The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) Read online

  Slipping his hand inside the makeshift bag’s loops, he lifted it off the bed and slung it over one shoulder. It wasn’t heavy.

  He stopped in the doorway and glared for the last time into the room he’d called “home” for more than fifteen years. He saw nothing, and he felt little more than that. Possibly a twinge, some tweak of memory or sentiment that should’ve been burned out of operation ages ago.

  More likely, it was a tiny jolt of worry. Not that Rector liked the idea of worrying any better than he liked the idea of nostalgia, but the last of his sap would take care of it. All he needed was a safe, quiet place to fire up the last of the precious powder, and then he’d be free again for … Another few hours at most, he thought sadly. Need to go see Harry. This won’t be enough.

  But first things first.

  Into the hall he crept, pausing by the stairs to loosely, hastily tie his boots so they wouldn’t flap against the floor. Down the stairs he climbed, listening with every step for the sound of swishing nun robes or insomniac priest grumblings. Hearing nothing, he descended to the first floor.

  A candle stub squatted invitingly on the end table near Father Harris’s favorite reading chair beside the fireplace in the main room. Rector collected the stub and rifled through his makeshift bag to find his matches. He lit the candle and carried it with him, guarding the little flame with the cup of his hand as he went.

  Tiptoeing into the kitchen, he gently pushed the swinging door aside. He wondered if there was any soup, dried up for boiling and mixing. Even if it wasn’t anything he wanted to eat, he might be able to barter with it later. And honestly, he wasn’t picky. When food was around, he ate it. Whatever it was.

  The pantry wasn’t much to write home about. It was never stocked to overflowing, but it never went empty, either. Someone in some big church far away saw to it that the little outposts and Homes and sanctuaries like these were kept in the bare essentials of food and medicine. It wasn’t a lot—any fool could see this was no prosperous private hospital or sanatorium for rich people—but it was enough to make Rector understand why so many folks took up places in the church, regardless. Daily bread was daily bread, and hardly anybody leftover from the city that used to be Seattle had enough to go around.

  “They owe me,” he murmured as he scanned the pantry’s contents.

  They owed him that loaf of bread wrapped in a dish towel. It hadn’t even hardened into a stone-crusted brick yet, so this was a lucky find indeed. They owed him a bag of raisins, too, and jar of pickles, and some oatmeal. They might’ve owed him more, but a half-heard noise from upstairs startled Rector into cutting short his plunder.

  Were those footsteps? Or merely the ordinary creaks and groans of the rickety wood building? Rector blew out the candle, closed his eyes, and prayed that it was only a small earthquake shaking the Sound.

  But nothing moved, and whatever he’d heard upstairs went silent as well, so it didn’t matter much what it’d been. Some niggling accusation in the back of his drug-singed mind suggested that he was dawdling, wasting time, delaying the inevitable; he argued back that he was scavenging in one of the choicest spots in the Outskirts, and not merely standing stock-still in front of an open pantry, wondering where the nuns kept the sugar locked up.

  Sugar could be traded for some serious sap. It was more valuable than tobacco, even, and the gluttonous, sick part of his brain that always wanted more gave a little shudder of joy at the prospect of presenting such an item to his favorite chemist.

  He remained frozen a moment more, suspended between his greed and his fear.

  The fear won, but not by much.

  Rector retied his blanket-bag and was pleased to note that it was now considerably heavier. He didn’t feel wealthy by any means, but he no longer felt empty-handed.

  Leaving the kitchen and passing through the dining area, he kept his eyes peeled against the Home’s gloomy interior and scanned the walls for more candle stubs. Three more had been left behind, so into his bag they went. To his delight, he also found a second box of matches. He felt his way back to the kitchen, and onward to the rear door. Then with a fumbled turning of the lock and a nervous heave, he stumbled into the open air behind the Home.

