“I’m Houjin, but people call me Huey. Mostly I stay over in Chinatown Underground, as Captain Cly calls it, but sometimes I stay here in the Vaults, too. Why did you come inside the wall? Usually people are running away from something, or running to something.”

But before Rector could respond, Houjin continued. “I mean, I didn’t run here. I came here when I was small, with my uncle. I don’t have any other family.”

“Orphan,” Rector choked out between swallows.

“Yes, both of my parents are dead. But there’s my uncle,” he repeated. “I heard your parents are dead, too. That’s why you lived in the home with the holy women, isn’t that right?”

Holy women? Rector frowned, then said, “Oh, yeah. The nuns. I lived in the Catholic home, that’s right.”

Houjin cocked his head and stared at Rector in a calculating fashion. “You must have been a baby when the Blight came.”

Rector cleared his throat. His voice was coming back. “Not sure. Don’t remember. But they tell me I’m eighteen, so I had to leave the home and make my own way.”

Nodding earnestly, Houjin said, “I’m not eighteen yet, but I make my own way.”

“You have a job?”

“I work on an airship. I’m learning to navigate, and maintain the engines. I want to be an engineer. Sometimes here in the city I work with the men at the Station, and Yaozu pays me to fix things. And sometimes I translate.”

Slowly, Rector propped himself more fully upright. “You mean, Chinese to English? That kind of thing?”

“There’s more than one kind of Chinese, you know. I speak a couple of them, good enough to go back and forth. And my Portuguese is good—better than my Spanish, but I’m learning. And I’m interested in French, too. I went to New Orleans a few months ago. Lots of people there speak French.”

“You’re a regular ol’ dictionary, ain’t you?”

“I like to talk. I like to learn different ways to talk. That’s all.”

Rector felt it’d be polite to throw the younger boy a bone. “You’re real good at it. You’ve hardly got a China accent at all.”

“Captain Cly says I’ve been losing more of my accent the more time I spend on the Naamah Darling. And the longer I spend around Zeke.”

“What’s a—”

Rector almost asked what a Naamah Darling was, but two things stopped him. First, his addled brain caught up to the fact that it must be the airship on which Houjin served. Second, his attention tripped over the word Zeke. So he asked, to make sure he’d heard correctly. “Zeke?”