Briar felt somewhat refreshed, but not much reassured by the conversation’s faintly sinister turn. She shouldered the rifle, slipped herself through the strap of her satchel, and stuffed the mask inside it. Her father’s old hat fit much better without the mask, so she put the hat back on rather than tie it to her satchel.
She told him, “All I want to do is find my son. That’s it. I’ll find him, and get out of your city.”
“I think you underestimate the trouble a woman like you can cause without even trying. You’re Maynard’s girl, and Maynard is the closest thing to an agreed-upon authority down here.”
She blinked hard. “But he’s dead. He’s been dead for sixteen years!
Swakhammer pushed aside a leather curtain and held it for Briar, who was now more reluctant to let him follow her. But there was no graceful way around it. She took the lead, and he dropped the curtain behind them both, casting the corridor into darkness except for his lantern.
“Sure he’s dead, and it’s a good thing for us. It’s hard to argue with a dead man. A dead man can’t change his mind or make new rules, or behave like a bastard so no one will listen to him anymore. A dead man stays a saint.” He tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the lantern. “Aim this over here so I can see.”
As if he’d forgotten something, he held up a finger that asked her to wait. He ducked back through the curtain and reappeared a few seconds later, chased by the smell of smoke.
“Had to put out the candles. Now bring that up close.”
Next to the leather curtain a long iron rod was propped against the wall. Swakhammer took it and threaded it through a series of loops at the bottom of the leather curtain.
“Are you…” Briar wasn’t sure how to ask the question. “Locking the curtain?”
He grunted half a laugh. “Just weighing it down. The more barriers we keep between the undersides and the topsides, the better the air stays; and when the bellows kick on and off, they blow these curtains all over the place.”
She watched him work, paying close attention. The mechanics of it all fascinated her—the filters, the seals, the bellows. Seattle used to be an uncomplicated trading town fed and fattened by gold in Alaska, and then it had dissolved into a nightmare city filled with gas and the walking dead. But people had stayed. People had come back. And they’d adapted.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Just hold the light. I’ve got it.” The curtains were anchored and bound by the rod, and he jammed the rod’s end into a groove beside the doorjamb. “That takes care of that. Now let’s go. Keep the light if you want. Go straight up here, and take the right fork, if you would, please.”
Briar wandered through the damp, moss-covered hallway that rang with the distant, perpetual drip of water. Sometimes from above, a thud or a jangling clank would sound, but since her escort paid the noises no attention, she did her best to tune them out too.
“So, Mr. Swakhammer. What did you mean when you said we were going to… to my father’s?” She looked over her shoulder. The jagged lantern light gave the man’s face a hollow, haggard appearance.
“We’re going to Maynard’s. It used to be a pub, down on the square. Now it’s the same as everything else here—dead as a doornail—but down in the basement there’s a crew of folks who keep the place running. I figure we’ll try that first because, well, for one thing you’re going to need some better filters and maybe a better mask. And for another, if your boy was out here telling people he’s Maynard’s grandson, the odds are good that someone would’ve brought him there.”
“Do you think so? Really? But he was trying so hard to find his way back to Levi’s house.”
The corridor opened into a three-way split. “Take the middle,” Swakhammer told her. “The question is, does the kid know where the house is?”
“I don’t think he does, but I might be wrong. If he doesn’t know, then I can’t imagine how he’d begin to start looking.”
“Maynard’s,” he said with confidence. “The pub is both the safest place he could end up, and the most likely place he’d end up.”
Briar tried not to let the lantern shake when she asked, half to herself and half to her companion, “What if he’s not there?”
He didn’t answer at first. He sidled up next to her and gently took the lantern away, holding it up higher and out as if he were looking for something. “Ah,” he said, and Briar saw the street name and the arrow painted on the wall. “Sorry. For a minute there, I thought we’d gotten turned around. I don’t come out this way often. Mostly, I stick closer to the square.”
“Oh.”
