“Sheriff Wilkes’s son. He’s the only other person down here who isn’t old enough to be my father. He says he knew you, in the Outskirts. He’s the one who told me you’d lived in the home, with the church women.”

“He told you…?”

“We go exploring inside the city all the time, but he hurt his leg out on Denny Hill, and now everyone says we have to be more careful. You can come out with us, if you want, when you feel better. Some of the old houses up there still have valuable things inside. Useful things, anyway. Sometimes. Not always…” His voice trailed off as if he were thinking of a few things in particular, but then it picked up again. “We have to look out for rotters, and for Yaozu’s men, if we get too close to the Station and we’re not supposed to be there. But mostly if you’re quiet, nobody bothers you. And no thing bothers you, either.”

“Zeke,” Rector said again. He wasn’t sure what to add.

“He’s around—do you want me to go get him? He’s been looking in on you, hoping you’d wake up. I know Zeke didn’t have an easy time, being Blue’s son; but he said you weren’t bad to him. I know you were dealing sap out there, and that you ran around with crooks, but Zeke said you’re the one who told him how to get inside.”

“He was … he was an all right kid,” Rector said, his words still dragging. He didn’t want to ask all the obvious questions, because the answers were obvious, too. And he didn’t want to say anything stupid to this Chinaboy because even though he was just some Chinaboy, he sounded awful damn smart, and Rector had a long-standing policy of being nice to smart people, in case they could be useful to him later.

So he didn’t ask any of the things he wanted to ask. And he didn’t say any of the things that were swelling up inside his stomach, all the memories of ghosts and dreams of phantoms, and the horrible haunting he’d undergone at the hands of Zeke.

Well, he thought it was Zeke. But that wasn’t possible, was it?

Zeke is alive. Or else this kid is crazy.

He strongly suspected that Houjin wasn’t crazy. To prove it, he told Houjin, “I’d like to see Zeke, sure. It would be nice to see a familiar face.”

“Great!” he said brightly. “Maybe you’d like some food, too—does that sound good? There’s a kitchen on the next floor down. Do you want to get up and come with me? If Zeke’s not there, he’s out at the fort.”