The Inexplicables (The Clockwork Century 4)

“I believe so. ” The princess turned to Rector and said, “I think I know what’s happening here. She ain’t sick, you see? She ain’t coming down inside. She’s smarter than that. She knows what’s here. ”

“Then what’s she doing up there?” Rector wanted to know.

“She’s looking for the thing that jumped on you, Red. Dollars to dice, he’s her mate. ”

Rector watched hard as the long-limbed, hair-covered creature up above—which looked almost tiny, all the way up there—came and went, out of focus. Moments later, as the fog twisted into a knot, it vanished.

More rocks and dried mortar came skittering down; and when the low-lying cloud cleared again, the wall was unoccupied. No leggy, shaggy thing glared down, and no more debris rained down, either.

Whatever it was, it was gone.

Rector let out his breath in a long, shaky shudder. He hadn’t even noticed he’d been holding it.

The princess released her grip on the back of his neck and patted him there, as if to reassure him. “She’s headed back to the woods for now, I expect. I don’t know if we can help her or not, but at least now we know what we’re up against. ”

Zeke kicked at a fallen rock. It tumbled into a pile of bricks and was still. “I got a fairly good look at her, and I still don’t know what we’re up against. ”

“Oh, you silly things. Right now, she’s not the worst of our problems. Let’s swing by the park before we call it a day. I’d hate to get so close and not even see our biggest one. ”

Nineteen

The boys agreed to stop by the park, and after a brief pause to change their gas-mask filters, they followed Angeline farther up the hill. All the way along the edge of Seattle the fractured wall kept them company, looming off to their left and casting a mighty black shadow. The rest of the way, it was as solid as ever.

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sp; Houjin breathed hoarsely into his mask and muttered, “It could be worse. I only see the one hole. ”

“Yeah, but it’s a big one,” Zeke said, and in the muffled silence Rector heard how worried he was.

The princess said, “It’s fixable. ”

“How can you be so sure?” Rector asked.

“Because the wall was buildable in the first place. Now hush up, all of you. We’re here. ”

A long row of tattered hedges reared up before them, skeletal and sad. What few leaves remained were withered and brown. No doubt they’d once been cut into tremendous blocks and lovingly pruned to keep their shape. Now they were as ghastly and lifeless as an ironwork fence gone to rust. But they marked a boundary, and Rector made a note of it.

Angeline led the way, pushing through the brittle flora, which crunched in pitiful snaps. The twigs were as light as dust, and they fluttered to the ground to join the nasty mulch where everything else had fallen.

And on the other side they saw more dead things—larger dead things. Trees that had once been mighty were now reduced to crumbling trunks, and the odd monument or piece of statuary had gone streaked and pitted from prolonged exposure to the gas. To the left they saw curving walkways with seams that had succumbed to rubble, and a large round pond with nothing inside it but a yellow-black muck. They noticed signs that had gone unreadable, the paint blistered to illegibility and the colors bleached to an ugly gold. Running through all this wreckage were paths that were once graceful, veering prettily between patches of manicured lawns and gardens, and were now uniform in their unkempt ugliness—though they retained their expensive, precise shapes. Nothing could grow in the Blight gas, and therefore nothing became overgrown. It could only rot where once it had thrived.

In the center of all this cheerless, colorless misery, a tremendous structure jutted from the center of a circular path. At first glance it blended into the wall, which ran a few yards behind it. “What’s that?” Zeke asked.

He was too loud, and Angeline shushed him. But she answered as she gathered them to her like a mother hen. “This way, boys. Stay close to the wall. Zeke, that’s the old water tower they was building when the Blight came. It’d look bigger if it weren’t standing in front of the wall. ”

The tower looked plenty big enough. Perhaps half the wall’s height, the water tower was a cylindrical, very tall turret made of bricks and capped with a metal roof like a boy’s hat. The roof was rusting, and red-rimmed holes both large and small were eating their way through the original material, but Rector could see that someone had tied flaps of canvas down over one pitted segment. Another large sheet hung loose, having lost its moorings. It flapped against the building like a ghost clapping slowly.

From within the smooth brick tower came the noises of men at work.

Rector picked out snippets of conversation and the occasional hoot of laughter. He heard heavy things being lugged and lighter things being thrown, or hit. He detected metal on metal, and the scrape and whine of wooden crates being shoved about and pried open, their nails squeaking against the wood that held them.

Spiraling up the tower ran a series of tall windows, too narrow for a man to crawl through but big enough to let light inside. Now they let light out, and beneath the rust-ragged cone that topped the structure, the brilliant electric buzz of man-made bulbs and high-powered lanterns made the top floor glow.

At the tower’s base, a white-painted gate had been left unfastened.

Rector watched Angeline out of the corner of his visor. She was eyeing that gate, and he knew she was probably calculating the value versus the trouble of pulling it open and investigating.

She caught him watching her and she winked. “Don’t worry. I won’t go for a climb without you. ”