The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) Read online

  “Maybe, but soon the last of us here—the last of us original makers, I mean—will need a fortress.”

  “You could do worse than Seattle,” Rector noted.

  “I agree, but the thought of a life spent in a gas mask doesn’t agree with me much. I may have to find some other line of work.”

  “You could go east, if that’s where the demand is.”

  Harry found whatever he was fishing for. His knees popped when he stood back up to his full height. “True. Inside the wall with the rotters and gas, or back East into the war. If it weren’t for shitty options, I’d have no options at all. Anyway, here,” he said, offering up a very small packet.

  Rector tried to keep his eyes from lighting up. He tried to stop himself from gliding across the rough-hewn floors and snatching the small fold of waxed paper right out of Harry’s outstretched hands. But there he was, eager as a dog at the prospect of a bone. Some small part of him had the grace to be embarrassed.

  “What’s this?” he asked coolly. “A birthday present?”

  “It’s what you came here for, and the only thing you want. You don’t want to learn anything, and you don’t want to work if you can help it. I’ve watched you run and burn for what now … a couple of years?”

  “Something like that,” Rector muttered, taking the packet and stuffing it into his pocket while pretending not to care.

  “I was dealing with a child before, and today you’re a man. So from here on out, you pay your own debts. I won’t protect you if you don’t.”

  “Never asked you to,” Rector snapped before he could stop himself. That small, embarrassed corner of his soul grew a size or two. He felt himself blushing, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. “But thanks for the birthday present. I’ll use it wisely.”

  “Nobody uses sap wisely.”

  Rector turned on his heels and grabbed the door, pushing it open and launching himself out into the night, where the trees were too thick and the sky too dark to show him anything but a bright stain in his vision from the brilliant lights of the chemist’s shack.

  When he could see again, he looked toward the wall.

  “Wait for me,” he told it. “I’ll deal with you soon enough.” And he headed off toward the water instead.

  Three

  The beach was deserted.

  It was also shiny with a glaze of moonlight and the intermittent sweep and flash of a powerful lamp scanning the water a few miles away. The lighthouse wasn’t for boats, not mostly. Not anymore. These days it guided the airships and their crews coming and going from Bainbridge Island, serving as a beacon for the kind of madmen who didn’t mind flying at night—or the kind of ships that had no choice in the matter. The distant beam came and went, blinking in and out, grazing the tops of the subtle waves and glinting off the edge of the Outskirts.

  Rector picked a large, flat rock that looked more dry than not and sat on it. For a moment he thought about staying and watching the sun rise, and then he realized what a dumb idea that was, considering he was facing west. But it might be pretty anyway, seeing the sky go from black to smoky foam gray.

  The last time he’d sat on this strip of coastline, the sky had gone the other way—from an overcast panorama of sickly white clouds to a deep, rolling, ominous shade of dark. A storm had crashed in from the north, coming over the ocean like it did only once in a great blue moon. One week before, he’d watched the sky change above him without caring. When the rain came down, pelting him so hard the droplets stung, he didn’t care about that, either. But when the thunder had begun, he’d gathered his things and headed inside.

  He almost hadn’t. He’d waited a few minutes in the downpour to see the lightning that always came with thunder—he thought those brilliant gold lines cracking across the waves might look like God on a bender. But there wasn’t any lightning, and he didn’t know why. He’d asked around, but no one could tell him. What did Northwesterners know about weather? Practically nothing, unless they were the sort who sailed. And the old mariners told him there hadn’t been any thunder at all—they said he’d only imagined it.

  But Harry’d heard it, too, and so did a bunch of other people. Rector might make things up and hear or see things once in a while, but he wasn’t wrong about the thunder.

  He untied a corner of his blanket pouch and shoved his hand down inside it, withdrawing a box of matches and the burlap pouch. Then he reached for the packet Harry had handed him on the way out the door, his birthday present. He deserved this one, and deserved it richly.

  But when he unfolded the little package, he found only another folded piece of paper stuffed inside it. The paper was blank and empty.

