The Inexplicables (The Clockwork Century 4)

“Oh, come on. No one can hear us out there, and we’d hear anybody coming up the stairs. ”

Tables of many sizes and shapes had been hauled inside, a feat that filled Rector with wonder, but not envy. (He sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to carry them up that winding passage. ) Upon the tables and lying beside them were more crates and an ever-present coating of sawdust, which was already going soggy under their feet.

Houjin went to the nearest table, where a substance in a series of tubes and glass vials was cooking over a gas-jet flame. “This isn’t junk,” he observed. “This is science. And that”—he moved to another table, where a larger apparatus was simmering merrily and unattended—“is a still. Surely you’ve seen one before? They’re using it to remove the sap residue from the gas. ”

“Of course I’ve seen a still before, but not one that big. Or one quite like it. ” Even Harry’s oversized operation on the Outskirts paled in comparison to this beast of a thing before him.

“Maybe it’s a prototype. ”

“What’s a prototype?”

“Um … it means something new. ”

Rector said, “Then just say ‘something new’; otherwise you’re showing off. Hey, this over here—is this the wire they want to use to blow us up?”

Houjin joined him beside a stack of spools, each one wrapped with coiled wire that still gleamed, which meant it hadn’t been inside the city very long. “Probably,” he said.

“Then how about we just steal the wire? Make ’em go get more. It’d buy us time. ”

“Sure, we could do that. You pick up one of those spools, and let me know how it goes,” Huey suggested wryly.

Rector bent over and tried to lift one.

“Heavier than they look, huh?”

“And then some,” Rector muttered. “It’s good wire, though. We shouldn’t leave it. ”

“You want to throw it out a window?” Houjin offered. “That one over there—the grate’s mostly off it, and it’s facing the wall. If we chuck a couple of spools out, maybe we can roll them down to the mining carts. ” But the grate wasn’t as loose as it looked, and the spools wouldn’t have fit, regardless. The boys abandoned that plan. “Never mind. Let’s just swipe some of the dynamite, and see if there’s anything else worth taking. Anything that might slow them down. ”

Rector didn’t know what bits of the chemistry set and distillery were more useful than others, so he contented himself with the crates of dynamite, which he opened—very carefully—using the edge of his ax. Deploying the weapon as a pry bar, he popped the lids one at a time and swiped a couple of strays from each. He stuffed them into his satchel and tried to forget that he was carrying enough explosives to launch himself to the moon.

A muffled clank reached his ears from down below. Rector sat up straight. “Huey, did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Shh!” he ordered.

The clanking came again, in a steady patter that implied footsteps.

Houjin abandoned whatever it was he’d been doing and dashed quickly back and forth between the two exits in the floor at opposite ends of the circular room. These exits were not offset with rails; they were nothing more than rectangular holes indicating stairs below.

“I can’t tell which way he’s coming!” Houjin said. His eyes were wide behind the mask, and Rector was pretty sure his own eyes matched. But they couldn’t panic. “Listen hard—we’ll figure it out, and pick the other way. Just one guy?”

“I think so…?” The acoustics were all lies, all bounces and bangs as the metal interior cast the sounds up against the roof. “But I can’t tell,” Rector admitted.

“Me either. ”

“Shit, he’s almost—”

As the man came closer to the top, the clatter of his ascent became clearer and clearer, but by the time the boys had picked a stairway, it was too late. A round, masked head popped up at the top of the stairs, swiveling back and forth as it rose.

The head stopped. The eyes within the mask saw the boys, who were frozen together, grabbing at each other in a tangle of fear.

The man came up out of the stairwell. He was an average-sized fellow, a little taller than Rector and forty pounds heavier, and he wore some kind of protective jumpsuit that zipped all the way from his crotch to his mask.

“Hey, you. What are you doing up here?” he asked. “You’re not supposed to be here…”

He reached toward a cargo belt that swung low on his waist, and Rector’s heart nearly stopped. The man was going for a gun—he was absolutely positive of it—and as soon as he had it in hand, everything would be over. He and Houjin would both be dead, both failures, both casualties of somebody else’s problem.