The Inexplicables (The Clockwork Century 4)

The other guy heard him anyway. “Not a bad idea.

Come with me. ”

“Like hell,” Rector said, and he started to run.

Three steps into that retreat, he collided with the corner of a building, bounced off, and caught himself just before falling down. His gas mask slid—not far enough to let in any of the toxic air, but one of his lenses had cracked, rendering his left eye’s view a mosaic of confusion. It was hard enough to see when everything was clear, including his head. Now he was half-blind in one eye, his ears were ringing, and he felt a warm, wet trickle of blood dripping down behind his ear.

He pulled himself together, picked a different direction, and ran that way. He bolted around the offending corner, tore to the right, stumbled on the uneven paving stones, and recovered. Then he ran forward some more, faster, up the hill … because that was the correct direction, wasn’t it?

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” complained the voice behind him. The voice was still coming, moving on feet that were very light and very fast in comparison to Rector’s.

He ran on anyway. The blood from his ear soaked the top of his collar and made the leather of his mask feel pulpy where the straps rubbed against the sore spot, but he ignored it. He also ignored the shuffling sounds that reached him over the pounding gong of his own heartbeat and the frantic skips and jumps of his hole-pocked shoes against the street.

He spied some stairs from the corner of his eye, swiveled on his heel, and climbed them, not knowing where they went and not caring much. All he had to do was get out of the other fellow’s line of sight, far enough away to hunker down and hide.

One of the stairs cracked beneath his foot and gobbled him up to his shin. He pulled his leg out by his knee, tugging with his hands to extract the boot and keep on climbing.

He wondered briefly why these stairs were on the outside of a building, then noticed, when the fog parted enough to let him notice anything, that these were interior stairs after all. The building had fallen away, leaving its insides exposed. Flight by flight, he passed big stretches of shattered flooring eaten up by holes. He huffed and puffed upward while hugging the rail, which rattled in his hand and surely wouldn’t hold him if he were to fall. It barely gave him balance enough to keep upright.

The Seattle city wall loomed up to his left, and that didn’t seem correct. He’d gotten turned around somehow.

Didn’t matter. Kept running. Heard nothing behind him, but the quiet might’ve been an illusion brought on by his stuffy ears. He wondered when it’d be safe to stop, and then he wondered what he’d do if he reached the top and there was nowhere left to go.

He didn’t wonder long.

The stairs ran out.

Rector teetered at the edge. He shook his head, trying to let the blood run out of his injured ear. It didn’t work, just made the pumping of his heart throb louder behind his eyes. But he didn’t hear anyone coming up behind him, so maybe this would be a safe place to stop. To catch his breath. To wait until his pursuer had gotten bored and wandered off.

His breathing was muffled and ragged inside his mask, but in time it slowed. He balanced there, not looking down and not looking back, waiting to hear that voice call out again.

It didn’t.

And after a good five minutes, he took as deep a breath as he dared—there above some precipice on the other side of that last lonely step, the bottom of which he couldn’t even see—and he began a slow, quivering retreat back the way he’d come.

Funny. He hadn’t noticed on his frantic way up how fragile the steps felt beneath his boots. The wobble wasn’t his imagination. They creaked, too. He leaned toward the rail, and to the bit of wall that remained on that side.

Don’t die yet. You ain’t allowed.

“Shut your mouth, Zeke. ”

One hand on the splintered, rickety rail, he breathed real slow and kept his eyes on his feet. One in front of the other. One step at a time.

He stopped.

What was that noise? Had the stranger caught up to him? He held still and listened.

Sounded like breathing. Low, wet, and not very healthy. Coming from something pretty big. But he didn’t see anything. The air was too dense; it moved like smoke in front of his lenses, one broken and one still clear.

Someone sighed.

Or something sighed. The gas-poisoned atmosphere whispered and complained, and once again Rector choked on a big gob of fear. It swelled until he could hardly swallow, and his heart caught up with a fluttering skip.

The breathing behind him—yes, behind him … and not his own—grew louder. Closer. So close he imagined he could feel it, warm and dank, against the back of his neck.

Stumbling now, he picked up his pace. He could fall, he thought. He could tumble and roll, and that would be faster, in a way. It’d hurt, and it’d be loud, but it’d be quick. A quick way to reach the bottom. A quick way to die. Wouldn’t it? His ankle turned, almost sprained. But didn’t. The joint kept locking, unlocking, with each stair.

A throaty groan shocked him with its nearness. He spun around, flailing, expecting to hit someone square in the face, but no. There was no one behind him, no one beside him—there couldn’t be. To one side was a drop-off leading nowhere; to the other, a lone wall—a final surviving shred of the old building.