Houjin paused and considered this. “Horses don’t do stairs very well. And no one wants to clean up all the shit, and it’s hard enough to feed people, let alone horses. Anyway, the Blight is funny, what it does to animals.”
“It kills them, don’t it? Same as people?”
If a good idea was fuel to make Houjin run, then a good question served as the brakes. He stood stock-still, and Rector could almost see the gears turning between his ears. “That’s hard to say. I don’t think anyone’s ever studied it, like a scientist counting birds or drawing plants. But it’s definitely different. Take the birds, for example.”
“The birds?”
“The crows. We have hundreds, maybe thousands, inside the walls. Their eyes turned a funny color—a weird shade of orange, kind of like your hair. But other than that, they seem all right. And the rats … we used to have rats, but the Blight kept them from making baby rats, or that’s what Dr. Minnericht said. So after a couple of years, there were no more rats.”
“Weird,” Rector observed.
The hike down to the kitchen was hard, but Rector made it without too much wheezing—then realized upon arrival that he was so appallingly hungry that he could scarcely eat anything at all. It was an unusual sensation for someone who’d spent his life leaning against the edge of hunger, and he wondered if this wasn’t a case of simply being too tired to eat.
He ate anyway.
In the large, carefully lit kitchen he gnawed on salmon jerky while Houjin rifled through the drawers, cabinets, and boxes for foods which would be good for somebody on the road to recovery. A great deal of dried fruit was on the menu—mostly apples and berries—but there were also cloth-wrapped hunks of bread, and a knifeful of fresh butter that tasted so good it made his eyes water. And he found his jar of pickles too, already opened but mostly full.
As he nibbled, he listened to Houjin natter on about the comings and goings of the underground, and the Doornails, and the residents of Chinatown, and Yaozu’s men, who clustered around the old King Street Station. Rector knew he would only retain fragments of what he heard, but he didn’t mind; it was nice to have an excuse to be quiet and think about things he dare not say aloud.
First and foremost: Zeke was alive. So had there ever been a ghost?
He narrowed his eyes and chewed thoughtfully, pretending to listen. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen or heard from the ghost since waking up. Granted, that was less than an hour of ghost-free awake-time, but still, it felt significant.
A brief, spontaneous thought flew out of his mouth, interrupting whatever anecdote Houjin was passing along. “Hey, how long was I out cold?”
Houjin paused mid-sentence, calculated, and said, “It’s been four days since you fell down the chuckhole.”
“Four days,” he mused. Four days without sap. It was the longest he’d been sober in ages, and he wanted some now, but not with the same god-awful fervor as before. It felt more like a routine he wanted to indulge, or a habit he merely missed. It didn’t feel like a gaping hole that ate his chest and his brain like a flame chewing through paper. Rector wasn’t the very picture of health, that was for damn sure, but he had to admit there was a certain feeble glimmer of clarity—a candle’s worth of awareness—that was catching hold, and his thoughts were lining up more easily, more cleanly.
By the light of this new and unfamiliar awareness, he recalled something else that made him shudder. He blurted out another question. “When I fell down the chuckhole, I was running away from something, wasn’t I? Something was chasing me.”
Houjin carefully masked his emotions so that Rector could barely see his uncertainty while he thought about his response. He sure did a lot of that: thinking before talking. Given how much talking he did, it made you wonder how fast his brain worked.
“You were running, yes. And I saw … something.”
“Oh, don’t give me that. You saw it, plain as I did,” Rector asserted, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen anything plainly. He’d heard it, and sensed it, and even smelled it—or he fancied he did, despite the gas mask. When that foul, dank breath had come so close to his skin he thought he’d die from fright, the odor had oozed like wet dog and moldering pine needles. Like dirty feet and sour water.
Houjin hemmed and hawed. “Well, you have to understand … there are many dangers inside the wall. Many things that will chase you, and try to hurt you.”
“Rotters. I’ve heard about them, and I heard some scraping around. Never actually saw any. But this wasn’t a rotter, what I was running from.”
“No, it must’ve been a rotter.”
“Couldn’t have been,” Rector argued. “Rotters were people once, weren’t they? And they don’t grow, after they’ve gone all dead and rotty.” Or so he assumed.
“No, they don’t grow. And yes, they were people first.”
“That thing that chased me was bigger than a person.”
