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But that was the problem, really. It sounded too fair. “What’s the catch?”
“There is no catch, son. Or if there is, it will come from your mother. If she cares for you as much as she claims, she’ll encourage you to stay. You’re a bright boy, and I think that together we could learn much from one another. I can keep you in a much finer lifestyle than she can provide, and for that matter—”
“Oh, I get it. You’re going to pay her to go away. ”
“Don’t be crass. ”
“That’s the point of it, ain’t it?” Zeke asked, not even angry anymore. He was surprised, and disappointed, and confused. But he’d gotten a promise, and whether or not it was kept or broken, it was a place to begin. “And I don’t care. You two can work it out between yourselves. I don’t care. All I want is to know she’s all right. ”
“Then we can work together, see? I’ll find her and bring her here. We can iron out the details later. But for now, I think that this first attempt at a family dinner… Let us conclude it,” he said, looking past Zeke at a man who was standing in the doorway.
It was the same black man with the milky eye. He bucked his chin up as if he wanted Dr. Minnericht’s attention.
“I want a mask,” Zeke said before the moment fully passed and he lost the doctor’s attention.
“You can’t have a mask. ”
“You’re asking me to trust you. How am I supposed to do that if you won’t trust me back, just a little?” Zeke pleaded.
“You are smart. I’m glad to see evidence of it; But the only reason you’ll need a mask is to leave the grounds, and I am not yet prepared to take your word that you’ll remain here of your own volition. So I’m afraid I’ll have to refuse your eminently reasonable request. ”
“What’s that mean?” Zeke asked, thrown by the big words and getting mad about them.
“It means no. You can’t have a mask. But it also means you don’t need to stay in your room. Roam wherever you like. I know where your boundaries are, and believe me when I say this: Within the confines of my kingdom, there’s nowhere that I can’t find you. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” he said with a sulk and a slouch.
“Yaozu will… Damn it all to hell, Lester, where’s Yaozu?”
“I couldn’t say, sir,” Lester replied, which did not mean that he did not know—only that he declined to say anything in front of Zeke.
“Fine. That’s just wonderful. He’s off doing… I don’t care. You. Come with me,” he said to Lester. “You,” he said to Zeke. “Make yourself at home. Explore the grounds. Do as you like, but I’d recommend that you stay close to the core, here on this floor. When I find your mother, I’ll bring her to you. No matter what you think of me or what you believe, you can rest assured that even should you somehow make it to the topside and mount your own search, I’ll find her first. Unless you want to be left out and lost when I locate her, you’ll stay close to home. ”
“Not ‘home,’ ” Zeke echoed with displeasure. “I said I understood, all right?”
“Good,” Minnericht said. It was less a positive declaration than a dismissal, but it was the doctor who flounced out of the room, almost dragging Lester behind him.
When they both were gone, and Zeke had the dining area to himself, he paced back and forth and then returned to his plate—though he did not sit down. He needed to think, and thinking was easier to do on a full stomach and in motion, so he carried the chicken with him. He gnawed it until there wasn’t a scrap of flesh left on the small bones; then he turned to the food that Minnericht had left behind on his plate.
After cleaning that plate too, and wondering briefly where the kitchen might be, Zeke let out a mighty belch and thought some more about gas masks.
Dr. Minnericht—whom Zeke refused to think of as his father—must keep some down there someplace. Clearly the doctor’s own was a custom model, made for him and no one else, but Zeke had seen several people down below. There was Yaozu, for starters, and the one-eyed black man. And with all those other rooms, locked or unlocked, there must be other people who manned the facilities. Upstairs Zeke could hear footsteps—heavy ones, like men in boots. Sometimes they walked as if on a guard’s dull circuit, and sometimes they ran in groups.
Whoever these men were, they weren’t stuck down below. They came and went. They must have masks someplace, and if Zeke could find a big storage closet or a room where such devices were stashed, then he wasn’t above stealing one.
If he could find one.
But after wandering around for a while, he could immediately locate neither a secret stash of gas masks to pilfer nor any other people. The underside of the train station was a ghost town except for the intermittent background noise of distant feet, conversations barely beyond earshot, and pipes in the walls that hissed and strained to accommodate water or warming steam.
