “But don’t you ever worry? Like you’re undermining the whole place—like it might all come collapsing down?”
From the back of the group Frank said, “Minnericht,” as if it explained everything.
Swakhammer said, “He’s a goddamned monster, but he’s brilliant. The plans are his. He’s the one who laid it all out and told us how to pull the dirt away without hurting the building, but we stopped doing it about six months ago.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Long story,” he said, and he didn’t sound like he meant to expound on the subject. “Let’s move.”
“To where?” Briar demanded, even as she fell into step behind him.
“To the old vault, I said. You’ll like it. It’s closer to the bank, blocks. We’ll get out and take a look around. Maybe we’ll see if your boy’s been there.”
“Closer?”
“Right at the edge of it. We’re headed for the old Swedish Trust—the only one that didn’t go under. What happened was, the foundation was undermined by the Boneshaker; and the big metal vault was too heavy for the floor. So it sank. And we use it as a front door.” He lifted the lantern up high and looked back over his shoulder. “We got everybody?”
“We got everybody,” Lucy confirmed. “Keep moving, big man. We’re right behind you.”
In some places the way widened so far that the light from the wiggling flame couldn’t penetrate its edges; and in some areas the going was so tight that Swakhammer had to turn himself sideways to squeeze through.
Briar trundled along behind him in the middle of the pack, tracking that weak yellow light and chasing its shadows from inside her miserable mask.
Fifteen
“Wake up. Wake up, boy. You alive, or are you dead?”
Zeke wasn’t sure who was talking, or if he was the one being spoken to.
His jawline itched all the way up to his ears—that’s what he noticed first. The skin felt burned, like he’d gone and laid down on a stovetop. Next, he noticed the weight on his belly, the uneven pressure of something heavy and hard. Then he felt a pain jabbing at his back, where he was lying against something uneven and possibly sharp.
And someone was shaking him, wiggling his head back and forth and fighting for his attention. The room smelled funny.
“Boy, you wake up now. Boy, don’t you play dead. I can see you breathing.”
He couldn’t figure out who the speaker was. Not his mother. And not… Rudy, whose name made him start and almost drag himself straight to horrified consciousness. Remembering was the tricky part, and the awful part. Suddenly he knew where he was, approximately.
He opened his eyes, and did not exactly recognize the face above his.
Almost androgynous with age, the face belonged to a woman, Ezekiel decided. She was old enough to be his grandmother, he was certain, but it was hard to be more precise by the light of her lantern. Her skin was a shade or two darker than his own, the color of a good suede tobacco pouch or the hair of a deer. The jacket she wore had belonged to a man, once. It was cut to fit someone bigger, and her pants were rolled and cinched to keep them from falling down. Her eyes were a pure dark brown like coffee, and they were framed with graying eyebrows that jutted from her forehead like awnings.
Her hands moved like crabs, fast and stronger than they looked. She squeezed the sides of his face.
“You’re breathing, ain’t you?”
“Yes… ma’am,” he told her.
He wondered what he was doing on his back. He wondered where Rudy was. He wondered how he’d gotten here, and how long he’d been there, and how he was going to get home.
The fluffy gray brows above him furrowed. “You didn’t take in no Blight, did you?”
“Couldn’t say, ma’am.” He was still lying, still wondering. Gazing up at her and too dazed to do anything but answer a direct question.
She stood upright, and only then did Zeke realize that she’d been crouched beside him. “If you’d taken any inside you, you wouldn’t be able to smart off. So I say you’re fine, unless you’ve broken something I can’t see. Have you broken anything?”
“Not sure, ma’am.”
“Ma’am. Aren’t you a funny thing.” It wasn’t a question.
“Not trying to be funny,” he mumbled, and tried to sit up. Something large and flat was blocking the way, and when he wrapped his fingers around it to push it aside, he realized it was a door. “Why is there a door on top of me?”
“Boy, that door done saved your life, it did. You wore it like a shield, all the way down the stairs. It kept you from getting crushed like you oughta have. What happened, see, is that an airship hit the tower. It crash-landed, you might say, right against the side. If it’d hit any harder, it could’ve broken through the cleaned-up floors all together, and then you’d have been one dead little boy, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose so, ma’am. Ma’am?” he asked.
