“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 running, climbing, or hiding—and she hadn’t yet found any sign of Zeke, who for all she knew might be dead already.
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 tunnel, but after a few yards, she could hear it. The furnace wasn’t howling and the bellows weren’t pumping at full blast; they were cooling quietly, clicking and fizzing as the lava-hot fires inside mellowed during the cyclical downtime.
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.
Her empty stomach gobbled at the liquid, and a little farther down in her bowels another gurgling told her to find the privy. At the other end of the hall she located a door and tried it. She emerged a few minutes later, feeling better than she had when she’d gone to sleep.
She also felt as if she were being watched, and she wasn’t sure why—until she realized she could hear voices nearby, and she’d misunderstood the sensation of barely being able to hear for that of being overheard. If she held very still she could recognize the voices. If she took a step to the right she could catch them more clearly.
“It’s a bad idea.” It was Lucy, sounding just short of openly confrontational.
“It might not be. We could ask her.”
“I’ve been talking to her. I don’t think she’ll go along with it.”
The other voice belonged to Swakhammer, without his mask. He repeated, “We could ask her. She’s not a kid, and she can answer for herself. It could be helpful; she could tell us for sure.”
“She thinks she already knows for sure, and she’s got other problems right now—speaking of kids,” Lucy said.
Briar slipped around the corner and pushed her back to the wall beside a door that had swung inward an inch.
“I think she talks like a woman who knows more than she’s saying, and if she does, then it’s no call of ours to drag it out of her,” Lucy said.
Swakhammer paused. “We don’t have to drag anything out of anybody. If she sees him, and he sees her, then everybody knows. He won’t be able to hide underneath some other crook’s mask; and the folks down here who are scared of him will have a reason to stand up.
“Or he could try and kill her, just for knowing the facts about him. And that means he’d kill me too, if I bring her to him.”
“Your arm needs fixing, Lucy.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, and I think I’m going to ask Huojin. He’s good with mechanical things, too. He’s the one who fixed up the furnaces after they went down last month, and he fixed Squiddy’s pocket watch for him, too. He’s a smart fellow. Maybe he can make it work all right.”
“You and those Chinamen. You keep making friends with them like that, and tongues will wag.”
“Tongues can wag all they want. We need those men, and you know it same as I do. We can’t keep half this equipment running without them, and that’s a fact.”
“Fact or no, they worry me. They’re just like those goddamned crows who hang out at the roofs—you can’t understand them, they talk amongst themselves, and they might be for you or against you, but you’d never know it until it’s too late.”
“You’re an idiot,” Lucy said. “Just ’cause you don’t understand them don’t mean they’re out to get you.”
“What about Yaozu?”
She made a snort. “You can’t call them all bastards just for one bad apple. If I did that, I’d never be civil to any man again. So get down off your high horse, Jeremiah. And leave Miss Wilkes alone about Minnericht. She don’t want to talk about him; so she sure as hell don’t want to talk to him.”
“See, that’s what I mean! She avoids the subject and she’s not stupid. She must wonder. If we asked her, she might be willing—”
Briar leaned her foot on the door and pushed it open. Swakhammer and Lucy froze as if they’d been caught at something naughty; they were facing one another on either side of a table with a bowl of dried figs and a stack of dried corn.
“You can ask me anything you want,” she said, though she made no promises about what she’d answer. “Maybe it’s time we put all our cards on the table. I want to talk about this doctor of yours down here, and I want Lucy to get her hand fixed, and I want one of those figs worse than I ever wanted a piece of pie on Christmas—but most of all, I want to go find my son. He’s been down here for… how long? A couple of days now, I suppose, and he’s alone and I don’t know—maybe dead already. But one way or another, I’m not leaving him down here. And I don’t think I can work this place on my own. I think I need your help, and I’m willing to give you mine in return.”
Swakhammer picked up a fat, soft fig from the top of the pile and tossed it to her. She caught it and chomped down on it, killing it off in a bite and a half, and sitting down beside Lucy, facing Swakhammer because she suspected he’d be easier to read.
Lucy was red, but not with anger. She was embarrassed to have been caught gossiping. “Darling, I didn’t mean to go behind your back and talk out of turn. But Jeremiah here has a bad idea and I didn’t want to show it to you.”
Briar said flatly, “He wants me to go with you and see Minnericht, to ask about your hand.”
“That’s the long and short of it, yes.”
Swakhammer leaned forward on his elbows, fiddling with an ear of corn and making the most earnest face he could manage. “You’ve got to understand: People will believe you if you set eyes on him, and if you say he’s not Blue—or he is. If Minnericht is Blue, then we have a right to hold him accountable for this place, and throw him out of it—give him to the authorities and let them handle him.”
“You can’t be serious.” Briar made it a statement.
“Of course I’m serious! Now, whether or not other people down here wouldn’t drag him into the street and feed him to the rotters… I’m not in a position to say. But I didn’t get the impression that you were real worried about anyone hurting him.”
“Not remotely.” She took another fig, and a swig out of the wooden mug she still toted. Swakhammer reached into a box behind his chair and pulled out a pouch of dried apples, which Briar pounced upon.
“Here’s the thing,” Swakhammer said while she chewed, again with his earnest face firmly established. “Minnericht… he’s… he’s a genius. A real bona fide genius, not the kind you read about in dreadfuls, you know? But he’s crazy, too. And he’s been down here, treating this place like it’s his own little kingdom, for the last ten or twelve years—ever since we figured out that we needed him.”
He didn’t like saying that part; Briar could see it in the way he balked around the word “needed.” He added, “At first, it was all right. Nothing was very organized, and this place was a real madhouse, since we didn’t have all the tricks nailed down yet.”