The Inexplicables (The Clockwork Century 4)

“You’re a regular ghost of a thing, ain’t you?”

“What?”

“Whitest man I ever see,” observed the Chinaman dispassionately. “His hair … what color you call that?”

“Ginger. Hey, I think I heard about you, boy. ”

Rector forced a smile. “Is that right?”

“You’ve been dealing from the orphanage, haven’t you? I heard about a boy so white you could see right through him, with hair the color of rust, besides. Is that you?”

“I reckon it must be,” he confessed.

The Chinaman asked, “You know this boy?”

“I know about him,” the white man said. “He uses Harry, don’t he?” he asked down at Rector, who still cringed against the light. “Harry’s your chemist, ain’t he?”

“That’s right, sir. I buy offa Harry. ” Or at least I used to. “And Harry gets all his stuff right here, through Yaozu. He don’t truck with Caplan or O’Reilly, so you can trust I’m one of yours. ”

The white man snorted as if trust wasn’t something he handed out quite so easily, but Rector knew the lingo and he’d dropped enough names to prove himself.

“Caplan and O’Reilly … Either one of them ever approach you?”

“No sir. ” But that wasn’t quite true. He’d met Caplan once in passing, through one of Harry’s rival chemists. Harry’d been laid up with consumption and hadn’t been able to cook, so Rector’d been forced to look up another source. “And if I did, I wouldn’t work with ’em. I know which side my bread is buttered on. ”

“All right, then. Hold on. We’ll throw down the ladder. Be careful hoisting yourself up. We don’t care to scrape anybody’s bits and pieces off the rocks, you hear me?”

He unrolled a long ladder; it unfurled like a flag, in a great lurching arc that hit the ground mere inches from Rector’s toes. He jumped back with a start.

“You see it?” the Chinaman prompted.

“Sure enough, I do. Say, could you maybe aim that light somewhere else? I can’t see with it shining down in my face. You said you don’t want to scrape me off the rocks, and well, I’d rather not require that service, either. ”

The light wobbled, wavered, and the beam shifted a few feet to the right.

Once Rector’s eyes stopped swimming with bold white orbs that obscured all the evening’s details, the remaining glare was enough to see by—so long as he didn’t need to see anything directly in front of him. But the glowing white ghosts seared into his vision refused to disperse entirely, so he held out his arms and relied on his peripheral vision until he could swat the rope ladder into his hands.

He climbed its loose dowel footholds by feel, bracing himself against the wobble of the unsecured steps; one hand over the other, and then one foot following the next, he scaled it slowly, uncertainly, and suddenly quite glad that the light was off his face but pointed too far away for him to see anything if he were dumb enough to look down.

He looked down.

As predicted, he saw nothing, except for a big circle of vivid brilliance cast by the lantern above. It hit the ground someplace below, illuminating only grass, gravel, and the edge of a fire pit that hadn’t seen any cooking action in years.

His stomach did a quick lurch, but there was nothing inside it to slosh or heave, so he didn’t even burp at the sudden realization of how high up he’d come, and how quickly. Was he climbing so fast? It was hard to tell. His hands and feet guided themselves, or maybe what was left of the sap churning around in his head was shielding him from the facts of the matter.

Forty feet or more. Straight up. A gate into someplace like hell.

He was half that distance before the Chinaman called down, “You got a mask?”

“Yes, I got a mask,” he panted.

“You put it on. The seal here not so good. ”

“I will. Put it on. When I get. Closer. ” He puffed out the words in time to his climbing.

“You put it on now. There gas up here. You smell it?”

“Sure, I can smell it,” Rector admitted. You could almost always smell the gas if you were within five miles of the city and if the wind was canted just right. It was easy to forget the low-level stink because you never smelled anything else.