The Inexplicables (The Clockwork Century 4)

And shortly after that, Rector’s eyes also cracked.

All the light, all the darkness, all the rustling sounds of nearby water, the scuttling clicks of crabs and the tiny splurts of spitting clams half buried in the soggy sand … every soft noise scraped against the inside of his skull—loudly, but not quite unpleasantly, rather like a headache made of candy.

He was lying on his back, and he didn’t remember how he’d gotten that way—if he’d fallen over, or opted to lie down. An odd-shaped rock or starfish was wedged against one of his lower vertebrae, so he shifted his weight and clenched his fists, flexing his fingers an

d remembering that he needed to breathe even as he realized that his nose was too stuffy to help with the task. It was clogged with the flavor of copper (his own blood) and tin (from the foil) and whatever other salty gunk saw fit to occupy the great sloshing space behind his eyes.

Still high enough to not mind any pain very much, Rector struggled to a seated position. His few worldly possessions remained right where he left them, and the incoming tide was within a few yards of soaking the lot.

Shakily at first, and then stronger as the drug was given more room to move, more blood flow to carry it through his system, he grabbed his supplies and packed them back up. Foil and pipe stem and matches into the pouch. Empty waxed packet tossed into the oncoming waves. Blanket tied back up at its corners. Everything over his shoulder, bouncing against his back as he left the beach.

He’d already forgotten that he was angry at Harry.

Just for now, for this stretch of minutes—hours, if he was lucky—he did not worry about where he’d sleep or what he’d eat, or whether or not Zeke’s phantom was coming for him. He didn’t even worry about how he was going to get past the Seattle wall, or what would happen once he got inside. For these moments, everything was clear. The path was as straight and illuminated as if it’d been painted onto the ground at his feet. And not only would there be no deviation from this course, but he could see no peril whatsoever attached to following it.

First, up onto the mudflats. Then, into the Outskirts and around their edge.

Next, up to the wall at the far southeast side of its expanse.

And then, through it. Into the lost, poisoned, abandoned city of Seattle.

It used to be that there were only two ways into Seattle: under the wall, or over it. Going over could be trouble, because it meant finding an air captain who was bribable enough to bring you into the roiling cauldron of thick, ugly air inside the wall. By and large this meant pirates, and pirates were, by definition, not the most trustworthy sort.

Rector did not like pirates.

He didn’t care so much for scrabbling around through soft, wet, smelly underground tunnels, either, but that was the better option up until six months ago, when an earthquake had collapsed the last easy access point—a water-runoff tube made of brick, part of the old sewer system from back when the city was alive. There were other ways to get underneath; Rector was positive of that. But he didn’t know any off the top of his head, and he didn’t want to ask the kind of people who could’ve told him. He owed them all money.

Anyway, these days he knew a third means into the city. A very recent one, still under construction: a gate cut into the wall about forty feet up. He’d seen men working on it by the water’s edge where the old piers rotted in the tidal muck. They’d picked a spot where no one was likely to see them working, and with King Street Station just on the other side of the barrier.

As a professional delinquent and occasional trafficker in illicit substances, Rector had access to a great deal of information that wasn’t strictly common knowledge—including the often disbelieved truth that people still lived inside the city … and the fact that most of them weren’t very nice.

Some of the city’s least nice residents lived and worked in King Street Station, which was ruled like a small, wicked kingdom by a mysterious Chinaman named Yaozu. Rector had never personally set eyes on Yaozu, but his imagination suggested an enormous, evil-looking man in billowy black clothing and a gas mask set with spikes. He might have tattoos on his face, or fingernails filed to points, or a terrible voice that sounded like it came from the chest of the devil himself.

No man who rules by the power of his name could be anything less than fearsome.

Rector knew roughly how the world worked, and he had no interest in meeting the monstrous Chinaman or his army of minions. Even if his empire had been built on sap, and even if his Station was where most of Rector’s drug of choice was presently made. But somewhere in the back of Rector’s head—bouncing feebly among the parts of his brain that still worked the best—he was prepared to admit that he had considered asking Yaozu for a job.

Of course, this would only come up if he survived his little quest, which he didn’t expect to. Which was fine by him. And even if he did survive, there was always the chance that Yaozu wouldn’t be in charge very long anyway. Nobody in the Outskirts except the chemists cared whether or not Yaozu managed the flow of sap that oozed out of the walled-up city. If some newcomer came along, up from Tacoma or Portland, or even from as far away as San Francisco, or wherever Harry was talking about …

Rector cared only insomuch as it might affect the supply chain, but he didn’t give two small shits if the operation was run by a Chinaman named Yaozu, or an Irishman named Hark O’Reilly, or a New Yorker named Louis Melville, or a Californian named Otis Caplan. Let them fight over it all they liked. Just let the best man win, and let the sap flow.

Let the whole world burn, for all Rector Sherman cared. After all, it had no place for him.

Four

Rector’s quest was fuzzy, but it was not altogether ridiculous: If he could find his way into the city, locate his deceased friend’s corpse, and treat it with a smidge of dignity, he could perhaps be freed from the nagging phantom that dogged his waking dreams.

It was not the worst plan he’d ever had. It didn’t rank among the finest, either, but the end of Rector’s rope was dangling near, and it was this or nothing. It might even redeem him a little bit if his last act on earth was an attempt at recompense, in case of pearly gates or skeptical angels.

A short, sparkling pang of guilt poked through the muffling layers of sap and jabbed him in the chest. “Zeke, I’m coming, goddammit. Isn’t that enough?” he said under his breath. “Christ, that’s all I can do now, ain’t it?” He trudged through darkness over the mudflats, to the wall looming blacker than any starless midnight—a false horizon created from something thicker and worse than the mere absence of illumination.

He could see the wall best when he did not look at it directly. It was most apparent from the corner of his eyes, from a sideways gaze as he hiked past ramshackle clusters of houses and businesses.

Over at the waterworks plant a steam whistle blew and something heavy clanked, like a large clock’s gears tipping together. One shift was ending, and another would soon begin. The plant ran day and night because there’d never be enough clean water if it didn’t—and without clean water, the Blight truly would have wiped out the Sound.

Rector remembered a stray, sharp fact in an uninvited flash: Briar Wilkes, Zeke’s mother, used to work there. She’d gone inside the wall after her son. She’d never come out, and, like her son, she was almost certainly dead. It weighed on Rector somewhat less than Zeke’s untimely passing, as he hadn’t liked Briar at all: the last time he’d seen her, she’d threatened him with bodily and spiritual harm, so if she was gone, well, that didn’t keep him up at night—and neither did her ghost.

The churning cranks and hisses of steam from the waterworks plant faded as he hiked farther away from the Sound, higher up the ungroomed hills, and along the worn dirt roads that had settled into uncomfortable ruts. He left the ruts and took to the grassy spots between the houses and sheds and barns. As these buildings thinned out, the open spaces became wider, more open, and almost more frightening because they gave him nowhere to hide.