He lied some more. “Yes sir, in my bag. I’ll fetch it out once I’m in, and I don’t need both hands for climbing.” As he said this, he considered retying the bag so it could sling across his chest. The jar of pickles weighed heavily against his kidneys, and the loaf of bread felt like a stone between his shoulder blades. None of it sat comfortably, but it sat, and he didn’t have to hold it.

If either of the two men noticed that he hadn’t pulled out any gloves, neither of them said anything.

“I reckon I’m as ready as I’m gonna get,” Rector said. He was still high enough to believe it, and to not worry about it half so much as he should have. “Left is toward the Doornails, and right is toward the Station, yes? And I follow the ledge until it dead-ends, regardless.”

“You’ve got it.”

With a small salute that was meant to look brave, Rector pushed the curtain aside—opening a slit to the deadly, stinking world within.

Gas billowed up and out, swirling around his face so thickly that its tendrils ghosted smokelike on either side of his visor. The visor itself was wide and clean—it gave him a good view with only a little detriment to the fringes of his sight—but it soon felt dirty from the greasy, ghastly Blight.

Rector wiped at the visor with the back of his sleeve, flashed the two men a smile they couldn’t see behind his mask, and, with a deep breath that hurt to take, ducked inside.

Chapter 5

Five

At first, without even the shuttered glow of a leaky lantern to guide him, Rector saw nothing at all behind the burlap-and-wax curtain that lurked on the other side of the timber scaffolding. He blinked repeatedly, wondering if he ought to drag out one of his candles and light it. Then he realized that the sun was coming up—just barely and vaguely, as if it wasn’t sure about this whole rising business—so maybe he wouldn’t need the extra light after all.

The runny gray haze that passed for dawn showed him only the faintest outlines of the ruined city, but the view stunned him all the same.

He’d heard stories. Everyone had heard stories, about how the city rotted inside its wall, dissolving and decaying in the heavy, poisonous gas that billowed out from the fissure at the city’s heart. It’s just a skeleton now, the chemists would say. The buildings remain, most of them—the ones the earthquakes didn’t take after the Boneshaker disaster. But everything that still lives, lives underground.

He blinked furiously, trying to clear his vision. Shapes emerged slowly from the gloom, coming into semifocus in clumps. They sharpened and wavered in cycles, in response to the drafts of sludge-thick air that moved, parted, and collected in currents of toxin.