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“I can’t leave him here,” Briar said. “He’s been real helpful to me. If he’s hurt—”
“Don’t start counting those chickens, Miss Wilkes. Not yet. I don’t hear any more fighting up there, do you?”
“I don’t,” she said.
Zeke agreed. “I don’t either. Maybe they moved on, or maybe everybody’s dead. ”
“I’d rather you didn’t put it like that,” his mother complained. “I like those people. Those people from Maynard’s and the Vaults, they’ve been good to me, and they didn’t have to be. They helped me go looking for you. I don’t know if I’d have lived this long without them. ”
Behind another door that was unmarked and unremarkable, Angeline pointed out another set of stairs. Briar thought that if she never saw another step in her life it would be too soon, but she led the way and let Zeke take up the rear. She was increasingly worried for the Indian woman with her bleeding belly; and she appreciated toughness, but Angeline wasn’t fooling anybody anymore. She needed a doctor—a real one, and a good one, and that didn’t bode well.
The only doctor Briar had ever heard anyone mention inside the walls was… well… it was Minnericht. And she had a feeling that if they caught up to him, he wouldn’t be very helpful.
Twenty-seven
Briar leaned against the door, pressing her ear to the crack and listening for all she was worth. On the other side she detected only silence, so she stopped and reloaded there in the dark, filling the rifle by feeling her way through her bag. It took an extra moment, but it was an extra moment she was willing to spare.
Finally she said, “I’m going first. Let me take a look. ”
“I can go first just fine,” Angeline argued.
“But my gun will fire more than twice, if it needs to. Keep a watch on my son, will you, ma’am?” she said, and she pushed at the door’s latch and let the wooden barrier creep back out of its frame.
Briar led with the barrel of her rifle, and followed with her masked face, swiveling back and forth to take in the whole scene despite the limitations of her visor. She could hear her own breath too loud in her ears, echoed and amplified in her mask, and it was still the same as when she’d first put it on and dropped down the tube. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to it.
The room before her was very different from the last time she’d seen it. The glorious unfinished lobby was littered with the aftermath of a localized but very vicious battle. Bodies were sprawled and folded across the regimental rows of chairs; she counted eleven at a glance, and she spied a magnificent hole in the wall that looked like it could’ve been cut by the Boneshaker machine itself.
And directly inside the hole, where the wall was bitten off and dangling in heavy, scarcely lifted chunks, Briar saw a foot atop the rubble, as if its owner had bodily created the hole and now languished within it.
She didn’t quite forget to scan the rest of the room, but her subsequent sweep of the area was perfunctory and fast. Without warning her son or the princess, still in their dark little cubbyhole, she ran to the foot and crawled up over the jagged blocks of broken masonry and marble until she could drop down beside it.
She let the Spencer fall off her shoulder, and set aside her satchel.
“Swakhammer,” she said, patting at his mask. “Mr. Swakhammer. ”
He didn’t respond.
The mask appeared intact, and mostly he did too—until she began to stick her fingers between the seams of his armor and feel for things that might be broken. She found blood, and quite a lot of it. She found that his leg was bending in an unlikely manner, broken somewhere below his knee and dangling inside a heavy boot with a steel-toed shell.
She was wrenching his mask away from his head when Zeke got tired of waiting in the stairwell. He came to the wall’s edge and asked into the hole, “Is somebody in there?”
“It’s Jeremiah. ”
Zeke asked, “Is he all right?”
“No,” she grunted. The helmet came mostly off, but it was attached by a series of springs and tubes. It fell away, but didn’t roll far. “Swakhammer? Jeremiah?”
Blood had pooled inside the mask; it was coming from his nose and—Bria
r noted with real alarm—it was dripping steadily from one of his ears.
“Is he dead?” Zeke wanted to know.
Briar said, “Dead folks don’t bleed. He’s done up brown, though. Jesus, Swakhammer. What happened to you? Can you hear me? Hey. ” She gently slapped his face, both cheeks. “Hey now. What happened to you?”
“He got in the way. ”
Minnericht’s filtered, masked voice came down like the hammer of God, echoing loudly through the chamber with its dead souls and split-open walls. Briar’s chest seized up in a tight flash of fear, and she wanted to scream at Zeke for leaving the relative safety of the stairwell. He was standing there, out in the open at the foot of the stone-cluttered hole, vulnerable as could be.
