It wasn’t a bad comparison. “Yeah, that’s right.”
He thought about the small cards the nuns passed out, each one with the image of a saint and a short biography on the back. Maynard’s would depict him in his hat, with his badge, buckle, and rifle. He’d be wearing a halo of gold-colored gas, and all the poor sinners would venerate him on bended knee with eyes averted out of respect. Maynard Wilkes: lawman and folk hero. A man who obeyed the spirit of the law if not the letter. He braved the Blight without a mask, back in the days before anybody knew what it was, or how it worked—only that it killed. He fought his own officers, his fellow lawmen, and the remaining civil authorities one and all … and he ran to the city jail to set the prisoners free. Gave ’em a fighting chance. And his famous last words, according to people who professed to be in the know, were, “None of those men were condemned. It’d be murder to let ’em die.”
It was a great story, and at least some of it was true.
If there was one thing Rector had learned in Sunday school, it was that people liked stories. People needed stories, same as they needed heroes. Dead heroes were the best kind, really. You couldn’t argue with them, and mostly, you only remembered the best things they’d ever done—while forgetting about the worst.
Once or twice, when he’d been too sublimely bored to think straight, Rector had opened up one of the Bibles lying around the orphanage. The words inside had been arranged funny, like they were spoken by someone in a play, but he got the stories anyway—and he learned about how a man after God’s own heart had lied, cheated, killed, and schemed … but went down in history as a great king all the same, all because of a lucky shot that knocked down a giant.
Maybe Maynard Wilkes had arrested half the people inside that prison. Maybe on another day, the occupants would just as soon have shot him as name a saloon in his honor. But it was those big stories people remembered, in the end.
And now the job of sheriff belonged to Maynard’s daughter. She wasn’t half the hero Maynard was, in Rector’s somewhat biased opinion; but if anybody had to call the shots, it might as well be her. Just like it might as well be Yaozu running the Station and the sap, and it might as well be Captain Cly turning away from pirating and setting up the docks inside the city.
How much did they choose—and how much was chosen for them by coincidence and lore?
Rector shrugged off the question. How much had he chosen, when he’d come inside the wall? And how much had he only been driven to?
Out through the huge round Vault door and under the streets the two boys dashed. They paused to spread the word to everyone they met, an assortment of men whose names Rector forgot as soon as he heard them. Along the damp corridors and muddy halls braced by mining timbers and railroad ties, the boys continued until they reached the ladder that would take them up inside the fort. Rector realized he almost could’ve found it on his own, a fact which surprised and pleased him, and made him wonder if his brain hadn’t cooked up like a boiled egg quite as bad as he’d thought. He was still capable of learning his way around, and that was something.
Up the rungs they went, and into the gloomy yellow-gray air.
Zeke headed directly to the main yard with its half-built docks at the east end and called out for Captain Cly or anybody from the Naamah Darling. No one answered. At first Rector thought the fort was a dud, but then a man stepped out of the fog. He was wearing a mask with a hole cut in the back for his ponytail, similar to the way Houjin wore his. This newcomer dressed halfway between a Chinese man and an airman, so Rector knew it must be somebody from the Naamah Darling, but he couldn’t recall anybody’s name except for Cly and Troost.
Zeke called out, “Fang! I know you don’t mean to sneak up on people, but goddamn.” Then, to Rector, he said, “Fang ain’t got no tongue, so he don’t talk. He’s the first mate on the Naamah Darling.” Turning back to the first mate, he said, “Princess Angeline is calling an underground meeting, down over at Maynard’s.”
Fang nodded, then mimed looking at a pocket watch.
Zeke understood. “When? Now, pretty much. I think. Hey, you seen my mom around? Or the captain? Anybody you want to tell, tell ’em right away. After we spread the word around the fort, we’re heading down to the saloon ourselves.”
Fang began to sign with his hands, but changed his mind and instead held up a finger, asking the boys to wait. He walked over to the lean-to. When he returned, he had a pencil and a piece of paper. Upon it, he wrote, I’ll tell Kirby. Your mother is inside the ship. Knock first. Loudly, and handed the paper to Zeke.
“Knock first? Well, all right. Come on, Rector—one more message to pass along, and then I’ll show you Maynard’s. You’ll like it, I think.”
Rector had a feeling that unless the saloon sold sap by the pound, he could take it or leave it … but Zeke’s enthusiasm was such that he sat back and let the kid run with it, all the way over to the big, bobbing hull of the Naamah Darling, which was tethered to the old totem pole.
