Her empty stomach gobbled at the liquid, and a little farther down in her bowels another gurgling told her to find the privy. At the other end of the hall she located a door and tried it. She emerged a few minutes later, feeling better than she had when she’d gone to sleep.
She also felt as if she were being watched, and she wasn’t sure why — until she realized she could hear voices nearby, and she’d misunderstood the sensation of barely being able to hear for that of being overheard. If she held very still she could recognize the voices. If she took a step to the right she could catch them more clearly.
“It’s a bad idea.” It was Lucy, sounding just short of openly confrontational.
“It might not be. We could ask her.”
“I’ve been talking to her. I don’t think she’ll go along with it.”
The other voice belonged to Swakhammer, without his mask. He repeated, “We could ask her. She’s not a kid, and she can answer for herself. It could be helpful; she could tell us for sure.”
“She thinks she already knows for sure, and she’s got other problems right now — speaking of kids,” Lucy said.
Briar slipped around the corner and pushed her back to the wall beside a door that had swung inward an inch.
“I think she talks like a woman who knows more than she’s saying, and if she does, then it’s no call of ours to drag it out of her,” Lucy said.
Swakhammer paused. “We don’t have to drag anything out of anybody. If she sees him, and he sees her, then everybody knows. He won’t be able to hide underneath some other crook’s mask; and the folks down here who are scared of him will have a reason to stand up.
“Or he could try and kill her, just for knowing the facts about him. And that means he’d kill me too, if I bring her to him.”
“Your arm needs fixing, Lucy.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, and I think I’m going to ask Huojin. He’s good with mechanical things, too. He’s the one who fixed up the furnaces after they went down last month, and he fixed Squiddy’s pocket watch for him, too. He’s a smart fellow. Maybe he can make it work all right.”
“You and those Chinamen. You keep making friends with them like that, and tongues will wag.”
“Tongues can wag all they want. We need those men, and you know it same as I do. We can’t keep half this equipment running without them, and that’s a fact.”
“Fact or no, they worry me. They’re just like those goddamned crows who hang out at the roofs — you can’t understand them, they talk amongst themselves, and they might be for you or against you, but you’d never know it until it’s too late.”
“You’re an idiot,” Lucy said. “Just ’cause you don’t understand them don’t mean they’re out to get you.”
“What about Yaozu?”
She made a snort. “You can’t call them all bastards just for one bad apple. If I did that, I’d never be civil to any man again. So get down off your high horse, Jeremiah. And leave Miss Wilkes alone about Minnericht. She don’t want to talk about him; so she sure as hell don’t want to talk to him.”
“See, that’s what I mean! She avoids the subject and she’s not stupid. She must wonder. If we asked her, she might be willing—”
Briar leaned her foot on the door and pushed it open. Swakhammer and Lucy froze as if they’d been caught at something naughty; they were facing one another on either side of a table with a bowl of dried figs and a stack of dried corn.
“You can ask me anything you want,” she said, though she made no promises about what she’d answer. “Maybe it’s time we put all our cards on the table. I want to talk about this doctor of yours down here, and I want Lucy to get her hand fixed, and I want one of those figs worse than I ever wanted a piece of pie on Christmas — but most of all, I want to go find my son. He’s been down here for… how long? A couple of days now, I suppose, and he’s alone and I don’t know — maybe dead already. But one way or another, I’m not leaving him down here. And I don’t think I can work this place on my own. I think I need your help, and I’m willing to give you mine in return.”
Swakhammer picked up a fat, soft fig from the top of the pile and tossed it to her. She caught it and chomped down on it, killing it off in a bite and a half, and sitting down beside Lucy, facing Swakhammer because she suspected he’d be easier to read.
Lucy was red, but not with anger. She was embarrassed to have been caught gossiping. “Darling, I didn’t mean to go behind your back and talk out of turn. But Jeremiah here has a bad idea and I didn’t want to show it to you.”
Briar said flatly, “He wants me to go with you and see Minnericht, to ask about your hand.”
“That’s the long and short of it, yes.”
Swakhammer leaned forward on his elbows, fiddling with an ear of corn and making the most earnest face he could manage. “You’ve got to understand: People will believe you if you set eyes on him, and if you say he’s not Blue — or he is. If Minnericht is Blue, then we have a right to hold him accountable for this place, and throw him out of it — give him to the authorities and let them handle him.”
“You can’t be serious.” Briar made it a statement.
“Of course I’m serious! Now, whether or not other people down here wouldn’t drag him into the street and feed him to the rotters… I’m not in a position to say. But I didn’t get the impression that you were real worried about anyone hurting him.”
“Not remotely.” She took another fig, and a swig out of the wooden mug she still toted. Swakhammer reached into a box behind his chair and pulled out a pouch of dried apples, which Briar pounced upon.
“Here’s the thing,” Swakhammer said while she chewed, again with his earnest face firmly established. “Minnericht… he’s… he’s a genius. A real bona fide genius, not the kind you read about in dreadfuls, you know? But he’s crazy, too. And he’s been down here, treating this place like it’s his own little kingdom, for the last ten or twelve years — ever since we figured out that we needed him.”
He didn’t like saying that part; Briar could see it in the way he balked around the word “needed.” He added, “At first, it was all right. Nothing was very organized, and this place was a real madhouse, since we didn’t have all the tricks nailed down yet.”
Lucy interrupted and agreed. “It was all right. He kept to himself and didn’t bother anybody, and he could be real helpful when he wanted to be. Some of the Chinamen treated him like he was some kind of magician. But,” she was quick to point out, “they didn’t treat him like that forever.”
“What changed?” Briar asked around a mouthful of apple. “And is there anything else to eat around here? I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m starving.”
“Hang on,” Swakhammer said, and he rose to a set of crates that must have functioned as cabinets. While he rummaged, Lucy continued.
“What changed was, people figured out that you could make good money off the Blight gas, if you turned it into lemon sap. And by ‘people’ I mean Doctor Minnericht himself. As I heard it, he was experimenting with it, trying to turn it into something that wasn’t so bad. Or maybe he wasn’t. Nobody knows but him.”
Swakhammer turned around with a tied-up sack. He pitched it to Briar, and it landed on the table in front of her. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Dried salmon,” he said. “What Lucy is leaving off is that Minnericht used to test it on his Chinese friends. I think he wanted them to treat it like opium. But he killed a bunch of them that way, and finally the rest of them turned on him.”
Lucy said, “Except for Yaozu. He’s Minnericht’s right-hand man, and he’s the business arm of the operation. He’s mean as a snake and — in his way — he’s smarter than Minnericht, I’d wager. The pair of them make an amazing amount of money together, running their little empire based on that nasty yellow drug, but God knows what they spend it on.”