  Outside wasn’t much colder than inside, where all the fires had died down and all the sleeping children were as snug as they could expect to get. Out here, the temperature was barely brittle enough to show Rector a thin stream of his own white-cloud breath gusting weakly before him, and even this chill would probably evaporate with dawn, whenever that came.

  What time was it again?

  He listened for the clock and heard nothing. He couldn’t quite remember, but he thought the last number he’d heard it chime was two. Yes, that was right. It’d been two when he awoke, and now it was sometime before three, he had to assume. Not quite three o’clock, on what had been deemed his “official” eighteenth birthday, and the year was off to one hell of a start. Cold and uncomfortable. Toting stolen goods. Looking for a quiet place to cook up some sap.

  So far, eighteen wasn’t looking terribly different from seventeen.

  Rector let his eyes adjust to the moonlight and the oil lamp glow from one of the few street posts the Outskirts could boast. Between the sky and the smoking flicker of the civic illumination, he could just make out the faint, unsettling lean of the three-story building he’d lived in all his life. A jagged crack ran from one foundation corner up to the second floor, terminating in a hairline fracture that would undoubtedly stretch with time, or split violently in the next big quake.

  Before the Boneshaker and before the Blight, the Home had been housing for workers at Seattle’s first sawmill. Rector figured that if the next big quake took its time coming, the Home would house something or somebody else entirely someday. Everything got repurposed out there, after all. No one tore anything down, or threw anything away. Nobody could spare the waste.

  He sighed. A sickly cloud haloed his head, and was gone.

  Better make myself scarce, he thought. Before they find out what all I took.

  Inertia fought him, and he fought it back—stamping one foot down in front of the other and leaving, walking away with ponderous, sullen footsteps. “Good-bye, then,” he said without looking over his shoulder. He made for the edge of the flats, where the tide had not come in all the way and the shorebirds were sleeping, their heads tucked under their wings on ledges, sills, and rocky outcroppings all along the edge of Puget Sound.

  Two

  Past the burned-out husk of the first sawmill and over the rocks, Rector found a familiar fissure in the ground. He hopped over the great crack as easily as crossing a creek, though it unnerved him. It unnerved everyone, ever since it was opened by the last earthquake of the previous year—the same quake that had collapsed the brick water-runoff tunnels that led into the city. It was too much a memento, this scar in the earth. It whispered warnings from the Boneshaker, and reminded the Outskirts how the world’s foundation could be rattled apart.

  Rector glared at the crevice. He sniffed, but it was not a gesture of disdain, just curiosity. No, nothing suspicious. The odor of Blight was no stronger here at this unsettling cranny than anywhere else on the mudflats outside the wall.

  “They still ought to fill you in,” he told the crack. “Shouldn’t leave it to chance.”

  Because what would happen then, if the Blight escaped? Everyone quietly knew that it was bound to overflow the wall someday, but it would be far worse if it didn’t need to—if the fumes found their way up other passages, like this one. It’d poison the whole earth, given time enough to leak.

  He shuddered and clutched his shoulders, then looked around to make sure no one had seen him act like a chicken. No, he was alone as far as he could tell. No lights, no commotion. No footsteps. Not even the quivering scuttles of wharf rats rustling through the grass.

  Beyond the crack and past the clot of dead trees—which Rector always thought looked like monsters, though he wouldn’t have told anyon
e—he started following a narrow path. He knew it by heart and needed no light. Before long he reached a small ring of five shacks. They were run-down and rotting, propped up by half-hearted measures and patched together with afterthoughts that kept them upright, but did nothing to improve their appearance.

  This was a logging camp, abandoned in 1879 like so many other things near the ruined city. Once there’d been eight buildings, then none, but a combination of dangerous, illegal work and the need for privacy had revived three of the uninspiring structures. In time, convenience had restored two more to something like their former glory.

  Dim, half-shuttered lights burned in four of the occupied shacks, but a vivid light shot out from the cracks of the largest. This near-blinding whiteness streaked past broken slats in the old shutters, speared through the weatherworn splits in the walls, and shot out from around the door.

