The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century)

by Cherie Priest

  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 vi
ew 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.

  “Maybe it’s a prototype.”

  “What’s a prototype?”

  “Um … it means something new.”

  Rector said, “Then just say ‘something new’; otherwise you’re showing off. Hey, this over here—is this the wire they want to use to blow us up?”

  Houjin joined him beside a stack of spools, each one wrapped with coiled wire that still gleamed, which meant it hadn’t been inside the city very long. “Probably,” he said.

  “Then how about we just steal the wire? Make ’em go get more. It’d buy us time.”

  “Sure, we could do that. You pick up one of those spools, and let me know how it goes,” Huey suggested wryly.

  Rector bent over and tried to lift one.

  “Heavier than they look, huh?”

  “And then some,” Rector muttered. “It’s good wire, though. We shouldn’t leave it.”

  “You want to throw it out a window?” Houjin offered. “That one over there—the grate’s mostly off it, and it’s facing the wall. If we chuck a couple of spools out, maybe we can roll them down to the mining carts.” But the grate wasn’t as loose as it looked, and the spools wouldn’t have fit, regardless. The boys abandoned that plan. “Never mind. Let’s just swipe some of the dynamite, and see if there’s anything else worth taking. Anything that might slow them down.”

  Rector didn’t know what bits of the chemistry set and distillery were more useful than others, so he contented himself with the crates of dynamite, which he opened—very carefully—using the edge of his ax. Deploying the weapon as a pry bar, he popped the lids one at a time and swiped a couple of strays from each. He stuffed them into his satchel and tried to forget that he was carrying enough explosives to launch himself to the moon.

  A muffled clank reached his ears from down below. Rector sat up straight. “Huey, did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Shh!” he ordered.

  The clanking came again, in a steady patter that implied footsteps.

  Houjin abandoned whatever it was he’d been doing and dashed quickly back and forth between the two exits in the floor at opposite ends of the circular room. These exits were not offset with rails; they were nothing more than rectangular holes indicating stairs below.

  “I can’t tell which way he’s coming!” Houjin said. His eyes were wide behind the mask, and Rector was pretty sure his own eyes matched. But they couldn’t panic. “Listen hard—we’ll figure it out, and pick the other way. Just one guy?”

  “I think so…?” The acoustics were all lies, all bounces and bangs as the metal interior cast the sounds up against the roof. “But I can’t tell,” Rector admitted.

  “Me either.”

  “Shit, he’s almost—”

  As the man came closer to the top, the clatter of his ascent became clearer and clearer, but by the time the boys had picked a stairway, it was too late. A round, masked head popped up at the top of the stairs, swiveling back and forth as it rose.

  The head stopped. The eyes within the mask saw the boys, who were frozen together, grabbing at each other in a tangle of fear.

  The man came up out of the stairwell. He was an average-sized fellow, a little taller than Rector and forty pounds heavier, and he wore some kind of protective jumpsuit that zipped all the way from his crotch to his mask.

  “Hey, you. What are you doing up here?” he asked. “You’re not supposed to be here…”

  He reached toward a cargo belt that swung low on his waist, and Rector’s heart nearly stopped. The man was going for a gun—he was absolutely positive of it—and as soon as he had it in hand, everything would be over. He and Houjin would both be dead, both failures, both casualties of somebody else’s problem.

  For all his adolescent philosophies to the contrary, Rector decided at that moment that he wasn’t interested in dying right now—much less at the top of a tower in a poisoned city, inside a wall, at the hands of some stranger. The whole thing felt undignified, and maybe Rector’s life thus far hadn’t been too big on dignity, but it’d be a shame if he died as ignobly as he’d lived.

  All of this flashed through his head like a bolt of lightning. He didn’t have time to reflect, and he didn’t have time to second-guess anything; he only had time to charge.

