“Oh. Yes, we will. Thank you.”
He handed her a pair of lanterns and some matches, and she thanked him for them. She jammed her wrist through their handles and held them by her forearm so she could freely climb the ladder.
Moments later she was standing in her old front yard.
The grass was as dead as the big old oak tree, and the yard was nothing but mud and the slickly rotten film of: long-gone grass and flowers. The house itself had turned a yellowed shade of brownish gray like everything else that’d been smudged by the Blight for sixteen years. Around the porch where rosebushes had once grown there was only the skeletal aftermath of brittle, poisoned flora.
She set the lanterns down on her porch and struck the matches to light them.
The front door was open. Beside it, a window was broken. If Zeke had done it, she hadn’t heard him, but it would’ve been easy for anyone to reach inside, unlock it, and enter. “Mother, are you in here yet?”
“Yes,” she said, not very loud. She couldn’t breathe, and it wasn’t the mask. Inside, everything was not as she’d left it, but it was close enough. People had come through; that much was obvious. Things were broken, and the obvious objects had been looted. A white-and-blue Japanese vase lay in shards on the floor. The china cabinet had been smashed and everything within it was missing or shattered. Beneath her feet, an Oriental rug was curled around the edges where it had been kicked by trespassers; and several sets of dirty footprints streaked across the parlor, and into the kitchen, and into the living area where Ezekiel was standing, staring at everything, taking all of it in—all at once.
“Mother, look at this place!” he said, as if she’d never seen it before.
As she handed him a lantern she said, “Here, have some light so you can actually see it.”
Look, there was the velvet couch, covered in dust so thick that its original color could not be told. Look, there was a piano with sheet music still clipped into place, ready to be played. And over there—above the doorway—a horseshoe that had never brought anybody any luck.
Briar stood in the middle of the room and tried to remember what it’d looked like sixteen years go. What color had that couch been? What about the rocking chair in the corner? Had it once had a shawl or a throw slung across its back?
“Ezekiel,” she whispered.
“Momma?”
She said, “There’s something I need to show you.”
“What’s that?”
“Downstairs. I need to show you where it happened, and how it happened. I need to show you the Boneshaker.”
He beamed from ear to ear. She could see it in the scrunch of his eyes behind the mask. “Yes! Show me!”
“This way,” she said. “Stay close. I don’t know how well the floor’s held up.”
As she said it, she saw one of her old oil lamps hanging on the wall as if she’d never left. Its blown glass reservoir was untouched—it wasn’t cracked, or even crooked. As she walked past it, the light of her cheap industrial lamp flickered against it and made it look briefly alive.
“The stairs are over here,” Briar said, and her legs ached at the thought of climbing yet more of them in one day; but she pushed the door open with her fingertips and the hinges creaked a familiar squeal. They’d rusted, but they held—and when the door was opened they sang with exactly the same old notes.
Zeke was too excited to talk. Briar could sense it in his quivery fumbling behind her, and in his permanent grin inside the mask, and in the quick, happy breaths that whistled through the filters as fast as a rabbit’s.
She felt the need to explain.
“There was a contest, years ago. The Russians wanted a way to mine gold out of ice in the Klondike. Your father won the contest, so they paid him to build a machine that could drill through a hundred feet of ice.” With every step down, she added a new piece of exposition, trying to slow their descent even as she forced herself to make it. “It hardly ever thaws up there, I guess, and mining is a tricky thing. Anyway, Levi had six months to build it and show it to the ambassador when he came to town for a visit, but then he said he’d run the drill engine early, because he’d gotten a letter asking him to.”
She’d reached the basement.
She lifted her lantern and let it light the room. Ezekiel came to stand beside her.
“Where is it?” he asked.
The rays of her lantern illuminated a mostly empty room scattered with stray sheets that once covered machinery or other equipment. “Not here. This isn’t the laboratory. This is only the basement. This used to be where he stored all the things he was working on while he waited for someone to buy them, or while he waited to figure out what he was going to do with them.”
“What happened to it?”
“I’m guessing Minnericht made off with everything he could carry. Most of what I saw there in the station—well, a lot of it, anyway—came from here. Those beautiful lights—did you see them? Powered by electricity, generated from I-don’t-know-what. Did you see the gun he had? That triple-barreled thing? I never saw one down here, but I saw some drawings for it. They were on that desk.”
