The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) (20 page)

Grouchily, Rector argued, “Well, maybe the rotters are headed out to sea.”

“But the rats and raccoons aren’t coming
in
that way,” he pointed out. “Your first idea—that the animals are coming inside the same way the rotters are getting outside—was a better one. If I were you, I’d stick with that theory.”

“Yeah, it
was
a pretty good thought.” He worked one finger under the itchiest mask strap and rubbed, figuring he could get away with it since his nails were covered by soft leather. If he felt like being honest with himself, he might’ve admitted that he didn’t have good thoughts every minute of every day, so he ought to stick with the ones that made it through. But he didn’t feel like being honest.

In the minute or two he’d kept his mouth shut thinking about it, he’d begun to hear the soft swish and roll of waves off to his right. “Rector?” Zeke asked, in exactly the same tone you’d use to talk a dog into putting down a bone.

“All right, that’s fine. You two live here, like you keep telling me. We’ll go your way, and see what we can find.”

The fog pooled and collected like snow. It drifted and gusted against the vertically stacked stone and twisted in small eddies; it spiraled and spun in tiny tornadoes that tugged at the boys’ hair and tickled the spots where their clothes didn’t cover their skin. Rector, Houjin, and Zeke moved without speaking, except to double-check that they were all together. Sometimes the air was so thick that they couldn’t keep track of one another unless they held hands. When they seemed to be hiking through a rich cream soup, they would spit one another’s names between their teeth, calling back and forth with as little sound as possible.

Rector dragged his fingers along the hastily erected wall, feeling the contours rise and fall, dip and crumble into a dry mortar crust. He dusted his hands off against his pants and shivered—even though it wasn’t as cold as it had been a few days earlier, it still wasn’t warm. It was almost never warm, and the wall’s imposing shadow drained the tepid sunlight of what little relief it offered. Up above, and somewhere past the boundaries of what they could see through the pallid air, even the flapping wings of the Blight-poisoned birds were sluggish and slow.

“You hear those?” Rector breathed. “Getting closer.”

“I hear ’em,” Zeke replied, so faintly that if Rector had been even another step away, he wouldn’t have heard him.

“I don’t like them.”

“They’re only birds,” Zeke assured him. Then he faced forward and softly called, “Huey?”

“Right here.”

“Thought I’d lost you for a second.”

“Keep up, you two,” Houjin urged.

“How much farther?” Zeke asked.

“A quarter mile?” he guessed. “Then we’ll hit the next drop down into the underground.”

“Are there carts?”

“Yes. Now
shhhh.
”

“Don’t you tell me—”

Houjin came to a sharp stop and turned around. Zeke ran into him, but bounced back. Huey held out his weapon—not to brandish it, exactly, but to make a point. “Hush! I told you, I
hear
something.”

Rector was mad, and he was scared, and he didn’t like having a younger kid (or anybody else) put a long metal pole in his face. He smacked the pole away with the back of his hand with a
clang
. It hurt, and it’d certainly bruise. He wished he hadn’t done it. “I don’t hear anything,” he fussed.

“Wait,” Zeke said, holding out both hands. The hand that held the big fireman’s ax drooped low. “I hear it, too.”

Houjin lowered his pole, pointing the sharp end at a spot barely a foot off the ground. Still in his softest voice, he said, “Coming from down
here.
”

Zeke readied his ax, holding it down at a similar level and getting ready to swing. “Raccoons?” he tried.

“Could be.”

Rector heard it, too. It scratched against his ears, a hoarse, hushed breathing sound coming from knee level a few yards away. He tried to take comfort from the fact that the breather didn’t sound very big; whatever it was, its inhalations and exhalations came fast and short, like a dog.

But what if it was something worse? Rector braced himself against the wall, which was cold, terribly cold, and a bit damp with condensation. “Could be a little kid,” he said. The words were almost a horrified gasp, squeezed out of his mask and into the open air. “A baby, or something. There are kid rotters, aren’t there? That’s what I heard.”

Neither of his companions responded.

“Where is it?” he asked. His friends didn’t answer that, either.

The question answered itself when the low-lying clouds thinned and stretched, revealing a pair of glimmering gold eyes. The eyes did not glow, but they flashed, flickering like a cat’s, or like any nighttime thing that roams and stalks.