“Stop calling me ma’am.”
“All right, ma’am,” he said from habit, not orneriness. “I’m sorry. I only wondered if you were the princess we met down in the tunnels. Are you the princess?”
“You call me Miss Angeline. That’s name enough for me, boy.”
Zeke said, “Miss Angeline. I’m Zeke.”
He flexed his legs to kick the door away from him, and he sat up. And with her help he stood, but without her help he would’ve slumped right back down to the floor again. Stars and foam gushed across his eyes, and he couldn’t see a thing for all the brilliant black light in his head. The sparkles throbbed in time to a vein on his temple.
He pulled himself together and thought that this was how it felt to faint; and then he thought that Princess Angeline had arms stronger than just about any man he’d ever met.
She was holding him, lifting him up and propping him against a wall. She said, “I don’t know what became of your deserter. He deserted you, too, I reckon.”
“Rudy,” Zeke said. “He told me he didn’t desert.”
“And he’s a liar, too. Here, take your mask back. The air in here ain’t so good; some of the windows broke upstairs and the bad air’s leaking inside. You’re back down in the basement now, and it’s better here than some other places, but all the seals are shot.”
“My mask. My filters are getting all stuffy.”
“No they ain’t. I cut two of mine down and stuck ’em in your slots. You’ll be all right again for a while—plenty long enough to get out of town, anyway.”
He complained, “I can’t get out of town yet. I came here to go up Denny Hill.”
“Boy, you ain’t no place near Denny Hill. It’s like I tried to tell you down in the Rough End tunnels, old Osterude wasn’t running you back home. He was running you down to the old devil they call Dr. Minnericht, and Jesus Christ knows what would happen to you then, but I don’t. Zeke,” she said more softly, “you’ve got a momma outside, and if you don’t get yourself home, she’s gonna worry herself something awful. Don’t you do that to her. Don’t you make her think she’s lost her child.”
A flash of pain quickened her face, and for a moment it looked like stone.
“Ma’am?”
The stone flexed and fell away. “It ain’t right, to do a mother like that. You got to get yourself home. You already been gone all day—a whole day—and it’s past nighttime again, practically morning. Come with me now, won’t you?” She held out her hand and he took it, for lack of knowing what else to do. “I think I’ve scared you up a quick passage back to the Outskirts.”
“Maybe, maybe that’s best,” he said. “I can always come back later, can’t I?”
“Sure enough, if you want to get yourself killed. I’m trying to do you a kindness, here.”
“I know, and I thank you,” he said, still uncertain. “But I don’t want to leave, not yet. I don’t want to go until I’ve seen the old house.”
“You’re in no shape for that, young man. None at all. Look at you, all banged-up head and torn-up clothes. You’re lucky you ain’t dead. You’re lucky I came after you, meaning to pull you away from that old devil with his fire-breathing cane.”
“I liked his cane,” Zeke said, and he reluctantly accepted the return of his mask. “It was neat. Helped him walk, and helped him defend himself, too. After the war where he got hurt—”
She cut in. “Osterude didn’t get hurt in no war. He ran away from it before he had time to get blowed up. He hurt his hip when he fell down drunk a couple years ago, and now he sucks down opium, whiskey, and yellow sap to keep it from hurting him too much. Don’t you forget this, boy—he ain’t your friend. Or maybe heweren’t your friend, I don’t know if the slide done killed him or not. I can’t find him, no how.”
“Are we in the basement? ” Zeke changed the subject.
“That’s right, just like I told you. You slid back all the way down when the ship crashed into the tower, like I said.”
“A ship crashed into the tower? Why’d it do that?” he asked.
“Well it wasn’t on purpose, you silly thing. I don’t rightly know why. Brink’s a pretty good captain, but I don’t recognize the ship he’s flying now. It must be new, and maybe he ain’t used to running it yet. They must’ve had a little accident, that’s all—and now they’re up there, fixing the damage before they take off again.”
His eyes adjusted to the lantern light and he realized, with some difficulty, that she was holding something stranger than a regular, oil-based device. “What’s that?”