“Ask them about Zeke. They’re watchmen, aren’t they? Maybe they saw my son while they were watching the streets. ”
The barkeep shook her head. “Not yet. Not these men. They won’t talk to you, even if they can. They’re only mercenaries, most of them. And they aren’t friendly. Just leave ’em be. ” She lowered her voice again, and marched straight ahead behind Briar.
Briar picked out a third armed man on another nearby rooftop, and then a fourth. She asked, “Are there always this many of them?”
Lucy was looking another direction, for she’d spotted yet a fifth. “Sometimes,” she said, but she sounded unconvinced by her own assessment. “This does seem like a lot for a welcome wagon. I wonder what’s going on. ”
Briar didn’t find this particularly reassuring, but she resolutely refused to hold her gun any tighter or walk any faster along the narrow, pipe-and-wood-frame corridors that held her up over the Blight-poisoned streets. “No one’s aiming at us, at least,” she said.
“True enough. Maybe they’ve had some problems. Maybe they’re looking out for somebody else. Honey, could you do me a favor?”
“Name it. ”
“Stick a little closer by me. This part’s uneven, and it’s hard for me to straighten myself without my arm. ”
Briar shifted her shoulder, twitching her satchel and gun until they wouldn’t clap Lucy in the face; then she put one arm around the other woman and helped her walk across the crooked beams. At the end of the way she pulled another lever, and another lift dropped down to meet them.
Lucy said, “This is the last of them. It’ll take us down, into the basement. Can you see the station over there?”
Briar squinted and thought that she might be able to spy a dark point and a circle crossed by two lines through the shifting sheets of curdled air. “Over there?”
“That’s right. That’s the clock tower, there. They’d just got it up when the Blight hit us all. This place right here,” she said as the gear-work mechanisms that held the platform aloft buckled and began to lower, “this was supposed to be a garage where the train cars were stored when no one needed them. It’s been turned into a lobby of sorts. ”
“A lobby?”
“Sure. Think of it as a hotel. It’s pretty nice inside,” Lucy said. “Nicer than the Vaults, anyhow. Even down here, money has plenty to say—and Minnericht’s rich as can be. ”
One level at a time, the rickety lift dropped the women. Through the skeleton of the huge, stillborn station their stomachs raced to beat them to the bottom; and at the bottom, the doors opened into more startling bareness—more blank reminders that there were no trains, and no tickets, and no customers. This was a place that had never been brand-new, and now it felt more ancient than the wings of flies trapped in dirty amber.
A puff of dust accompanied the settling of the lift.
Briar sneezed, and Lucy lifted her arm to wipe her nose on her sleeve, but the mask kept her from success. “Come on, dear,” she said. “It’s not much farther, and the deeper we go, the more comfortable the station becomes. ”
“How long has he lived here?” Briar asked as she followed Lucy off the lift.
“Oh, I don’t know. Ten years, maybe? He’s had quite a long time to spruce the place up to his liking, that’s for sure. ”
They walked across flat stone without any shine or tiling, and their footsteps banged an announcement echo up to the room’s edge. The vast, blank space terminated against a set of red double doors that were sealed with smooth black flaps at all the seams. Briar touched one of the flaps and stared at it more closely. It looked cleaner and more manufactured than the hastily improvised seals of the other quarters.
“How do we get inside? Do we have to knock a special way, or pull a bell?” Briar asked, noting that the door had no external knobs or latches.
Lucy said, “Help me pull the arm out of this sling, will you?”
Briar assisted with the detangling, and then Lucy swung the arm three times against the rightmost door. The sound was sharp and clanging. It was the sound of metal on metal.
“The doors…”
“Steel, I think. Someone told me he made them out of a train car’s siding. But someone else told me he yanked them down from the entrance, so I don’t know where he got them, really. ”
“And they’re just going to let us inside?”
Lucy shrugged, and her mostly limp arm swung jauntily against her belly. “Rotters don’t knock. Everybody else, they figure they can manage. ”
“Wonderful,” Briar mumbled, and soon the jerk and squeal of interior braces revealed that they’d been heard.
The door took half a minute to open, as bars and locks were twisted, lifted, and set aside; and then came the squeal of unhappy hinges as the portal split open. Behind it, a thin man with an oversized mask glared suspiciously out into the area that Lucy had called “the lobby. ” An averagely tall fellow, he was dressed like a cowboy in canvas pants, a buttoned-shut shirt, and a pair of gun belts that overlapped one another around his hips. Across his chest another strap held another gun, a larger one like Briar’s Spencer. He was younger than many of the other people she’d seen inside the city walls, but he was not as young as her son. He might’ve been as old as thirty, but it was hard to tell.
“Hello there, Richard,” Lucy said.