Surely someone, somewhere tended the guest rooms; and certainly someone must have cooked, and must be coming back to clean up later—or so Zeke assured himself as he wandered the levels that had been deemed acceptable by his host.
In time, he successfully followed his nose to the galley; and from the cupboards he scavenged wax-paper packets of jerky, a pair of gleaming red apples, and some dried cherries that tasted as sweet as candy when he gnawed them. He couldn’t find the source of the fresh food that had been served at dinner, but Zeke was pleased with his loot. He hauled it back to his room for a later meal, or a midnight snack.
He hadn’t found what he’d meant to find, but his need to swipe and hoard something had been appeased for now. He went back to his room, sat on the edge of the overstuffed bed, and fretted idly about what would come next, the roasted chicken warm and heavy in his stomach. The weight of the meal pinned him onto the blankets and lured him into deeper and deeper comfort. It coaxed him back under the sheets, and though he’d only meant to close his eyes for a few moments, he did not awaken again until morning.
Twenty-four
Zeke awoke the next morning determined to carry out the leftovers of last night’s plan. He stuffed his pockets with the food he’d gathered (minus a few mouthfuls for breakfast) and wandered back out to the corridor with its lift. The gate was down, but it was easy to move; and once inside the boy had no idea what to do with it. Four levers hung from a wire-frame ceiling overhead, and for all he knew one of them was an alarm.
There must be stairs.
Somewhere.
There must be other people, too, or so he was thinking when a peculiarly tall Chinese man and a peculiarly short white man conspired their rushed and distracted way around the corner. They stopped their chattering and quit their brisk pace in order to gaze curiously at Zeke.
“Hey,” he said to the men.
“Hey,” the white man said back. He was a round little fellow, Zeke’s height but three or four times his girth, with a belt that circled his waist like an equator and a military cap squashed down over his overgrown hair. “You the Blue boy?”
“I’m Zeke,” he said, neither confirming nor denying. “Who are you?
They didn’t answer him any better than he’d answered them. “Where you heading off to? There’s rotters upstairs, boy. If you’ve got any brains in your skull, you’ll stick down here, where it’s safe. ”
“I wasn’t going nowhere. I was just looking around. The doctor said I could. ”
“Did he now?”
“Yeah, he did. ”
The thin, tall Chinaman leaned down to see Zeke better, and asked in a rough, hoarse voice, “Where’s Yaozu? Looking after boys, that’s not our job. ”
“Is it Yaozu’s job?”
The smaller man said, “Maybe he likes it, being the doctor’s right hand. Maybe he don’t. I couldn’t say, except that he puts up with it. ”
Zeke nodded, absorbing the information and filing it away in case it was important. “All right. Well, let me ask yo
u this, then. How do I get upstairs? I’ve seen pretty much all there is to see down here. ”
“Didn’t you hear me? Can’t you hear the commotion? Them’s rotters, boy. I can hear them all the way from here. ”
The tall man with the thin brown eyes said, “It’s dangerous, next floor up. Doornails and rotters are a bad, bad mix. ”
“Come on, fellas,” Zeke wheedled, sensing that he was losing their attention to whatever task they’d been chasing when he’d stopped them. “Help a kid out. I just want to take a look around my new homestead. ”
The men shrugged back and forth at one another until the taller of the two walked away, leaving the small man. He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. And don’t go upstairs, if you know what’s good for you. There’s trouble up there. Rotters been coming inside from all over the place, like someone’s deliberately letting ’em in. And there’s other problems, too. ”
“Like what?”
“Like your pa don’t have many friends outside the station, and sometimes they make a stink. You don’t want to get stuck in the middle of that. And I don’t want to be the one who gets blamed for putting you there. ”
Zeke said, “If I get up there and get killed, I won’t tell a soul it was you who sent me. Deal?”
The fat man laughed, and squeezed his thumbs into the band of his belt. “You’ve got me there, don’t you? That’s real fine, sure enough. I won’t tell you how to work the lift, because that ain’t my job and I don’t like pulling all them strings; but if you were to follow that hallway behind me, and take it all the way to the left, you’d find a set of stairs down at the end of it. But if anybody asks, I didn’t tell you anything. And if you stick around, then you remember who done you a favor. ”
“Thanks!” Zeke said brightly. “And I’ll remember, don’t worry. You’re a champ, man. ”