What happened next remains a subject of much debate.

It might have been only an accident, after all — a terrible malfunction of equipment running amuck. It may have been nothing more than confusion, or bad timing, or improper calculations. Or then again, it might have been a calculated move after all, plotted to bring down a city’s core with unprecedented violence and mercenary greed.

What motivated Dr. Blue may never be known.

He was an avaricious man in his way, but no more so than most; and it’s possible that he wished only to take the money and run — with a bit of extra cash in his pocket to fund a larger escape. The inventor had recently married (as tongues did wag, his bride was some twenty-five years his junior), and there was much speculation that perhaps she had a hand in his decisions. Perhaps she urged his haste or she wished herself married to a richer husband. Or perhaps, as she long maintained, she knew nothing of anything.

What is certain is this: On the afternoon of January 2, 1863, something appalling burst out from the basement and tore a trail of havoc from the house on Denny Hill to the central business district, and then back home again.

Few witnesses agree, and fewer still were granted a glimpse of the Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine. Its course took it under the earth and down the hills, gouging up the land beneath the luxurious homes of wealthy mariners and shipping magnates, under the muddy flats where sat the sprawling sawmill, and down along the corridors, cellars, and storage rooms of general stores, ladies’ notions shops, apothecaries, and yes… the banks.

Four of the major ones, where they were lined up in a row — all four of those banks were ravaged as their foundations were ground into mulch. Their walls rattled, buckled, and fell. Their floors collapsed downward in a V-shaped implosion as their bottom buttresses dropped away, and then the space was partially filled with the toppling roofs. And these four banks held three million dollars or better between them, accumulated from the California miners cashing in their nuggets and heading north in search of more.

Scores of innocent bystanders were killed indoors as they stood in line for deposits or withdrawals. Many more died outside on the street, crushed by the leaning, trembling walls as they gave up their mortar and crashed heavily down.

Citizens clamored for safety, but where could it be found? The earth itself opened up and swallowed them, here and there where the Drill Engine’s tunnel was too shallow to maintain even the thinnest crust of land. The quaking, rolling street flung itself like a rug being flapped before beaten clean. It moved hard from side to side, and in waves. And wherever the machine had gone, there came the sounds of crumbling and boring from the underground passages left by its passing.

To call the scene a disaster does it a terrific disservice. The final death toll was never fully calculated, for heaven only knew how many bodies might lie wedged in the rubble. And alas, there was no time for excavation.

For after Dr. Blue lodged his machine back beneath his own home, and after the wails of the injured were tended, and the first of the angry questions were being shouted from the remaining rooftops, a second wave of horror would come to afflict the city. It was difficult for Seattle’s residents to conclude that this second wave was unrelated to the first wave, but the details of their suspicions have never been explained to anyone’s collective satisfaction.

Only the observable facts can be recorded now, and perhaps in time a future analyst may provide a better answer than can presently be guessed at.

This much is known: In the aftermath of the Drill Engine’s astonishing trail of destruction, a peculiar illness afflicted the reconstruction workers nearest the wreckage of the bank blocks. By all reports this illness was eventually traced to the Drill Engine tunnels, and to a gas which came from them. At first, this gas appeared odorless and colorless, but over time it built up to such an extent that it could be discerned by the human eye, if spied through a bit of polarized glass.

Through trial and error, a few particulars of the gas were determined. It was a thick, slow-moving substance that killed by contamination, and it could be generally halted or stilled by simple barriers. Temporary stopgap measures cropped up across the city as an evacuation was organized. Tents were disassembled and treated with pitch in order to form makeshift walls.

As these barriers failed one ring at a time, and as thousands more of the city’s inhabitants fell fatally ill, sterner measures were called for. Hasty plans were drawn up and enacted, and within one year from the incident with Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine, the entire downtown area was surrounded by an immense brick, mortar, and stone wall.

The wall stands approximately two hundred feet high — depending on the city’s diverse geographic constraints — and it averages a width of fifteen to twenty feet. It wholly encircles the damaged blocks, containing an area of nearly two square miles. Truly, it is a marvel of engineering.

However, within this wall the city spoils, utterly dead except for the rats and crows that are rumored to be there. The gas which still seeps from the ground ruins everything it touches. What once was a bustling metropolis is now a ghost town, surrounded by the surviving and resettled population. These people are fugitives from their hometown, and although many of them relocated north to Vancouver, or south to Tacoma or Portland, a significant number have stayed close to the wall.

They live on the mudflats and up against the hills, in a sprawling nontown most often called the Outskirts; and there, they have begun their lives anew.

One

She saw him, and she stopped a few feet from the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

The woman in the dull black overcoat didn’t blink and didn’t move. “What do you want?”

He’d prepared a speech, but he couldn’t remember it. “To talk. To you. I want to talk to you.”

Briar Wilkes closed her eyes hard. When she opened them again, she asked, “Is it about Zeke? What’s he done now?”

“No, no, it’s not about him,” he insisted. “Ma’am, I was hoping we could talk about your father.”

Her shoulders lost their stiff, defensive right angles, and she shook her head. “That figures. I swear to God, all the men in my life, they…” She stopped herself. And then she said, “My father was a tyrant, and everyone he loved was afraid of him. Is that what you want to hear?”

He held his position while she climbed the eleven crooked stairs that led the way to her home, and to him. When she reached the narrow porch he asked, “Is it true?”

“More true than not.”

She stood before him with her fingers wrapped around a ring of keys. The top of her head was level with his chin. Her keys were aimed at his waist, he thought, until he realized he was standing in front of the door. He shuffled out of her way.

“How long have you been waiting for me?” she asked.

He strongly considered lying, but she pinned him to the wall with her stare. “Several hours. I wanted to be here when you got home.”

The door clacked, clicked, and scooted inward. “I took an extra shift at the ’works. You could’ve come back later.”

“Please, ma’am. May I come inside?”

She shrugged, but she didn’t say no, and she didn’t close him out in the cold, so he followed behind her, shutting the door and standing beside it while Briar found a lamp and lit it.

She carried the lamp to the fireplace, where the logs had burned down cold. Beside the mantle there was a poker and a set of bellows, and a flat iron basket with a cache of split logs. She jabbed the poker against the charred lumps and found a few live coals lingering at the bottom.