She slipped an arm around his waist.

When they reached the wing where Yaozu lived, Briar extricated herself without any reproach. She said only, “I’ll go back to the vaults, and maybe I’ll see you there in a bit. But I’m not interested in consorting with you-know-who.”

“Who’s consorting? Good Lord, woman. You make it sound worse than it really is.”

“Time will tell how bad it really is. Until then, I’ll stick to my concerns, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t. And I’ll be back at the vaults in an hour or two. Is … um. Is Zeke around?”

She looked at him with a flash of something sharp and bright — a wink of intensity that she didn’t show him for long. She told him, “No, he’s not around. I’ve sent him off to Chinatown with Mercy. His leg’s all but healed up now, and he’s paying her back for stitching him up by helping on her rounds with Dr. Wong.”

“Helping?”

“I think he’s sweet on her, and it’s a shame. You can get almost anything down here in the underground, but girls his own age are hard to come by. Mercy doesn’t have ten years on him, so I guess he thinks that’d be all right. Anyway, she’s put him up next door to her father’s place, and I didn’t have to bully him too hard to stay out there with them.”

“For the night?”

“For a night or two.” Again, that spark of … invitation? It flashed, and returned to a simmer. “As long as I feel like locking him out. He’s a big boy. He’ll find something to occupy his time.”

“That’s … good to know.”

She walked away from him then, and without looking back, she disappeared down the corridor that would take her back into the open areas beneath the streets, and back to the vaults.

It scrambled his thoughts and made him reconsider how badly he needed to talk to Yaozu, but those reconsiderations were undone when he heard the man’s voice behind him, thereby settling the matter.

“Captain Cly, I see you’ve returned. I got your telegram. Angeline sent it down a few days ago, though she obviously didn’t bring it herself. You know, I don’t think she likes me much.”

“She’s … finicky about who she likes.”

Ignoring the polite deferral, Yaozu said, “Perhaps that’s one more thing I should put on our wish list, when it comes to citywide improvements. A set of taps.”

“Do you think we can set one up? I don’t know if it’s even possible, down here.”

Yaozu shrugged, the lines of his clean white outfit shifting and settling again. “I do not yet know what would be required, but I am interested in learning. Is there any chance Houjin would have any idea?”

“I don’t know. But if you tell him to go find out, he’ll report back within a day or two, putting one together with a couple of tin cans and a drawer full of spoons.”

“Yes, I hear he’s prone to such improvisations. And how was your excursion down to Texian territory?”

“It was fine. Brought back all your goodies, and everything on everybody else’s list, too. It weighed us down like crazy, all the things everyone wanted. If we hadn’t been so heavy, we might’ve missed that storm in Denver. But that’s just how it goes.”

“There’s nothing to be done about the weather,” Yaozu said graciously. “At any rate, if you’re not otherwise occupied, I’d appreciate your company up at the fort. I’ve summoned a handful of men to help with the loading and unloading, but you’re the one who knows what’s what in your cargo bay.”

Cly echoed his phrasing. “Otherwise occupied? Uh, no. Not right this second. I can take an hour or two to help you get all your gear in order.” That’s what he’d told Briar, after all. An hour or two. Though he determined on the spot that he was not going to hang around and be helpful for even one minute longer than that.

“Excellent. Walk with me, Captain.”

“Sure. Listen, there’s something you should know. Maybe you’ll care, and maybe you won’t,” he said, adjusting his pace to walk with the shorter man, whose legs could not comfortably match his long stride. “It’s about the sap, and what it’s doing outside the city.”

“I already know about the gas, and those Mexicans in Utah.”

“Sure. But have you heard about the zombis in New Orleans?”

Seventeen

Josephine held her breath and aimed.

She exhaled slowly as the zombi moseyed behind a stack of crates outside the warehouse down at the river’s edge. This was the same warehouse she’d visited once before, following the two Texian officers — and then, of course, she’d been saved from potential disaster by Marie Laveau, may she rest in peace. But Marie could not save her now. Marie was beyond saving anyone anymore, and it was almost as if the zombis knew it.

Josephine would not have said it out loud, but it was hard not to notice, and not to wonder at how the riverbanks were more dangerous now than before the Queen had passed on despite Texas’s efforts to the contrary. Patrols ran every night, in three shifts. Texian soldiers and Texian guns picked off the dead men by the score, leaving everyone to wonder just how many of the things, precisely, had been running around all this time.

Every morning there were more bodies, more corpse-corpses. Some of the zombies were recognized, named, and taken away. Most were not. Most of them were burned down to charred black scraps, and if anything was left, it was buried. Or else, the nasty remnants were dumped into the ocean — where everything eventually rusts, or warps, or is eaten away by carrion-seekers small and large.

They must be managed now, before they become unmanageable.

These days, or at least these curfewed nights, Josephine had started lighting candles and praying to no one in particular that it wasn’t already too late.

Then she’d pick up Little Russia and don unfancy clothes, adding a dark brown cloak. She’d meet her escort downstairs at the door, and he’d flash his badge again and again to see them both past the anxious watchmen who kept the Quarter under lock and key between dusk and dawn.

Together, they would go down to the river, to the warehouses, to the edges of the territory trawled by the organized boys in brown — with their rolling-crawlers and air support, their well-drilled sharpshooters and lookouts. They worked the fringes as a team, without the tactical advantage of numbers … but between them, they did their part to keep the things contained.

And to study them, and discuss their theories, their suspicions.

Tonight, like every night, the warehouse was dark.

Its huge double doors — built to accommodate ship-repairing cranes and equipment — had rotted and fallen off, and now lay flat and fragmented across the pier, leaving the interior exposed to the elements.

And to the zombis.

A pair of them wandered back and forth, wheezing as they shambled, seemingly in search of nothing at all — and, finding nothing, they merely changed their path and searched for nothing once more, in another direction. Josephine could see them from her vantage point atop an old shipping container, upon which she had lain down flat on her belly … all the better to alternately watch the riverbank and its forlorn, collapsing buildings through a spyglass, and over the edge of Little Russia’s barrel. Three other zombis were milling about, lurching and sagging, coughing and hunting.

She shuddered. She shook her head, braced her elbows, and closed one eye.

“Be patient,” whispered her companion.

She scrunched her eyes shut and resisted the urge to hit him. “I know,” she said instead, through gritted teeth. “And I am.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to get your dander up. I’m just trying to tell you that if you give this one on the left a minute or two, I think it’ll circle back around. You might be able to hit ’em both with one bullet.”