Angeline hunted until she found the cabinet she wanted, from which she retrieved a set of small spectacles. The lenses didn’t match—one was round, one more rectangular—and the frames had clearly been bent together without regard for aesthetics from whatever sturdy wire had been most readily available at the time.

“These’ll do!” she declared, sticking them on her face. She tweaked the bends around her ears and adjusted the fit until they looked like they’d stay on. “It’s funny, looking through ’em. But they’ll tell us where there’s gas, and that’s the important bit. How do I look?”

Zeke laughed, and Houjin gave her a solemn nod that just barely hid a smile.

Rector answered, “Like a million bucks!”

“A million bucks! I don’t have that much, even if I look it. But I’ve got enough to feed us, so let’s head down the back tunnels and see if they’re stable enough to let us breathe like civilized people.”

The lenses in the makeshift spectacles were made from polarized glass, so they cast oddly shaped rainbows around the tunnels when the lantern light hit them just right. Angeline occasionally held her hands out in front of herself, sometimes purely to look at them. She announced, “It sure is strange, how putting glass up to your face makes the whole world look like magic.”

“Like magic? Really?” Zeke asked, visibly restraining himself from asking for a chance to wear them himself.

“The world wobbles a bit, and when I walk, I feel like I’m stepping forward into a big hole.”

Houjin stepped around an eddy of fallen rocks, holding out a lantern to light the way ahead. Somewhere not too far away, machinery hummed to life and the dull, resonant buzz of a mechanical crank rose to a roar. Close behind this noise came a gust of air; it billowed down the tunnel, pulling at tousled hair and unrolled sleeves. It flapped and swelled like the breath of some leviathan deep in the earth’s bowels.

Rector shivered. “Miss Angeline?” He touched her arm.

She stared straight ahead, through the light of Houjin’s lantern and into the darkness beyond, as if she could see the wind itself, and judge it.

After a moment of concentration, she patted his hand and said, “Don’t worry. The glass isn’t showing me anything. This air’s clean.” She gave him a smile big enough to show she was missing one tooth, so far back in her mouth that he hadn’t seen it before. “Of course, it ought to be clean. You hear that sound?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

“That’s the nearest pump room, starting up its engines. Must be coming up on suppertime. You can set your watch by the pumps in Chinatown, and I know because I’ve done it before.”