“You did what you had to do. I understand.”
“Good, good. I’m glad you’re the understanding kind.” He flashed that yellow-toothed smile. “I thought you might be. You come from a fair sort of stock.”
At first she didn’t catch his meaning, but then she remembered why they’d taken her in so quickly. “Well,” she said, because she wasn’t sure what else to say. She’d spent twenty years trying to prove she wasn’t a thing like her father, and now she had his reputation to thank for her own safety in a very strange place. She wondered what he would’ve thought of it if he’d known. Privately, she suspected that he would’ve been appalled, but then, she’d been wrong about him once or twice before.
So she said, “I appreciate you saying so.” And she didn’t ask him any more questions. She’d rather listen to his silence than listen to his lies.
“Now tell me, Miss Wilkes. What are we looking for, precisely?”
“Some sign,” she said. “Of my boy, I mean. Anything at all that shows he might’ve been here.”
“Like what?”
She thought about it as she poked her way through the debris. Chunks of decaying wooden walkways hung over the edges of the shattered streets, and splinters rained down to settle on her hat. There was no wind and there was no sound. It was like standing underwater in a stagnant pond. All around them the dirty yellow air hung in place. At any moment, Briar thought, the world might freeze and she would stay there, stuck in amber.
She said, “Like anything different from last time you were here. Like footprints, or… or things like that. I don’t know. Tell me about what I’m seeing, could you please? I don’t understand. Where are we, exactly?”
“This is where the Boneshaker cut through under the street. The street fell in. We’re standing on it now, but up there”—he pointed at the jagged ceiling above—“that’s the rest of the street. And the walkways. And whatever else was up there sixteen years ago.”
“Fantastic,” she said. “It’s dark down here. I can hardly see a thing.”
“I’m real sorry. I didn’t bring a lantern.”
“Don’t apologize,” she told him. She picked her way around to a spot that seemed to be the back, or the edge, or some far corner of the pit. Directly in front of her, a black chasm opened up in the shape of a crushed circle, and disappeared deeper into the earth. Beyond a few feet, she could see nothing of where it might go or what it might hold.
She called into it. “Hello?” But she didn’t use her loudest voice, and she would’ve been shocked to receive an answer.
None came.
“We can go up to street level, if you want. Over here,” Squiddy said. He led her to a steeply cut ledge and pointed at the boards and bricks that had been jammed and stacked together. “It’s a climb, but it’s not bad. You can see better up there.”
“All right. I’ll follow you.”
He scaled the slope with ease, scampering like a man half his age, until he crested the edge and stood, backlit against the lip of the gaping hole. Briar came up behind him and took his hand when he offered it. He pulled her over the edge and beamed inside his helmet mask. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Sure.”
If she’d been asked to pick ten words to describe the scene before her, “beautiful” wouldn’t have made the cut.
If she hadn’t known better, she might’ve guessed that it had hosted a war in some other time; she might have assumed that some terrible scourge or blast had destroyed the whole landscape. Where once there had been stately structures that held money and the bustle of patrons, now there was only a long, open wound in the ground. The wound had gone rough around its massive edges, and it was beginning to fill with rubble.
In one place there seemed to be a stack of rounded river boulders. A closer look revealed them to be skulls, crusty and gray. They’d collected in a low gully, having rolled away from their forgotten bodies.
Briar fought to catch her breath. It was difficult, as she should’ve expected, given Squiddy’s warning about the air. But it was a real and hard-fought struggle to bring a lungful at a time through her filters, which strained against the incoming impurities. It was like breathing through a feather mattress.
And how could she ever tell if her son had come by this place?
Gazing down into the pit she could see no sign of a trail—not even the one she’d so recently used. The terrain was unfit for keeping footprints. An elephant could’ve trod through the rubble and it wouldn’t have left a mark.
A wave of hopelessness splashed against her and she cringed, tightening and hugging herself against the possibilities. She was out of ideas. She couldn’t have discerned it if an army of Zekes had come this way. It was all she could do to swear to herself that no, he must not be back inside that tunnel with the edges as big as a house’s roof. No, he couldn’t be lying suffocated or squirming at the bottom of a hole Zeke’s father had dug before he was born. No, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t have known about the air in this place. No, no, and no again.
