The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century)

by Cherie Priest

  Somewhere in the distance he could hear the clank, clang, and clatter of the elevator, but they were a long, many-doored hallway away from it when Houjin stopped and pulled out a key.

  Rector tried to keep from sounding impressed when he asked, “Your workshop locks?”

  “Yaozu thought it might be a good idea. This would have been one of the engineers’ offices if anybody had ever used this station for traveling.”

  “How nice for you,” he said, more crossly than he meant to. He’d never owned a key to anything, not in his entire life. Not even now that he had his own room.

  Houjin unlocked the door and led everyone inside, setting his lantern on a small table beside the door. On the wall above it, there was a metal bubble with a button in the middle. Houjin pushed the button. With a sputtering series of sparks, a line of bulbs lit up overhead. They were connected on a wire, and hanging low enough that he could’ve touched one if he stood on his toes.

  He lifted one hand almost mindlessly, reaching for the light as if it called him.

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Zeke warned him. “Them things are hot.”

  “Not yet. But they will be soon,” Houjin confirmed. “They’re electric, and it takes them a minute to warm up.”

  “I’ve never seen so many in one place.” Rector withdrew his hand.

  Houjin nodded and reached for a large box, which was sitting beside an even larger desk. The desk was littered with wires, coils, tools, schematics, stray parts, and scraps of paper covered in Chinese characters. The box was heavy, if Houjin’s posture could be gauged. He used his elbow to clear a spot, then set the box on the desk.

  He said, “Electric lights are better than torches and candles down here, because they don’t leave smoke everywhere. Better than lanterns, because fuels like kerosene are heavy to carry around. And you don’t have to keep refilling the bulbs. You just change them out once in a while.”

  “Where do they get their power from?” Rector asked.

  “The pump rooms, same as the air circulation. They run on coal.”

  “Coal’s heavy, too,” he pointed out.

  “True, but we’re already using coal to power the air circulation. It was easy to rig up a generator and siphon off some of the energy. I’m telling you,” he said as he began to unpack the box, “electricity is the future. Before long, we won’t be using coal anymore, or any of the petroleum derivatives.”

  Houjin had just used two words in a row that Rector didn’t recognize, but Rector played along like this made perfect sense to him. “I like how they don’t smell like anything.”

  “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 t
onight 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.”

  Houjin solemnly agreed, but added, “I wonder how many are left.” And then, more brightly, “I wonder if we could use them against the tower men!”

  Rector liked the idea. “You mean, if we could wrangle them—like a herd of cattle—and drive them up the hill? That’d be a hell of a sport.”

  “But there aren’t enough of them, not anymore,” Zeke said.

  “We don’t know that for sure. They sometimes bunch up in pockets,” Houjin countered. “And Yaozu’s making more of them—we saw that for ourselves.”

  Angeline shuddered. “That man, I swear. He’ll go straight to hell someday and feel right at home.”

  They wandered and searched, ultimately creeping down along the hill’s incline because it was easier going down than up, and because the old city prison was that direction, too.

  “It’s another few blocks that way”—Angeline indicated east—“and lucky for us, it’s no farther.”

  Lucky for them indeed, Rector thought, when a rhythmic bluster of faint background noise became loud enough to catch his attention. With the mask rubbing against his hair, making static sounds against his ears, it was hard to say at first, but eventually—yes—he detected the draw and puff of something breathing. And it wasn’t one of his fellow party members, he was fully certain of that.

  He stopped without noticing he’d stopped. He stood in his tracks like an animal aware of a predator, like a small thing wanting to become smaller for fear of a big thing.

  Everyone looked at him.

  Rector held up a finger, pointing at nothing but the gray-green sky beyond the Blight. He tried to ask if they heard the noise, too, if they knew where it was coming from, and was it close—was it as close as it felt? But when he opened his mouth, it was too dry to speak.

  Angeline backed up against him, readying her net. Over her shoulder, she said to him, “I hear him, too, Red.”

  He pushed himself against her. Knowing that something was coming for him yet again, he felt better with her beside him.

  “Stay calm,” she urged. She passed her net to Houjin, who didn’t quite know what to do with it except to hold it ready. She pulled a wrapped, fresh fish out of her pack. It must’ve weighed ten pounds, Rector thought wildly—it could’ve fed a family of four, or half a dozen orphans in a Catholic home outside the wall. Why hadn’t they ever gone fishing to feed the kids? Did nobody in the church know how?

  Frantic, disjointed thoughts scattered through his head, tumbling in all directions as his fear stirred them up and shook them.

  “He wants me,” he breathed.

  “Red, my boy … he doesn’t know what he wants.”

  The fish was still on a line as thick as a cable, with a great metal hook fastened through its mouth, jabbing through its cheek. If there’d ever been any blood, it was gone now. And Rector didn’t know what fish blood looked like, anyway, or if they even had blood … and now his mind was racing so wildly that the thoughts came faster and faster, each upon the heels of the last one. He could not remember having ever thought so quickly or so clearly about nothing at all of any importance.

  He wanted a hit of sap worse than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. That’d slow his mind down, wouldn’t it? Sap would fix it. It’d temper his fluttering heart, drag his thoughts down, keep him calm. Keep him ready for any kind of action that required more thought than running and screaming, in case running and screaming weren’t enough.

  The princess thrust the heavy fish toward Zeke, who hesitated. She changed her mind, retrieved the net from Houjin, and gave the fish to him instead.

  Louder and louder came the breathing, from something so huge his wheezing gasps filled the whole block. The creature was hidden in the foggy air, but he was moving; the source of th
e sound slipped from left to right, accompanied by heavy footsteps.

  Zeke backed up against Rector, too, not for protective purposes, but from the ordinary, human need to band together for defense. Houjin joined them, and soon they were in a nervous back-to-back circle, everyone facing outward … everyone looking through the fog, straining to see what lurked inside it.

  Angeline shifted the net in her hands, and elbowed Houjin so he’d hold up the fish.

  “Hello out there,” she said softly. “We know you’re watching us. Are you hungry?”

  Zeke tried it, too. “Hey out there, Mister Sasquatch. Miss Angeline says you don’t mean us any harm.”

  In response, they heard a loud huff or cough. It was the chuffing sound of something with a stuffy nose, a congested torso. It was off to their left. Everyone calibrated accordingly, twisting to observe the location without leaving anyone’s back undefended.

  Angeline picked up the thread. “You’re stuck inside here, aren’t you? You’re just trying to go outside, isn’t that it? You’ve got a lady friend over there, beyond the wall. I seen her when I went fishing. She got up close to me, and didn’t make a sound, but she watched from the trees.”

  “You saw her?” Houjin whispered.

  She lowered her voice. “Sure did. She’s a pretty-colored thing, smooth and brown-red, like cedar.”

  The big thing groaned, or roared feebly. Rector retreated as deeply as possible into the tangle of his friends, wanting nothing more than to bolt for the nearest shelter; and if he had the faintest idea where that might’ve been, he might’ve done so. But he didn’t, and the only thing keeping him from being by himself in the Blight, in the wrecked city, was this knot of humanity.

  His mask fogged. His eyes watered.

  “He’s coming,” he said, and he hated himself for how much it sounded like whining.

  Angeline’s cadence was steady as a rock, and her words poured like honey into the fog. “That’s all right. Let him come. How about this, boys—all of us, now. Let’s start moving toward the jail. Let’s see if he’ll follow us. But don’t make any fast moves, or sudden gestures. We don’t mean him any trouble, and we want him to know it.”