  “Goddammit, Harry! Some lousy goddamn birthday present from you. Goddammit! I thought we were friends, you old horse’s ass!” He shouted louder than someone who wished to remain inconspicuous ought to, but it was dark and he was mad. He crushed the waxed paper and the blank paper up into a ball and chucked it toward the ocean.

  If it hit the waves or just made it to the beach, he didn’t know. He didn’t hear it land.

  “All that talk about doing me a favor,” he growled. “Maybe I could do him the favor of burning down that stupid shack. Save him the trouble of deciding where to go, yeah. How would he like that favor?”

  Shaking now with rage as well as the symptoms of withdrawal, he retrieved the last dregs of his personal stash from his jacket pocket. With quivering hands he tapped the bottom edge against his palm to settle the contents, and he assembled his tools.

  The pouch held scraps of tinfoil, a tiny teaspoon, a wooden napkin ring, and a broken glass pipe. He wouldn’t need the spoon; there wasn’t enough sap left to measure. He left the glass pipe’s bowl wrapped in the old handkerchief he’d found someplace, since he couldn’t use it and he didn’t want to cut himself.

  He extracted a square of foil and held it firmly between his fingers, suddenly second-guessing his decision to do this out on the beach. But the wind wasn’t strong; if anything, it was almost curiously absent. The birds were still sleeping, the world was still dark, and no one was watching.

  No one saw as he bent the foil around the napkin ring so that it made a shiny little surface like the top of a drum.

  No one saw him dump the last few precious grains of yellow dust onto the foil, or strike the first match to cook the stuff into fumes. Not even the birds yawned and peeked, and not even the most curious tide-pool residents winked up at him as he bent his head down low over the foil, held it firmly but gently in his fingers, closed his eyes, and lowered the glass stem.

  In a rush of concentrated, sulfurous fog, the cobwebs in his head were blasted clean.

  Urine-colored fire washed over his brain; brimstone and brine simmered and smoked, and in the wake of that first astonishing explosion (which never became less astonishing with time, or less painful, or less needful and joyful), a placid, pale nothingness dawned.

  Rector privately suspected that this was what it felt like to die. First there’d be shock, an outburst of fear and sensation. Then would come this calm, this warmth and smoothness, and the pleasant apathy drawn from an ironclad knowledge that the world no longer mattered.

  Given time for the powder to cool and the residue to blow away … given scorched fingertips and a nose that ran with pink and yellow mucus, blood, and Blight in a biological slime … this harmonious eggshell of bliss would … crack.

  And shortly after that, Rector’s eyes also cracked.

  All the light, all the darkness, all the rustling sounds of nearby water, the scuttling clicks of crabs and the tiny splurts of spitting clams half buried in the soggy sand … every soft noise scraped against the inside of his skull—loudly, but not quite unpleasantly, rather like a headache made of candy.

  He was lying on his back, and he didn’t remember how he’d gotten that way—if he’d fallen over, or opted to lie down. An odd-shaped rock or starfish was wedged against one of his lower vertebrae, so he shifted his weight and clenched his fis
ts, flexing his fingers and remembering that he needed to breathe even as he realized that his nose was too stuffy to help with the task. It was clogged with the flavor of copper (his own blood) and tin (from the foil) and whatever other salty gunk saw fit to occupy the great sloshing space behind his eyes.

  Still high enough to not mind any pain very much, Rector struggled to a seated position. His few worldly possessions remained right where he left them, and the incoming tide was within a few yards of soaking the lot.

  Shakily at first, and then stronger as the drug was given more room to move, more blood flow to carry it through his system, he grabbed his supplies and packed them back up. Foil and pipe stem and matches into the pouch. Empty waxed packet tossed into the oncoming waves. Blanket tied back up at its corners. Everything over his shoulder, bouncing against his back as he left the beach.

  He’d already forgotten that he was angry at Harry.

