“All those people where?” she asked, and the last word came out with a gulp of anguish, because she knew — even though it was impossible, and crazy. She knew where, even though it didn’t make any sense at all.

“He’s gone… He went…” Rector lifted his index finger and pointed in the general direction of the old city.

It took every ounce of willpower Briar could summon to keep from cracking the boy across the face; she didn’t have enough left over to keep herself from shouting, too. “How would he do that? And what does he plan to do when he gets over the wall and he can’t breathe, or see—”

Rector’s hands were up again, and he’d found enough nerve to step forward. “Ma’am, you have to stop shouting. You have to stop.”

“—and there’s no one there but the leftover, locked-in, shambling rotters who will grab him and kill him—”

“Ma’am!” he said loud enough to interrupt, and almost loud enough to get himself kicked. But it stopped her tirade, just for a beat, and it was long enough for him to blurt out, “People live in there!”

What felt like a long stretch of silence followed. Briar asked, “What did you say?”

Trembling, retreating again, stopping when his shoulders pressed against the bricks, he said, “People live there. Inside.”

She swallowed hard. “How many people?”

“Not very many. But more than you might expect. Folks who know about them call ’em Doornails, ’cause they’re dead to the rest of the world.”

“But how…?” She rocked her head back and forth. “That’s not possible; it can’t be. There’s no air in the city. No food, no sun, no—”

“Hell, ma’am. There’s no sun out here, either. And the air, they found a way around that, too. They sealed off some of the buildings and they pump it down from up top — from over the side of the wall, where the air’s clean enough to breathe. If you ever hiked all the way around it, you’d see the tubes sticking up on the far side of the city.”

“But why would anyone do that? Why go to all the trouble?” And then a horrible thought flickered through her mind and tumbled out of her mouth. “Please tell me they aren’t trapped in there!”

Rector laughed nervously. “No, no ma’am. They aren’t trapped. They just…” He lifted his shoulders into a shrug. “They stayed.”

“Why?” she demanded in a short warble of near-hysteria.

He tried again to hush her, patting the air with his hand, begging her for a lower voice and a quieter exchange. “Some of ’em didn’t want to leave their homes. Some of ’em got stuck, and some of them thought it’d all blow over.”

But he was leaving part of it out; she could tell it from his new burst of nervousness. “And the rest of them?” she asked.

The boy dropped his voice to a harsh whisper. “It’s the sap, ma’am. Where do you think it all comes from, anyway?”

“I know it comes from the gas,” she grumbled. “I’m not a fool.”

“Never said you were, ma’am. But how do you think people get the gas in the first place? Do you know how much sicksand the Outskirts produce? A lot, that’s how much. More than anybody could ever make just from boiling it out of the rainwater.”

Briar had to admit, that’s how she’d assumed people made the drug — either that, or from the waste cast off by the Waterworks. No one seemed to know what became of the containers of processed Blight resin after it was barreled up to cool. She’d always suspected that it was swiped to be sold on some market or another, but Rector insisted otherwise. “It doesn’t come from what you folks cook out of the groundwater at the ’works, either. I’ve known a chemist or two who got a hand on that mess, but he said you couldn’t do anything with it. He said it was useless, just poison.”

“And lemon sap is something better?”

“Lemon sap, God,” he blasphemed with a sneer of derision. “That’s what the old folks call it, sure.”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t care what you kids call it, I know what it is when I see it — and I’ve seen it do worse to people than poison them. If my father were still alive he’d…” She didn’t know how to finish. “He would’ve never stood for it,” she said weakly.

“Maynard’s dead, ma’am. And maybe he wouldn’t have liked to know it, I couldn’t say, but he’s the closest thing to a patron saint that some of us have got.”

“It would have driven him mad,” she speculated curtly.

It was Rector’s turn to ask, “Why?”

“Because he believed in the law,” she said.

“Is that all you got? He was your own dad, and that’s all you know about him?”

She told him, “Shut your mouth, before I smack it.”

“But he was fair. Don’t you get it? The boys and girls on the street who sell the septic sacks and run ’em, and the thieves, the whores, and the broke and the busted — all of ’em down here who know the hard way how life ain’t fair… they all believe in Maynard because he was.”

Briar interrogated Rector on the finer points of Zeke’s escape. By the time a larger priest and a greater number of nuns showed up to bully Briar out of the stairwell, she’d learned plenty — none of it reassuring, and all of it leading to one terrifying fact.

Her son had gone inside the walled-up city.

Five

Ezekiel Wilkes shivered at the entrance to the old water runoff system. He stared into the hole as if it might eat him, or as if he wanted it to — because he was having second thoughts about this whole thing. But his third thoughts were insistent. He’d come this far. He only had a few yards to go, through a large tunnel and into a city that had been functionally dead since before he was born.

The lantern in his hand quivered with the chilled shakes of his elbow. In his pocket, a folded, wrinkled map was wadded into a nub. He only carried it as a matter of formality. He knew it by heart.

But there was one thing he didn’t know, and it bothered him greatly.

He didn’t know where his parents had once lived. Not exactly.

His mother had never mentioned an address, but he was sure they’d lived up on Denny Hill, which gave him a place to start looking. The hill itself wasn’t so big, and he knew roughly what the house looked like. At bedtime when he was younger, Zeke’s mother had described it to him as if it’d been a castle. If it still stood, it was lavender and cream, with two full stories and a turret. It had a porch that wrapped around the front of the house; and on that porch was a rocking chair painted to look like it was made of wood.

It was actually made of metal, and fitted with a mechanism that connected to the floor. When a crank was wound, the chair would rock itself for the benefit of anyone who was sitting in it at the time.

Zeke found it almost infuriating how little he knew about the man who’d made it work. But he thought he knew where to look for answers. All he had to do was hike through the tunnel and head up the hill to his immediate left, which ought to be Denny Hill.

He wished he had somebody to ask, but there wasn’t anybody.

There wasn’t anything, except a wafting stink from the heavy fumes of a mysterious gas that still leaked out from the earth inside the wall.

Now was as good a time as any to put on his mask.

He took a deep breath before sliding the harness over his face and securing it. When he exhaled, the interior fogged for a second and then cleared.

The tunnel looked even more distant and unearthly when he viewed it through the mask’s visor. It appeared elongated and strange, and the darkness seemed to wobble and twist when he turned his head. The straps of the mask rubbed itchily where they lay over and under his ears. He slipped a finger up underneath the leather and ran it back and forth.

He checked his lantern for the dozenth time and yes, it was full of oil. He checked his bag and yes, it had all the supplies he’d been able to swipe. He was as ready as he was ever going to be, which was only just ready enough.