Houjin stayed steadiest. He kept the point of his sharpened bar aimed at the thing’s face. Zeke took up a defensive position at Huey’s shoulder, prepared to swing the huge ax at anything that came close enough to hit, assuming he could lift it off his shoulder.

Rector plastered himself against the slimy wall, his pickax hanging from one hand. It knocked against his thigh. He clutched the weapon higher, up against his chest.

The bright-eyed thing came forward in a slinking crouch. It snarled and slathered as it crept, its joints stiff and its ears flattened. It approached them unhappily, nervously, curiously.

Hungrily.

“Mad dog,” Rector wheezed.

Houjin disagreed. “No. A
fox.
It’s a Blight-poisoned fox.”

“Never seen one of them before,” Zeke marveled, still arched and primed for battle.

Rector asked, “Is it dead? A rotter fox?”

Zeke shook the ax. “Go on, you. Get out of here.”

Huey said, “Not dead. Real sick, though. The birds fight off the Blight—they live with it. Four-footed things don’t handle it so good.”

The ragged creature paced forward slowly and stopped within a few feet, as if considering what to do. Three people to one small, ill animal … it weighed the odds, and weighed its own hunger. It growled, yipped, and shook its head, but did not retreat.

“You see.” Houjin planted his feet apart, ready to strike if he had to. “It’s
thinking.
Or it’s trying to. Rotters don’t think.”

Zeke swung the ax in the fox’s general direction. “Get along, you dumb thing. Get out of here. Don’t bother us, and we won’t bother you.”

His ax went wobbly, due to its weight. He drew it back up and held it with both hands.

The fox quivered and hopped back half a step. It snapped its jaws, spraying yellow-tinged spittle in every direction. Then it made up its mind, turned sharply, and dashed away. It disappeared through the fog in an instant, and the sound of its small feet—its little claws clicking against pebbles—lingered only a moment longer.

All three boys exhaled hard and let their weapons fall to their sides.

“I’m glad we didn’t have to kill it,” Zeke confessed.

Houjin said, “I don’t know. It isn’t happy being alive in here.”

This time, Rector agreed with Houjin. “Should’ve just smashed its head in. Would’ve done it a kindness.”

But Zeke still sagged, looking unhappy behind his visor. “I feel sorry for it. I wish we could’ve caught it, maybe let it go outside the wall.”

“So it could go bite other foxes, and make them sick, too?” Houjin swung his bar up over his shoulder so it rested against his neck.

Zeke did likewise with his ax, and sighed. “Maybe if it got some fresh air, some regular air, it’d get better.”

They still whispered, though their caution evaporated somewhat in the wake of the fox’s disappearance. Rector still brought up the rear, watching backwards to make sure no one followed them, and praying that Houjin and Zeke would see anyone up ahead. It was odd, feeling so alone but knowing that they weren’t—that the city crawled with sick and dying things, and dead things that hunted regardless.

Rector surveyed the wall, too, but it stayed firm and showed no signs of holes, or even cracks. There were no breaches big enough to let anything person-sized (or even fox-sized, or rat-sized) in or out. He clung to it, oddly comforted by its epic reliability.

He said, “I thought maybe that fox was a good sign.”

Houjin looked back at him. His face was a masked shadow. “Why?”

“You saw it. It hadn’t been inside for very long. Makes me wonder if we’re close to the entrance, or exit.”

“But you saw it run off,” Zeke said. “Those things move pretty fast. It could’ve run pretty far.”

Huey paused, and the two boys who followed him paused, too. “What if we’re going about this the wrong way?”

“Everything feels like the wrong way, down here,” Rector said. He was getting thirsty, and he was also getting the very smothered feeling of spending too long in a gas mask. He wanted to get inside, someplace where the air was clean. He was running out of patience, and he didn’t want to admit it. It grieved him to think that the wall held several square miles of space, which meant that there was still a whole lot of territory to check before he could report to Yaozu that he’d done his job.

“That’s not what I mean. What if the hole isn’t in the wall—what if the hole is underground? Say one of the tunnels collapsed and left a spot that stretched beyond the wall, to someplace outside. What if things are getting inside that way?”

