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“Your first trip into the city didn’t go so great, that’s all. ”
“The second time’s a charm. ”
“I thought that was the third time. ”
Rector sniffed, and caught a whiff of a sour mixture of charcoal, sweat, and mildewing leather. “Once in a while I get a second chance. I’m never lucky enough for a third. ”
Down short, meandering paths and around crumbling corners, he stuck close to Houjin, who knew his way around as if he had a map burned into his brain. Rector tried hard to pay attention, to note his surroundings and let his internal map keep track of them. Sometimes he thought he had a handle on it, but other times he was sure he couldn’t have found his way back to the Vaults without a native scout and a fistful of cash.
“This place is a rabbit warren,” he complained, holding his side. “Hey, can we slow it down a little?”
“Sure. Sorry. We’re almost to the top, anyway. Catch your breath. ”
“We’re near the fort?”
Houjin said, “Practically under it. I didn’t want to take you the overhead way. You were griping about the stairs, so I thought this would be easier. One more set, and then a ladder. But that’s all for now, I promise. ”
“I’ll hold you to that. ”
Rector wondered why they’d worn their masks underground all this way, but then he noticed the tumbled walls and sunken places in the ceiling. The city was settling around them, on top of them. Slowly, he assumed—but surely. Inevitably. But for now, that dim, worrying thought was mostly tamped down or drowned out by another dim, worrying thought: Zeke was alive. And he was nearby.
Rector found himself stalling without really knowing why.
“Tell me about this fort,” he started to request, but Houjin had already gone ahead.
“Right up here. Come on!” He made a show of climbing the stairs slowly, to let Rector catch up. At the same time, it was clear that the Chinese boy was impatient. He was probably always impatient with people who were slower than him. If that was the case, Rector thought the kid must spend a great deal of time frustrated out of his gourd.
One more door waited—a double-wide portal that slid sideways on a track. Long, loose flaps of rubber were fastened around its edges, and these retreated stickily. “They’re seals,” Houjin explained. “We need new ones on this door, but the rest of the block needs some maintenance before new seals will do any good. ”
So that answered one question: why the extra caution was in order.
Now to answer another one. The big one.
Now to confirm for himself that he hadn’t been haunted by some scrappy kid he’d once known, because that kid wasn’t dead.
He did his best to hide his creeping, almost choking reluctance. He didn’t want Houjin to know how badly he feared confirming the truth—that his own mind had been toying with him all this time. So he did his best to scramble up in the other boy’s wake, making a fumbling mess of it, but getting up to the surface all the same.
Houjin indicated a ladder that had been nailed, braced, and repeatedly affixed to a wall that didn’t seem overly inclined to hold it. “The captain says we’re putting in stairs here, soon. But for now, this is all we have. After you. ” He gestured grandly.
“Naw, you can…” Rector began, then caught himself and felt a stab of self-hatred. This was stupid, wasn’t it? Nothing to be afraid of, except for the possibility that his mind was betraying him, caving in on itself like the city inside the wall. He shook it off. “All right, I’ll go
first. ”
The rungs were rough yet slippery under his bare hands. He wished he’d thought about gloves, but it was too late for that, and now he’d have to deal with it. His heels skidded but caught behind him. He pushed on against exhaustion and weakness, fumbling with his cane up the ladder and into a small, square room.
A watery glow soaked in through the windows, none of which had any glass in them. Along with the light came a faint sense of the world being discolored. The air was yellowed like old paper; it was a sepia substance, one Rector thought he could reach out and touch.
Houjin popped up, stepped off the ladder, and sighed. “Oh look—the sun’s out,” he announced.
The Northwest had many days when the sun rose but nobody saw it, courtesy of the cloud layer. The compressed fog of the Blight exaggerated this gloom, filtering every scrap of light and turning it to murk.
“And I think it’s warming up. ”
“I think you’re right,” Rector agreed. It definitely wasn’t freezing, and Rector was only a little cool without a coat. That was the best he could say of it.
Houjin began a monologue of copious explanations which Rector half listened to and half ignored. “This is Fort Decatur. It’s one of the oldest parts of the city, where all the white people holed up when there was trouble with the native people. ”
Rector thought of Angeline, who’d clearly made herself at home. “I guess they don’t have trouble with them anymore. ”
