“Maybe it’s a prototype.”

“What’s a prototype?”

“Um … it means something new.”

Rector said, “Then just say ‘something new’; otherwise you’re showing off. Hey, this over here—is this the wire they want to use to blow us up?”

Houjin joined him beside a stack of spools, each one wrapped with coiled wire that still gleamed, which meant it hadn’t been inside the city very long. “Probably,” he said.

“Then how about we just steal the wire? Make ’em go get more. It’d buy us time.”

“Sure, we could do that. You pick up one of those spools, and let me know how it goes,” Huey suggested wryly.

Rector bent over and tried to lift one.

“Heavier than they look, huh?”

“And then some,” Rector muttered. “It’s good wire, though. We shouldn’t leave it.”

“You want to throw it out a window?” Houjin offered. “That one over there—the grate’s mostly off it, and it’s facing the wall. If we chuck a couple of spools out, maybe we can roll them down to the mining carts.” But the grate wasn’t as loose as it looked, and the spools wouldn’t have fit, regardless. The boys abandoned that plan. “Never mind. Let’s just swipe some of the dynamite, and see if there’s anything else worth taking. Anything that might slow them down.”

Rector didn’t know what bits of the chemistry set and distillery were more useful than others, so he contented himself with the crates of dynamite, which he opened—very carefully—using the edge of his ax. Deploying the weapon as a pry bar, he popped the lids one at a time and swiped a couple of strays from each. He stuffed them into his satchel and tried to forget that he was carrying enough explosives to launch himself to the moon.

A muffled clank reached his ears from down below. Rector sat up straight. “Huey, did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Shh!” he ordered.

The clanking came again, in a steady patter that implied footsteps.

Houjin abandoned whatever it was he’d been doing and dashed quickly back and forth between the two exits in the floor at opposite ends of the circular room. These exits were not offset with rails; they were nothing more than rectangular holes indicating stairs below.

“I can’t tell which way he’s coming!” Houjin said. His eyes were wide behind the mask, and Rector was pretty sure his own eyes matched. But they couldn’t panic. “Listen hard—we’ll figure it out, and pick the other way. Just one guy?”

“I think so…?” The acoustics were all lies, all bounces and bangs as the metal interior cast the sounds up against the roof. “But I can’t tell,” Rector admitted.

“Me either.”

“Shit, he’s almost—”

As the man came closer to the top, the clatter of his ascent became clearer and clearer, but by the time the boys had picked a stairway, it was too late. A round, masked head popped up at the top of the stairs, swiveling back and forth as it rose.

The head stopped. The eyes within the mask saw the boys, who were frozen together, grabbing at each other in a tangle of fear.

The man came up out of the stairwell. He was an average-sized fellow, a little taller than Rector and forty pounds heavier, and he wore some kind of protective jumpsuit that zipped all the way from his crotch to his mask.

“Hey, you. What are you doing up here?” he asked. “You’re not supposed to be here…”

He reached toward a cargo belt that swung low on his waist, and Rector’s heart nearly stopped. The man was going for a gun—he was absolutely positive of it—and as soon as he had it in hand, everything would be over. He and Houjin would both be dead, both failures, both casualties of somebody else’s problem.

For all his adolescent philosophies to the contrary, Rector decided at that moment that he wasn’t interested in dying right now—much less at the top of a tower in a poisoned city, inside a wall, at the hands of some stranger. The whole thing felt undignified, and maybe Rector’s life thus far hadn’t been too big on dignity, but it’d be a shame if he died as ignobly as he’d lived.

All of this flashed through his head like a bolt of lightning. He didn’t have time to reflect, and he didn’t have time to second-guess anything; he only had time to charge.

He hollered, because that’s what you do when you charge. He swung the ax at a wobbling, frenzied pitch, and within two seconds he’d crossed the open expanse of floor between him and the man at the edge of the stairs. Houjin was right behind him, waving that sharpened iron bar as though it were a sword and they were the cavalry and this were some kind of heroic last stand—though Rector hoped with all his might that it wasn’t.

They ran at the stunned man, who remained stunned enough that his hand stopped at the edge of his belt and he took half a step back.

The half step either saved him or killed him, and the boys didn’t know which.