  Rector winced. His eyes weren’t ready for the light, not quite yet, but here he was at Harry’s place, and he was almost out of sap. He felt woefully ill-prepared to begin this whole adulthood thing without it, and that meant it was time to beg, borrow, or steal.

  Christ knew he didn’t have a dime to call his own.

  Steeling himself against the inevitable wash of light, he put one hand on the door and gave it a gentle push. Its hinges let out a small squeak, and the damp-swollen wood scraped against the doorjamb, then scooted inward, revealing a jumble of tall stills, jars, boxes, tubes, and funnels. And light, always the light … so much light that Rector wondered how anyone could see anything at all.

  He shielded his eyes and stepped inside, calling out, “Harry? It’s just me.”

  Harry Sharpe, chemist or alchemist or something between the two, was hunched over a table of delicate equipment, measuring spoons, and beakers. He did not immediately look up from his work, but he stopped what he was doing. “Stay where you are, Rector. I won’t have you jostling me now, boy—you hear?”

  “Sure, Harry. Whatever you say.”

  He closed the door behind himself and leaned against it, fully prepared to do as he’d been told. Harry was cooking, and cooking was dangerous. One ill-timed interruption or misplaced hand, one extra drop of the wrong ingredient in the wrong decanter, and the resulting explosion could level the old lumber camp like a meteor. Even Rector knew better than to interfere, so he stayed where he was. He watched Harry’s wide back, and the resumed motion of his shoulders, and the back of the man’s salt-and-pepper hair, which had gone flat with perspiration.

  “You shouldn’t show up without warning like this. If I hadn’t been cooking, I might’ve had a gun in my hand.”

  “Sorry,” Rector mumbled.

  Harry made a finishing gesture—adding a final dose of something sizzling and bleak—and stood up straighter than before, though he did not yet turn around. He watched the chemical reaction before him, waiting to see if anything needed adjustment before deciding all was well.

  Still keeping his back to the boy, he said, “I don’t suppose there’s a chance in hell you’re here with a fistful of money, is there?”

  Rector shifted his weight from one foot to the other and scratched idly at his elbow. “Well, you see, Harry, it’s been a strange week.”

  “Nothing strange at all about you coming by empty-handed.”

  “Aw, don’t be like that. It’s my birthday.”

  “Birthdays aren’t strange either.”

  “But this is my eighteenth birthday,” he insisted, not sure the approach would work, but not yet ready to abandon it. “I been kicked out of the Home.”

  Harry did not immediately respond. He waited for some faint smoldering sound to level off, then turned his head. A large, multi-lensed set of spectacles was fastened around his face, and each round slip of glass was polarized. The apparatus looked heavy, and indeed, the straps had worn grooves into Harry’s fleshy pink jowls. He pushed the glasses up onto his forehead, then farther up onto his skull. He wiped at one sweaty cheek with the back of his hand.

  “That day was bound to come.”

  “Yep. So now I’m ready to—”

  Harry interrupted. “You’re a man now, Rector, in every way that counts. And I’ve been treating you like a boy for all this time.” Finally too annoyed with the spectacles, he pulled them away. The strap snapped off his head with a humid pop. “I haven’t really done you any favors.”

  “You done me plenty of favors, Harry.”

  “Not the good kind. I felt sorry for you, but it wasn’t very helpful.”

  Rector sensed a shift in the conversation and didn’t like it, but he wasn’t sure how to play it. “You’ve helped me out for years, and I appreciate it like a good Christian orphan ought to. Now I’m here to earn a proper living, and get myself a proper job.”

  Harry laughed, maybe at the “Christian” part. “Selling ain’t no trade. And you’ve been using more than you’ve been selling.”

  Rector mustered a smattering of false dignity. “I do not believe that’s a fair assessment.”

  “Goes to show how much you’ve smoked then, don’t it? Look, kid,” he said more kindly, but not by any great measure. “I’ve always let you slide, haven’t I?”