“But listen, as for your boy, if he’s not at Maynard’s… well, then he’s not at Maynard’s. You can ask around, see if anyone’s seen him or heard about him. If nobody has, then at least you’re spreading the word—and that can only help him. Folks down at Maynard’s, when they hear they’ve got flesh and blood to the old lawman lost or wandering here in the city, they’ll move hell, high water, or Blight-wash to find him, just to say they’ve seen him.”
“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
“Why would I bother?”
Above them something heavy fell, and the pipes that ran along the walls shuddered in their posts.
“What was that?” Briar demanded. She skidded closer to Swakhammer and resisted the urge to ready her rifle.
“Rotters? Our boys? Minnericht testing some new toy? There’s no telling.”
“Minnericht,” Briar repeated. It was the third time she’d heard the name. “The same man who made your… your Daisy?”
“That’s him.”
“So he’s a scientist? An inventor?”
“Something like that.”
Briar frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s a man with many toys, and he’s always unveiling new ones. Most of his toys are dangerous as hell, though a few of them are kind of fun. He does little mechanical things sometimes, too. He’s an odd bird, and not always a friendly one. You can say it out loud, if you want.”
“Say what out loud?” She stared straight ahead, into the damp, faintly noxious distance.
“What you’re thinking. You’re not the first person to notice it—how much Minnericht sounds like your husband.”
“My former husband. And I wasn’t thinking that,” she lied.
“Then you’re a damn fool. There’s not a man down here who hasn’t wondered about it.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” she protested, though she was deathly afraid that she did. “Seattle wasn’t a huge city, but it was big enough to have more than one scientist living here, I bet. Or this Minnericht might’ve come from someplace else.”
“Or he might be old Levi, dressed up different and wearing a new name.”
“He isn’t,” she said so quickly that she knew it must sound suspicious. “My husband is dead. I don’t know who this Minnericht may be, but he’s not Levi, I can promise you that.”
“Down this way.” Swakhammer urged her toward a darker path that ended in a ladder. The ladder disappeared into another brick-lined tunnel. “You want to go first, or do you want me to?”
“You can go first.”
“All right.” He put the lantern’s wire handle in his teeth, leaned his head forward, and descended with the light almost singeing his shirt. “How? ” he asked from down below.
“How what?”
“How do you know Minnericht isn’t Leviticus? You sound pretty certain, Widow Blue.”
“If you call me that again, I’ll shoot you,” she promised. She set her feet on the rungs and climbed down after him.
“I’ll keep that in mind. But answer my question: How do you know it ain’t him? Far as I know, no one ever found Blue’s body. Or if anyone did, no one announced it.”
She hopped down off the last rung and stood up straight. At her full height, she barely came up to his shoulder. “Nobody found him because he died here in the city at the same time so many other people did, and no one was willing to come back to look. Rotters probably got his body, or maybe it’s just decayed away to nothing. But I’m telling you, he’s as dead as a stone, not down here living inside these walls that are all his fault. I can’t imagine why you’d even wonder such a thing.”
“Really? You can’t imagine?” He gave her a smirk and shook his head. “Yeah, it’s real hard to imagine… one crazy scientist makes crazy machines and destroys a whole city, and then as soon as the dust settles, there’s a crazy scientist making crazy machines.”
“But surely someone has actually seen Minnericht? Everyone knew what Levi looked like.”
“Everyone knew what Blue looked like, sure. But no one knows about Minnericht. He keeps his lace covered and his head down low. There’s a girl who used to lurk down here, Evelyn somebody, he used to have a good time with her, every now and again, before she got herself too junked up on the Blight and started to turn.”
He looked down at Briar and said quite pointedly, “That was a few years ago, before we had a good idea of how to breathe down here. It took some trial and error, it did, and this is a place where only the strong survive. And Evie, she just wasn’t strong. She got sick and started slipping, so the good doctor shot her in the head.”
“That’s…” Briar couldn’t think of a response.
“That’s plain old practicality, is all. We’ve got plenty of rotters shambling around; we didn’t need one more hanging about. Point is,” he tried again, “before she went down, she told folks she’d got a look at his face, and it was all scarred up—like he’d been burned, or like something else bad had happened to him. She said he almost never took off his gas mask, even when he was underside here in the safer places.”