The Vitruvian Boy, or Adventures in the Last Steam Colony

Chapter 2

Dart’s clothes fit oddly on Keiro. The rough canvas shirt felt tight at his shoulders, and the trousers were short at the ankles. The boots that Dart gave him were too large and Keiro had to lace them up tight to keep them in place. The leather, military-style coat that he donned had several missing buttons and patches in the elbows. Everything had clearly been worn many times in the past, and Keiro felt clumsy and restricted in the clothes. Long coat tail will hinder kicks—sleeves will lessen force of punch impact—shoes increase chance of tripping or stumbling by 30%.

“Do you have anything that fits?” Keiro said as Dart came up from another pile of clothes with a pair of dusty goggles.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Dart answered and hung the goggles around his own neck. Where the goggles rested, the thief’s skin was wrinkled and pale like an old man’s finger had crept up his neck from beneath the collar of his shirt. Scar—a mark left on body tissue where a burn has not healed and fibrous connective tissue has developed. “You’re lucky I have anything that fits you at all. Half this stuff I had to patch together myself.”

Judging by the gloves Dart was pulling on now, this was true. The leather fingers had been hacked off and the oversized palms had been inexpertly stitched together to fit Dart’s hands. The thief jammed on a pair of boots at least as big as Keiro’s own, and then he rummaged behind one pile of books to pull out a small tin safe. The safe had no lock on it, but it had rusted enough that Dart had to pry the lid open. Inside, there were a few objects—a gold chain, several worn playing cards, a glass eye, and a handful of small metal chips—credits—money, Keiro’s information stream told him.

Dart grimaced, pocketing the credits, and stuffed the safe back behind the books. Then he stood back to survey the map that covered one wall. “If we’re going to see the Inkers, we’ll have to go this way…” he mumbled to himself, tracing a line from a section of the map labeled “The Walled City” to an area at the other end of the map called “Segu Style District.”

“You don’t know where it is?” Keiro asked. From Dart’s speech earlier and the thief’s own odd tattoo, he had assumed Dart knew the Inkers.

“I do,” Dart said, eyes still on the map. He grinned. “But we’ll have to take a slightly different route to get there today.” He didn’t elaborate on the reason. “Ready to go?” he asked and opened the door, stepping outside.

On Keiro’s first trip into the Walled City, he had been close to unconsciousness from lack of water and food, and an overload of senses. This time around, he felt more clear-headed. He found that he could ignore the constant information streaming into his mind if he concentrated on observing the specifics around him—the rusted walls around him—made of aluminium and steel alloy—their current location—average 4 stories above ground level or 32 feet or 9.7 metres. He found that if he watched where he stepped and followed Dart, he could reduce the information stream to a buzz in the back of his mind.

“Don’t get lost,” Dart said as he led Keiro down the corridors and stairs. “It could take weeks to find you again in here.”

The building was huge and didn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason to order its corridors and stairwells. There were no windows at all, but Keiro could hear the reverberating drip-drip-drip of water even though he couldn’t tell where all the sounds came from. Occasionally, he heard vague echoes of voices down the corridors, behind doors, and between the walls. Lightbulbs flickered on and off where they jutted out from random nooks and crannies in the walls. Sometimes, Keiro felt like he was being watched. Once, he glimpsed a pair of eyes behind a dirty glass window set in a corridor, but whoever was watching them disappeared from sight as soon as Keiro noticed him. It set his nerves on edge to feel people all around him, and yet, was unable to see any of them.