After Angeline left, Houjin and Rector munched quietly on the cherries, each lost in his own set of thoughts. Finally, there was nothing left between them but a pile of pits and stems, which Houjin swept away with his palm.
“You want to go find Zeke?” he asked, spitting the last pit into his hand, then tossing it over his shoulder.
“Sure,” Rector said. But the more he thought about it, the less sure he was.
Eight
The meal made Rector feel almost human again, which was good, because Houjin intended to show him every single sight in the underground at top speed. Rector tried to keep up, and he tried to respond when a response was called for; but the underground was full of stairs. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Surely thousands of them, maybe just in the Vaults alone. And since people don’t just fall their way underground, unless they’re being chased by long-armed monsters and happen to land in a chuckhole, the residents put in stairs. That was fine—even sensible—but Rector would’ve given anything to stumble upon one of the “elevators” Houjin mentioned in passing. Apparently there had been hydraulic lifts installed in King Street Station. They sounded wonderful.
“So where are we going, again?” Rector asked, trying to keep the gasping out of his voice as he followed behind Houjin, his cane adding an extra beat to the rhythm of his pace.
Houjin, thereby reminded of his slower companion, dragged his footsteps back to a more followable level and replied, “Fort Decatur. Zeke’s supposed to be helping Captain Cly, but he’s more likely getting in the way. Given his druthers—did I say that right? That’s how people say it, isn’t it, druthers?—he’d be off with Miss Mercy making the rounds, but his mother said he had to give that poor woman a break from his company, so he’s off to the fort.”
“Miss Mercy … the nurse, right?”
“Right. She’s twenty-four, and Sheriff Wilkes says that’s too old for Zeke, but Zeke follows her around anyway, pretending to have an interest in medicine.”
“Pretending?”
“As long as he makes himself useful, Miss Mercy doesn’t mind him. But it’s pretty obvious,” Houjin declared, reaching up for a large lever beside a big round door, “that she doesn’t like him half so much as he likes her. Hey, put your gas mask on.”
“Are we almost outside?”
“Almost. You’re all right running around under the city, most places. But not topside.”
Houjin pulled the lever and heaved his full weight onto the huge round door, shoving it outward. It slipped on perfectly quiet hinges that moved without a squeak. The door looked far too large to be moved by someone so small, but something about the angles let it swing open despite the imbalance.
“Follow me,” the kid prompted, taking a mask out of some pocket Rector hadn’t noticed.
Rector fished his own mask out of his satchel, then mumbled, “Hey, this isn’t mine. Mine got all busted up.”
“I know. That’s one of mine. Put it on.”
“Like I’ve got a choice.”
“Everyone has a choice.”
As Rector climbed up the last set of stairs (he hoped), he watched the other boy slip the mask over his face with the practiced ease of someone who did this a dozen times a day, every day. With somewhat more difficulty, Rector put his on, then went over the threshold, joining Houjin outside the vaults.
The scenery wasn’t terribly interesting—there was just a dark roof made of earth and reinforced timbers where the sky ought to be. Basement walls and building foundations disappeared upward like ordinary building fronts without windows, and the streets between them were packed and damp. The walkways were littered with barrels and buckets, stones, brooms, tracks, bricks, ladders, bird skeletons, rusting junk, and handwritten signs that advertised directions or left messages.
Houjin scanned those messages, some of which were written in Chinese, and shrugged to indicate that none of them were directed at him. “Let’s go,” he urged, his voice muffled by the filters.
Already, Rector hated the masks. They were uncomfortable and tight, and they made it hard to see and breathe.
Houjin used his foot to shove the door closed once more, locking it with a loud, low clank and pop. He explained, “It’s easier to shut it than push it open. Are you ready?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” He might’ve been grinning behind that mask, but Rector didn’t like it.
“Your first trip into the city didn’t go so great, that’s all.”
“The second time’s a charm.”
“I thought that was the third time.”
Rector sniffed, and caught a whiff of a sour mixture of charcoal, sweat, and mildewing leather. “Once in a while I get a second chance. I’m never lucky enough for a third.”
