Ganymede (The Clockwork Century 3)

“Seattle?” he repeated, neither confirming nor denying anything.

“You heard me. Seattle. What can you tell me about it?”

He shrugged and leaned against Ganymede’s shrouded bulk, pulling a tobacco pouch out of his vest pocket. As he delivered a pinch into a white square of rolling paper, he told her, “Not sure what you’re looking to hear. It’s an old port town, up in the Washington Territory. Not much to it anymore. ”

“That’s not what I’ve heard. ”

“What have you heard?”

She crossed her arms. “There’s gas in Seattle, isn’t there? Turns men into the walking dead, isn’t that right?”

He didn’t bother to deny it. “Something like that. ” He scrunched the paper into a cigarette and pulled the match out of his mouth. Lifting a corner of the cloth that covered Ganymede, he struck the match on the craft’s rough-edged side. It sparked to life, and he used it to light the cigarette.

“How does anyone live there, if it’s full of this poisonous gas?”

“So this is what you want with Cly. ”

“He’s been living there in Seattle, hasn’t he?”

Troost’s eyes did not exactly narrow, since they had never been open all the way, but now Josephine felt as if she were being squinted at. “No. He’s got a flat in Tacoma, about thirty miles to the south. ”

“But he comes and goes from Seattle a lot, doesn’t he?”

“You’ll have to ask him. I haven’t been with his crew terribly long. ”

“You’re lying. ”

“I’m not. ”

They stared each other down, him smoking carelessly and her braced for a fight that he wasn’t prepared to give her.

Kirby Troost repeated, “I’m not lying. I don’t know how much time he spends in Seattle, but I know he visits regularly. There’s a woman there, and he’s sweet on her. I think he’d like to settle down, if she’ll have him. ”

“Inside a poisoned, abandoned city?”

“People still live there, underground. It’s … complicated. They’ve got this wall around it, and a crazy system of air tubes and vents, and filters, and whatnot. ”

“And this woman of his, she lives there?” she asked without really meaning to. She didn’t care. She wasn’t even curious. She wasn’t sure why she’d pressed the issue.

“Her, and her son. She’s a widow. ”

“Is she—” Josephine wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask. “—good for him?” she finished weakly.

“I don’t know, I’ve barely met her. He sure likes her a lot, and that’s what’s important, as far as I’m concerned. He’s got this plan to set up an airyard dock inside the city wall. The people who live there are willing to pay him to maintain it. ”

“Why?” she asked. It was a why that applied to any number of questions she couldn’t yet formulate more specifically.

“It’s hard for them to keep contact with the outside world. It’s practically a secret, them living there. They like to be left alone; to their own devices, if you know what I mean. They don’t bother nobody, and they don’t want anybody bothering them. But sometimes they need supplies. They need to send letters or messages. Things like that. ”

“And if Cly does this, if he starts a business there—he’ll live there, too, and marry this woman?”

“Yeah, I’d say he’ll marry her if she’ll have him. ” Then he turned the conversation just a notch to the right, in exactly the direction Josephine didn’t want him to go. “You and him—the captain, I mean. There’s history there, ain’t that right?”

“He told you?”

“He mentioned it. Didn’t say much, except that it was years ago, and it didn’t work out. ”

She only just noticed that he almost never blinked. “That’s about right. ”