“So that’s what Houjin wanted the diesel for,” Rector mused.

“What?”

“Diesel. It’s fuel. We stole some from the tower. He said it burns.”

“He wasn’t half kidding,” Zeke agreed. He lowered his hand and squinted into the light. “They won’t let any of them go, will they? All those fellows are going to die.”

“One way or another. If there are any survivors, I bet you we’ve got new rotters in the morning. Yaozu will see to that.”

“And we helped kill them.”

Rector did not say that he expected that he’d helped kill more than a few people, given how long he’d been selling sap, and how many people he’d watched it kill. “It was us or them, you know.”

“I know. But still. It feels…”

“Don’t worry about how it feels, ’cause that don’t matter right now. What matters is we routed ’em, and they can’t touch us—or the Vaults, or the Station, or Chinatown either. Maybe it’s dark and wet, and maybe it’s full of hungry dead things, and maybe it smells bad and the food tastes weird and the place is falling down around our ears. But that don’t matter, Zeke. It don’t matter because Seattle is ours, and they can’t have it.”

Rector sniffed and wiped a smudge of sooty sweat from under his chin.

“Now help me find the Sizemore House before any more rotters find us. Let’s go home, all right?”

Chapter 29

Twenty-nine

Come morning, everyone was battered, bruised, singed, and uninterested in getting out of bed … except for Zeke, who shoved at Rector’s stiff, unhappy shoulders. “Get up, you. Come on, we’ve got to go get the inexplicable.”

Into his pillow Rector mumbled, “I don’t have to go do shit.”

His head ached. His arms ached. His knee ached, and he wasn’t even sure why. He had a deep-seated suspicion that if he pulled his face off the pillow, he’d see that Zeke was holding a far-too-bright lantern that would blister his eyeballs. This did not encourage any rising or shining on his part.

“Fine then, I’ll just go by myself and tell everybody you were too chicken to come along.”

Still facedown, Rector complained, “You wouldn’t.”

“I might.”

Even though Rector didn’t care—and he didn’t—what Zeke did or didn’t tell anybody, he rolled over. The blanket twisted around his legs; he kicked his foot free and cracked open one eye. He was right about the lantern.

It burned.

“Tell ’em whatever you like.”

“You’re already awake,” Zeke noted. “Might as well get yourself up and do something useful.”

He opened the other eye. “Why don’t you drag Huey out to play with the inexplicable, if it’s so damn important to have company?”

“He didn’t want to come. He didn’t say that, but I know him well enough. It scared him, and he don’t want to see it again. I can’t blame him, except that I do.” Zeke gave Rector another shove for good measure, then withdrew—holding the lantern higher and farther away, thank God.