Boneshaker

Eleven

At the bottom of the stairs Briar stumbled into a mostly empty room with a floor that was sinking below its original foundation. It sagged and dipped, a foot or more at the room’s center and a few inches along its edges. Down there, coal was stashed in big mining carts that had been wheeled directly to their location through a tu

The tu

There were no tracks in the tu

From beam to beam, long segments of knotted rope were strung up high, and, from the rope, glass lanterns hung in steel cages.

As if it were a trail of bread crumbs, Briar followed the rope as fast as she could push herself. She still held Maynard’s rifle out and ready to be lifted or fired, but it mostly swung underneath her arm as she ran. She saw no other people coming or going, and if the Chinamen were following her, they were doing so quietly. Nothing like the rumbling rush of feet echoed behind her, and nothing like voices, coughs, or laughter chimed out from her destination.

Perhaps fifty yards down the line, under the row of whichever businesses occupied the block, the tu

She pushed the flaps aside a tiny crack, just enough to peer past them.

Two directions were lit; two were dark. One of the bright corridors resonated with an argument. The other was quiet. She hastily took the quieter lit passage and hoped for the best. But in another twenty feet, the passage dead-ended against an iron gate that could’ve held back a herd of elephants.

The gate stuck up out of the ground where its pilings had been buried somewhere far below, and deeply, for more than mere appearance. It leaned out at a determined angle, intended to repel some astonishing force with the pointed tips of its topmost pikes. On the other side of the leaning gate Briar saw a tight wooden wall wrapped with barbed wire. The timbers looked as if they’d once been on the ground, functioning as railroad ties, but there was a horizontal latch where an immense wooden arm could be levered up and out — and as Briar looked more closely, she could see cracks where a door was cut, or pressed, or jammed into place.

She grasped at the gate, feeling along its bars until her fingers fumbled at a lifting lock. It wasn’t fastened, only slipped into place so it was easy to move.

She gripped the latch and pulled, but the door didn’t budge.

So she pushed. It groaned forward, and a gust of air puffed into the underground chamber. Briar didn’t need to smell the gas through the mask or look through her fragment of polarized lens to know it was there.

On the other side, she found a set of stone stairs. The stairs led up and out, but no farther down.

She didn’t give herself time to change her mind or look for another way through the situation. Up on the street she could get her bearings. She flattened herself sideways and squeezed past a wooden door onto the stairwell. She used her backside to push the door shut and lifted the rifle again, forcing her hands to steady and her attention to focus, because here she was, in Seattle proper. Inside the wall, with the terrible things that were trapped within it, and terrible people, too, for all she knew of it.

The rifle made her feel safer. She squeezed it hard and silently thanked her late father for his taste in firearms.

Up the steps she couldn’t see a thing except for a sharp rectangle of hard ash gray, and it wasn’t even the gray of the sky. It was the permanent dusk imposed by the height of the wall, its shadow blocking out even the weak, drizzling sunlight that came for a few hours each day during the winter.

“What street is this?” Briar asked herself. Her own voice wasn’t much more comfort than the rifle. “What street?”

Something was odd about the door, she thought, but it didn’t occur to her until she was past it that there had been no external latch, knob, or even a lock. It was a door designed to keep people out unless they had the permission of those already secured there.

It almost gave her a flash of panic, knowing that now, even if she needed to, she could not retreat. But retreat wasn’t part of the plan, anyway.

The plan was up. The plan was to reach the street, scout for street markers, acquire her bearings, and then set out for… Where? Well. There was always home.

The house on the side of the hill hadn’t been home for very long, only a few months; and since she now knew there were people inside the wall, she could safely bet that the house had been raided for the bulk of its valuables. But there might be something useful remaining. Leviticus had made so many machines, and he’d hidden so much of his best and favorite devices in tricky, closed-off rooms that might’ve gone overlooked.

And besides — she knew nothing of Ezekiel’s plans except that he’d wanted to see his father’s laboratory and hunt for exonerating evidence there.

Did Ezekiel even know where the house was located?

Briar rather thought that he didn’t; but then again, she’d also thought he couldn’t get inside the city, and she’d been quite wrong on that point. He was a resourceful boy; she had to give him that. Her wisest course of action might be to simply assume that he’d succeeded.

While she lurked at the bottom of the chipped stone stairs, down in the darkness as if she were sitting in a well, Briar slowly caught her breath and found her psychic footing. No one shoved the door open and discovered her. Not a sound reached her ears — not even the clanging racket of the machine works in the building at her back.

It might not be so bad.

She leaned one booted toe forward and placed it quietly on the nearest stair. The second step was climbed with equal slowness and silence. While her mask-impaired side vision permitted it, Briar watched the door behind her shrink as she rose.

She’d heard stories about the rotters, and she’d seen a few of them in the first days after the Blight broke, but how many could possibly be left inside the city? Surely at some point they would die, or fail, or decay, or simply succumb to the elements. They must be in terrible shape, and weak as kittens if they still crawled or shambled.

Or that is what she told herself as she climbed.

Bending her knees to crouch, she kept her head below the crest of the stairwell until the last possible moment, and then she craned her neck to see without exposing herself to whatever might wait above.

More dark than bright, the city was not quite so bleak that she’d need a light, but it wouldn’t be long before the tar-thick shadows of the walls and the roofs would cast the whole scene into early midnight.

The street crumbled at Briar’s eye level, slick and muddy from rainwater and Blight runoff. Its bricks split and spread. The whole surface was uneven and lumpy, and it was littered with debris. Carts sprawled overturned and broken; the mostly dismembered and long-decayed corpses of horses and dogs were scattered into piles of sticky bones, loosely co

Briar swiveled her head slowly left, then right. She couldn’t see far in any direction.

Between the dimness and the concentrated, thickened air, no more than half a block could be discerned at once. Which way the streets ran, there was no telling. North and south, east and west, none of it meant anything without the sun to guess it by.