Forgetting Fang’s note, Zeke rushed up to the ship and seized the hatch that would let him inside.
Rector, getting an inkling of what Fang’s note meant, reminded him. “Hey, you saw what Fang … said. Maybe you should—”
“Knock, oh yeah—that’s right.” He struggled with the hatch, which didn’t want to release. “Ain’t I making enough racket, though? What’s wrong with this thing, anyhow?” He gave the hatch a whack with the back of his hand, then scanned the ground for something heartier to hit it with. Not seeing anything, he made a fist and punched at the hatch while hollering, “Mother, Fang said you’re in there. I need to talk to you real quick. It’s important! Mother?”
And the hatch dropped violently open. It was all but flung to the ground, snapping back against the underside of the ship with a clang before settling into the usual position. But it wasn’t Briar Wilkes scowling down from the ship’s interior.
Captain Cly did not look happy.
“Important?” he said, his voice carefully controlled within his mask.
“Well, yeah…” Zeke said. “Took you long enough to answer the door. Were you in the back?”
Rector put his palm to his forehead.
“Fang said Momma’s in there. I’m looking for her, and you, too,” Zeke continued, clueless as could be.
Rector heard a door open with the sticky suck of seals being broken, and Briar saying, “Ezekiel Anderson Wilkes?” … which couldn’t be good. If Rector knew one thing about other people’s parents, it was that hearing all three of your given names called in one breath was a sign of bad things to come.
“Mother! There you are. We’ve got to get down into the underground. Everybody has to go to Maynard’s.”
“And why is that?” she asked, sitting down beside the crouching captain. Her feet dangled out through the hatch, and Rector saw that her boots were not tied.
“Because Miss Angeline says so. We saw something real awful today, up by the north edge of the wall. We know how the rotters are getting out, and the animals are getting inside. Long story short, we’ve got intruders.”
Captain Cly and Briar Wilkes exchanged a worried glance. The captain scratched at the side of his head, where the mask seal was rubbing against his temple. “What were you kids doing out at the north end, anyway? I suppose Houjin was with you,” he muttered.
“Sure, he was with us—but so was the princess. We wouldn’t’ve gone out there alone, of course,” Zeke lied through his teeth.
“Angeline went with you?” Briar Wilkes reached down to tie her boots, and added, “That makes it a little better, I guess—I trust her to keep you out of … Come to think of it, I’m not so sure. She gets into plenty of trouble on her own, without you three tagging along.”
The captain made a feeble effort to reassure her. “Oh, she’ll keep ’em out of the worst of it, I expect. And they’re standing here in one piece now, aren’t they? Two of ’em, at any rate. Where’s Huey?”
Zeke answered. “The princess sent him down to Chinatown to spread the same news we’re telling you. There’s trouble cooking out at the north end of the wall, and the whole city needs to hear about it.”
Twenty-one
Maynard’s Saloon was packed to the gills. Even Zeke admitted, with no small measure of awe, that he’d never seen so many people crammed inside it—and, for that matter, he wouldn’t have figured this many people would fit. But everyone had come. There were a number of men from Chinatown, and a smattering of people Rector didn’t recognize at all. He didn’t know where they’d come from, but a couple of them looked like airmen, maybe—and a couple others might’ve been miners or loggers from outside the walls.
The establishment itself was amazingly normal looking, so far as Rector could tell from peeking between the crowd. It had a big wooden bar with a mirrored backdrop, and brass fixtures that appeared to get a regular polishing. A tall player piano sat in a corner, its padded seat occupied by two thin men who stood precariously upon it in order to see over the crowds. Likewise, there were people standing on the wooden chairs that ordinarily went around the card tables.
The lights were a combination of electric and gas, and they glimmered brightly from wall to wall, flickering in the mirrored portions of the serving area and glinting off the metal trim. Maynard’s looked warmer than it felt.
Everyone who pushed, stretched, and strained on tippytoes to see was facing the mirror. Miss Lucy was there, right at home stationed behind the bar, and beside her Angeline Sealth sat on the bar proper, waiting for the room to fill up to her satisfaction.
The boys elbowed through the crowd.
Rector saw the crew of the Naamah Darling, including the captain, Fang, and Kirby Troost; he saw Frank and Willard, who still smelled like the smoke room; and he noted Mercy Lynch standing between her father and a wizened Chinese man whose eyes were very bright and sharp behind a pair of spectacles. “Doctor Wong?” he asked Zeke.