The Inexplicables (The Clockwork Century 4)

It thrashed and writhed, climbing steadily out of the house or shop or hotel in which it’d landed. Rector started to run. Houjin grabbed him by the arm but didn’t stop him; he ran with him, keeping Rector’s wrist clenched tight so they didn’t lose each other.

“What?” Rector squeaked, “is … that?” But Houjin was running too hard, paying too much attention to answer.

Besides, it was after them. The cracks and stomps of the big thing’s scramble were surely loud enough to raise the dead or bring them running. It was finding its footing, gathering its energy, focusing its attention, and listening to the Blight just like the boys had done.

Houjin’s feet stumbled and he slowed, looking over his shoulder and then forward again, quickly. One direction, then the other. Trying not to fall. A worthy goal, in Rector’s estimation, but behind them something enormously tall was mumbling to itself. It sniffed the air—they could hear it, like a windstorm up two great nostrils—and picked its direction.

It tumbled out of the wreckage of its fall, and gave chase along their retreat path.

“Shit!” Houjin gasped wetly. It was the first time Rector’d ever heard him curse, but this was a fantastic time to start getting the hang of it.

Improbably heavy footsteps clomped hard against the smooth-packed streets and uncluttered avenues, making a beeline right for Houjin and Rector, who had wholly quit fighting Houjin’s attempts to guide him—by force, if necessary—farther up the hill and away from the thing behind them.

In Rector’s head he was going over the possibilities. Perhaps some oversized rotter dropped in from the sky … maybe the giant captain? He was big, he was nearby, and the ship was right up there. Huey had made such a show of pointing it out, hadn’t he?

Anything but the inexplicable.

But he knew it was all wrong. The captain would’ve called out, certainly. He would’ve said their names and asked what they were doing; he wouldn’t have fallen from the sky only to scare them witless. The thing behind them rumbled a thick bellow that wasn’t quite a cry and wasn’t quite a call. Either way, it wasn’t human.

Definitely not the captain, even as Rector’s racing brain tried to maintain the hypothetical option.

“No way,” he wheezed. “No way. ”

“Hush up!”

“Where are we going?”

“I said, be quiet!”

“Huey, for Chrissake, it already hears us!”

“Underground. ” He coughed. “Back to the underground. ”

Rector’s heart took a dip down to his stomach. There was no way they’d outrun the thing. They were at least three blocks from the nearest entrance he knew of … if, in fact, they were anywhere close to where he thought they were. This realization made him lunge all the harder to keep up with Huey, whose grip on Rector’s arm seemed terribly fragile.

An unexpected curb appeared under their feet. Houjin jumped it, just barely and just in time. Rector caught it with his shin and went flying. Momentum snapped him free of Huey’s grip and he rolled off to the side, up against a wall that had held up a roof a long time ago, and now served entirely to make Rector’s head spin. Stars flashed and flickered before him, and he couldn’t see anything.

Even his own hand, when he wobbled it forward in an effort to right himself, looked misshapen and alien. It was coated in stars and Blight like everything else, and the prospect of getting onto all fours felt insurmountable.

Houjin was feeling around with his hands and feet, whispering, “Rector!”

“Um…”

A moment later, a very firm hand seized Rector’s ankle, pulling it out from under him. Rector’s heart nearly stopped.

“Sorry; I’m sorry,” Huey said. “Get up, Rector. Get up! We have to…” And then he stopped talking.

The thing was very close; they could feel it more than they could hear it—the nearness of something unfamiliar and large, its existence pressing against their fear like a tangible force. It shoved against their chests, and stuffed up the filters in their masks. Neither one of them could breathe anymore except in short, horrified bursts that fogged their visors and gave them scarcely enough oxygen to keep from passing out.

The inexplicable—for what else could it be?—circled them and sniffed, always that disgusting sniffing as he tried to smell something other than the Blight. He homed in on them awkwardly, uncertainly. When he was within a few feet (ten feet? twenty?), someone shouted.

“Over here!”

The call was loud—almost as loud as the inexplicable’s roar. The call was accompanied by footsteps. Big, solid, certain ones.

“Captain!” Houjin barked, though where he’d found the energy or breath to holler even that one word, Rector would never know.

“Huey? And Rector, I expect,” Andan Cly added. “You two—run. ”