Boneshaker

She waited, watching to see what her son would do next.

Upstairs, they both heard the sound of heavy feet stomping through the parlor. Captain Cly called out, “Miss Wilkes, you in here?”

She yelled back, “We’re down here. Give us a second; we’ll be right up!”

Then Briar said, “Say something, Zeke. I’m begging you, boy. Say something.”

“What should I say?” he asked, and it sounded like he honestly didn’t know.

She tried, “Say you don’t hate me. Say you understand, or if you don’t understand, tell me that it’s all right. Say I’ve told you what you’ve always wondered, and now you can’t accuse me of holding anything back anymore. Or if you can’t forgive me, then for Christ’s sake tell me so! Tell me I’ve wronged you, same as I wronged him years ago. Tell me you can’t understand, and you wish you’d stayed with Mi

Zeke turned his back on her and stared again into the bubble of buttons, levers, and lights. He took a hard look at the shriveled body whose face he’d never see. Then he reached for the glass dome lid and drew it down until the latch caught with a click that held it closed.

He slid down the side of the big machine and stopped a few feet away from his mother, who was too terrified to cry, for all that she wanted to get it out of the way.

He asked, “What do we do now?”

“Now?”

“Yeah. What do we do now?”

She gulped, and released her death grip on her satchel’s strap. She wanted to know, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, do we go through the house, take what we can salvage, and go back to the Outskirts?”

She said, “You think maybe we should stay here. Is that it?”

“It’s what I’m asking you. Can we even go back to the Outskirts now? Would you have a job? You’ve been gone for days; I guess we both have. Maybe we should take whatever money’s left and see if the captain would take us back east. The war can’t go on forever, can it? Maybe if we go far enough north, or far enough south…” The idea faded, and so did his list of suggestions. “I don’t know,” he concluded.

“I don’t either,” she said.

He added, “But I don’t hate you. I can’t. You came into the city to find me. Ain’t nobody else in the world except you would give a damn enough to try it.”

Her nose went stuffy and her eyes filled up. She tried to wipe them both and forgot she was wearing a mask. She said, “All right. And good. Good, I’m glad to hear you say that.”

Zeke said, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go upstairs and see what we can find. And then… and then… what do you want to do?”

She put her arm around his waist and hugged him fiercely as they climbed the stairs together.

On the floors above, they could hear the air pirates rifling through drawers, poking their hands through shelves and cabinets.

Briar said, “Let’s go give them a hand. There’s a safe in the floor of the bedroom, under the bed. I always thought I’d come back for it someday, I just didn’t know how long it’d take me.” She sniffled, and was almost happy. She asked, “One way or another, we’ll be all right, won’t we?”

“I think we might be.”

“And as for what we do next…” She took the lead and brought him back up into the hallway, where the combined light of their lanterns made the narrow space light up with warmth. “There’s a little time left to decide. I mean, we can’t stay here. The underground is no place for a boy.”

“Or a woman either, as I heard it.”

“Or a woman either, maybe.” She gave him that much. “But maybe that don’t apply to us. Maybe I’m a killer, and you’re a runaway. Maybe we deserve this city, and these people, and maybe we can make something good of it. It can’t be much worse than the life we’ve got outside the wall.”

Captain Cly’s hulking shadow met them in the parlor, and Croggon Hainey came in through the front door, adjusting his mask and still swearing softly about his missing ship. He paused long enough to say, “This is a strange thing, Miss Wilkes. I don’t think I’ve ever been invited to steal from anyone’s home before.”

She looked around at the coiled strips of damp wallpaper, the mushy rugs, and the squares of strange colors where paintings had once hung. Shells of furnishings languished along the walls and beside the fireplace, and the crisp, sharp edges of broken window glass made fu

Zeke’s grin hadn’t stayed, but he raised it again like a flag and said, “Hard to believe there’s anything worth having in this old wreck. But Momma says there’s money stashed upstairs.”

She left her arm around him and kept him as warm and close as he’d let her. To the two air captains she declared, “This is my house. If there’s anything left that’s worth taking away, then let’s go get it. Otherwise, I’m finished here. I’ve salvaged what I can, and it’s enough to lean on.”

Zeke held still while she ruffled his hair; then he turned to Captain Cly and asked, “Is it true you were there, at the jailbreak? Momma says you were one of the fellows who took my grandfather back home.”

Cly nodded and said, “That’s a fact. Me and my brother. Let’s clean this place out, get back on board, and then I’ll tell you about it, if you want. I’ll tell you the whole story.”

Epilogue

At the ’works, a supervisor with a peevish face and very thick gloves told Hale Quarter that no, Mrs. Blue hadn’t been to work that day. For that matter, she hadn’t worked a shift in nearly a week, and as far as the supervisor was concerned, she was no longer employed at the plant. Furthermore, he did not know what had become of her. And no, he had no idea where she might’ve gone, or what she might be doing now.

But if Hale was truly interested, or desperate, or bored, he was welcome to rummage through whatever personal effects of hers remained. As far as the supervisor knew, no one had cleaned off her shelf or emptied her cubby.

Briar didn’t have anything that anyone wanted.

The young biographer nodded and wormed his finger between his shirt collar and his neck, for the room was astonishingly warm. Steam oozed, billowed, and sometimes sprayed out from between the cracks on the big machines; and boiling water for processing was dumped from crucible to crucible in sizzling, foaming waterfalls of heat and heaviness. The other workers eyed him with suspicion and open contempt even though no one had told them who Hale had come seeking. It was enough that he was dressed in clothes that fit him, and that he carried a notebook under his arm. It was enough that he wore glasses that fogged with every fresh pour from a hanging vat above and beyond his head. He was not their kind, and they were not prepared to be kind to him. They wanted him out from underfoot, and off their working floor.

Hale accommodated them. He scuttled out of the main processing area, slipping a little on the steam-slicked grates that served as floors between the stations. Before he was clear altogether, he asked in a coughing yell, over his shoulder, “How will I know which things are hers?”

The supervisor didn’t even look up from the valves he was monitoring. A fat red needle was quivering between a blue zone and a yellow one. He simply said back, “You’ll know.”

Hale wandered back to the rear entrance and to the room where the employees kept their personal belongings, and within a few moments he understood what the supervisor meant. He found a shelf with Briar’s last name written on it — or presumably, that was the original idea. Graffiti had scrawled, scribbled, and argued its way across the shelf’s little ledge until there was no way to know for certain.