It took the Naamah Darling less than half an hour to find the lot of them, and a fraction of that time to return everyone to Fort Decatur, just for now. The captain wanted to visit Mercy Lynch to see about the big, hard gash in the back of his head. Houjin could scarcely contain himself for worry, and he couldn’t be stopped from recounting the fight to everyone who’d sit still long enough to listen, so he came, too.
And Rector … well, Rector’d had enough excitement for one day.
He went back to his room, because it was his room, and he could sleep there if he wanted to.
Twenty-four
The trip to the northern quadrant of the walled city was getting easier for Rector by virtue of familiarity; but the next morning it still took nearly an hour for him and Houjin to reach the gas-filled, fog-obscured blocks near Millionaire’s Row on Capitol Hill.
They skulked and tiptoed, dodging the loudest of fallen branches, bricks, and roofing tiles and listening constantly for the telltale muffled groans that said rotters were approaching.
Rector also kept one eye on the wall, up to his left. He remembered all too well the second creature—the inexplicable, or sasquatch, or yeti, or whatever anybody wanted to call her—and he didn’t wish to see her again.
Soon they reached the edge of the old city park, where the landscaping was no more welcoming than last time. But in the span of a day, much had happened. The giant rolling machine was parked at the tower’s base and whatever crates it’d unloaded had been carried upstairs or left stacked on the curving sidewalks and sloping grade upon which the old water reservoir perched. The boys saw stacks of folded canvas, barrels of pitch, boxes marked DANGER, and boxes stamped THIS END UP. They saw sealed water jugs and boxes of ammunition, and two tanks big enough that both boys could’ve sat inside one of them together. Stenciled on the side was the word DIESEL.
“What’s a diesel?” Rector whispered.
Houjin whispered back, “Fuel. It’s for that machine over there. And other things, too, maybe.” Behind his mask, his eyes lit up, then smoldered down to the cunning look that said he had an idea. “And it burns as easy as kerosene…”
Up at the top of the tower, just beneath the conical roof, the windows were covered with black iron cages. Behind them, a warm yellow glow burned in a swelling, shrinking pulse that promised nothing good to come. Down below, the boys could hear the hum of machinery and the faint whistle of windblown Blight gas curling through the neighborhood.
Houjin jabbed Rector with his elbow. “Do you think anyone’s home?”
“How should I know?”
“Didn’t say you ought to. I was just checking your opinion, that’s all.”
“Oh.” Well, then. That was better. Rector made a show of thinking about it, harder than he needed to. “I don’t hear anybody. Do you?”
“No.”
“Me neither. There’s two ways up and down that thing. Should we split up?”
“No!” Houjin said abruptly. “Why double our odds of getting caught? We pick one side, and go up together. If we pick wrong, you know the story—you’re here ’cause Otis’s men sent you inside, and I hate Yaozu because … because he poisoned my father, or whatever else you feel like saying on the fly. If we pick right, we sneak up without anybody bothering us. And we should hurry, before Caplan’s people return from the Station.”
“Right, right. Good point.” Rector shifted his position, and his knee popped. “You got your big sharp iron thing?”
“Yes. You got that ax?”
“Yeah. I like it better than the pick.”
“Then let’s go do this.”
And before Rector had a chance to change his mind, Houjin left their cover and made for the tower’s rear entrance.
The darkness there was unnervingly deep. The sun was still up, but shadowed, and nightfall would be on its way soon enough. The boys didn’t light their lanterns, but left them slung over their backs, affixed to the straps on the bags with all their supplies.
The back door looked as black as the entrance to a train tunnel. It was even curved in an intimidating arch, and was fixed with a gate—same as the one out front. But this gate had fallen away; one of its hinges had rusted through, and it leaned sharply toward the ground. Beyond it, there was nothing but midnight, and the faint suggestion that somewhere higher up, there might be a tiny bit of light to guide them.
Rector and Houjin swallowed hard as they stared into the inscrutable void.
Rector had never seen Houjin balk before, not like this. But it wouldn’t be good to chicken out even worse than a younger boy, so he steeled himself and straightened his shoulders. “I’m oldest, so I’ll go first.”
Huey said, “Fine with me,” like he didn’t care, but he sounded relieved.
Steeling himself, teasing himself with the thought of sap waiting at the top, Rector led the way up the short hill and around the curved walkway.
