The Inexplicables

by Cherie Priest

Page 50

 

  “They do have a smell,” Houjin argued lightly. “You notice it after a while. But it isn’t very strong, and that’s not why I brought you down here. This is what I wanted to show you. ”

  He held up a device that appeared to be made mostly out of dynamite, with a handful of other things attached.

  Both Zeke and Rector jumped back.

  “Shit, Huey!” Zeke said. “Warn a guy before you start flashing that around!”

  “It’s perfectly safe … for the moment,” he added, bouncing it gently in his hands. “Nothing to spark it off. You wouldn’t want to go playing catch with it, but it won’t blow us up,” he said with a grin.

  Rector eyed the dynamite bundle with a mixture of horror and curiosity. “Is that … is that a clock you got tied to it?”

  “Yes! Here,” he said, placing the odd contraption on the desk, beside its box. “It has an alarm—you can set it to strike at a certain time. ”

  “Like … to wake you up? I’ve heard of those,” Rector said.

  “To wake you up, to tell you to go to work … it doesn’t matter. The point is, it strikes. ”

  “And what’s that thing next to it?” Zeke asked, pointing at a strange little device about the size of two thumbs pressed together.

  “It’s a dry cell battery. ”

  Rector didn’t have a clue what that meant, and a shared glance with Zeke told him he wasn’t alone. “Why’s it stuck on that board?”

  The alarm clock and the battery were fastened to each other by a copper wire. A piece of brass was affixed to the clock’s alarm key, and all of the pieces were mounted with screws and bolts to a board which was a bit smaller than a loaf of bread.

  “I don’t get it,” Zeke confessed.

  “It’s … these, you see…” Houjin pointed at various spots on the board, settling on the two bits of brass. “These are the contact points, you understand? When the alarm rings, it sends an electrical current from the clock to the battery, just like the current in a hand-pump trigger. ”

  Zeke eyed the clock with suspicion. “The alarm’s not going to ring, is it?”

  “The clock’s wound down. It couldn’t strike if it tried. ”

  Rector stared at the board and its weird components, then considered the dynamite, and the clock—and he thought of the enormous grandfather clock at the orphan’s home, and how it’d chime as told, every hour on the hour. And just like the spark that would jump between the connectors, the answer flickered between his ears.

  He said, “This means you can tell the dynamite when to blow up. ”

  “Yes!” Houjin exclaimed. “That’s it exactly! We can tell the dynamite to explode at five o’clock, or eleven o’clock, or whenever we like—but it explodes when we’re a long ways away from it. We’re going to surprise those tower men out of their skins! They’ll never know what hit them. If any of them survive, they’ll come looking for us—but we won’t be anywhere they can reach us, not by then. ”

  “That’s … that’s genius,” Zeke said with naked awe.

  “Thank you. I’m excited by it myself. Yaozu brought up the idea; he thought it was possible, but he didn’t know how to make it happen. But that’s Yaozu’s kind of genius,” he said as an afterthought. “He doesn’t know how to do everything, but he knows who to ask. ”

  A knock on the door made everyone jump, but it was only a Chinese man in a rounded hat. He said something to Houjin, who nodded quickly and made a brief reply. The other man left, leaving the boy to explain. “Angeline is outside waiting for us. We should go. ”

  They backtracked through the Station, and Rector marveled again at how beautiful it all was—practically the inside of a mansion, or how he’d always imagined a mansion must look. Every surface gleamed and glowed.

  Maybe that was it. Everything was made out of something that shone. Brass, glass, marble … it all conspired to toss the electricity and gaslight around the echoing space, making them look warm and bright without being harsh.

  They didn’t go all the way back to the Pullman car. Instead, they exited in a different direction, and Houjin led them straight to Angeline, who they found reclined on a bench with her hat over her face.

  “Napping on the job?” Zeke greeted her with a grin.

  She pulled the hat aside and whapped him with it. “Didn’t realize you three would turn up so fast. I’m old and I’m tired, and I can close my eyes if I want to. ”

  Rector fished around in his bag for a mask, suspecting he would need it. “So what happens next? You’re back, and looking for us. Did something interesting happen?”

