The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) (3 page)

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.

Dim, half-shuttered lights burned in four of the occupied shacks, but a vivid light shot out from the cracks of the largest. This near-blinding whiteness streaked past broken slats in the old shutters, speared through the weatherworn splits in the walls, and shot out from around the door.

Rector winced. His eyes weren’t ready for the light, not quite yet, but here he was at Harry’s place, and he was almost out of sap. He felt woefully ill-prepared to begin this whole adulthood thing without it, and that meant it was time to beg, borrow, or steal.

Christ knew he didn’t have a dime to call his own.

Steeling himself against the inevitable wash of light, he put one hand on the door and gave it a gentle push. Its hinges let out a small squeak, and the damp-swollen wood scraped against the doorjamb, then scooted inward, revealing a jumble of tall stills, jars, boxes, tubes, and funnels. And light, always the light … so much light that Rector wondered how anyone could see anything at all.

He shielded his eyes and stepped inside, calling out, “Harry? It’s just me.”

Harry Sharpe, chemist or alchemist or something between the two, was hunched over a table of delicate equipment, measuring spoons, and beakers. He did not immediately look up from his work, but he stopped what he was doing. “Stay where you are, Rector. I won’t have you jostling me now, boy—you hear?”

“Sure, Harry. Whatever you say.”

He closed the door behind himself and leaned against it, fully prepared to do as he’d been told. Harry was cooking, and cooking was dangerous. One ill-timed interruption or misplaced hand, one extra drop of the wrong ingredient in the wrong decanter, and the resulting explosion could level the old lumber camp like a meteor. Even Rector knew better than to interfere, so he stayed where he was. He watched Harry’s wide back, and the resumed motion of his shoulders, and the back of the man’s salt-and-pepper hair, which had gone flat with perspiration.

“You shouldn’t show up without warning like this. If I hadn’t been cooking, I might’ve had a gun in my hand.”

“Sorry,” Rector mumbled.

Harry made a finishing gesture—adding a final dose of something sizzling and bleak—and stood up straighter than before, though he did not yet turn around. He watched the chemical reaction before him, waiting to see if anything needed adjustment before deciding all was well.

Still keeping his back to the boy, he said, “I don’t suppose there’s a chance in hell you’re here with a fistful of money, is there?”

Rector shifted his weight from one foot to the other and scratched idly at his elbow. “Well, you see, Harry, it’s been a strange week.”

“Nothing strange at all about you coming by empty-handed.”

“Aw, don’t be like that. It’s my birthday.”

“Birthdays aren’t strange either.”

“But this is my
eighteenth
birthday,” he insisted, not sure the approach would work, but not yet ready to abandon it. “I been kicked out of the Home.”

Harry did not immediately respond. He waited for some faint smoldering sound to level off, then turned his head. A large, multi-lensed set of spectacles was fastened around his face, and each round slip of glass was polarized. The apparatus looked heavy, and indeed, the straps had worn grooves into Harry’s fleshy pink jowls. He pushed the glasses up onto his forehead, then farther up onto his skull. He wiped at one sweaty cheek with the back of his hand.

“That day was bound to come.”

“Yep. So now I’m ready to—”

Harry interrupted. “You’re a man now, Rector, in every way that counts. And I’ve been treating you like a boy for all this time.” Finally too annoyed with the spectacles, he pulled them away. The strap snapped off his head with a humid
pop.
“I haven’t really done you any favors.”

“You done me plenty of favors, Harry.”

“Not the good kind. I felt sorry for you, but it wasn’t very helpful.”

Rector sensed a shift in the conversation and didn’t like it, but he wasn’t sure how to play it. “You’ve helped me out for years, and I appreciate it like a good Christian orphan ought to. Now I’m here to earn a proper living, and get myself a proper job.”

Harry laughed, maybe at the “Christian” part. “Selling ain’t no trade. And you’ve been using more than you’ve been selling.”

Rector mustered a smattering of false dignity. “I do not believe that’s a fair assessment.”

“Goes to show how much you’ve smoked then, don’t it? Look, kid,” he said more kindly, but not by any great measure. “I’ve always let you slide, haven’t I?”

“And that’s my favorite thing about you.”

“Boys get room to slide, Rector.
Men
have to make their own way.”

Rector was being dismissed. He could see it coming, as surely as he’d seen his birthday looming. And now the fateful day had clicked, and here he was, more desperate than he’d realized even five minutes ago for a good, solid dose of his favorite habit.

Hastily, trying to get ahead of the inevitable shutdown, he said, “Then Harry, teach me how to cook. Teach me a trade, like the one you got. I’m smart enough to learn it.”

“Smart enough, I reckon. But not careful enough.” He took another swipe at his glowing, overheated face, then wiped his own body’s grease on the brown canvas overcoat he wore to keep his clothes covered. “You’d send yourself sky high with your first batch.”

“No, I wouldn’t. Harry, I’m begging you, I don’t have noplace to go, and I don’t have anyone waiting for me, or looking out for me. I need for you to teach me.” Nervously, his eyes skittered across the apparatuses and gloves, the tables, the charts, and the supply boxes. Something jumped out at him—something he should’ve noticed sooner, but hadn’t. “You’re expanding shop here, aren’t you? This is more sap than I’ve ever seen you work.”

Harry’s eyes darkened. Rector couldn’t imagine what he’d said to make things worse than they already were.

“Yes, I’ve been busy. There’s a war going on, remember? It’s all I can do to keep up with demand back East.”

