Listen as hard as she might, she couldn’t hear anyone following behind her; so she slowed down and tried to catch her breath while she glared from corner to corner at the boxes with their stenciled labels. It was hard, though, to gather her calm. She forced the air through the filters and dragged it through her mouth in a demanding, drawn-out gasp, but there wasn’t enough to satisfy, no matter how much she fought. And she didn’t dare remove the mask, not yet—not when her goal was to find her way out into the streets, into the thick of the gas. She read the labels on the boxes like the words were a mantra.
“Linen. Processed pitch. Eight-penny nails. Two-quart bottles, glass. ”
Behind her there were voices now, maybe the same ones and maybe different ones.
A big wood door with glass cutout panels had been buttressed and sealed with thick black patches of pitch. Briar shoved her shoulder against it. It didn’t budge, not even to squeak or flex. To the door’s left, there was a window that had received similar treatment. It was covered with sheets of thin wood that had been thoroughly sealed around its edges and along its seams.
To the right of the door there was another counter. Behind it, there were stairs leading down into yet more darkness, with yet more candles glimmering above them.
Even around the ambient swish and press of the mask moving against her hair, Briar could hear footsteps. The voices were getting louder, but there was nowhere else to run or hide. She could go back into the corridor stuffed with onrushing Chinamen, or she could head down the stairs and take her chances with whatever may wait at the bottom.
“Down,” she said into the mask. “All right, down. ” And she half stumbled, half skipped down the crooked, creaking stairwell.
Ten
Down through the old hotel next door to the bakery, Zeke followed Rudy and his one dim candle. Once they got to the basement they took another tunnel lined with pipes and brickwork. They were going lower—Zeke could feel the grade declining by feet at a time. The descent seemed to take hours. He finally felt compelled to ask, “I thought we were going up the hill?”
“We’ll get there,” Rudy told him. “It’s like I said, sometimes you’ve got to go down in order to go up. ”
“But I thought it was mostly houses where they lived. My mother said it was just a neighborhood, and she told me about some of their neighbors. We keep going underneath all these big places—these hotels and things. ”
“That wasn’t a hotel we just went through,” Rudy said. “It was a church. ”
“It’s hard to tell from the underside of it,” Zeke complained. “When do we get to take off these masks, anyway? I thought there was supposed to be clean air down here someplace. That’s what my buddy Rector told me. ”
Rudy said, “Hush. Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
They stood together, perfectly still, under the street and between a tunnel’s worth of walls that were wet with mold and muck. Above, a skylight of glass tiles allowed enough light to see down into the corridor, and Zeke was astonished to conclude that it must already be morning. These skylights dotted the underground chambers, but between them there were places where the darkness overcame everything, creating nooks where the tunnels were as black as ink. Rudy and Zeke stepped between these patches of darkness as if the shadows made safe places, where no one could see them and nothing could touch them.
Here and there, a drip of water would ping and splash its way to the earth. Up above, there was sometimes a rattle of something moving far away, out of reach. But Zeke heard nothing closer.
“What am I listening for?” he asked.
Rudy’s eyes narrowed behind his visor. “For a second there, I thought someone was following us. We can take our masks off soon. We’re working our way—”
“Along the hill. Yeah. You said. ”
“I was going to say,” Rudy growled, “that we’re working our way toward a part of town where there’s a little action. We’ve got to cut through it, and when we do, we’ll hit the sealed quarters. And then you can take off your mask. ”
“So people still live there, at the hill?”
“Yes. Sure they do. Yes,” he said again, but his voice died away and he was listening again for something else.
“What’s wrong? Are there rotters?” Zeke asked, and started fumbling for his bag.
Rudy shook his head and said, “I don’t think so. But something’s wrong. ”
“Someone’s following us?”
“Hush up,” he said fiercely. “Something’s wrong. ”
Zeke saw it first, the deliberate outline that flowed away from the nearest shadowed patch where nothing could see and nothing could touch them. It did not move so much as it formed, from a vague shape approximately his own size into something with edges—something with clothes, and the white-sharp glint of a button catching the light from the next skylight over.
It came into focus from the shoes up; he detected the curve of boots and the crumpled wrinkles of slouched pants and flexed knees straightening as if to stand. The cuffs of a jacket, the seams of a shirt, and finally a profile that was as jarring as it was distinct.
Zeke’s breath caught in his throat, and it was warning enough for Rudy to swivel on his one good heel.