  He hollered, because that’s what you do when you charge. He swung the ax at a wobbling, frenzied pitch, and within two seconds he’d crossed the open expanse of floor between him and the man at the edge of the stairs. Houjin was right behind him, waving that sharpened iron bar as though it were a sword and they were the cavalry and this were some kind of heroic last stand—though Rector hoped with all his might that it wasn’t.

  They ran at the stunned man, who remained stunned enough that his hand stopped at the edge of his belt and he took half a step back.

  The half step either saved him or killed him, and the boys didn’t know which.

  Before Rector reached him, the man toppled backwards and downward. He flailed, waving his arms and desperately reaching for some sort of balance, but he didn’t find it. He only found the stairwell hole behind him … right where he’d put his left foot.

  This didn’t stop Rector, who was on fire with the zeal of self-defense.

  He brought the ax back and punched with it, knocking the off-kilter fellow even farther off-kilter; and when Houjin joined the fray, the weight of the Chinese boy’s heavy iron stick took the right leg out from under the intruder (or were they the intruders? Rector didn’t have time to care).

  The man in the jumpsuit went tumbling backwards, down the stairs.

  As he fell, he yelped and complained, accompanied by the sound of straining metal stretching, breaking, and crumbling. As they waited for him to hit bottom, Rector and Houjin were petrified—their hands over their mouths, blocking their filters—but only for a moment.

  Houjin said, “We had a story!”

  And Rector replied, “I forgot it!”

  “Me, too!”

  “Oh, Jesus, we have to go!”

  They scrambled to the other exit, Rector picking up one last stick of dynamite on his way, and Houjin nabbing a smaller coil of wire, one he could carry without breaking his back. Down the stairs they stampeded, no longer worried about the sound of their passage—worried only about escape.

  “Is he following us?” Houjin wheezed as he threw himself out the door and into the creeping, thickening shadow of the wall.

  Rector didn’t know, so he said, “No!” and kept running.

  “Wait!”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Wait,” Houjin said again—and with a halfhearted effort to regain his quiet and composure, he gasped to catch his breath. They were still alone, with nothing but the sound of their o
wn breathing filling their ears. “He’s stuck down there, or out cold, or something. We’ve got a minute, I think.”

  “What are you doing?” Rector demanded, still ready to run headlong down the hill and right back into the Vaults without pause. He didn’t want a minute. He wanted out of there.

  “The diesel,” he said.

  “Too heavy to carry with us!” Rector insisted.

  “I know! I don’t want to take it all the way.” Houjin knocked the nearest steel drum onto its side and gave it a shove. It rolled and sloshed, heavily lumbering over the uneven ground. “Help me with this.”

  “I thought we were running—”

  “Just help me,” he insisted, shoving his weapon into the back of his belt. “I have an idea. For later.”

  Rector joined him at the side of the drum, planting his hands on it to help with the shoving, rolling, and guiding. “If anybody sees us, we’re dead! If we get caught, I’m running, and I’m leaving you here. I’m going back underground.”

  “We might be dead already,” Houjin huffed. “If we get spotted, we drop it. All right?”

  “Fine,” Rector grumbled, halfway praying that someone would see them so he could resume his flight to safety.

  Both of them were almost faint with fright and exertion; their air supply came too thin to support so much running and hollering. But they pressed onward and pushed harder, manhandling the metal barrel over the hill’s edge and down onto one of the curved walkways, where it could roll more smoothly, so long as it followed the path.

  But then Houjin pushed it off the path, along the wall’s edge. The way was harder going, but they kept at it.

  “Where are we going with this thing?” Rector demanded. “It’s heavy as hell!”

  “To the hole … in the wall…” Houjin puffed. “Trust me … would you?”

  “Ain’t got much choice right now, do I?”

  “You could find your way back to Sizemore without me.”

  Rector said, “Maybe,” and was almost surprised when he realized it was true, never mind that he’d just threatened to do exactly that. He panted back at Houjin, “But you look like … you need … a hand. And I wanna know … what you want to set on fire.”