Past the burned-out husk of the first sawmill and over the rocks, Rector found a familiar fissure in the ground. He hopped over the great crack as easily as crossing a creek, though it unnerved him. It unnerved everyone, ever since it was opened by the last earthquake of the previous year—the same quake that had collapsed the brick water-runoff tunnels that led into the city. It was too much a memento, this scar in the earth. It whispered warnings from the Boneshaker, and reminded the Outskirts how the world’s foundation could be rattled apart.

Rector glared at the crevice. He sniffed, but it was not a gesture of disdain, just curiosity. No, nothing suspicious. The odor of Blight was no stronger here at this unsettling cranny than anywhere else on the mudflats outside the wall.

“They still ought to fill you in,” he told the crack. “Shouldn’t leave it to chance.”

Because what would happen then, if the Blight escaped? Everyone quietly knew that it was bound to overflow the wall someday, but it would be far worse if it didn’t need to—if the fumes found their way up other passages, like this one. It’d poison the whole earth, given time enough to leak.

He shuddered and clutched his shoulders, then looked around to make sure no one had seen him act like a chicken. No, he was alone as far as he could tell. No lights, no commotion. No footsteps. Not even the quivering scuttles of wharf rats rustling through the grass.

Beyond the crack and past the clot of dead trees—which Rector always thought looked like monsters, though he wouldn’t have told anyone—he started following a narrow path. He knew it by heart and needed no light. Before long he reached a small ring of five shacks. They were run-down and rotting, propped up by half-hearted measures and patched together with afterthoughts that kept them upright, but did nothing to improve their appearance.

This was a logging camp, abandoned in 1879 like so many other things near the ruined city. Once there’d been eight buildings, then none, but a combination of dangerous, illegal work and the need for privacy had revived three of the uninspiring structures. In time, convenience had restored two more to something like their former glory.

Dim, half-shuttered lights burned in four of the occupied shacks, but a vivid light shot out from the cracks of the largest. This near-blinding whiteness streaked past broken slats in the old shutters, speared through the weatherworn splits in the walls, and shot out from around the door.

Rector winced. His eyes weren’t ready for the light, not quite yet, but here he was at Harry’s place, and he was almost out of sap. He felt woefully ill-prepared to begin this whole adulthood thing without it, and that meant it was time to beg, borrow, or steal.