“And that’s all the more reason you need a … an apprentice. Or a helper, or something. Harry,
please.
”

“If I liked you any less or trusted you any better, I might consider it. But neither of them things are true, so I’ve got to tell you no. You don’t want to be part of this right now, Wreck. Things are getting hot back East, and…” He faltered and stopped, like there was something else he meant to say, but he couldn’t figure out how to add it.

“That stupid war’s been happening longer than I been alive. It’ll peter out one of these days, don’t you think?”

Harry shook his head. “It might. But right now, let’s pray it’s not replaced with something even worse.”

“What’s worse than war? And why would we have a war out here, on this coast? That don’t make any sense.”

With a grim chuckle, the older man stood up straighter, and quickly checked a simmering beaker. “It’s a shame you have to ask. Maybe you’ll go inside the wall sometime, and you won’t wonder anymore.”

He stepped away from the cluttered table, revealing a still much larger than his old system. A vast network of tubes, tubs, and valves stretched almost to the ceiling. Another foot, and it’d jut up through the tinplate roof.

“Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll go inside the wall,” Rector said as if he hadn’t been planning it anyway. “But it looks to me like you need help. That’s a mighty big kit you’ve got there.”

“I don’t need help, and you don’t know what you’re asking. You want to stay here with me, maybe sleep out in one of the side houses? You want to take up a place in the war that’s coming? I don’t think you do, boy.”

“What are you talking about? The war stops at the river, don’t it?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Harry said. “Things are getting uncomfortable for fellows like me, you understand?”

“No, I don’t.”

“There are plenty of men out here, much closer to home, who want a piece of what we’re doing. Especially since business has boomed so big.” Rector wanted to jump in and ask again,
Why?
but Harry was too fast for him. “Yaozu’s no dummy, but he’s only one man. Half the dealers and distributors on the West Coast are thinking about coming up here and taking the operation away from him.”

“You think that could happen?”

Halfway under his breath, he said, “It’s happening already.” Then he bent over a wooden crate stacked on the floor with others of its kind, looking for something. “They’re already coming, already circling like sharks. It won’t be long before I have to head inside the wall myself, much as I don’t like the prospect of it. I’m not defenseless, but I’ll be outdone by the kind of men coming up from Mexico, California, and the Oregon Territory.”

“How do you know they’re coming, Harry? Who tells you anything, except me and maybe Bishop? And he’s inside the wall. He don’t know nothing.”

Harry looked back at Rector with a chilly, unhappy frown clamped down on his face. “I hear things. I heard the thunder last week—did you? It wasn’t natural.”

“You’re going ’round the bend, old man.”

“Maybe, but soon the last of us here—the last of us original makers, I mean—will need a fortress.”

“You could do worse than Seattle,” Rector noted.

“I agree, but the thought of a life spent in a gas mask doesn’t agree with me much. I may have to find some other line of work.”

“You could go east, if that’s where the demand is.”

Harry found whatever he was fishing for. His knees popped when he stood back up to his full height. “True. Inside the wall with the rotters and gas, or back East into the war. If it weren’t for shitty options, I’d have no options at all. Anyway, here,” he said, offering up a very small packet.

Rector tried to keep his eyes from lighting up. He tried to stop himself from gliding across the rough-hewn floors and snatching the small fold of waxed paper right out of Harry’s outstretched hands. But there he was, eager as a dog at the prospect of a bone. Some small part of him had the grace to be embarrassed.

“What’s this?” he asked coolly. “A birthday present?”

“It’s what you came here for, and the only thing you want. You don’t want to learn anything, and you don’t want to work if you can help it. I’ve watched you run and burn for what now … a couple of years?”

“Something like that,” Rector muttered, taking the packet and stuffing it into his pocket while pretending not to care.

“I was dealing with a child before, and today you’re a man. So from here on out, you pay your own debts. I won’t protect you if you don’t.”

“Never asked you to,” Rector snapped before he could stop himself. That small, embarrassed corner of his soul grew a size or two. He felt himself blushing, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. “But thanks for the birthday present. I’ll use it wisely.”

“Nobody uses sap wisely.”

Rector turned on his heels and grabbed the door, pushing it open and launching himself out into the night, where the trees were too thick and the sky too dark to show him anything but a bright stain in his vision from the brilliant lights of the chemist’s shack.

When he could see again, he looked toward the wall.

“Wait for me,” he told it. “I’ll deal with you soon enough.” And he headed off toward the water instead.

Three

The beach was deserted.

It was also shiny with a glaze of moonlight and the intermittent sweep and flash of a powerful lamp scanning the water a few miles away. The lighthouse wasn’t for boats, not mostly. Not anymore. These days it guided the airships and their crews coming and going from Bainbridge Island, serving as a beacon for the kind of madmen who didn’t mind flying at night—or the kind of ships that had no choice in the matter. The distant beam came and went, blinking in and out, grazing the tops of the subtle waves and glinting off the edge of the Outskirts.

Rector picked a large, flat rock that looked more dry than not and sat on it. For a moment he thought about staying and watching the sun rise, and then he realized what a dumb idea that was, considering he was facing west. But it might be pretty anyway, seeing the sky go from black to smoky foam gray.

The last time he’d sat on this strip of coastline, the sky had gone the other way—from an overcast panorama of sickly white clouds to a deep, rolling, ominous shade of dark. A storm had crashed in from the north, coming over the ocean like it did only once in a great blue moon. One week before, he’d watched the sky change above him without caring. When the rain came down, pelting him so hard the droplets stung, he didn’t care about that, either. But when the thunder had begun, he’d gathered his things and headed inside.