“For how long?”
“Long enough. You trust me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then walk with me.” She pocketed her powder and beckoned again.
This time, Josephine obeyed immediately. The lantern shook as she ran toward the old woman, and the boards of the wharf creaked beneath her feet. Her fear was a shocking, unfamiliar thing, and her body was so prepared to fight or run or die that her hands quaked and her teeth chattered, but Mrs. Laveau patted her shoulder and smiled. “There, you see? The dead must be reminded of their place.”
Four
Captain Cly closed the enormous door behind himself and kept his head low as he descended the stairs. Two floors deep, beneath the initial bank basement where the door was located, the “vaults” remained one of the safest corners of the city—the deepest, most secure, and most like a collection of ordinary homes. This bunker-within-a-bunker also served as storage for the most direly needed essentials: clean water, ammunition, gunpowder, gas masks and their accoutrements, and grocery supplies to keep the population fed.
Over in “Chinatown,” nearer the wall’s edge on the far side of King Street Station, the oriental workers kept stores of their own, as their food preferences did not strictly overlap with the doornails. But in the last year, some of the doornails had taken to wandering toward the Chinese kitchens in search of unfamiliar food—while likewise some of the Chinese had shown an interest in dried salmon, occasional fruit tarts, and intermittent baked sweets.
Food was a language all its own. And it was in no one’s best interest for anyone to starve.
The halls were not particularly mazelike, and they were as well lit as anything else beneath the city’s surface. The ceilings were lower than Cly might have preferred, but this set the vaults apart from few other places in the world; so he watched his forehead and made his way along the first corridor without complaint, silent or sworn aloud.
From the stairs at the other end he heard someone approach, moving with an uneven gait. Before the other man’s head could rise into view, Cly called out a greeting. “Swakhammer, is that you?”
Jeremiah Swakhammer appeared with a lopsided grin and a cane. “Yeah, it’s me. You heard this thing tapping, did you?”
“You’ve never been too light on your feet,” Cly said, extending a hand, which Swakhammer shook. “But now that you’ve got a third leg to bang around, sure enough. I know the sound of you.”
“I won’t have it much longer, maybe. That crackpot Chinaman doctor Wong says if I’m careful, my leg will be right as rain within another few weeks. I might not even have a limp to show for it.”
“That crackpot Chinaman doctor saved your lousy ass, Jerry. Don’t act like you don’t know it.”
“I do, I do,” he said. The grin stayed put, even spreading. “But he puts the most god-awful muck on me—these salves and creams—and he makes me drink teas that taste like tobacco simmered in horse piss.”
Cly was not altogether unfamiliar with Chinese medicine himself, having spent time in San Francisco and Portland with his first mate, Fang. “Do they work?”
“Mostly. I think.”
“Then quit your bellyaching, eh?” The captain slapped Swakhammer on the back, just to make him wobble. Jeremiah was a big man in his own right, but built wide—whereas Cly was built tall. “You ought to buy him flowers, next time you see the topside!”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what my daughter said.” The words came out of his mouth a little funny, like he wasn’t accustomed to referring to anyone that way. “But she’s a tyrant of a thing, just like that doctor. Must be common to medical folks.”
“It’d shock me silly if any child of yours was a pushover. Speaking of her, how’s she doing? Is she settling in here to stay, or thinking of heading home?”
Swakhammer shifted his shoulders and gave half a shrug. “She’s doing good—she gets on great with Dr. Wong, and helps him out down in Chinatown, and around here, too.” A note of pride crept into his voice when he added, “She’s as tough as me and twice as smart—so she fits in all right with the other women we got down here.”
“When am I going to meet this kid, anyway?”
“She’s no kid, not anymore. But you can meet her right now, if you want. I think you’re headed right for her. You’re looking for Briar, aren’t ya?”
Captain Cly’s perennial flush bloomed around his collar. “I was … well, sure. Headed over to see her, I suppose. But I’m looking for Houjin, too. And he’s usually clowning around with her boy.” Suddenly it occurred to him to wonder, “But what’s your girl got to do with it? Did somebody get hurt?”
“Briar’s all right, since that’s what you’re really asking.” Swakhammer said, “Come on, I’ll walk with you, and introduce you to my tyrant offspring.”
