Boneshaker

The corridor opened into a three-way split. “Take the middle,” Swakhammer told her. “The question is, does the kid know where the house is?”

“I don’t think he does, but I might be wrong. If he doesn’t know, then I can’t imagine how he’d begin to start looking.”

“Maynard’s,” he said with confidence. “The pub is both the safest place he could end up, and the most likely place he’d end up.”

Briar tried not to let the lantern shake when she asked, half to herself and half to her companion, “What if he’s not there?”

He didn’t answer at first. He sidled up next to her and gently took the lantern away, holding it up higher and out as if he were looking for something. “Ah,” he said, and Briar saw the street name and the arrow painted on the wall. “Sorry. For a minute there, I thought we’d gotten turned around. I don’t come out this way often. Mostly, I stick closer to the square.”

“Oh.”

“But listen, as for your boy, if he’s not at Maynard’s… well, then he’s not at Maynard’s. You can ask around, see if anyone’s seen him or heard about him. If nobody has, then at least you’re spreading the word — and that can only help him. Folks down at Maynard’s, when they hear they’ve got flesh and blood to the old lawman lost or wandering here in the city, they’ll move hell, high water, or Blight-wash to find him, just to say they’ve seen him.”

“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”

“Why would I bother?”

Above them something heavy fell, and the pipes that ran along the walls shuddered in their posts.

“What was that?” Briar demanded. She skidded closer to Swakhammer and resisted the urge to ready her rifle.

“Rotters? Our boys? Mi

“Mi

“That’s him.”

“So he’s a scientist? An inventor?”

“Something like that.”

Briar frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s a man with many toys, and he’s always unveiling new ones. Most of his toys are dangerous as hell, though a few of them are kind of fun. He does little mechanical things sometimes, too. He’s an odd bird, and not always a friendly one. You can say it out loud, if you want.”

“Say what out loud?” She stared straight ahead, into the damp, faintly noxious distance.

“What you’re thinking. You’re not the first person to notice it — how much Mi

“My former husband. And I wasn’t thinking that,” she lied.

“Then you’re a damn fool. There’s not a man down here who hasn’t wondered about it.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” she protested, though she was deathly afraid that she did. “Seattle wasn’t a huge city, but it was big enough to have more than one scientist living here, I bet. Or this Mi

“Or he might be old Levi, dressed up different and wearing a new name.”

“He isn’t,” she said so quickly that she knew it must sound suspicious. “My husband is dead. I don’t know who this Mi

“Down this way.” Swakhammer urged her toward a darker path that ended in a ladder. The ladder disappeared into another brick-lined tu

“You can go first.”

“All right.” He put the lantern’s wire handle in his teeth, leaned his head forward, and descended with the light almost singeing his shirt. “How? ” he asked from down below.

“How what?”

“How do you know Mi

“If you call me that again, I’ll shoot you,” she promised. She set her feet on the rungs and climbed down after him.

“I’ll keep that in mind. But answer my question: How do you know it ain’t him? Far as I know, no one ever found Blue’s body. Or if anyone did, no one a

She hopped down off the last rung and stood up straight. At her full height, she barely came up to his shoulder. “Nobody found him because he died here in the city at the same time so many other people did, and no one was willing to come back to look. Rotters probably got his body, or maybe it’s just decayed away to nothing. But I’m telling you, he’s as dead as a stone, not down here living inside these walls that are all his fault. I can’t imagine why you’d even wonder such a thing.”

“Really? You can’t imagine?” He gave her a smirk and shook his head. “Yeah, it’s real hard to imagine… one crazy scientist makes crazy machines and destroys a whole city, and then as soon as the dust settles, there’s a crazy scientist making crazy machines.”

“But surely someone has actually seen Mi

“Everyone knew what Blue looked like, sure. But no one knows about Mi

He looked down at Briar and said quite pointedly, “That was a few years ago, before we had a good idea of how to breathe down here. It took some trial and error, it did, and this is a place where only the strong survive. And Evie, she just wasn’t strong. She got sick and started slipping, so the good doctor shot her in the head.”

“That’s…” Briar couldn’t think of a response.

“That’s plain old practicality, is all. We’ve got plenty of rotters shambling around; we didn’t need one more hanging about. Point is,” he tried again, “before she went down, she told folks she’d got a look at his face, and it was all scarred up — like he’d been burned, or like something else bad had happened to him. She said he almost never took off his gas mask, even when he was underside here in the safer places.”

“Well, there you go. He’s just an unfortunate man who’s hiding some scars. There’s no reason to assume the worst.”

“No reason to assume the best, either. He’s a madman, sure as your husband was. And he’s got the same knack for building things, and making things work.” Swakhammer seemed on the verge of saying something else. “I’m not saying that’s who he is, for sure. I’m just saying that lots of people think he might be.”

Briar sneered. “Oh, come on. If you folks really thought he was Blue, you’d have dragged him into the street and fed him to the rotters by now.”

“Mind your step,” he told her, indicating with the sweep of the lantern the way the tu

“I could stop it.”

“Maybe you could; maybe you can’t. If you’re that sold on taking the trouble, I’d like to see you try it. Last few years, the old doctor’s been more trouble than he’s worth down here — useful instruments aside.” He patted at the Daisy and shook his head. “He does good work, but he does bad things with his good work. He’s got a bit of passion for being in charge.”

“You said yourself, nobody’s in charge down here except a man who died sixteen years ago.”

He grumbled, “I didn’t say that exactly. Come on. Not much farther, I swear. Can you hear it?”

“Hear what?” Even as she asked the question, she could hear strains of music. It wasn’t loud and wasn’t too melodic, but it was distinct and cheerful.

“Sounds like Varney’s playing, or trying to play. He can’t pound out a song worth a damn, but he’s doing his best to learn. There was an old player piano in Maynard’s, but the mechanism inside it rotted out. A few of the boys rigged it up so you could play it like a regular instrument. The poor machine hasn’t been tuned since before the walls, but you can probably hear that for yourself.”