The Inexplicables (The Clockwork Century 4)

He was on the ground level now; he sensed it before he knew it as a fact.

It wasn’t merely the long hike from the roof, and it wasn’t simply the wider passage or the paths in the dust swept clean by the regular intrusion of feet. It was the way the windows had all been covered. They were sealed with sheets of wood, planks, corrugated tin, and a hundred other scraps of building material that had been scavenged from the city.

Rector exited the stairwell, and held his lantern up and forward. He investigated the nearest amalgam of reinforcement, and was convinced that yes, this had all been accomplished from the inside. Big nail heads jutted from piles of sturdy trash, and braided steel cables were lashed from corner to corner.

Not keeping anything in. Keeping everything out.

Rector spoke quietly to himself, since there was no one else to hear him. “They shore up the first floors to keep out the rotters. I get it. ” So the rotters couldn’t climb. It was good to know.

He couldn’t tell what the building had been in its original incarnation. A hotel? A bank? A boardinghouse, or other residence? He scanned the scene for some hint but didn’t see one. Every identifying piece of furniture or signage, every useful scrap had been stripped and repurposed from elsewhere.

He stood still and listened, but heard nothing except the lantern’s sizzling wick and his own raspy, warm breath straining through his filters. He ducked back into the stairwell and shoved his lantern out in front of himself as if it were a sword. It led the way farther down, one more flight, and it stopped in a basement.

The basement wasn’t anything more complex than a freshly excavated root cellar. The timbers that held up the weaker points looked like railroad ties, and there were tracks laid down in the mud.

The lantern wasn’t strong enough to tell him how far back the tracks might go; its beams surrendered to the unnatural walls and other lines, showing nothing but a large, cleared space that could’ve been the bottom of any silver mine or saltworks. There, three different sets of tracks stretched out in three different directions, all disappearing within ten yards. Rector didn’t hear any rolling wheels, creaking carts, or squealing brakes. If these tunnels were ever used, nobody was down there now.

He closed his eyes again and backed up to the stairwell, struggling to determine which of the tracks might head off in the general direction of north. Instinct told him it was the middle set, which curved off to the left. He let his instinct win, swung his shoulders to adjust his pack, and set off.

So this was the underground.

Dark, close, and eerily quiet. After twenty minutes of exploring, seeking some exit other than the way he’d come in, Rector spotted a byway tunnel. The edge of his lantern’s light brushed up against something that looked promisingly like a staircase.

He adjusted his mask. If he was going to hit the great outdoors again, the seal needed to be snug. He hated the seal, he hated the snugness, and he hated the way the rubber line against his face was itching something awful—a combination of ordinary friction and the Blight’s irritation. Sometimes he forgot that he shouldn’t scratch the seam, and one hand would reach up mindlessly to give it a vigorous scrubbing with his fingernails. But then he’d remember that it would only make the itch worse, and he’d stop himself, and swear about it.

Resisting the urge to take the steps two at a time, he let his lantern lead the way. Up he climbed, slowly enough that his chest didn’t hurt and his breath didn’t fog up the mask’s interior.

At the top he found a trapdoor of sorts, the kind used to cover up root cellars and basements when they need an outside entrance. These doors were doubled, and they were latched from within—just like the windows in the other building.

“They probably want to keep people out, too. Not just rotters. ” But he suspected the security system wasn’t so great, if any dumb kid from the Outskirts could let himself inside. “Or maybe I’m just lucky. ”

He laughed out loud at that, and tried to rub at an itchy place on his nose, only to be reminded that the gas mask blocked any serious relief.

The door’s fastener wasn’t too complicated. It was just a system of levers on a crank, so when he turned a wheel, the lock slid aside and the doors would swing … in? No. They swung out. He lifted the right-side door and raised his head a few inches to look around.

Ah, daylight. Or what passed for daylight in Seattle, which was good enough for Rector. But the milky white sky did nothing to warm the low-lying clouds of fog and gas; instead, it made the air look colder—as if it were the frozen, blowing breath of some preposterous monster.

He considered a strategic retreat. He thought about shutting the doors and ducking back underneath the city. It was close and dark and smelled weird (or maybe that was his mask), but there weren’t any flesh-eating creatures roaming its corridors. Up here, dead things walked.

But dead things walked in his head, too.

At the far reaches of Rector’s vision, the flickering, twitching shade of Zeke Wilkes gave a disapproving shake of its head.

You promised. I won’t wait much longer, Wreck. I’ll come for you, if you don’t come for me.

“You come for me all the damn time anyway. ”

Outside the air was scratchy and dense. He’d known that already, but had forgotten it in the short time he’d been beneath the streets. He shuddered and climbed up to the last stair, and with all the patience he could muster, he drew the doors back down behind himself until they clicked into place.

Now. Where was he?

An alley.

Navigating half by touch and half by squinting through the thickened air, he struggled to the left … where he encountered a fence, so he turned around to try the other way out of the alley. Hugging the building’s exterior wall, he crept to its edge.

A corner. Excellent.

The steady patter of dripping water sounded nearby, and someplace not too far away he heard a building settle on its foundations, creaking and moaning. No other sound broke the spell. No footsteps. No shuffling. Nothing to indicate that he wasn’t alone …