Before Rector reached him, the man toppled backwards and downward. He flailed, waving his arms and desperately reaching for some sort of balance, but he didn’t find it. He only found the stairwell hole behind him … right where he’d put his left foot.

This didn’t stop Rector, who was on fire with the zeal of self-defense.

He brought the ax back and punched with it, knocking the off-kilter fellow even farther off-kilter; and when Houjin joined the fray, the weight of the Chinese boy’s heavy iron stick took the right leg out from under the intruder (or were they the intruders? Rector didn’t have time to care).

The man in the jumpsuit went tumbling backwards, down the stairs.

As he fell, he yelped and complained, accompanied by the sound of straining metal stretching, breaking, and crumbling. As they waited for him to hit bottom, Rector and Houjin were petrified—their hands over their mouths, blocking their filters—but only for a moment.

Houjin said, “We had a story!”

And Rector replied, “I forgot it!”

“Me, too!”

“Oh, Jesus, we have to go!”

They scrambled to the other exit, Rector picking up one last stick of dynamite on his way, and Houjin nabbing a smaller coil of wire, one he could carry without breaking his back. Down the stairs they stampeded, no longer worried about the sound of their passage—worried only about escape.

“Is he following us?” Houjin wheezed as he threw himself out the door and into the creeping, thickening shadow of the wall.

Rector didn’t know, so he said, “No!” and kept running.

“Wait!”

“Are you crazy?”

“Wait,” Houjin said again—and with a halfhearted effort to regain his quiet and composure, he gasped to catch his breath. They were still alone, with nothing but the sound of their own breathing filling their ears. “He’s stuck down there, or out cold, or something. We’ve got a minute, I think.”

“What are you doing?” Rector demanded, still ready to run headlong down the hill and right back into the Vaults without pause. He didn’t want a minute. He wanted out of there.

“The diesel,” he said.

“Too heavy to carry with us!” Rector insisted.

“I know! I don’t want to take it all the way.” Houjin knocked the nearest steel drum onto its side and gave it a shove. It rolled and sloshed, heavily lumbering over the uneven ground. “Help me with this.”

“I thought we were running—”

“Just help me,” he insisted, shoving his weapon into the back of his belt. “I have an idea. For later.”

Rector joined him at the side of the drum, planting his hands on it to help with the shoving, rolling, and guiding. “If anybody sees us, we’re dead! If we get caught, I’m running, and I’m leaving you here. I’m going back underground.”

“We might be dead already,” Houjin huffed. “If we get spotted, we drop it. All right?”

“Fine,” Rector grumbled, halfway praying that someone would see them so he could resume his flight to safety.

Both of them were almost faint with fright and exertion; their air supply came too thin to support so much running and hollering. But they pressed onward and pushed harder, manhandling the metal barrel over the hill’s edge and down onto one of the curved walkways, where it could roll more smoothly, so long as it followed the path.

But then Houjin pushed it off the path, along the wall’s edge. The way was harder going, but they kept at it.

“Where are we going with this thing?” Rector demanded. “It’s heavy as hell!”

“To the hole … in the wall…” Houjin puffed. “Trust me … would you?”

“Ain’t got much choice right now, do I?”

“You could find your way back to Sizemore without me.”

Rector said, “Maybe,” and was almost surprised when he realized it was true, never mind that he’d just threatened to do exactly that. He panted back at Houjin, “But you look like … you need … a hand. And I wanna know … what you want to set on fire.”

“The hole.”

“You want to set … the hole … on fire?”

“Not right now … but later. You’ll see … what I mean…”

They stashed the diesel fuel behind a stack of stones that had been blown off the wall. They hid it with a few extras, and now that they were away from the park and the tower, they rested. Houjin marked the spot with a small pyramid of rocks.

“What’s that for?”

“So we can find it later, or tell other people how to find it. Come on, let’s get back to the Station and hand off this dynamite. I don’t think the Doornails will take too kindly to us stashing it down in their living quarters, but Yaozu has places he can keep it.”

Twenty-five

Rest didn’t come easy for anyone that night. More than a few people stayed up and worried, or went out to the Station hunting for news. And the men who worked out at the Station—most of them known for violence and a disinclination to be friendly—chatted nervously with the Doornails and Chinamen alike about where they’d found the dynamite and how much damage it might’ve done, had they not unhooked it and stashed it someplace safer.