  Just for now, for this stretch of minutes—hours, if he was lucky—he did not worry about where he’d sleep or what he’d eat, or whether or not Zeke’s phantom was coming for him. He didn’t even worry about how he was going to get past the Seattle wall, or what would happen once he got inside. For these moments, everything was clear. The path was as straight and illuminated as if it’d been painted onto the ground at his feet. And not only would there be no deviation from this course, but he could see no peril whatsoever attached to following it.

  First, up onto the mudflats. Then, into the Outskirts and around their edge.

  Next, up to the wall at the far southeast side of its expanse.

  And then, through it. Into the lost, poisoned, abandoned city of Seattle.

  It used to be that there were only two ways into Seattle: under the wall, or over it. Going over could be trouble, because it meant finding an air captain who was bribable enough to bring you into the roiling cauldron of thick, ugly air inside the wall. By and large this meant pirates, and pirates were, by definition, not the most trustworthy sort.

  Rector did not like pirates.

  He didn’t care so much for scrabbling around through soft, wet, smelly underground tunnels, either, but that was the better option up until six months ago, when an earthquake had collapsed the last easy access point—a water-runoff tube made of brick, part of the old sewer system from back when the city was alive. There were other ways to get underneath; Rector was positive of that. But he didn’t know any off the top of his head, and he didn’t want to ask the kind of people who could’ve told him. He owed them all money.

  Anyway, these days he knew a third means into the city. A very recent one, still under construction: a gate cut into the wall about forty feet up. He’d seen men working on it by the water’s edge where the old piers rotted in the tidal muck. They’d picked a spot where no one was likely to see them working, and with King Street Station just on the other side of the barrier.

  As a professional delinquent and occasional trafficker in illicit substances, Rector had access to a great deal of information that wasn’t strictly common knowledge—including the often disbelieved truth that people still lived inside the city … and the fact that most of them weren’t very nice.

  Some of the city’s least nice residents lived and worked in King Street Station, which was ruled like a small, wicked kingdom by a mysterious Chinaman named Yaozu. Rector had never personally set eyes on Yaozu, but his imagination suggested an enormous, evil-looking man in billowy black clothing and a gas mask set with spikes. He might have tattoos on his face, or fingernails filed to points, or a terrible voice that sounded like it came from the chest of the devil himself.

  No man who rules by the power of his name could be anything less than fearsome.

  Rector knew roughly how the world worked, and he had no interest in meeting the monstrous Chinaman or his army of minions. Even if his empire had been built on sap, and even if his Station was where most of Rector’s drug of choice was presently made. But somewhere in the back of Rector’s head—bouncing feebly among the parts of his brain that still worked the best—he was prepared to admit that he had considered asking Yaozu for a job.

  Of course, this would only come up if he survived his little quest, which he didn’t expect to. Which was fine by him. And even if he did survive, there was always the chance that Yaozu wouldn’t be in charge very long anyway. Nobody in the Outskirts except the chemists cared whether or not Yaozu managed the flow of sap that oozed out of the walled-up city. If some newcomer came along, up from Tacoma or Portland, or even from as far away as San Francisco, or wherever Harry was talking about …

  Rector cared only insomuch as it might affect the supply chain, but he didn’t give two small shits if the operation was run by a Chinaman named Yaozu, or an Irishman named Hark O’Reilly, or a New Yorker named Louis Melville, or a Californian named Otis Caplan. Let them fight over it all they liked. Just let the best man win, and let the sap flow.

  Let the whole world burn, for all Rector Sherman cared. After all, it had no place for him.

  Four

  Rector’s quest was fuzzy, but it was not altogether ridiculous: If he could find his way into the city, locate his deceased friend’s corpse, and treat it with a smidge of dignity, he could perhaps be freed from the nagging phantom that dogged his waking dreams.

  It was not the worst plan he’d ever had. It didn’t rank among the finest, either, but the end of Rector’s rope was dangling near, and it was this or nothing. It might even redeem him a little bit if his last act on earth was an attempt at recompense, in case of pearly gates or skeptical angels.