  “And that’s my favorite thing about you.”

  “Boys get room to slide, Rector. Men have to make their own way.”

  Rector was being dismissed. He could see it coming, as surely as he’d seen his birthday looming. And now the fateful day had clicked, and here he was, more desperate than he’d realized even five minutes ago for a good, solid dose of his favorite habit.

  Hastily, trying to get ahead of the inevitable shutdown, he said, “Then Harry, teach me how to cook. Teach me a trade, like the one you got. I’m smart enough to learn it.”

  “Smart enough, I reckon. But not careful enough.” He took another swipe at his glowing, overheated face, then wiped his own body’s grease on the brown canvas overcoat he wore to keep his clothes covered. “You’d send yourself sky high with your first batch.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Harry, I’m begging you, I don’t have noplace to go, and I don’t have anyone waiting for me, or looking out for me. I need for you to teach me.” Nervously, his eyes skittered across the apparatuses and gloves, the tables, the charts, and the supply boxes. Something jumped out at him—something he should’ve noticed sooner, but hadn’t. “You’re expanding shop here, aren’t you? This is more sap than I’ve ever seen you work.”

  Harry’s eyes darkened. Rector couldn’t imagine what he’d said to make things worse than they already were.

  “Yes, I’ve been busy. There’s a war going on, remember? It’s all I can do to keep up with demand back East.”

  “And that’s all the more reason you need a … an apprentice. Or a helper, or something. Harry, please.”

  “If I liked you any less or trusted you any better, I might consider it. But neither of them things are true, so I’ve got to tell you no. You don’t want to be part of this right now, Wreck. Things are getting hot back East, and…” He faltered and stopped, like there was something else he meant to say, but he couldn’t figure out how to add it.

  “That stupid war’s been happening longer than I been alive. It’ll peter out one of these days, don’t you think?”

  Harry shook his head. “It might. But right now, let’s pray it’s not replaced with something even worse.”

  “What’s worse than war? And why would we have a war out here, on this coast? That don’t make any sense.”

  With a grim chuckle, the older man stood up straighter, and quickly checked a simmering beaker. “It’s a shame you have to ask. Maybe you’ll go inside the wall sometime, and you won’t wonder anymore.”

  He stepped away from the cluttered table, revealing a still much larger than his old system. A vast network of tubes, tubs, and valves stretched almost to the ceiling. Another foot, and it’d jut up through the tinplate roof.

  “Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll go inside the wall,” Rector said as if he hadn’t
been planning it anyway. “But it looks to me like you need help. That’s a mighty big kit you’ve got there.”

  “I don’t need help, and you don’t know what you’re asking. You want to stay here with me, maybe sleep out in one of the side houses? You want to take up a place in the war that’s coming? I don’t think you do, boy.”

  “What are you talking about? The war stops at the river, don’t it?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Harry said. “Things are getting uncomfortable for fellows like me, you understand?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “There are plenty of men out here, much closer to home, who want a piece of what we’re doing. Especially since business has boomed so big.” Rector wanted to jump in and ask again, Why? but Harry was too fast for him. “Yaozu’s no dummy, but he’s only one man. Half the dealers and distributors on the West Coast are thinking about coming up here and taking the operation away from him.”

  “You think that could happen?”

  Halfway under his breath, he said, “It’s happening already.” Then he bent over a wooden crate stacked on the floor with others of its kind, looking for something. “They’re already coming, already circling like sharks. It won’t be long before I have to head inside the wall myself, much as I don’t like the prospect of it. I’m not defenseless, but I’ll be outdone by the kind of men coming up from Mexico, California, and the Oregon Territory.”

  “How do you know they’re coming, Harry? Who tells you anything, except me and maybe Bishop? And he’s inside the wall. He don’t know nothing.”

  Harry looked back at Rector with a chilly, unhappy frown clamped down on his face. “I hear things. I heard the thunder last week—did you? It wasn’t natural.”

  “You’re going ’round the bend, old man.”