And then inside.
Because he could not see, he held out his hands, still wearing the scraped-up gloves he’d gotten from Fang and had not yet replaced. He stretched his fingers as wide as they’d go and swayed his arms slowly. He was desperately afraid that he would hit something, and, likewise, desperately afraid that he wouldn’t.
What did the inside of a water tower look like? He had no idea, and too much sense to strike up a light when the passage was dotted with windows that would show a lantern’s progress. But what if there was a big pool of water down there? What if he fell and drowned? Wouldn’t that be something—double drowning, smothering underwater inside his mask. He shuddered and scooted one foot out in front of him, patting his toes along the ground.
He hit metal.
The edge of his boot clomped dully against it, and even this faint thud cast enough echo that he and Houjin both froze, on the verge of running away. But nothing answered it; no one called down to see what was going on, or what had happened.
The boys began to breathe again.
Rector felt outward and found the metal wall that his toes had found first. He dragged his hands around it and determined that the surface was curved, and had once been painted … or so he deduced from the large, bubbled flakes that came off at his touch. He could find no end to this wall, but he did find a handrail to his immediate right, so he seized the rail and explored with his feet until he found the stairs.
He looked back at Houjin, who stood in the doorway. The other boy was backlit by the marginally brighter gloom outside.
Rector held out a hand and said very softly, “Here, take my hand.”
Huey did, and he let Rector draw him forward.
Then Rector said, “Like Angeline had us do: hold on to the back of my satchel.”
“All right.”
“And watch your step.”
“I can’t watch my step. I can’t see my feet!” Houjin whispered, and he chased the quiet joke with a laugh that shouldn’t have been so loud. “Sorry!” he said. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s all right. That was funny,” Rector assured him with too much earnestness. “Just stick close. Don’t leave me by myself up here, and don’t fall through the steps like that other guy did. They’re half rotted out underneath us, can you tell? These stairs … Jesus, they make a lot of noise, don’t they? If anybody was up there, they’d have surely heard us by now.”
“Don’t assume anything,” Houjin urged.
Up ahead, one of the tall, narrow windows let a dim shaft of lighter shadow into the narrow spiral, but it didn’t reveal anything important, or anything Rector hadn’t already figured out. The stairs were only about as wide as a bookshelf and eaten up with rusty-edged holes that cut through the old paint job. For that matter, the handrail wasn’t in the best of shape, either. It hung from the bricks in loose, dusty bolt holes that oozed bloody red corrosion.
“How much farther, you think?” Houjin asked. “Since you can see ahead farther than I can.”
“Hard to say. Just keep moving. Damn, this is a lot of stairs.”
“If you had your way, there’d be elevators everywhere.”
“Damn right, there would be.”
A hazy gray glow announced the imminent conclusion of their climb. They rose toward it like night bugs swooping to a lantern, but kept their heads down low when it came time to breach the top.
Side by side, they peeked over the edge and found themselves at eye level with the floor.
They were alone.
With big sighs, they scampered up the last half-dozen steps and walked into the open.
They stood directly beneath the roof. It rose up to a point above them, like a frozen circus tent. Its weaker spots and open holes were covered with tarps, as they’d seen from outside, which flapped idly and without any vigor.
The room itself was circular. In it, eight oversized windows with ironwork grates provided a view of the city in every direction—except for the side facing the wall, which showed nothing but a big black barrier pressing close, as if it were trying to see inside.
“Would you look at all this junk!” Rector exclaimed, keeping his voice just above a whisper.
“Shhh!”
“Oh, come on. No one can hear us out there, and we’d hear anybody coming up the stairs.”
Tables of many sizes and shapes had been hauled inside, a feat that filled Rector with wonder, but not envy. (He sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to carry them up that winding passage.) Upon the tables and lying beside them were more crates and an ever-present coating of sawdust, which was already going soggy under their feet.
Houjin went to the nearest table, where a substance in a series of tubes and glass vials was cooking over a gas-jet flame. “This isn’t junk,” he observed. “This is science. And that”—he moved to another table, where a larger apparatus was simmering merrily and unattended—“is a still. Surely you’ve seen one before? They’re using it to remove the sap residue from the gas.”
“Of course I’ve seen a still before, but not one that big. Or one quite like it.” Even Harry’s oversized operation on the Outskirts paled in comparison to this beast of a thing before him.