“But then your grandfather came around looking for him. I mean, everyone was looking for him, but if anyone knew where Levi’d gone off to, it’d be me, so this is where he came.
“I hadn’t talked to him since I’d run off to get married. My daddy never liked Levi. He thought Levi was too old for me, and I guess he was right. But more than that, he thought Levi wasn’t any good, and I guess he was right about that, too. So the last time I ever spoke to your grandfather, I called him a liar for saying my husband was a crook; and I lied through my teeth and said I didn’t know where my husband was. But he was right down here, in this laboratory.”
Zeke said, “I wish I’d got to meet him. Your pa, I mean.”
She didn’t know how respond to that, and a reply choked her until she could say, “I wish you had, too. He wasn’t always a real warm man, but I think he would’ve liked you. I think he would’ve been proud of you.”
Then she cleared her throat and said, “But I was awful to him, the last time I saw him. I threw him out, and I never saw him alive again.” She added, more to herself than to him, “And to think it was Cly who brought him back home. It’s a smaller world than you know.”
“Captain Cly?”
“Oh, yes. It was Captain Cly, though he was a younger man at the time, and nobody’s captain, I don’t suppose. Maybe he’ll tell you about it when we get back on the ship. He’ll tell you how the jailbreak really happened, since you’ve always wanted to know so badly. If anyone can set the facts straight, it’s him, since he was there.
“But later that same night, when my daddy came here looking for Levi, I went down into the laboratory like I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Your father’d made a big stink about it, how I shouldn’t go there without his permission. But I came on down and let myself inside while he wasn’t looking. He was under that dome, working with some wrenches or some bolts, with his backside hanging out and his head buried down deep in the Boneshaker’s workings. So he didn’t see me.”
Zeke was creeping up toward the driver’s panel, up toward that glass bubble that was thicker than his own palm. He hoisted his lantern as high over his head as he could hold it and peered through the scraped-up surface. “There’s something inside it.”
Briar spoke more quickly. “I opened the laboratory door, and right over there was a stack of bags marked FIRST SCANDINAVIAN BANK. Over there, where that table’s all broke up now, there were several sacks, lined up in a row and stuffed to busting with money.
“I froze, but he saw me anyway. He jerked up in that seat and gave me a glare like nothing I’d ever seen before. He started yelling. He told me to get out, but then he saw that I’d already seen the money and he tried a different approach: He admitted he’d stolen it, but told me he didn’t know anything about the gas. He swore it was an accident.”
Zeke asked, “What happened to the money? Is any of it still here?” His eyes scanned what was left of the room and, seeing nothing, he began to scale the Boneshaker’s resting place.
Briar continued. “He’d already stashed most of it. What I saw was only a little bit that he hadn’t got around to hiding yet. I took some of that with me when I left; and I stretched out every penny. That’s how we ate when you were little, before I went off to work at the water plant.”
“But what about the rest of it?”
She took a deep breath. “I hid it upstairs.”
And she said, faster than before, trying to spill the whole thing out before Zeke got a chance to see it himself. “Levi tried to sell me some snake oil about running away together and starting over someplace else, but I didn’t want to go anyplace else. And, anyway, it was plain as day he’d been planning to run off without me. He started shouting, and I was angry, and I was scared. And on that table, the one that used to be over here, I saw one of the revolvers he was trying to turn into something bigger and stranger.”
“Mother!”
She didn’t let his exclamation slow her down. She said, “I picked it up and I held it out at him, and he laughed at me. He told me to go upstairs and get whatever I planned to take with me, because we were leaving town in the Boneshaker, and we were leaving within an hour. Otherwise I could stay there and die like everybody else. And he turned his back on me; he went right back up into the machine and started working again, just like I wasn’t there. He never did think I was worth a damn,” she said, as if it had only just occurred to her. “He thought I was dumb and young, and pretty enough to look nice in his parlor. He thought I was helpless. Well, I wasn’t.”
Zeke was close enough to the battered glass that when he held his lantern up to it, he could see a sprawled shape beneath it. He said, “Mother.”
“And I’m not saying he threatened me, or he tried to hit me. It didn’t happen like that at all. How it happened was, he got back into the Boneshaker, and I came up behind him, and I shot him.”
