If a good idea was fuel to make Houjin run, then a good question served as the brakes. He stood stock-still, and Rector could almost see the gears turning between his ears. “That’s hard to say. I don’t think anyone’s ever studied it, like a scientist counting birds or drawing plants. But it’s definitely different. Take the birds, for example.”

“The birds?”

“The crows. We have hundreds, maybe thousands, inside the walls. Their eyes turned a funny color—a weird shade of orange, kind of like your hair. But other than that, they seem all right. And the rats … we used to have rats, but the Blight kept them from making baby rats, or that’s what Dr. Minnericht said. So after a couple of years, there were no more rats.”

“Weird,” Rector observed.

The hike down to the kitchen was hard, but Rector made it without too much wheezing—then realized upon arrival that he was so appallingly hungry that he could scarcely eat anything at all. It was an unusual sensation for someone who’d spent his life leaning against the edge of hunger, and he wondered if this wasn’t a case of simply being too tired to eat.

He ate anyway.

In the large, carefully lit kitchen he gnawed on salmon jerky while Houjin rifled through the drawers, cabinets, and boxes for foods which would be good for somebody on the road to recovery. A great deal of dried fruit was on the menu—mostly apples and berries—but there were also cloth-wrapped hunks of bread, and a knifeful of fresh butter that tasted so good it made his eyes water. And he found his jar of pickles too, already opened but mostly full.

As he nibbled, he listened to Houjin natter on about the comings and goings of the underground, and the Doornails, and the residents of Chinatown, and Yaozu’s men, who clustered around the old King Street Station. Rector knew he would only retain fragments of what he heard, but he didn’t mind; it was nice to have an excuse to be quiet and think about things he dare not say aloud.

First and foremost: Zeke was alive. So had there ever been a ghost?

He narrowed his eyes and chewed thoughtfully, pretending to listen. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen or heard from the ghost since waking up. Granted, that was less than an hour of ghost-free awake-time, but still, it felt significant.

A brief, spontaneous thought flew out of his mouth, interrupting whatever anecdote Houjin was passing along. “Hey, how long was I out cold?”

Houjin paused mid-sentence, calculated, and said, “It’s been four days since you fell down the chuckhole.”