Rector snorted with exasperation. “Or what if they’re dropping from the sky, hitching rides on crows or dirigibles?”

“Don’t be like that,” Houjin groused back at him.

“Look, Yaozu told me to check the
wall
. He didn’t tell me to dig through every underground tunnel, pit, shaft, or cave. One thing at a time, all right? Let’s rule out the wall, and then move on to other ideas.”

Huey conceded, “That’s not the most unreasonable thing you’ve ever said.”

“God forbid you admit I had another good idea.”

“It’s not a
good
idea. It’s a plan someone else gave you, and you’re sticking to it because it’s the easiest thing to do.”

Zeke rolled his eyes and started walking along the wall. “Can’t you two get along for ten whole minutes? I don’t know what your problem is.”

“This guy,
he’s
the problem,” Rector said.

Huey retorted with a “Shut up.”

This once, Rector did so—but not because of the command. It was his turn to hear something, out in the fog. “Guys? What’s that?”

From back in the fog somewhere in front of them, a voice called back. “Silly boys. You’re making enough noise to wake the dead. Or call ’em to supper.”

Princess Angeline stepped forward out of the filthy mist, a close-fitting mask covering her face—though her eyes showed, and her silver hair was left to flop around her shoulders. She wore a pair of canvas pants, and a jacket that was buttoned all the way to the top, stopping just under her throat. Slung around her chest was a bandolier that held a row of small throwing knives.

Houjin perked up immediately. “Miss Angeline!”

“Hey there, fellows. You’re a little far from home, ain’t you?”

Zeke said, “Yes, ma’am, but we’re on a mission.”

“What kind of mission?”

Rector stepped in, since the mission belonged to him. “We’re checking the wall for holes. We think the rotters are getting out, and animals are getting in. We know the men out at King Street have been watching their end of the wall, so we thought we’d start at this end.”

“That’s either brave of you, or dumber than homemade sin.”

“A little of both?” Zeke tried. “We were getting ready to head back to the Vaults. We’re thirsty and hungry, and we haven’t seen anything except for one sick fox.”

“Aw, a fox? That’s a shame. You saw it wandering around up here?”

Houjin said, “Yes, ma’am. We chased it off.”

Angeline put her hands on her hips and cocked her head thoughtfully. “It’s not a bad idea. Not the bit about the fox, but the bit about a hole in the wall. Should’ve thought of it myself, but I’ve been in and out of town a lot. My grandson is getting married out in Tacoma, so I haven’t been around so much.”

“Didn’t know you had a grandson,” Zeke said with a touch of awe.

“I do. But that’s beside the point. You think we have a hole?”

Rector wasn’t stupid enough to mention that it was Yaozu’s theory, and the other two boys kept that particular piece of information quiet as well. He’d been warned that the princess hated the powerful Chinese man who ran most of the Station. And even if Rector hadn’t liked her, he didn’t want to anger a woman who wore that many sharp things attached to her clothes.

So all he said was, “A hole, a crack …
something
that lets things out, and lets things in.”

Houjin added, “There must be someplace where people see Blight-sick animals more often. Now that I think about it, we really should’ve followed that fox.”

Rubbing at her chin under her mask, Angeline said, “You’d never have caught him. There’s plenty of strange goings-on here in the wall these days, boys, I tell you what—it gets weirder by the day.”

Intrigued, Rector asked, “Why do you say that?” But he did so in a normal speaking voice, and everyone else shushed him. “Sorry! Sorry,” he said much more softly.

“That’s right, boy. Don’t ever forget where you are.” She came in close to the three of them, gathering them around her as if she meant to shield them. “Always keep your voice down low.
Always.
We can talk between us, but keep it quiet.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Zeke and Houjin said.

Rector nodded, then he said, “I was trying to ask: Did you ever hear of something called an
inexplicable
?”

She frowned. “Nope. What’s that word mean?”

Houjin told her, and she said, “All right, I’ll remember that. And let me answer your other question, Red,” she said, perhaps misremembering his name, or just having decided to call him that. “Actually, how about I show you, rather than tell you.”

He hemmed and hawed. “Aw, we were just heading back down to the Vaults, like we said.”

“Yes, and I heard you. You’re heading over to the Sizemore House?” she asked Houjin, who bobbed his head.