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Nodding earnestly, Houjin said, “I’m not eighteen yet, but I make my own way. ”
“You have a job?”
“I work on an airship. I’m learning to navigate, and maintain the engines. I want to be an engineer. Sometimes here in the city I work with the men at the Station, and Yaozu pays me to fix things. And sometimes I translate. ”
Slowly, Rector propped himself more fully upright. “You mean, Chinese to English? That kind of thing?”
“There’s more than one kind of Chinese, you know. I speak a couple of them, good enough to go back and forth. And my Portuguese is good—better than my Spanish, but I’m learning. And I’m interested in French, too. I went to New Orleans a few months ago. Lots of people there speak French. ”
“You’re a regular ol’ dictionary, ain’t you?”
“I like to talk. I like to learn different ways to talk. That’s all. ”
Rector felt it’d be polite to throw the younger boy a bone. “You’re real good at it. You’ve hardly got a China accent at all. ”
“Captain Cly says I’ve been losing more of my accent the more time I spend on the Naamah Darling. And the longer I spend around Zeke. ”
“What’s a—”
Rector almost asked what a Naamah Darling was, but two things stopped him. First, his addled brain caught up to the fact that it must be the airship on which Houjin served. Second, his attention tripped over the word Zeke. So he asked, to make sure he’d heard correctly. “Zeke?”
“Sheriff Wilkes’s son. He’s the only other person down here who isn’t old enough to be my father. He says he knew you, in the Outskirts. He’s the one who told me you’d lived in the home, with the church women. ”
“He told you…?”
“We go exploring inside the city all the time, but he hurt his leg out on Denny Hill, and now everyone says we have to be more careful. You can come out with us, if you want, when you feel better. Some of the old houses up there still have valuable things inside. Useful things, anyway. Sometimes. Not always…” His voice trailed off as if he were thinking of a few things in particular, but then it picked up again. “We have to look out for rotters, and for Yaozu’s men, if we get too close to the Station and we’re not supposed to be there. But mostly if you’re quiet, nobody bothers you. And no thing bothers you, either. ”
“Zeke,” Rector said again. He wasn’t sure what to add.
“He’s around—do you want me to go get him? He’s been looking in on you, hoping you’d wake up. I know Zeke didn’t have an easy time, being Blue’s son; but he said you weren’t bad to him. I know you were dealing sap out there, and that you ran around with crooks, but Zeke said you’re the one who told him how to get inside. ”
“He was … he was an all right kid,” Rector said, his words still dragging. He didn’t want to ask all the obvious questions, because the answers were obvious, too. And he didn’t want to say anything stupid to this Chinaboy because even though he was just some Chinaboy, he sounded awful damn smart, and Rector had a long-standing policy of being nice to smart people, in case they could be useful to him later.
So he didn’t ask any of the things he wanted to ask. And he didn’t say any of the things that were swelling up inside his stomach, all the memories of ghosts and dreams of phantoms, and the horrible haunting he’d undergone at the hands of Zeke.
Well, he thought it was Zeke. But that wasn’t possible, was it?
Zeke is alive. Or else this kid is crazy.
He strongly suspected that Houjin wasn’t crazy. To prove it, he told Houjin, “I’d like to see Zeke, sure. It would be nice to see a familiar face. ”
“Great!” he said brightly. “Maybe you’d like some food, too—does that sound good? There’s a kitchen on the next floor down. Do you want to get up and come with me? If Zeke’s not there, he’s out at the fort. ”
“Hang on. Let me see. ” Rector hauled his legs over the edge of the bed, knees first, then unfolded them and set his feet down on the floor. The floor was rough-hewn but it didn’t creak, and he didn’t feel any splinters against his bare toes. “My socks. They’re gone. ”
This observation prompted him to look down at everything else he was wearing, in order to double-check that he was wearing anything at all.
The clothes weren’t his. He didn’t recognize them, but he wasn’t prepared to complain about them. The shirt was sewn from inexpensive blue cotton flannel, but it didn’t have any holes in it. His pants were cotton canvas, too, not wool for winter but lighter for summer—such as it was. They were brown, and there was a long seam sewn tightly across the knee where they’d split and been mended.
He was better dressed now than he was when he’d come inside the wall.
“Whose clothes are these?” he asked, patting himself down. “And where’s my bag? The one I brought with me?”
“The clothes came from the stash downstairs, where the clean and stitched-up things go. Most of the linens don’t come from salvage inside the wall, not anymore. Blight’s too hard on the fabrics, unless they’re treated with rubber or wax. So people down here—they barter, or trade. They collect. ” He shrugged, and Rector got the distinct impression that Houjin was talking his way around the fact that he didn’t really know.
“And my things? All my worldly possessions? Did somebody make off with them?”
“Nobody made off with anything, except for you,” Houjin said. The faint tone of accusation wasn’t strong enough to mean anything to Rector until he added, “The satchel you took from the stopover room on Commercial is under the bed. Mr. Swakhammer says you can have it, for now. It’s one of his, but he’s got others. ”
