Boneshaker

They were Asian — Chinese, she guessed, since two of the men had partially shaved heads with braids like Fang’s. Covered with sweat, wearing long leather aprons that protected their legs and bare chests, the men wore goggles with tinted lenses to shield their eyes from the fires they worked.

Briar tore herself away from the men and retreated into the nearest corner that did not hold a furnace or an open bowl of flame.

The men advanced, still speaking to her in that tongue she could not decipher, and Briar remembered she had a rifle. She whipped it off her back and aimed it at the first man, and the next one, and the third — back and forth — and at the next two men who entered the room to see what the commotion was about.

Even through the charcoal filter in her mask, she could sense the soot choking the air. It smothered her, even though it couldn’t really be smothering her, could it? And it watered her eyes, though it couldn’t really reach them.

It was too much, too sudden — the masked and chattering men with their fires and their shovels, their gears and their buckets of coal. The darkness in the closed, claustrophobic room was oppressive and bright around the edges from the white-hot coals and the yellow flames. All the shadows jerked and twitched. They were sharp and terrible, and they looked violent against the walls and the machinery.

“Stay away from me!” Briar shrieked, only barely thinking that they might not understand her, or even be able to hear her very well through the mask. She brandished the rifle, swinging it and jabbing it at the air.

They held up their hands and retreated, still talking rapidly in spits and bursts. Whether or not they spoke English, they spoke gun.

“How do I get out of here?” she demanded, on the off chance that someone understood her language better than he could communicate in it. “Out! How do I get out?”

From the corner, someone barked a single-syllable reply, but she couldn’t hear it clearly. She quickly turned her head to glimpse the source and saw an elderly fellow with long white hair and a beard that came to a scraggly, pale point. A white film covered his eyes. Briar could see, even in the orange-and-black fever of the bellows room, that he was blind.

He raised a thin arm and pointed to a corridor between a furnace and a machine the size of a cart. She hadn’t seen it before. It was only a black sliver as wide as a drawer, and it seemed to be the only means of entry or exit.

“I’m sorry,” she said to him. “I’m sorry,” she said to the rest of them, but she didn’t lower the rifle. “I’m sorry,” she said again as she turned herself sideways and dashed for the hallway.

Into the narrow space she ran. After a few feet something slapped against her face, but she burst past it and kept jogging madly, into a better-lit walkway pocked with candles shoved into cra

Here and there she saw slotted windows to her left, covered and stuffed with more treated cloth, papers, pitch, and anything else that might insulate and seal out the awful gas outside.

Briar was panting inside the mask, fighting for each lungful of air. But she couldn’t stop, not when there might be men chasing her, not while she didn’t know where she was.

It did look familiar, she thought. Not very familiar — not an oft-visited place, but a location she might’ve seen once or twice under better circumstances, and brighter skies. Her chest hurt, and her elbows ached a little from the bruising descent through the waving yellow tube.

All she could think was out : where the exit might be, where it might lead her, and what she might find there.

The hallway opened into a large room that was vacant except for barrels, crates, and shelves stocked with all ma

Listen as hard as she might, she couldn’t hear anyone following behind her; so she slowed down and tried to catch her breath while she glared from corner to corner at the boxes with their stenciled labels. It was hard, though, to gather her calm. She forced the air through the filters and dragged it through her mouth in a demanding, drawn-out gasp, but there wasn’t enough to satisfy, no matter how much she fought. And she didn’t dare remove the mask, not yet — not when her goal was to find her way out into the streets, into the thick of the gas. She read the labels on the boxes like the words were a mantra.

“Linen. Processed pitch. Eight-pe

Behind her there were voices now, maybe the same ones and maybe different ones.

A big wood door with glass cutout panels had been buttressed and sealed with thick black patches of pitch. Briar shoved her shoulder against it. It didn’t budge, not even to squeak or flex. To the door’s left, there was a window that had received similar treatment. It was covered with sheets of thin wood that had been thoroughly sealed around its edges and along its seams.

To the right of the door there was another counter. Behind it, there were stairs leading down into yet more darkness, with yet more candles glimmering above them.

Even around the ambient swish and press of the mask moving against her hair, Briar could hear footsteps. The voices were getting louder, but there was nowhere else to run or hide. She could go back into the corridor stuffed with onrushing Chinamen, or she could head down the stairs and take her chances with whatever may wait at the bottom.

“Down,” she said into the mask. “All right, down.” And she half stumbled, half skipped down the crooked, creaking stairwell.

Ten

Down through the old hotel next door to the bakery, Zeke followed Rudy and his one dim candle. Once they got to the basement they took another tu

“We’ll get there,” Rudy told him. “It’s like I said, sometimes you’ve got to go down in order to go up.”

“But I thought it was mostly houses where they lived. My mother said it was just a neighborhood, and she told me about some of their neighbors. We keep going underneath all these big places — these hotels and things.”

“That wasn’t a hotel we just went through,” Rudy said. “It was a church.”

“It’s hard to tell from the underside of it,” Zeke complained. “When do we get to take off these masks, anyway? I thought there was supposed to be clean air down here someplace. That’s what my buddy Rector told me.”

Rudy said, “Hush. Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

They stood together, perfectly still, under the street and between a tu

Here and there, a drip of water would ping and splash its way to the earth. Up above, there was sometimes a rattle of something moving far away, out of reach. But Zeke heard nothing closer.