Zeke’s hand found a latch down by his knee. He reached down to pull it, and hesitated.
She told him, “Go on. Look, or spend the rest of your life wondering if Minnericht was telling you the truth.”
Zeke took one more glance back at the doorway, where Briar stood motionless with her lantern, then pressed the latch and pulled back the door. The glass dome lid hissed on a pair of hinges and began to rise.
A mummy of a man was seated inside, slumped forward and facedown.
The back of his head was missing, though pieces of it could be seen here and there in chunks—stuck to the inside of the glass, and to the control panel. The stray bits had gone black and gray, glued to wherever they’d splattered and fallen. The dried-out corpse was dressed in a light-colored smock and was wearing leather gloves that came up to its elbows.
Briar said, quieter, and slower, “I can’t even pretend I was protecting you. I didn’t figure out I was going to have you for another few weeks, so I don’t have that excuse. But there you have it. I killed him,” she said. “If it weren’t for you, I don’t suppose it would’ve ever mattered. But you’re here, and you’re mine—and you were his, too, whether he deserved you or not. And whether I like it or not, it matters.”
She waited, watching to see what her son would do next.
Upstairs, they both heard the sound of heavy feet stomping through the parlor. Captain Cly called out, “Miss Wilkes, you in here?”
She yelled back, “We’re down here. Give us a second; we’ll be right up!”
Then Briar said, “Say something, Zeke. I’m begging you, boy. Say something.”
“What should I say?” he asked, and it sounded like he honestly didn’t know.
She tried, “Say you don’t hate me. Say you understand, or if you don’t understand, tell me that it’s all right. Say I’ve told you what you’ve always wondered, and now you can’t accuse me of holding anything back anymore. Or if you can’t forgive me, then for Christ’s sake tell me so! Tell me I’ve wronged you, same as I wronged him years ago. Tell me you can’t understand, and you wish you’d stayed with Minnericht in his train station. Tell me you never want to see me again, if that’s what you mean. Say anything. But don’t leave me standing here, wondering.”
Zeke turned his back on her and stared again into the bubble of buttons, levers, and lights. He took a hard look at the shriveled body whose face he’d never see. Then he reached for the glass dome lid and drew it down until the latch caught with a click that held it closed.
He slid down the side of the big machine and stopped a few feet away from his mother, who was too terrified to cry, for all that she wanted to get it out of the way.
He asked, “What do we do now?”
“Now?”
“Yeah. What do we do now?”
She gulped, and released her death grip on her satchel’s strap. She wanted to know, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, do we go through the house, take what we can salvage, and go back to the Outskirts?”
She said, “You think maybe we should stay here. Is that it?”
“It’s what I’m asking you. Can we even go back to the Outskirts now? Would you have a job? You’ve been gone for days; I guess we both have. Maybe we should take whatever money’s left and see if the captain would take us back east. The war can’t go on forever, can it? Maybe if we go far enough north, or far enough south…” The idea faded, and so did his list of suggestions. “I don’t know,” he concluded.
“I don’t either,” she said.
He added, “But I don’t hate you. I can’t. You came into the city to find me. Ain’t nobody else in the world except you would give a damn enough to try it.”
Her nose went stuffy and her eyes filled up. She tried to wipe them both and forgot she was wearing a mask. She said, “All right. And good. Good, I’m glad to hear you say that.”
Zeke said, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go upstairs and see what we can find. And then… and then… what do you want to do?”
She put her arm around his waist and hugged him fiercely as they climbed the stairs together.
On the floors above, they could hear the air pirates rifling through drawers, poking their hands through shelves and cabinets.
Briar said, “Let’s go give them a hand. There’s a safe in the floor of the bedroom, under the bed. I always thought I’d come back for it someday, I just didn’t know how long it’d take me.” She sniffled, and was almost happy. She asked, “One way or another, we’ll be all right, won’t we?”
“I think we might be.”
“And as for what we do next…” She took the lead and brought him back up into the hallway, where the combined light of their lanterns made the narrow space light up with warmth. “There’s a little time left to decide. I mean, we can’t stay here. The underground is no place for a boy.”