A squat, long piece of furniture was pushed against the wall. It was naked, without a single piece of paper or the smallest scrap of pencil left upon it.
“Minnericht, or Joe Foster, or whoever he was… I reckon he took everything that wasn’t nailed down. At least, he took everything he saw. Everything he could move. But he couldn’t move that goddamned Boneshaker, even if he knew how to find it.”
She opened the top right desk drawer and slipped her fingers underneath a hidden panel, where she pushed a button.
With a pop and a crunch, a shape like a door appeared in the wall.
Zeke squealed and ran to it.
“Watch out,” his mother warned. “Let me show you.” She went to the rectangular shape and ran her hands along the depression where the door had been revealed. She pushed the panel at a certain spot and it withdrew, sliding back with a squeak to reveal another set of stairs.
“Well,” she said. She lifted the lantern up high and held it out into the room. “It looks like the ceiling’s held.” But not much else had.
Part of one wall and all of the floor was totally lost, ground up like meat. Wires as fat as fingers dangled broken from the ceiling and lay scattered across heaping stacks of rubble that had been pushed up and back, shoveled aside as easily as snow by the giant machine that jutted out from the subterranean depths of the hill, and into the old laboratory.
The Boneshaker was intact, covered by the debris it had so efficiently generated. It was planted in the very middle of the room as if it had grown roots there.
The lanterns weren’t enough to push back all the darkness, but Briar could see the machine’s scratched steel panels between the slabs of fallen masonry, and the enormous drilling grinders still jabbed into the air like the claws of a terrible crab. Only two of the machine’s four grinders were visible.
The drill engine had not so much broken as crushed to dust three long tables that glittered with shards of glass. It had knocked down and demolished rows of shelving and cabinets; everything it had brushed against even lightly was shattered to splinters.
“It’s a wonder it didn’t bring the whole house down,” Briar whispered. “I tell you, at the time I thought it was going to.” Even through her mask, the air was stuffy and cool, and clogged with the mold, dust, and Blight of sixteen years.
“Yeah,” Zeke said, agreeing with anything she felt like saying.
At a glance, it appeared that the machine was on its side, but this impression was only a trick of the room’s proportions. It was nose-up, a third of the way out of the cellar’s floor. Its grinding drills—each one the size of a pony—had twirled and twisted around everything near them; Briar remembered thinking of giant forks twirling at a bowl of spaghetti. And although rust had taken the biting edges off the grooved, bladed drills, they still looked nastier than a devil’s dream.
Briar swallowed hard. Zeke crouched like he was going to jump, but she put out an arm to stop him. She said, “Do you see, on the top of it—there’s a thick glass dome, shaped like a bullet?”
“I see it.”
“That’s where he sat to drive the thing.”
“I want to go sit in it. Can I? Does it still open? Do you think it still works?”
He jumped before she could stop him, leaping across the gap and landing lightly on the stairs at the edge of the litter-clogged room.
Briar said, “Wait!” and she came after him. “Wait, don’t touch anything! There’s glass everywhere,” she admonished. The lantern in her hand was still swaying from her jump, so it looked like the dusty, half-collapsed room was filled with stars.
“I’ve got my gloves on,” Zeke said, and began a scramble that would move him across the floor, past the drills, and up to the driver’s bubble.
“Wait.” She said it with urgency, and with command. He stopped.
“Let me explain, before you demand that I explain.”
She slid down the stairs and crawled up beside him, onto the stacks of rubble and rocks and what was left of the cellar walls that coated the Boneshaker like a lobster’s shell.
She said, “He swore it was an accident. He said there was a problem with the steering and the propulsion, that the whole thing was out of his control. But you can see with your own two eyes how he put it right back in the basement when he was finished with it.”
Zeke nodded. He got down on his knees and brushed away what dust his hands could move, revealing more of the steel plating with its fist-sized dents.
“He swore that he didn’t know what became of the money because he didn’t take it, and he swore that he hadn’t ever meant to hurt a soul. And believe it or not, for a few days he was able to hide here. No one knew exactly where the machine had gone off to. At first, no one knew he’d driven it right back home, easy as turning a cart.