After another ten minutes of hushed hiking and breathless silence, their masks were not clogged yet, but clogging. They wouldn’t be comfortable outside for very much longer without taking a break to adjust their filters, and everyone knew it, but this was too big to ignore. And it was urgent enough to investigate despite the creeping peril of equipment that could not keep them safe forever.

For the wall was not merely cracked, and not merely burrowed through.

It was shattered—split in an untidy slash from top to bottom, its rubble scattered in every direction. Blocks had been smashed into houses, lodged in the tops of brittle trees, and tumbled across what was left of the streets.

Zeke whistled quietly, a short note of awe. “What could do something like that?” he asked. “Did … did a ship crash into it, or something?”

Houjin shook his head. “Dynamite. I bet you anything.”

Zeke asked, “But wouldn’t we have heard it?”

They all stood in silence gaping up at the fissure when two thoughts clicked together in Rector’s head. “That storm, a couple of weeks ago. There was thunder, remember? Everybody talked about it, since we don’t ever get none, hardly.”

Angeline pondered this. “We might’ve heard dynamite, and mistook it for weather. Not bad, Red. That’s as good a guess as any.”

“If he’s right, it’s been like this for weeks,” Houjin mused. “That’s plenty of time for animals to get inside and get sick.”

“Plenty of time for man-shaped animals to get inside, too,” the princess said.

“Look over there…” Zeke said, peering off to the north.

Rector followed his lead and saw a swath of hazy yellow burning weakly through the fog. “Is that … light? I thought we were practically at the end of the wall.”

“There ain’t much wall at this northeastern side, that’s for sure,” Angeline confirmed. “But it goes around farther to the north, then back to the east. As for over there…”

Then Houjin said slowly, “It’s the old park, isn’t it? Up near the big houses, where the rich people used to live.”

“This whole hill is where the rich people used to live,” Zeke told them. “My momma’s place was back down the hill a few blocks, over to the south.”

“Yeah, but I mean the really rich people. The men who owned the mills, and the logging company. They lived along Fourteenth Street, and the road stopped at the top of the hill, where they were going to put a park.”

The princess nodded. “They started building it not too long before the Boneshaker came. They put down a cemetery, too, on the other side”—she waved her hand to suggest a distant location—“and they filled it up with people who’d been dead for years and years and buried downtown once already.”

“Why didn’t they just wait for new dead people?” Rector asked.