  A short, sparkling pang of guilt poked through the muffling layers of sap and jabbed him in the chest. “Zeke, I’m coming, goddammit. Isn’t that enough?” he said under his breath. “Christ, that’s all I can do now, ain’t it?” He trudged through darkness over the mudflats, to the wall looming blacker than any starless midnight—a false horizon created from something thicker and worse than the mere absence of illumination.

  He could see the wall best when he did not look at it directly. It was most apparent from the corner of his eyes, from a sideways gaze as he hiked past ramshackle clusters of houses and businesses.

  Over at the waterworks plant a steam whistle blew and something heavy clanked, like a large clock’s gears tipping together. One shift was ending, and another would soon begin. The plant ran day and night because there’d never be enough clean water if it didn’t—and without clean water, the Blight truly would have wiped out the Sound.

  Rector remembered a stray, sharp fact in an uninvited flash: Briar Wilkes, Zeke’s mother, used to work there. She’d gone inside the wall after her son. She’d never come out, and, like her son, she was almost certainly dead. It weighed on Rector somewhat less than Zeke’s untimely passing, as he hadn’t liked Briar at all: the last time he’d seen her, she’d threatened him with bodily and spiritual harm, so if she was gone, well, that didn’t keep him up at night—and neither did her ghost.

  The churning cranks and hisses of steam from the waterworks plant faded as he hiked farther away from the Sound, higher up the ungroomed hills, and along the worn dirt roads that had settled into uncomfortable ruts. He left the ruts and took to the grassy spots between the houses and sheds and barns. As these buildings thinned out, the open spaces became wider, more open, and almost more frightening because they gave him nowhere to hide.

  Standing out in the wet scrub with mossy rocks and trees that rotted where they’d fallen, Rector felt small and conspicuous as he approached the looming monolith of the Seattle city wall.

  Flat and plain, the wall was made of unevenly sized stones, mortared swiftly together. The overall color was gray with a hint of sickly green, for even the ever-present mold and mildew took its cues from the Blight-tainted air. It was inscrutable and blank. It appeared unbreachable by all but the most foolhardy daredevils, given the slippery flora, wet slime, and treacherous patches of fickle moss that would slough away without remorse even under the desperate fingers of a f
ervently praying climber.

  But once he got up close, Rector could see that it harbored secrets and promises.

  He tiptoed, moving his legs more carefully through the vegetation and keeping his eyes peeled against the heavy darkness that kept him guessing about his progress. He did not want to light a candle, not yet. Besides the fact that he had so few, he did not wish to draw attention to himself. Not until he figured out exactly where he meant to go, and exactly whose attention he needed.

  This next part would be tricky.

  He listened for all he was worth and, around the swirling fuzz of the sap still sparkling between his ears, he heard the gruff, intermittent chatter of men who were bored and not very happy. Rector turned himself sideways and walked along the tall stone barrier, its shadow made thicker still by the wee morning hours and a moon smudged over by clouds.

  The men were somewhere above him and ahead of him. He followed their voices.

  His footsteps ground into wet grass and against slippery pebbles, leaving streaked prints along the groove at the wall’s base. The path was uneven, broken by tree roots and fallen pieces of rock; it was clotted with the detritus of leaves, dead grass, and human trash blown by ocean winds to collect against the stones like snowdrifts.

  At times, he sank to his calves in rotting mulch, the compost of things lost, forgotten, and turned damp by the climate.

  Rector muttered a sour curse and wished out loud that, just this once, the June Gloom would take it up a notch and freeze. Frozen mud would be easier to navigate, and ice was no slicker than the vitreous slime that squished down the grade.

  The conversation above him grew louder.

  Both participants were wearing gas masks. Rector could hear it from the muffled hum to their words, and the way their consonants were rubbed off around the edges, but as he came closer, he could pick out the gossip more clearly.

  “I just don’t want to hear about it later, that’s all. If Yaozu tries to cuss me about it, I’ll … I won’t be real happy. But if we’re late, that’s what he gets for putting a kid in charge. That ain’t right.”