Down short, meandering paths and around crumbling corners, he stuck close to Houjin, who knew his way around as if he had a map burned into his brain. Rector tried hard to pay attention, to note his surroundings and let his internal map keep track of them. Sometimes he thought he had a handle on it, but other times he was sure he couldn’t have found his way back to the Vaults without a native scout and a fistful of cash.
“This place is a rabbit warren,” he complained, holding his side. “Hey, can we slow it down a little?”
“Sure. Sorry. We’re almost to the top, anyway. Catch your breath.”
“We’re near the fort?”
Houjin said, “Practically under it. I didn’t want to take you the overhead way. You were griping about the stairs, so I thought this would be easier. One more set, and then a ladder. But that’s all for now, I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Rector wondered why they’d worn their masks underground all this way, but then he noticed the tumbled walls and sunken places in the ceiling. The city was settling around them, on top of them. Slowly, he assumed—but surely. Inevitably. But for now, that dim, worrying thought was mostly tamped down or drowned out by another dim, worrying thought: Zeke was alive. And he was nearby.
Rector found himself stalling without really knowing why.
“Tell me about this fort,” he started to request, but Houjin had already gone ahead.
“Right up here. Come on!” He made a show of climbing the stairs slowly, to let Rector catch up. At the same time, it was clear that the Chinese boy was impatient. He was probably always impatient with people who were slower than him. If that was the case, Rector thought the kid must spend a great deal of time frustrated out of his gourd.
One more door waited—a double-wide portal that slid sideways on a track. Long, loose flaps of rubber were fastened around its edges, and these retreated stickily. “They’re seals,” Houjin explained. “We need new ones on this door, but the rest of the block needs some maintenance before new seals will do any good.”
So that answered one question: why the extra caution was in order.
Now to answer another one. The big one.
Now to confirm for himself that he hadn’t been haunted by some scrappy kid he’d once known, because that kid wasn’t dead.
He did his best to hide his creeping, almost choking reluctance. He didn’t want Houjin to know how badly he feared confirming the truth—that his own mind had been toying with him all this time. So he did his best to scramble up in the other boy’s wake, making a fumbling mess of it, but getting up to the surface all the same.
Houjin indicated a ladder that had been nailed, braced, and repeatedly affixed to a wall that didn’t seem overly inclined to hold it. “The captain says we’re putting in stairs here, soon. But for now, this is all we have. After you.” He gestured grandly.
“Naw, you can…” Rector began, then caught himself and felt a stab of self-hatred. This was stupid, wasn’t it? Nothing to be afraid of, except for the possibility that his mind was betraying him, caving in on itself like the city inside the wall. He shook it off. “All right, I’ll go first.”
The rungs were rough yet slippery under his bare hands. He wished he’d thought about gloves, but it was too late for that, and now he’d have to deal with it. His heels skidded but caught behind him. He pushed on against exhaustion and weakness, fumbling with his cane up the ladder and into a small, square room.
A watery glow soaked in through the windows, none of which had any glass in them. Along with the light came a faint sense of the world being discolored. The air was yellowed like old paper; it was a sepia substance, one Rector thought he could reach out and touch.
Houjin popped up, stepped off the ladder, and sighed. “Oh look—the sun’s out,” he announced.
The Northwest had many days when the sun rose but nobody saw it, courtesy of the cloud layer. The compressed fog of the Blight exaggerated this gloom, filtering every scrap of light and turning it to murk.
“And I think it’s warming up.”
“I think you’re right,” Rector agreed. It definitely wasn’t freezing, and Rector was only a little cool without a coat. That was the best he could say of it.
Houjin began a monologue of copious explanations which Rector half listened to and half ignored. “This is Fort Decatur. It’s one of the oldest parts of the city, where all the white people holed up when there was trouble with the native people.”
Rector thought of Angeline, who’d clearly made herself at home. “I guess they don’t have trouble with them anymore.”
“Why would they? The Duwamish all left, except for Angeline. But here we are. These days, Captain Cly is using the fort to start off a proper set of docks.”
“As opposed to an improper set?”
“You know what I mean: someplace regular ships can come and go, not just sap-runners or pirates that can hover around or drop down air vents. The captain says that when he’s done, we’ll get mail and everything.”
“You can’t get mail right now?”
Houjin flashed him a look which, even through his visor, evidenced concern that Rector might’ve bruised his brain worse than previously feared. “Do you see a post office?”