The Inexplicables (The Clockwork Century 4)

“Yeah, it was a pretty good thought. ” He worked one finger under the itchiest mask strap and rubbed, figuring he could get away with it since his nails were covered by soft leather. If he felt like being honest with himself, he might’ve admitted that he didn’t have good thoughts every minute of every day, so he ought to stick with the ones that made it through. But he didn’t feel like being honest.

In the minute or two he’d kept his mouth shut thinking about it, he’d begun to hear the soft swish and roll of waves off to his right. “Rector?” Zeke asked, in exactly the same tone you’d use to talk a dog into putting down a bone.

“All right, that’s fine. You two live here, like you keep telling me. We’ll go your way, and see what we can find. ”

The fog pooled and collected like snow. It drifted and gusted against the vertically stacked stone and twisted in small eddies; it spiraled and spun in tiny tornadoes that tugged at the boys’ hair and tickled the spots where their clothes didn’t cover their skin. Rector, Houjin, and Zeke moved without speaking, except to double-check that they were all together. Sometimes the air was so thick that they couldn’t keep track of one another unless they held hands. When they seemed to be hiking through a rich cream soup, they would spit one another’s names between their teeth, calling back and forth with as little sound as possible.

Rector dragged his fingers along the hastily erected wall, feeling the contours rise and fall, dip and crumble into a dry mortar crust. He dusted his hands off against his pants and shivered—even though it wasn’t as cold as it had been a few days earlier, it still wasn’t warm. It was almost never warm, and the wall’s imposing shadow drained the tepid sunlight of what little relief it offered. Up above, and somewhere past the boundaries of what they could see through the pallid air, even the flapping wings of the Blight-poisoned birds were sluggish and slow.

“You hear those?” Rector breathed. “Getting closer. ”

“I hear ’em,” Zeke replied, so faintly that if Rector had been even another step away, he wouldn’t have heard him.

“I don’t like them. ”

“They’re only birds,” Zeke assured him. Then he faced forward and softly called, “Huey?”

“Right here. ”

“Thought I’d lost you for a second. ”

“Keep up, you two,” Houjin urged.

“How much farther?” Zeke asked.

“A quarter mile?” he guessed. “Then we’ll hit the next drop down into the underground. ”

“Are there carts?”

“Yes. Now shhhh. ”

“Don’t you tell me—”

Houjin came to a sharp stop and turned around. Zeke ran into him, but bounced back. Huey held out his weapon—not to brandish it, exactly, but to make a point. “Hush! I told you, I hear something. ”

Rector was mad, and he was scared, and he didn’t like having a younger kid (or anybody else) put a long metal pole in his face. He smacked the pole away with the back of his hand with a clang. It hurt, and it’d certainly bruise. He wished he hadn’t done it. “I don’t hear anything,” he fussed.

“Wait,” Zeke said, holding out both hands. The hand that held the big fireman’s ax drooped low. “I hear it, too. ”

Houjin lowered his pole, pointing the sharp end at a spot barely a foot off the ground. Still in his softest voice, he said, “Coming from down here. ”

Zeke readied his ax, holding it down at a similar level and getting ready to swing. “Raccoons?” he tried.

“Could be. ”

Rector heard it, too. It scratched against his ears, a hoarse, hushed breathing sound coming from knee level a few yards away. He tried to take comfort from the fact that the breather didn’t sound very big; whatever it was, its inhalations and exhalations came fast and short, like a dog.

But what if it was something worse? Rector braced himself against the wall, which was cold, terribly cold, and a bit damp with condensation. “Could be a little kid,” he said. The words were almost a horrified gasp, squeezed out of his mask and into the open air. “A baby, or something. There are kid rotters, aren’t there? That’s what I heard. ”

Neither of his companions responded.

“Where is it?” he asked. His friends di

dn’t answer that, either.

The question answered itself when the low-lying clouds thinned and stretched, revealing a pair of glimmering gold eyes. The eyes did not glow, but they flashed, flickering like a cat’s, or like any nighttime thing that roams and stalks.

Houjin stayed steadiest. He kept the point of his sharpened bar aimed at the thing’s face. Zeke took up a defensive position at Huey’s shoulder, prepared to swing the huge ax at anything that came close enough to hit, assuming he could lift it off his shoulder.