“Well, don’t.” Rector straightened himself up and prayed for a nice soft feather bed, but told God he’d settle for enough energy to make it to this crazy train station. “Let’s go, if we’re going.”

Houjin crouched and used his hand to push down a loose floorboard. A trapdoor lid came aside, and under it were lanterns. “All right, but take one of these. You probably won’t need one, but you never know.”

Zeke agreed. “Always better to have one, just in case.”

“You two carry them. I can barely carry myself.”

“Have it your way,” Houjin said, missing a measure of his usual levity. “I don’t know how long you plan to survive down here. We do look after our own, but like Miss Lucy says, the Lord helps those who help themselves.”

Rector sniffed. “I’ll help myself just as soon as I can breathe without hurting and walk without fainting, thank you very much. Four days,” he reminded them both. “I spent four days down on my back. Give me half that to get myself back up.”

Zeke said, “That sounds fair.”

“You’re easier on him than you ought to be.” Houjin handed Zeke a lantern and took one for himself. He fished a box of matches out of his pocket and tried to strike one. “Yaozu isn’t so generous.”

“You act like this fellow is some kind of bogeyman.”

Houjin stopped fiddling with the match and squinted through his visor. “What’s a bogeyman?”

Zeke said, “A monster, sort of. Something that comes for you at night after you go to bed.”

Houjin gave this some consideration, and told him, “Maybe that was it—the monster that chased you into the chuckhole. Maybe it was a bogeyman.”

“It wasn’t a bogeyman,” Rector mumbled unhappily, now wishing he hadn’t said anything at all about the thing he’d run from, or mentioned the bogeyman, either, since Houjin was obviously testing out this new English word and having fun with it. “There ain’t no such thing.”

“Something chased you into the chuckhole? Was it a rotter?”

“No.”

And in this way, Rector found himself telling the story to Zeke, just like he’d already told it to Houjin and to Angeline. He relayed it haltingly, stopping often to catch his breath as they went deeper into the building’s interior; and he continued telling it as they took a ladder up one last story to the roof (it was a ladder, not stairs, as Huey was fast to point out). He was finished with the highlights by the time they stood on the roof, testing out the long, narrow bridge that spanned the distance to the third floor of a hotel across the alley below.

Zeke put a foot on the bridge and shoved. It creaked, but didn’t sag.

“Are you sure it’ll hold us?”