Twenty

Briar left to wash up, and when she returned, Lucy was sitting in a chair with her arm laid out on a table. The arm was surrounded by bolts, gears, and screws. A Chinese boy who couldn’t have been a week older than Ezekiel was rooting around in Lucy’s wrist joint with an oilcan and a long pair of tweezers.

He looked up at Briar through an elaborate pair of spectacles with adjustable, interlocking lenses attached at the corners.

“Briar!” Lucy said happily, though she was careful not to jostle the arm. “This here is Huojin, but I call him Huey and he doesn’t seem to mind it.”

He said, “No, ma’am.”

“Hello… Huey,” Briar said to him. “How’s her arm coming along?”

He aimed his forehead back down at the splayed machinery so that the lenses would show the work space better. “Not bad. Not great. The arm is a fine machine, but I didn’t invent it or build it. I have to feel my way around it,” he said. His English came glazed with an accent, but it was not very thick and he was quite understandable. “If f had the copper tubes I need, I think I could make it work just right again. But I had to improvise.”

“‘Improvise,’ did you hear that?” Lucy laughed. “He reads English out of books. And when he was a little thing, he used to practice it on all of us folks down here. Now he talks a damn sight better than most of the men I know.”

Briar wondered what Huey had been doing down in the underground as a small child. She nearly asked, but then she thought it might not be any business of hers, so she didn’t. She said, “Well, I’m glad he’s here working on you. Can you tell me more about that mark outside of Maynard’s? What does it mean?”

Lucy shook her head. “It means that Minnericht likes to mark his territory like a dog, pissing all over it. I wonder what his gripe was with Maynard’s? He’s left us alone for a while; maybe he just figured it was time to stir things up to keep us paying attention. Or maybe Squiddy still owes him.”

Briar said, “Mr. Swakhammer thought maybe one of Minnericht’s men saw me. Maybe the doctor’s mad that I went down to Maynard’s without visiting him first.”

Lucy didn’t respond. She pretended to watch Huey as he closed up the panel on her arm and sealed it back into place. Finally she said, “That’s possible. He’s got eyes just about everyplace, damn him. And he couldn’t just knock on the door or leave a note, God no. Instead he’s got to send down the dead, soften us up, and maybe pick off a man or two in order to make a statement. I wonder how he’d like it if we went down to the station and popped his locks. Let him deal with the dead in his own home space. It’d be an act of war. And maybe we could use an act of war.”

Huey wrapped up his work and tightened the last screw. He leaned back and pulled the heavy glass contraption off of his forehead. The straps stuck around his ears and then came loose with a snap. “All done, Mrs. O’Gunning. I wish I could fix it up better for you, but that’s the best I can do.”

“Sweetheart, it’s just amazing, and I can’t thank you enough. Anything you want, anything you need — you let me know. Next time the airmen come through town, I can put in a request.”

“More books?” he asked.

“More books. As many books as they’ll carry for you,” she swore. The boy thought for a moment and then said, “When will the Naamah Darling come back again? Do you know?”

“I’m sorry sweetheart, but I couldn’t say. Why? You want to leave a message for Fang?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said. “I would like some books in Chinese, and he would know where to get them. He’d know which books are good, I think.”

“Consider it done. I’ll stop by the tower on Tuesday, and ask around for you.” She carefully ruffled her fingers in his hair, and although they were stiff, the gesture came across as friendly as she meant it. “You’re a good one, Huey. A fine boy, and a smart one.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and with a bow, he excused himself back into the halls of the Vaults.

Briar said, “He sure does talk good.”

“I wish I could take credit for it, but I can’t. I just gave him what I had and let him learn it all himself.” She twisted the arm left and right, and up and down. “You know,” she said, “I think this’ll be fine for a while. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough.”

“Does that mean you don’t want to go to Minnericht after all?” Briar asked.

Lucy said, “Maybe, maybe not. Let me give this a few hours and see how it goes. What about you? Are you still interested in going all the way out to King Street to meet him?”

She said, “I think so, yes. Besides, if Mr. Swakhammer’s right, you can’t hide me forever. He knows I’m down here someplace, and he’ll keep trying to flush me out if I don’t go introduce myself. I don’t want to make any trouble for you, Lucy.”

“Trouble’s fine, darling. We get trouble all the time, and if he wasn’t giving us grief about you, it’d be something else. So how about this? Let me holler for Squiddy. We’ll see if he’ll take you down to the old bank blocks. He knows his way around that place better than anybody else, I’ll tell you what. If there’s any sign of your boy down there, he’ll be the man to find it.”

Briar’s eyebrows pinched up into her forehead. “Really?” She tried to remember which patron of Maynard’s they were discussing. “The thin man with the muttonchops and the goatee?”

“That’s him. He’s a mad old boy, but we all are, down here. Now, listen: Squiddy used to be a small-time crook, when he was Huey’s age and younger. Back before the walls, he was making a big plan to break into the banks himself. He drew up all sorts of plans, and he learned all the nooks and crannies real good… and I think it made him madder than hell that the Boneshaker took the block first.” She moved her arm again and winced. “But don’t get me wrong; he’s all right. He’s sharp, in his own way, and he likes to look helpful. He won’t screw you up or leave you stuck.”

“How reassuring,” Briar said.

“Oh, don’t I know it. Here now — you’d better hurry up. It’ll be getting dark before long. It hardly stays light at all up there, this time of the year, so go get Squiddy and take your look around while there’s still time for you to do it. He knows to expect you. I already told him he was going to show you the sights, and he said he was all right with it.”

Briar found Squiddy playing cards with Willard and Ed.

Squiddy folded his hand and tipped his hat at Briar, who wasn’t sure if she should tip hers back or not. So she nodded and told him, “Hello. Lucy said you’d be kind enough to show me around the bank blocks for an hour or two real quick, before sundown.”

“That’s right, ma’am. I’ve got no trouble working on the Lord’s day. Let me just get my gear.”

Squiddy Farmer was a narrow man from chin to toes, dressed in skinny pants and a buttoned jersey that fit so close you could count his ribs. He threw a wool sweater over the whole ensemble; and although the sweater was large enough to hit his hips, its neck hole was small enough to squeeze his head. The salt-and-pepper puff of his balding scalp and fluffy sideburns popped through the opening.

He smiled, showing a mostly full set of teeth that didn’t often see a brush. From a side table behind the spot where cards were being shuffled, he picked up a bubblelike helmet with a portal on the front.

When he saw her looking at it with frank confusion, he said, “It’s one of Dr. Minnericht’s models. He said I could have it, because no one liked it very well and it was just collecting dust.”

“Why?” she asked. “Does it work?”

“It works. It works real good, but it’s real heavy — and I have to cut my own filters for it. I don’t mind it, though. I like being able to see almost all the way around, you know?” He showed her the way the curved glass wrapped from ear to ear, and she had to admit that it looked convenient.