Cly fell into step beside Jeremiah, and together they strolled around the next corner, down to the next flight of stairs. “Is something wrong with one of the boys?”
“Zeke got himself scratched up. Those kids were out in the hill blocks—they’d gone through Chinatown and let themselves up near one of the pump rooms, poking around at the big houses up on the hill, or what’s left of them.”
“Scavenging?”
“Playing around, is my guess. Boys do dumb stuff. Anyhow, he fell on something—or fell in something. I’m not too clear on the particulars, but they can give you the story.”
“Will he be okay?”
“Looks like it. He’ll be walking around like me for a while, dragging one foot behind him. But he didn’t break anything, so he’ll wind up with a scar and not much more for his trouble. As long as it doesn’t fester.”
By way of announcing himself, Swakhammer leaned forward and knocked on a door that was halfway open. He poked his head around it. “Everybody decent?” he asked. It was a joke between him and his daughter, after she’d walked in on him while the doctor was helping him bathe. Ever after, he’d insisted that she knock and confirm decency before entering.
But she usually didn’t.
“Decent as we’ll ever be,” Mercy Swakhammer Lynch called back her father’s own favorite response. “Didn’t you say you were headed topside?”
“I did,” he confirmed as he stepped inside. “But then I ran into this guy, and I realized you hadn’t met him yet—so I figured I’d show you off.”
“Show me off?”
Andan Cly followed Jeremiah Swakhammer inside, doing his best to make himself look smaller. An exercise in futility, given that he could’ve reached up and placed both elbows flat on the ceiling, but he hunched anyway.
The room was large and quite bright, due to Mercy’s insistence that she couldn’t work in the dark, goddammit, and a place with so much potential for injury and illness ought to have some kind of clinic … or if nothing else, a room that could serve as one in a pinch. She’d picked the empty “apartment” next to her own sleeping quarters and stocked it with every gas lamp, oil lamp, candle contraption, and electric lantern at hand, and with the help of Dr. Wong, she’d gotten the place more or less serviceable.
Now she was staring intently at Zeke’s leg as he lay flat on a table, grimacing for his life. She wore a set of lenses strapped to her face, helping the light show her what the trouble was. When she looked up at her father and his friend, her eyes were as big and strange as an owl’s.
“Hi, there,” Cly said to her. “It’s … not Miss Swakhammer, is it? Jerry said you were married, once.”
“Widowed,” she said. “It’s Mrs. Lynch if you like, or Mercy if you can’t be bothered.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Cly. I have a ship, and I swing through every now and again. If you ever need anything, you can let me know, and I’ll try to pick it up for you.”
“Thank you for the offer. I’ll likely take you up on it one of these days.” She used the back of her hand to shove a stray bit of hair out of her face. Her locks were lighter than Jeremiah’s, on the dark side of blond and worn in a braid that was knotted at the back of her neck. Even though she was seated, Cly could see that there was something of her father in her shape. She was too sturdy to be called slender, and her strong, straight shoulders were a direct inheritance.
Zeke made a muffled umph noise when she dived back in with the needle, stitching a long, jagged gash with swift, sure strokes. He said, “Sorry.”
Mercy said, “You’re doing just fine. I’ve seen bigger, older men be worse babies than you by a long shot.” It was probably true. Before coming to Seattle at her father’s behest, she’d worked in a Richmond hospital, patching up wounded veterans.
Zeke knew this, and he said between gasps, “I could be a soldier, you know.”
“What are you now, sixteen or seventeen?”
“Sixteen.”
She nodded, and squinted. “Old enough,” she said, but something in her tone suggested she’d seen younger. “I don’t recommend it, though.”
“I ain’t looking to join up,” Zeke assured her, then bit back another yelp.
Cly noted that Zeke’s mother was not present, but he assumed she’d return before long. He went over to a seat—in the form of an old church pew someone had hauled down to the underground—and made himself comfortable. Swakhammer joined him. Between the pair of them, they occupied almost half of it.
“It’s just as well you’re not interested in fighting,” Cly told the boy. “You’d give your momma a fit.”
Zeke gave a pained laugh that ended in a gulp. “Shit, Captain. You know her. She’d probably sign up and come to war after me.”
“I do admit, there is a precedent,” he said. He leaned back and made a halfhearted effort to get comfortable. “What happened to you, anyway? And where’s your partner in crime?”