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He couldn’t figure out who the speaker was. Not his mother. And not… Rudy, whose name made him start and almost drag himself straight to horrified consciousness. Remembering was the tricky part, and the awful part. Suddenly he knew where he was, approximately.
He opened his eyes, and did not exactly recognize the face above his.
Almost androgynous with age, the face belonged to a woman, Ezekiel decided. She was old enough to be his grandmother, he was certain, but it was hard to be more precise by the light of her lantern. Her skin was a shade or two darker than his own, the color of a good suede tobacco pouch or the hair of a deer. The jacket she wore had belonged to a man, once. It was cut to fit someone bigger, and her pants were rolled and cinched to keep them from falling down. Her eyes were a pure dark brown like coffee, and they were framed with graying eyebrows that jutted from her forehead like awnings.
Her hands moved like crabs, fast and stronger than they looked. She squeezed the sides of his face.
“You’re breathing, ain’t you?”
“Yes… ma’am,” he told her.
He wondered what he was doing on his back. He wondered where Rudy was. He wondered how he’d gotten here, and how long he’d been there, and how he was going to get home.
The fluffy gray brows above him furrowed. “You didn’t take in no Blight, did you?”
“Couldn’t say, ma’am. ” He was still lying, still wondering. Gazing up at her and too dazed to do anything but answer a direct question.
She stood upright, and only then did Zeke realize that she’d been crouched beside him. “If you’d taken any inside you, you wouldn’t be able to smart off. So I say you’re fine, unless you’ve broken something I can’t see. Have you broken anything?”
“Not sure, ma’am. ”
“Ma’am. Aren’t you a funny thing. ” It wasn’t a question.
“Not trying to be funny,” he mumbled, and tried to sit up. Something large and flat was blocking the way, and when he wrapped his fingers around it to push it aside, he realized it was a door. “Why is there a door on top of me?”
“Boy, that door done saved your life, it did. You wore it like a shield, all the way down the stairs. It kept you from getting crushed like you oughta have. What happened, see, is that an airship hit the tower. It crash-landed, you might say, right against the side. If it’d hit any harder, it could’ve broken through the cleaned-up floors all together, and then you’d have been one dead little boy, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose so, ma’am. Ma’am?” he asked.
“Stop calling me ma’am. ”
“All right, ma’am,” he said from habit, not orneriness. “I’m sorry. I only wondered if you were the princess we met down in the tunnels. Are you the princess?”
“You call me Miss Angeline. That’s name enough for me, boy. ”
Zeke said, “Miss Angeline. I’m Zeke. ”
He flexed his legs to kick the door away from him, and he sat up. And with her help he stood, but without her help he would’ve slumped right back down to the floor again. Stars and foam gushed across his eyes, and he couldn’t see a thing for all the brilliant black light in his head. The sparkles throbbed in time to a vein on his temple.
He pulled himself together and thought that this was how it felt to faint; and then he thought that Princess Angeline had arms stronger than just about any man he’d ever met.
She was holding him, lifting him up and propping him against a wall. She said, “I don’t know what became of your deserter. He deserted you, too, I reckon. ”
“Rudy,” Zeke said. “He told me he didn’t desert. ”
“And he’s a liar, too. Here, take your mask back. The air in here ain’t so good; some of the windows broke upstairs and the bad air’s leaking inside. You’re back down in the basement now, and it’s better here than some other places, but all the seals are shot. ”
“My mask. My filters are getting all stuffy. ”
“No they ain’t. I cut two of mine down and stuck ’em in your slots. You’ll be all right again for a while—plenty long enough to get out of town, anyway. ”
He complained, “I can’t get out of town yet. I came here to go up Denny Hill. ”
“Boy, you ain’t no place near Denny Hill. It’s like I tried to tell you down in the Rough End tunnels, old Osterude wasn’t running you back home. He was running you down to the old devil they call Dr. Minnericht, and Jesus Christ knows what would happen to you then, but I don’t. Zeke,” she said more softly, “you’ve got a momma outside, and if you don’t get yourself home, she’s gonna worry herself something awful. Don’t you do that to her. Don’t you make her think she’s lost her child. ”
A flash of pain quickened her face, and for a moment it looked like stone.
“Ma’am?”
