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A candle stub squatted invitingly on the end table near Father Harris’s favorite reading chair beside the fireplace in the main room. Rector collected the stub and rifled through his makeshift bag to find his matches. He lit the candle and carried it with him, guarding the little flame with the cup of his hand as he went.
Tiptoeing into the kitchen, he gently pushed the swinging door aside. He wondered if there was any soup, dried up for boiling and mixing. Even if it wasn’t anything he wanted to eat, he might be able to barter with it later. And honestly, he wasn’t picky. When food was around, he ate it. Whatever it was.
The pantry wasn’t much to write home about. It was never stocked to overflowing, but it never went empty, either. Someone in some big church far away saw to it that the little outposts and Homes and sanctuaries like these were kept in the bare essentials of food and medicine. It wasn’t a lot—any fool could see this was no prosperous private hospital or sanatorium for rich people—but it was enough to make Rector understand why so many folks took up places in the church, regardless. Daily bread was daily bread, and hardly anybody leftover from the city that used to be Seattle had enough to go around.
“They owe me,” he murmured as he scanned the pantry’s contents.
They owed him that loaf of bread wrapped in a dish towel. It hadn’t even hardened into a stone-crusted brick yet, so this was a lucky find indeed. They owed him a bag of raisins, too, and jar of pickles, and some oatmeal. They might’ve owed him more, but a half-heard noise from upstairs startled Rector into cutting short his plunder.
Were those footsteps? Or merely the ordinary creaks and groans of the rickety wood building? Rector blew out the candle, closed his eyes, and prayed that it was only a small earthquake shaking the Sound.
But nothing moved, and whatever he’d heard upstairs went silent as well, so it didn’t matter much what it’d been. Some niggling accusation in the back of his drug-singed mind suggested that he was dawdling, wasting time, delaying the inevitable; he argued back that he was scavenging in one of the choicest spots in the Outskirts, and not merely standing stock-still in front of an open pantry, wondering where the nuns kept the sugar locked up.
Sugar could be traded for some serious sap. It was more valuable than tobacco, even, and the gluttonous, sick part of his brain that always wanted more gave a little shudder of joy at the prospect of presenting such an item to his favorite chemist.
He remained frozen a moment more, suspended between his greed and his fear.
The fear won, but not by much.
Rector retied his blanket-bag and was pleased to note that it was now considerably heavier. He didn’t feel wealthy by any means, but he no longer felt empty-handed.
Leaving the kitchen and passing through the dining area, he kept his eyes peeled against the Home’s gloomy interior and scanned the walls for more candle stubs. Three more had been left behind, so into his bag they went. To his delight, he also found a second box of matches. He felt his way back to the kitchen, and onward to the rear door. Then with a fumbled turning of the lock and a nervous heave, he stumbled into the open air behind the Home.
Outside wasn’t much colder than inside, where all the fires had died down and all the sleeping children were as snug as they could expect to get. Out here, the temperature was barely brittle enough to show Rector a thin stream of his own white-cloud breath gusting weakly before him, and even this chill would probably evaporate with dawn, whenever that came.
What time was it again?
He listened for the clock and heard nothing. He couldn’t quite remember, but he thought the last number he’d heard it chime was two. Yes, that was right. It’d been two when he awoke, and now it was sometime before three, he had to assume. Not quite three o’clock, on what had been deemed his “official” eighteenth birthday, and the year was off to one hell of a start. Cold and uncomfortable. Toting stolen goods. Looking for a quiet place to cook up some sap.
So far, eighteen wasn’t looking terribly different from seventeen.
Rector let his eyes adjust to the moonlight and the oil lamp glow from one of the few street posts the Outskirts could boast. Between the sky and the smoking flicker of the civic illumination, he could just make out the faint, unsettling lean of the three-story building he’d lived in all his life. A jagged crack ran from one foundation corner up to the second floor, terminating in a hairline fracture that would undoubtedly stretch with time, or split violently in the next big quake.
Before the Boneshaker and before the Blight, the Home had been housing for workers at Seattle’s first sawmill. Rector figured that if the next big quake took its time coming, the Home would house something or somebody else entirely someday. Everything got repurposed out there, after all. No one tore
anything down, or threw anything away. Nobody could spare the waste.
He sighed. A sickly cloud haloed his head, and was gone.
Better make myself scarce, he thought. Before they find out what all I took.
Inertia fought him, and he fought it back—stamping one foot down in front of the other and leaving, walking away with ponderous, sullen footsteps. “Good-bye, then,” he said without looking over his shoulder. He made for the edge of the flats, where the tide had not come in all the way and the shorebirds were sleeping, their heads tucked under their wings on ledges, sills, and rocky outcroppings all along the edge of Puget Sound.
Two
Past the burned-out husk of the first sawmill and over the rocks, Rector found a familiar fissure in the ground. He hopped over the great crack as easily as crossing a creek, though it unnerved him. It unnerved everyone, ever since it was opened by the last earthquake of the previous year—the same quake that had collapsed the brick water-runoff tunnels that led into the city. It was too much a memento, this scar in the earth. It whispered warnings from the Boneshaker, and reminded the Outskirts how the world’s foundation could be rattled apart.
Rector glared at the crevice. He sniffed, but it was not a gesture of disdain, just curiosity. No, nothing suspicious. The odor of Blight was no stronger here at this unsettling cranny than anywhere else on the mudflats outside the wall.
“They still ought to fill you in,” he told the crack. “Shouldn’t leave it to chance. ”
Because what would happen then, if the Blight escaped? Everyone quietly knew that it was bound to overflow the wall someday, but it would be far worse if it didn’t need to—if the fumes found their way up other passages, like this one. It’d poison the whole earth, given time enough to leak.
He shuddered and clutched his shoulders, then looked around to make sure no one had seen him act like a chicken. No, he was alone as far as he could tell. No lights, no commotion. No footsteps. Not even the quivering scuttles of wharf rats rustling through the grass.
Beyond the crack and past the clot of dead trees—which Rector always thought looked like monsters, though he wouldn’t have told anyone—he started following a narrow path. He knew it by heart and needed no light. Before long he reached a small ring of five shacks. They were run-down and rotting, propped up by half-hearted measures and patched together with afterthoughts that kept them upright, but did nothing to improve their appearance.
This was a logging camp, abandoned in 1879 like so many other things near the ruined city. Once there’d been eight buildings, then none, but a combination of dangerous, illegal work and the need for privacy had revived three of the uninspiring structures. In time, convenience had restored two more to something like their former glory.