“He’s not here,” she said, and the words bounded around inside her mask.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Squiddy asked. His fluffy eyebrows twitched beneath his glass faceplate. “You wouldn’t want to find him here, not really.”
“I suppose not,” she said.
“We could come back with a light, early tomorrow. We could look inside the tunnel. You wouldn’t have to do a whole lot of crawling or anything. If he got up inside there, he didn’t go far.”
She squeaked, “Maybe. Yes. I don’t know. Maybe. It’s getting dark.” She added the observation because she couldn’t convince herself to choose an answer. “What time is it?”
“It’s always getting dark down here,” he agreed. “I don’t know what time it is. Coming up on lunch, that’s all I know. What do you want to do now? ”
She didn’t have an answer for that, either. So she tried, “Do you have any ideas? Any thoughts on where we might look? Are there any other safe places, or cleared-out breathing places nearby?”
Squiddy’s oversized head swiveled back and forth as he surveyed the area for suggestions. “I’m forced to tell you no, Miss Wilkes. There’s no place where the breathing’s good until you get out to where the Chinamen keep themselves at night. They live near their old blocks, that way,” he pointed.
“And Dr. Minnericht?”
“That way.” He pointed ninety degrees away from his first gesture. “About the same distance. Where we just came from, that’s the closest spot for getting away and getting some air, and I don’t think anybody could find it if he didn’t know it was there.”
Back down in the pit Briar could barely see the place where they’d come out. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. And she was glad that he couldn’t see her face as well as she could see his.
As the white-gray sky above them lowered its lids and sank to a darker hue, Briar and Squiddy trudged back down the slope and reentered the tunnel beneath the ledge. The door sealed behind them with a grinding suck, securing them once more in the fire-dim brightness of machinery and filters.
“I’m real sorry,” he said to her, still through the helmet because they hadn’t yet passed enough seals to breathe freely. “I wish we’d found some sign of him. It’s a shame we didn’t.”
“Thank you for taking me out here,” she told him. “You didn’t have to do it, and I appreciate it. I suppose now I’ll go find Lucy and see how she’s doing. Maybe, if she still wants to, we can go and catch this doctor of yours.”
Squiddy didn’t answer right away, as if he were chewing on a sentence before spitting it out. Then he said, “That might be a good idea. There’s always a chance that Dr. Minnericht found your boy and brought him in. Or maybe one of his folks did. He’s got folks just about everywhere.”
Briar’s throat seized as if it were being held in a fist. The thought had already occurred to her, and even though she was firmly, totally, thoroughly certain that the doctor was not her former husband… it still churned her stomach. If she’d ever had one thing to be thankful for, it was that Zeke had never met his father; and she had no intention of letting a pretender insert himself into that role.
But instead of screaming all this through the mask, as she desperately wanted to do, she cleared her throat and said, “He has people who work for him, does he? This doctor? I’ve heard them mentioned, but I haven’t seen any sign of them yet.”
“Well, they don’t wear uniforms or nothing,” Squiddy said. “But you can pretty much pick them out of a crowd. They’re usually downed airmen, or dealers who come and go. Some of them are chemists who work with the doctor. He’s always looking for new ways to make the sap, or make it easier to make. Sometimes they’re big old thugs from outside the walls, and sometimes they’re just sap-heads who hang around close and run errands, or do favors. He’s got a little bit of an army down here, if you want the truth. But it’s never the same army twice.”
“Sounds like people come and go a lot. Sounds like he’s not an easy man to work with.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he mumbled. Then he said, “Or that’s how I’ve heard it. But you’re new to the Inside, and you aren’t making any trouble. You’re just looking for your boy, that’s all, and I don’t think he’ll make any problems for you. He’s a businessman, you know? It’d be bad for business, I think, if he did you any harm. The kind of folks who work with him, they’re real fond of your daddy’s memory.”
She stepped out in front of him and led the way along the path. Without turning around to meet his eyes, she said, “As I heard it, that’s not always the case. I hear the doctor doesn’t care much for the peace, and maybe he might not like me much.”