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Lucy rattled off an invitation to sit or talk, and the man spoke in a string of syllables that no one present but Lucy could follow. At the end of his spiel she thanked him and he left as quietly as he’d entered.
“Well?” Swakhammer said.
Lucy stood. “He said he just came back from the east tunnel and main blockade down at Maynard’s. He says there’s a mark left out there, a big black hand plain as day. And we all know what that means. ”
Briar looked at them questioningly.
So Swakhammer told her, “It means the doctor is taking credit for his handiwork. He wants us to know that the rotters were a special gift from him. ”
Nineteen
Ears ringing, Zeke kicked against the hatch until it was wide enough for him to squeeze himself out into the city, which was exactly where he didn’t want to be. But all things being equal, he’d rather be outside in the Blight than inside with the airmen, who were slowly unfastening themselves from their belted seats and moaning or fussing as they patted themselves down.
The silent and inscrutable Fang was nowhere to be seen, until Zeke located him standing beside the captain and looking back at Zeke with one eye.
The captain said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“It’s been fun, but it’s time for me to get going,” Zeke said, trying to come across as droll and not shaken. He thought it’d make a great line to leave them with, but the hatch wasn’t quite clear enough to permit him to pass. He shoved his feet against it, using his legs as levers.
The captain unfolded himself from his leaning seat and murmured something to Fang, who nodded. Then the captain asked, “What’s your name, boy?”
Zeke didn’t answer. He scaled
the lip of the hatch, leaving bloody handprints on every spot he touched.
“Boy? Fang, grab him, he’s hurt—boy?”
But Zeke was already out. He leaped to the ground and shoved his shoulders back against the door, jamming it shut only temporarily, but long enough for him to stumble into a run across the compound.
Behind him, from inside the belly of the crippled ship, Zeke could’ve sworn that he heard someone call his name.
But that was ridiculous. He’d never told them what it was.
It must’ve been something else they cried after him, some other word that his ears took to be his name in a fit of confusion.
He swiveled his head left and right, and his vision swam, though the sights told him almost nothing. There were walls—the city walls, he thought at first—but no, these were smaller and made of great, mushy logs with pointed tops; and the spots between them had been cemented with something else, so they presented a uniform front.
Someone on the ship had said something about a fort.
He racked his brains to recall his maps and remembered something about Decatur, where settlers used to hole up against the locals during times of trouble. Was this it?
The log walls that surrounded him looked like they could be punched down in a pinch. They’d been standing and rotting in the wet, poisonous air for a hundred years, or that’s what Zeke guessed in his addled state. A hundred years and they were crumbling to spongy splinters but still standing—and there weren’t any handholds anywhere he could see.
Around him the Blight-fog clumped and cluttered the air, and he could not see more than a few feet in any direction. He was panting again, losing control of his measured breathing inside the mask, and wheezing against the filters. The seals made his face itch, and every gasp he drew tasted like bile and whatever he’d last eaten.
Behind him, somewhere in the soupy air, someone was kicking at the door of the crashed ship. Soon, the crew would be out. Soon, they could come for him again.
All the “soons” were scaring him; and all the stretches of rumpled wood walls were bleak and blank under his hands as he felt his way along them. He thrust his palms and fingers out, even though they ached and he didn’t know if they were bruised or broken or merely bent and exhausted. He flung his fingers and wiggled them at every crevice, trying to find a crack or a door or any other means of crawling under and out. He wasn’t a big kid. He could fit through an astonishingly small gap if it came to it, but without a sound and without a warning…
… it didn’t come to it.
A hand so strong that it didn’t feel real clamped down across Zeke’s mask-covered mouth, yanking him by the head and pulling him off his feet—into a recessed nook along the wall where the darkness was thick enough to hide almost anything.
It hid the pair of them, the boy and the hand that grabbed him; and the man who held him had arms that might be made of iron for all the softness in them.
Zeke didn’t struggle for two reasons. First, he could already tell that it was more useless than not; whoever was holding him was stronger and a little taller, and breathing without sounding like he was going to vomit or pass out at any moment—so clearly, the advantage went to his opponent. And second, he wasn’t entirely certain that he wasn’t being helped. After all, he didn’t want the men from the airship to find him, and they were scrambling out of their craft swearing and hollering as they surveyed the damage some fifty yards away.
Just when Zeke thought perhaps they were going to resume their search, find him, and drag him back to the wounded vessel, the hands that held him began to haul him backward and sideways.
