Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century 1)

A secondary tremor followed the initial quake, but it passed quickly. As soon as the land was stable again, Briar Wilkes began to run.

On the way home she passed debris in the street and people crying or shouting at each other, standing on the cobblestones in their nightclothes. Here and there, something that had fallen over had caught fire. Off in the distance, the clanging chimes of makeshift fire brigades were sounding as the blocks awakened into disarray one by one.

No one noticed or recognized Briar as she dashed, lantern in hand, up the steep hills and around the wide places where big things had fallen and blocked the way. The quake hadn’t felt so bad to her, down on the beach, but the earth was funny sometimes and it moved inconsistently. It hadn’t been nearly so bad as the…

And in her memory, the shocking, jolting, bashing fury of the Boneshaker machine was moving underneath her again, tearing down basement walls and gutting the underground, pummeling the rocks and digging, blasting, destroying everything it touched.

… She wasn‘t the only one thinking it, she knew. Everyone thought of it, every time another quake wiggled the land.

She wasn’t worried about her father’s house; it had withstood worse. And when she got there, she wasn’t even relieved to find it standing without any obvious damage. Nothing short of finding Zeke on the porch could have slowed her down.

She burst in the door and into the cold, dry interior that was every bit as empty as she’d left it. Her hand stopped at the knob to her father’s room. There was a brief instant of hesitation, a resistance to the breaking of long-established habit. Then she seized the knob and shoved it.

Inside, all was dark until she brought the lantern around. She left it on the bedside table and idly noted that the drawer was still open from where Zeke had stolen the old revolver Rector had mentioned. She wished he’d taken something else. The gun was an antique that had belonged to Maynard’s father-in-law. Maynard himself had never used it and it probably didn’t even work, but, of course, Zeke wouldn’t have known that.

Again she felt that stab of regret, and she wished she’d told him more. Something. Anything. When she got him back, then.

When she got him home, she’d tell him anything he wanted to know—any story, any fact. He could have it all if he’d just make it home alive. And maybe Briar had been a terrible mother, or maybe she’d only done the best she could. It didn’t matter now, when Zeke was in that toxic, walled-up city where undead Blight victims prowled for human flesh and criminal societies lurked at the bottom of rigged-up homes and cleaned-out basements.

But for all the things she’d botched, screwed up, lost, forgotten, lied about, or misled him on… she was going in there after him.

With one hand on each door’s handle, she whipped Maynard’s huge old wardrobe open and stood before it, a determined frown planted firmly on her face. Its false bottom lifted up when Briar popped her thumb down into a hole.

Something tight and heavy squeezed in her stomach.

There it all was, just like she’d left it years before.

She’d tried to bury these things with Maynard. At the time, she couldn’t have imagined ever wanting or needing them. But the officers had come and dug him up, and when they returned his body, it had been stripped of the things she’d used to dress him.

Six months later Briar had come home to find them in a bag, sitting in front of the door. She never did find out who’d returned them, or why. And by then, Maynard had been in the ground too long to disturb him a second time. So the artifacts of his life, the things he wore every day, had gone back into their private drawer underneath the floor of his wardrobe.

One by one she withdrew the items and set them on the bed.

The rifle. The badge. The hard leather hat. The belt with its big oval buckle, and the shoulder holster.

His overcoat hung like a ghost in the back of the four-footed closet. She grabbed it and pulled it out into the light. Black as the night outside, the wool felt trench was treated with oil to resist the rain. Its brass buttons were tarnished but securely stitched, and inside one of the pockets Briar found a pair of goggles that she’d never known he owned. She tore off her own coat and clawed her way into his.

The hat should have been a little too big, but she had a lot more hair than Maynard did, so it all worked out. The belt was too long and the ornate MW buckle was huge, but she threaded it through the loops of her pants, yanked it tight, and locked the big metal plate low on her belly.

In a back corner of the wardrobe was a plain brown trunk stuffed with ammunition, rags, and oil. Briar had never cleaned her father’s Spencer repeater, but she’d watched him do it a thousand times, so she knew the motions. She sat on the edge of his bed and copied them. When it was fresh enough that it gleamed in the low, runny lantern light, she picked up a tube of rimfire cartridges and thumbed the contents into the rifle.

At the bottom of the plain brown trunk, she found a cartridge box. Though the trunk’s lid had gathered fifteen years of dust, the contents appeared sound, so she took the box of additional ammunition and stuffed it into a satchel she spotted lying under the bed.

To the cartridges she added her father’s goggles, her old gas mask from the evacuation days, her pouch of tobacco, and the sparse contents of a coffee jar she kept behind the stove, which amounted to about twenty dollars. It wouldn’t have been that much if she hadn’t just been paid.

She didn’t count it. She already knew it wouldn’t get her very far.

As long as it got her inside the city, it would do. And if it wouldn’t, she’d think of something else.

Through the curtains in her father’s bedroom, the sun was on the verge of rising—and that meant she would be late for work, had she intended to go. It’d been ten years since she’d missed a day, but on this occasion they’d have to forgive her or fire her, whichever they preferred.

But she wasn’t coming in.

She had a ferry to catch—over to Bainbridge Island, where the airships docked and fueled for legitimate business. If the smugglers with their contraband didn’t also originate from the island across the Sound, then surely one of them could point her in the right direction.

She dumped the rifle into the holster that slung over her back, shrugged her way into the satchel, and closed her father’s wardrobe. Then she closed his house, and left it dark and empty.

Seven