“People still live there, underground. It’s … complicated. They’ve got this wall around it, and a crazy system of air tubes and vents, and filters, and whatnot.”

“And this woman of his, she lives there?” she asked without really meaning to. She didn’t care. She wasn’t even curious. She wasn’t sure why she’d pressed the issue.

“Her, and her son. She’s a widow.”

“Is she—” Josephine wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask. “—good for him?” she finished weakly.

“I don’t know, I’ve barely met her. He sure likes her a lot, and that’s what’s important, as far as I’m concerned. He’s got this plan to set up an airyard dock inside the city wall. The people who live there are willing to pay him to maintain it.”

“Why?” she asked. It was a why that applied to any number of questions she couldn’t yet formulate more specifically.

“It’s hard for them to keep contact with the outside world. It’s practically a secret, them living there. They like to be left alone; to their own devices, if you know what I mean. They don’t bother nobody, and they don’t want anybody bothering them. But sometimes they need supplies. They need to send letters or messages. Things like that.”

“And if Cly does this, if he starts a business there — he’ll live there, too, and marry this woman?”

“Yeah, I’d say he’ll marry her if she’ll have him.” Then he turned the conversation just a notch to the right, in exactly the direction Josephine didn’t want him to go. “You and him — the captain, I mean. There’s history there, ain’t that right?”

“He told you?”

“He mentioned it. Didn’t say much, except that it was years ago, and it didn’t work out.”

She only just noticed that he almost never blinked. “That’s about right.”

Kirby Troost, still mostly unblinking, said, “I can see it.”

“See what? Andan and me?”

The shadow of a smile tugged at the corner of his lip. “Yeah. I can see it. Not exactly two of a kind, but I suppose — given what I’ve heard — he’s got a certain type he prefers.”

“And you think I fit that type?”

“Smart and tough. You’re taller, though. Taller than Miss Wilkes.”

“I thought you said she was a widow.”

“I did, but it’s complicated.”

“So complicated, you call her miss?”

“Complicated enough. We mostly call her ma’am. She’s a yitty-bitty thing. A little smaller than me, even. But I don’t know too many men who’d argue with her, push come to shove. That’s what I mean, about him having a type. Not many men argue with you, either.”

The back door squeaked open, and before Josephine even noticed him reaching for it, Kirby Troost was holding a six-shooter primed and ready. Upon seeing Cly and Houjin, he lowered it and tucked it back into his belt.

“Cap’n,” he said. “You’ve got a visitor.”

“Josephine,” he greeted her with a nod. “Something I can do for you?”

“A word in private, if you please.”

The oriental boy’s face constricted into a sneaky grin, as if he looked forward to embarrassing the captain with this moment later on — but it would wait. He opened his mouth to say something, but Cly didn’t give him time.

“Huey, you and Kirby stay close.”

Kirby Troost said, “Great.”

To which the captain said, “You can teach him to play cards if you want. Just keep each other out of trouble, will you? Josie, how about we go out back and walk along the river.”

“That sounds fine,” she told him stiffly, and she followed him as he went back out the way he’d come in, holding the door for her and — like his engineer — shutting it firmly and quickly as soon as they were through it.

Down along the river, there was a path built on old railroad ties and bleached-bone boards pounded into the mud. They walked slowly along this, going nowhere in particular, unwilling to look at each other.

After a minute or two of unhurried shuffling, he finally asked, “What do you want, Josie? Or what do you need? Why’d you come all the way back out here from the Quarter?” His words were tense, like he was afraid to hear the answer.

“It’s about the zombis, Andan.”

That caught him off guard. Whatever he’d been expecting or fearing, this wasn’t it. “The what now?”

“Zombis. That’s what we call them here, though you must have a different word for them in Seattle.”

“In Seattle?”

“The walking dead, Andan.”

“Yeah.” He scratched at the back of his neck, feeling the sweat already gathering there, from the warm wet air by the river and from the company, as well. “We’ve got some of those. We call them rotters. I don’t think there’s any real word for them. They aren’t like animals, or bugs — we don’t have scientists falling all over themselves to catalog ’em.”

“Madame Laveau calls them zombis, and she’s the only woman on earth who seems able to control them at all.”

“Laveau? The Queen? Hot damn, is she still alive?”

“Yes, dear,” Josephine said without thinking; the phrase simply fell out of her mouth. “She’s still alive, and she’s brought me a Texas Ranger who thinks he knows what’s making them. She wants me to work with him.” She sighed.

“What’s the Queen got to do with the dead things? You said she controls them? Maybe they aren’t the same problem we’ve got. Ours don’t answer to anybody,” he replied, but he didn’t sound certain. Suddenly he added, “Come to think of it, I’ve seen them answer to a machine. My buddy Jerry, he has this gun he calls Daisy — and it shoots a big gong of sound. It stuns them into holding still, but only for a few minutes.”

Josephine remembered watching Marie Laveau clang her cane against the lamppost. That was the same thing in its way, wasn’t it? A big gong of sound? She did not believe in coincidences, so she filed this information away. “I need you to tell me about them, Andan. Tell me everything you know.”

He did.

It came out haltingly, as he fumbled around the conversation — trying to spare her the things she already knew, and pass along only what was helpful. Much of what he told her was truly revolutionary, particularly one important point confirming what the Ranger had told her: One way or another, the zombis, or rotters, or whatever they were … they originated in the walled-up, poisoned city.

Seattle was the source. Seattle was the problem.

“No,” he corrected her when she said as much aloud. “People like me, we’re the problem. We moved the gas out, so the chemists could turn it into sap. We spread the poison around because we’ve been paid well to do so, but that shouldn’t have mattered. We shouldn’t have done it.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself. All of us, everywhere, everything we do … it hurts someone, someplace. I’m convinced of it.”

“That’s a god-awful philosophy, Josie.”

“It’s not a philosophy; it’s an observation.”

But privately she could only agree. She also understood that his desire to settle down and do something else had as much to do with someone named Briar up in the Washington Territories as it did with his own guilt.

She briefly considered bringing up this Briar person, then felt silly for the impulse. It didn’t matter. When this was over, and Ganymede was in the appropriate hands, she and Cly would go their separate ways on the same grand scale as before, and that would be the end of it.

Sentimentality would do neither of them any good. She fought it hard, and turned it off, and walked beside him without thinking about how much she’d once enjoyed doing so.

She did not think about how much it’d warmed her, and been an odd source of pride, to roam with the giant pirate whom no one ever stopped or bothered, or assaulted or robbed, or even questioned — no matter how softly he spoke or how friendly his words. She did not recall how she’d appreciated his strength, even seeing it used against others when he’d fight for money in the ring, and she refused to consider for even a moment how she’d lengthened the bed they’d so often shared in order to make him more comfortable.