This gave Houjin an idea. He brightened. “Not necessarily. Captain Cly, he’s much bigger than a regular man.”
“You think your Captain Cly chased me and tried to kill me? Because I don’t, and I haven’t even met the guy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. And it wasn’t ever human,” he said with certainty. “You saw it, too. You already admitted you did, so don’t go taking it back, now.”
“But there’s the fog, and the Blight—it’s so hard to see anything that isn’t right in front of your face. All I saw was a shadow, coming up behind you. And yes, it was big, but…”
“What was big?”
Both boys jumped as if they’d been shocked. They turned to see a slender female figure in the doorway. Her hair was almost solid silver, and she wore it long down her back, but tied in a leather thong. She was Indian, Rector could see that at a glance, and he guessed she must be old enough to be somebody’s grandmother, but she didn’t look ready for a rocking chair. Everything about her was efficient and tough, from the fit of her clothes, which he guessed had once belonged to a man, to the rifle slung over her back.
Tough or no, she greeted Houjin with a toss of her head and a grin, saying, “Hey there, boy. Found yourself some company, I see. Where’s your usual shadow?”
“His mother wanted him over at the fort. I don’t know what for. This is Rector,” Houjin declared. “Rector, this is Miss Angeline.”
“Ma’am,” he acknowledged.
“Huey pulled you out of the chuckhole, didn’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am, that was me.”
She laughed. “Those damn holes. Half of them are older than the wall. Hit your head up good, I heard.”
“Yes, ma’am.” When in doubt, stay polite; that was Rector’s policy.
Miss Angeline came into the kitchen and helped herself to some of the salmon jerky, then pulled a bag off her shoulders and dumped its contents on the counter. “Picked up some cherries down south a bit, past where the Blight makes them taste funny. I ate some on the way here, but you kids are welcome to whatever’s left.”
“Thank you, Miss Angeline!” Houjin jumped off his stool and helped himself to a handful. He offered a few to Rector, who accepted, then told the native woman, “It’s funny, right before you got here we were talking about just that—the chuckhole, and how Rector got there.”
“Running through the dark in the Blight, I gotta assume.”
“Yes, but running from something strange,” he replied, every word dripping with conspiracy. “Tell her, Rector. Tell her what you saw.”
“Neither one of us saw it too good. As you were saying.”
“Rotters?” she guessed.
Rector shook his head. “No, not rotters. Something bigger, and something that still had some brains in its head. It didn’t just chase me, Miss Angeline.” Rector relayed the rest quickly, and with a shiver he hadn’t expected. “It stalked me.”
Silence fell between the three of them. Rector gazed nervously at Miss Angeline, trying to figure out if she thought there was any truth to his story. She was thinking about it, which he appreciated. In his experience, ninety-nine people out of a hundred would dismiss any given claim out of hand when it came from someone like him.
She asked, “You said it still had some brains. How could you tell?”
It’d been an impression, really. An understanding he’d reached at some point, but when? Oh, yes, now he remembered. “It figured out which way I was running, and it got ahead of me.”
She nodded. “Might’ve been thinking. Then again, maybe it was too big to follow the way you were headed. How big was it?”
“Big,” Rector said passionately, if uselessly. He attempted to clarify. “Bigger than a person, but smaller than … than … smaller than an elk.”
“Is an elk the biggest thing you ever set eyes on?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Huh. Mind you, bigger than a man and smaller than an elk—that could be Captain Cly.”
Houjin grinned. “That’s what I said, too.”
“Not that I think he’d come after you,” she was quick to add. “Huey, you saw this thing, too?”
Houjin replied around a mouthful of blush-colored cherries. “Saw it about as good as he did, through the fog, and the Blight. I don’t know what it was.”
“But you don’t think it was a rotter.”
“No,” he said. Then, with more confidence, “No, it wasn’t a rotter. It was shaped different. Arms were longer, and legs were shorter. It … it’s hard to describe. Do you believe us?”
“Do I believe you? A bit, mostly because the thing you described reminds me of something. Not something very likely, so don’t get your hopes up, but let me look into it. We can talk about it later.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rector said, more disappointed than he cared to admit. It was nice that she hadn’t called him a liar outright, but it would’ve been nicer if she’d simply said, Oh sure—that’s something I know all about, and you’re not a loony case or anything.