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“More beer?”
Much to Briar’s surprise, the mug was empty. It was baffling stuff, and she almost certainly shouldn’t have replied, “More, all right. But only a bit. I need to keep myself steady. ”
“This’ll keep you steady—or anyway, it won’t make you too sloppy, too fast. What you need right now is a moment to sit and talk and think. Let’s come on together now, boys. ” She waved for the bar’s occupants to come in closer and pull up seats. “Right now I know you think you’ve got to run out and get looking, and I don’t blame you. But listen to me, baby, there’s time. No, don’t look at me like that. One way or another, there’s time. Let me ask you this, did he come with a mask?”
She took another hard swallow and found that the beer wasn’t so bad on its second full dose. It still made her mouth taste like the bottom of a restaurant sink, but with practice, it became easier to drink. “He did, yes. He made preparations. ”
“All right, that would buy him half a day. And it’s been more than half a day, so that means he’s found a spot to hole up and hunker down. ”
“Or he’s dead already. ”
“Or he’s dead already, fine. ” Lucy frowned. “Yes, that’s a possibility. Either way, there’s no
thing you can do for him right at this moment except pull yourself together and make a plan. ”
“But what if he’s trapped somewhere, stuck and needing a rescue? What if he got pinned down by the rotters, and his air’s running out, and he’s—”
“Now see, don’t go getting yourself all worked up like that. It’s no help to him, or to you. If you want to think that way, then sure, we can think that way. What if heis trapped up someplace and needing a hand? How are you going to find that place? What if you go running off to the wrong place, and leave him stranded?”
Briar grimaced down into the mug and wished that the woman weren’t making so much sense. “Fine. Then what do I do to get started?”
If Lucy’d had two hands, she would’ve clapped them together. As it was, she thwacked her clockwork fist down on the counter and declared, “Excellent question! We start with you, of course. He got inside through the water runoff tunnels, you said. Where was he going?”
She told them about the house, and about how Zeke wished to prove his father’s innocence by finding proof of the Russian ambassador’s interference, and how she did not know if the boy had any idea where the house was located.
Even though Swakhammer had heard most of it already, he stood quietly in the background and paid attention to the story again, as if he might learn something new on the second hearing. He loomed behind the bar, and in front of the fractured mirror. He was all the more ferocious when she could see him from all sides.
When Briar had finished catching them up on everything she could think of, a jittery silence fell in Maynard’s.
Varney broke it by saying, “The house you lived in with Blue, that was up the hill there, wasn’t it? Up off Denny Street. ”
“That’s right. If it’s still standing. ”
“Which one?” someone asked. Briar thought it might’ve been Frank.
“The lavender one with cream-colored trim,” she said.
The one Swakhammer had called Squiddy asked, “Where was his laboratory? Downstairs?”
“In the basement, yes. And it was huge,” she recalled. “I swear, it was as big as the whole house aboveground, almost. But…”
“But what?” Lucy asked.
“But it was so badly damaged. ” Despite the warming numbness of the alcohol, her anxiety spiked once more. “It’s not safe down there. Parts of the walls fell down, and there was so much glass everywhere. It looked like an explosion in a goblet factory,” she said more quietly.
The memory distracted her with its immediacy. The machine. The destruction downstairs when she’d run there, terrified and searching frantically for her husband. The smell of wet earth and mold; the raging hiss of steam pouring from cracks in the Boneshaker’s body; the stink of burning oil and the wire-sharp taste of metal gears grinding themselves into smoke.
“The tunnel,” she said out loud.
“I beg your pardon?” Swakhammer said.
She repeated, “The tunnel. Er… Varney, is that right? Varney, how did you know which house was ours?”
He fired a wad of tobacco into the spittoon at the end of the counter, and answered, “Used to live up that way myself. Lived with my son, a few streets over. Used to joke about how it ought to be painted blue instead of that purple color. ”
“Did anyone else here know about the old house? Where we lived, it wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t the most common knowledge in the world, either. ” No one replied, so she concluded, “Right. Basically, nobody knows. But what about the money blocks?”
Lucy raised an eyebrow. “The money blocks?”