  “Yes and no, by which I mean I have an idea where the sasquatch might be hanging about. I don’t know what you boys have done all morning, but I’ve been near the tower, keeping my ears open. It’s a good way to learn things. ”

  “And what did you learn?” Houjin prodded politely.

  “I learned that them fellows don’t have the faintest idea we’ve been snatching their dynamite,” she said. Rector noticed that she’d lumped herself in with the Station men, courtesy of her word choice. “They’ve been coming and going, reporting back, telling their boss what they’ve been up to. It’d be more helpful if we didn’t already know. ”

  “Do you know when they plan to blow us up?” Houjin asked, doing the same thing, and siding with Yaozu’s people.

  “They’re still deciding, but leaning toward tonight around dark-thirty. At some point, they’ll need to coordinate better than that, but for now all I have is their general idea. ”

  “Are we going to let them try?” Zeke asked. When everyone looked at him a little funny, he added, “Well, we have the advantage on them right now, but once they figure out their explosives didn’t work, they’ll know we’re on to them. ”

  Houjin pondered this a moment and replied, “The Station fellows … and whoever else is coming along … should time it as close as possible. It’ll confuse the heck out of the tower men, if they try to blow us up and their tower goes up in smoke instead. We’ll have more of an advantage than just surprise: We’ll shock them silly. ”

  “Let’s not worry about that right now,” Angeline said. “The other thing I learned from the tower men is that they’re worried about some oversized rotter, hanging around about halfway down Denny Hill. ”

  “The sasquatch! Let’s hope he stays there. Now all we have to do is track him and catch him,” Rector said. When he put it out there like that, the task sounded big. It sounded frightening. It sounded like something he’d rather skip in favor of picking live dynamite out of cubbyholes.

  The princess said, “I’ve got my net, that helmet you found, and some fresh fish. How about you boys? You got your weapons?”

  They didn’t, but these things were stashed at the Sizemore House tunnel entrance, so they could be retrieved easily enough. Angeline was satisfied by this, and after making sure they all had masks and the usual supplies, she led them away from King Street Station and under the city, along the hand-cart tracks, and up the incline toward Denny Hill and the Sizemore House.

  They emerged ready for battle.

  Twenty-seven

  Everyone was masked and armed. The boys carried their usual weapons, and the princess had her knives—but, as she’d told them, she hoped they wouldn’t be necessary. On the way, they’d discussed the state of Zeke’s fox, and she was encouraged by the creature’s progress. Not healed in a day, certainly. But any sign of improvement was cause for optimism, and perhaps it wouldn’t take so much to bring the sasquatch back around.

  As they began their stealthy quest, Angeline reminded them: “We’re here to save him, not hurt him. Don’t you forget that. But at the same time, I expect you to defend yourselves if you need to. I’d rather have the three of you alive than the sasquatch. ”

  Rector followed along behind her, and then near her as they spread out from one another by just a few feet.


  That was the rule. They were to stay within sight of one another—no exceptions, no detours, no side excursions, no matter how interesting something looked or sounded. If something off the beaten path needed investigating, you said something to the group … and the group decided whether or not it was worth a visit. In case of rotters, everyone knew where to access the underground, and how to hole up in a remaining building in case an entrance wasn’t nearby. There were safe spots throughout all the neighborhoods, even this one, but they weren’t very close together. One for every two or three blocks, no more than that.

  If trouble came calling, they’d have to run.

  As Zeke confessed while they walked quietly along the blocks, it was almost spookier without the rotters. He whispered, because Angeline said they could whisper. They were far enough from the tower that none of the men were likely to hear them, and they didn’t want to hide from the sasquatch; they wanted to lure him out. Quiet voices were tolerated, and even encouraged.

  “It’s like this,” he said, placing one foot carefully on the far side of a fallen stone slab, and testing his weight against it before stepping across. “When you know the rotters are here, it ain’t a surprise to find them. They used to be pretty much everywhere, but you just stayed away from the spots where you knew they’d be. ”

  He slipped on a patch of pebbles, caught himself, and continued. “But when they’re just … when they’re gone … then you don’t know where they are. And they could be anyplace,” he told them. “You can’t stay away from anyplace if you don’t know where it is. It’s like trying to avoid everything—you can’t do it. So you wind up scared of every place, and every sound, because any place and any sound could mean a rotter’s coming to get you. ”