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above those walls, new sections of street-level buildings must be sealed against the blight.”
    “Gotcha.”
    “Also, if we expand and fix this passage, we could turn one of the offshoot basements into another pump room.”
    “Do we need another pump room? The air’s plenty breathable down here.”
    “So far,” Yaozu agreed, “but in the last few weeks, the workers have been keeping longer hours, and more coal is being used to power the pumps. My engineers suggest that it’s a maintenance issue. Therefore, I wish to invest in maintenance procedures. I want to clean the pump tubes, all two to three hundred feet of them, one after another.”
    Cly made a low, worried whistle. “That sounds like a big job.”
    “Yes—a job that will require the pumps to be shut down for cleaning, one at a time. But before we can begin such a chore, supplementary pumps must be operational. Do you understand?”
    “I do,” he said thoughtfully. Then he stopped and said, “And this must be the brick pile.”
    Yaozu nodded. “You first? Since you’re holding the light.”
    They scaled the bricks and slid down the other side. Cly dusted off his pants and observed, “The kind of thing you’re talking about … big renovations, big improvements … is going to take time. And money.”
    “Money we have, and time, too—though less of the latter than the former.”
    The path split before them, and Yaozu urged Andan Cly down the right fork.
    “How much time?”
    “Impossible to say. The tubes and pumps have held for years, and might hold for years to come. Or they might not.”
    “What about those engineers you mentioned?” Cly asked. “Can they give you a better idea?”
    “They’re trying, but they are new to the city and still learning the finer points of its workings. I have recruited them with generous paychecks. And I am trusting your confidence on this matter when I tell you—” He paused and looked up into the giant’s face. “—I’m burning through Minnericht’s coffers at a rather alarming rate. He left a fortune, of course. He hoarded it like a dragon, underneath King Street Station. But it is costing a fortune to keep this place livable.”
    The captain asked, “Then why are you going to all this trouble? Does the sap really make that much money, to make it all worth this?”
    A thin, slow smile spread across Yaozu’s face, and it was not entirely pleasant. “Oh, yes . And the potential for more money still is staggering . The gas—this punishing, brutal substance that killed the city above us—it offers us the means to save it. With better processing and more efficient means of survival underground, these doornails”—he used the white men’s slang for the underground citizens—“could make more money than Californians have ever dug out of their rocks.”
    “And you.”
    “Me?”
    “You stand to make a bundle, too, don’t you?”
    “Absolutely. But as I was sometimes forced to wonder, with regards to my former … employer, what does it profit a man to be wealthy, but to live in the midst of such…” He hunted for a word, and settled on one. “Instability? It was obscene to me, how much he could have done for this place—and how little interest he showed in doing so.”
    “So why don’t you make your money and leave? With what’s left of Minnericht’s stash, you could live like a king outside these walls. Everybody knows it. Everybody wonders.”
    “Everybody knows it?” Yaozu asked, his understated smile fixed in place. “I wonder what else everybody knows.” He gazed down the pathway and once more struck out for it. “But to answer your question, I stay here because I want to. I like this settlement where a man like me, or like you”—he gestured one long hand toward Cly’s chest—“can live undisturbed by others.”
    “But I don’t live here.”
    “You could if you wished; you’d fit right in. Perhaps,” he said, watching Cly duck to dodge a low-hanging support beam,