Boneshaker

“Then he started fighting me; I don’t know why. I like to think that he knew it was the end, and he was trying to help keep me safe by pushing me away. But I fought his fighting me. I was as determined as hell to take him away and get him safe. He was equally determined to stay.

“We fell together, landing against the counter, and when I got him back up again, he was gone. He’d started moaning and drooling — with all those bites on him, the poison had worked its way inside him.

“That’s when it happened. That’s when he bit me.

“He only got my thumb, and he barely broke the skin, but it was enough. I knew he was gone then, even more than when his eyes had gone nasty and his breath had turned stale like a dead animal on the street. Charlie would’ve never hurt me.” She cleared her throat again, but she wasn’t crying. Her eyes stayed dry, glittering in the candlelight.

The pipes whistled again, and she used it as an excuse to pause. She continued with, “I should’ve killed him. I owed him that kindness. But I was too afraid, and I’ve hated myself for it ever since. Anyway, it’s all done now, or left undone, and there’s no fixing it. Point is, I ran out to the Outskirts and found a church where they let me lie down and cry.”

“But the bite.”

“But the bite,” Lucy said. “Yes, the bite. The bite took to rotting, and the rot took to spreading. Three of the nuns held me down and a priest did the first amputation.”

Briar cringed. “The first?”

“Oh, yes. The first one didn’t take enough. They only took my hand, right at the wrist. The second time they came back with the saw and they took it above the elbow, and then the third time I lost it all the way up to the shoulder. That did the trick, at least. I nearly died from it, each time. Each time the wound was red and hot for weeks, and I wished the sickness would just take me, or someone would just shoot me — since I was too weak and hurt to shoot myself.”

She hesitated, or perhaps she was only tired.

But Briar asked, “Then what happened?”

“Then I got better. It took a long time, about a year and a half before I felt like myself again. And then, I could only think of one thing: I needed to go back and take care of Charlie. Even if that meant putting a bullet through his eye, he deserved better.”

“But by then we had a wall.”

“That’s right. There’s more than one way inside, though, as you learned yourself. I came up through the runoff tu

“But…” Briar shook her head. “What about the other hand? And what about the replacement?”

“The other hand? Oh.” She shifted again in bed, and the feathers in the mattress rustled together with the blanket. A great yawn split her face, and she used the tail end of it to blow out the candle beside her bed. “The other hand I lost about two years later, down here. One of the newer furnaces exploded; it killed three of the Chinamen who worked it, and blinded another one. My hand got caught by a scrap of white-hot metal, and that was the end of that.”

“God,” Briar said. She leaned forward and blew out her own candle, too. “That’s terrible, Lucy. I’m so sorry.”

Lucy said into the dark, “Not your fault. Not anybody’s fault, except my own for being down here after all that time. And by then we had our wicked old doctor, and he fixed me up.”

Briar heard a settling swish of legs turning over underneath fla

Lucy sealed off another yawn with a high, satisfied note like the warning whistle of a teakettle. “It took him a while, figuring out how he was going to do it. He made up all these plans and drew all these pictures. It was a game to him, putting me back together. And when he had it all made, and all ready to wear, he showed it to me and I like to have died. It looked so heavy and weird, I thought I’d never be able to carry it, much less wear it.

“He didn’t tell me, either, how he pla

“Christ, Lucy…”

“It was worse than the other times, and worse than losing the arms in the first place. But now, well.” She must have rolled, or tried to move the arm again. It jangled beneath the blanket, clattering against her chest. “Now I’m glad to have it. Even though it cost me.”

Briar heard a hint of something bad in the last thing Lucy said before she finally went to sleep, but it was late and she was too exhausted to ask about it. She’d spent almost her entire time in the walls ru

As Briar tried to calm her mind, her stomach grumbled and she realized that she hadn’t eaten anything in longer than she could remember. Even thinking about the lowest of possibilities nearly sent her belly crawling out on its own in search of food. But she had no idea where she would go, so she clutched it hard, curled up into a ball, and resolved to ask about breakfast in the morning.

Briar Wilkes wasn’t much of a praying woman, and she wasn’t sure she believed too hard in the God she swore by on occasion. But as she closed her eyes and tuned her mind away from the intermittent squealing of the heating pipes, she begged the heavens for help, and for her son…

… who, for all she knew, might be dead already.

And then she was awake.

It happened so fast that she thought she must be crazy and she hadn’t slept at all, but no — something was different. She listened hard and heard no sign of Lucy in the other bed, and there was a crack of dusty orange light leaking under the door. “Lucy?” she whispered.

No answer bounced back from the other mattress, so she fumbled around with her hands until she settled on the candle and a stray scattering of matches.

Once lit, the candle revealed that yes, she was alone after all. A half-moon dent in the featherbed showed the shape where Lucy no longer lay, and the pipes were silent, though when Briar leaned the back of her hand against them they were warm to the touch. The room was comfortable but empty, and her lone candle didn’t do enough to shove the darkness aside.

Beside the basin there was a lantern with a hurricane glass. She lit the lantern and added its light to the candle flame, which she abandoned to the table by the bed. There was water in the basin. The sight of it made her so spontaneously thirsty that she almost drank it, but she stopped herself and remembered that there were barrels of fresher stuff down the corridor.

She splashed a little on her face, pulled her shoes back on, and relaced her waist cinch. Down in the underground, she liked wearing it; it felt like armor, or a buttress that kept her upright when she was too tired or frightened to stand up straight.

The door was a lever latch, which answered her question about how Lucy might’ve left the room unaided. Briar leaned on it and it clicked open. Out in the hallway, small flames were mounted along the walls every few feet.

It was disorienting. Which way had she come from?

The left, she thought.

“All right, left,” she said to herself.

She couldn’t see the end of the tu

The barrels were beside the doors as promised, and a stack of wooden mugs were jumbled on a shelf above them.

God only knew when they’d last been washed, but Briar couldn’t make herself care. She grabbed the first, least dirty-looking one and picked the barrel lid away with her fingertips. Inside, the water looked black, but it was only dark from the shadows. It tasted no worse than the runoff they cooked at the processing plant, so she drank it down.