A man from the squad stepped forward. His uniform’s adornments identified him as an officer. He looked over Charlotte and then took a much longer time assessing Grave.
“These are the two we’ve been looking for,” the officer said. “Lewis. Chapman. See to it that these men receive their reward. The squad will escort the prisoners to their cells.”
“Pardon me, sir,” Wallace cut in.
The officer pivoted, his expression making it clear he found being addressed by the bounty hunter very distasteful.
Wallace noticed the officer’s disposition as well and ducked his head in respect. “You’ll see that I have a contraption on the girl’s neck. To keep her in line.”
“Yes,” the officer replied.
“It’s just that it’s quite an expensive device.” Wallace tugged at his shirt collar. “If I could take it off . . . I have the key right here.”
He pulled a minuscule silver key from his vest pocket.
“Hand it over.” The officer reached for the key. “And give me the chain.”
With some reluctance, Wallace relinquished the key and the chain.
“The collar will be returned to you once the prisoner is secure,” the officer told Wallace.
“Of course, sir.” Wallace cleared his throat. “Might I have your name in case I need to inquire as to your whereabouts?”
The officer’s heavy brow creased with irritation. “Bristow. Major Bristow.”
“Much obliged, Major.” Wallace bowed, making it clear that he rarely had occasion to do so.
Had Charlotte not been gagged, she would have pleaded for the collar to be removed. The squad, numerous and armed as they were with sabers and rifles, posed enough of a threat that any attempt at escape would have been suicidal. The collar’s weight on her neck sapped her strength, a constant reminder of what could happen if the device were activated. But for now she was at the mercy of Major Bristow.
“Form up!”
The squad snapped to attention at Bristow’s command. The group divided, half of the soldiers forming ranks in front of Charlotte and Grave, and the others behind them. The major stayed at Charlotte’s side.
“Forward!”
They began to march. Charlotte had to walk quickly to match the swift, snapping steps of the squad. They’d reached the end of the docks when two sharp rifle reports sounded. Charlotte twisted her neck toward the sound. The soldiers at her back partially blocked her view, but she thought she saw Wallace and Cooper lying on the dock with the soldiers, Lewis and Chapman, standing over them.
“Eyes ahead,” Major Bristow said to Charlotte. “With that Ribbon around your neck, the last thing you want to do is stumble.”
Charlotte complied. It seemed incongruous to pity her one-time captors, but Charlotte couldn’t rejoice in Wallace and Cooper’s fate. Promised fortune, they’d unwittingly brought on their own demise. The Empire’s swift, cruel execution of the two bounty hunters wasn’t all that troubled Charlotte. Their deaths meant that capturing Charlotte and Grave hadn’t been enough. They also wanted to keep the whereabouts of their prisoners a secret, so much so that assurances Wallace and Cooper might have offered to keep silent wouldn’t have been enough. All of these things offered clues as to the fate that awaited Charlotte and Grave, but Charlotte couldn’t yet discern what that might be.
She did know where they were going. She’d known from the moment she’d spied the burned coast. As special punishment for Boston’s role in fomenting the War for Independence, after the entire city had been razed, the Empire had erected the primary internment structure in the colonies: the Crucible. Of all the horrors evoked by the Empire, the Crucible was counted among the worst. Charlotte had never heard it spoken of except in fear. The Crucible was a place that devoured hope. And now she would be locked away inside it. The prison occupied the one-time site of Faneuil Hall, where a skirmish the Revolutionaries had named the Boston Massacre took place. Rallying cries about the unjust deaths of the five men who’d fallen there helped to create a surge of colonial unrest, and eventually the outbreak of war. The placement of the Crucible served as a cruel joke, the fate of Boston demonstrating what a true massacre looked like.
The march from the harbor to the Crucible was brief. Charlotte could hear the place before she laid eyes on it. From the shoreline, she caught the sounds of a steady thrumming, deep groans, and the anguished grind of metal on metal. Then the prison itself was rising before her. A feat of engineering on which the Empire prided itself, the Crucible was constructed of individual iron cubes, each just large enough to accommodate a man. The cubes were grouped in clusters of four with each one fixed onto a joint with a swivel hinge. The joint connected via a long steel arm to a central axis around which the clusters orbited. As the inner axis turned, the swivel hinges of each cluster turned. In addition to turning, the Crucible’s arms also rose and descended from the central axis. The Crucible was in near-constant motion, slow but inexorable, controlled from one of the guard towers that ringed the structure. Its movement was halted only to accommodate the entrances and exits of guards and officers.
But before the Crucible stopped for their party, they would witness another mockery of the Resistance. Once she had realized where they were being taken, Charlotte had expected her captors would parade them past the Hanging Tree, but she still wasn’t prepared for the stark horror of it. The Hanging Tree wasn’t a living thing—after Boston had been burned over, the earth was salted, barren. Instead, the British had erected a tree of their own, a blasphemous replica of the stately elm that patriots had dubbed the Liberty Tree. While the Empire’s tree had been forged from metal like the trees of New York’s Iron Forest, the similarities between the two sculptures ended there. The Hanging Tree had a hulking trunk of black iron and thick, twisting branches that gave the appearance of forced contortion in their spread rather than nimble grace. The matte black of cold iron made it seem as if the tree still bore scars of the fires that consumed Boston, the trunk and limbs forever charred.
As much as the iron body of the Hanging Tree evoked dread, the sight of strange, gilded fruit hanging from its branches proved far worse, burrowing into Charlotte’s mind to leave an indelible, sickening image. If the razing of Boston had served to demonstrate the breadth of the Empire’s vengeance, the Hanging Tree bespoke its cruel precision.
The severed heads of America’s Revolutionary heroes, encased in gold, dangled from the black limbs. These eternal death masks glittered in a mockery of the patriots’ sacrifice. Charlotte recognized a few of the visages, those features familiar from portraits she’d studied alongside the lessons in Revolutionary history that all children of the Resistance memorized. The noble George Washington and his celebrated officer, Nathanael Green. Charlotte could identify Christopher Gadsden only because whoever had cast his head in gold had, in a cruel twist of humor, added a brass and iron rattlesnake that curled around what was left of Gadsden’s neck.
As their line trudged past the tree, Charlotte saw that a ribbon had been tied around the forehead of Patrick Henry, with the words DEATH IT IS crudely scrawled on the silk. She turned her gaze away from the awful monument and snuck a glance at Grave. His eyes were fixed upon the tree. He frowned as they passed by, but his expression was more puzzled than troubled.
Charlotte felt an unexpected pang of disappointment, but quickly chided herself. After all, what meaning could the Hanging Tree have for Grave? He hadn’t been raised in the Resistance. No stories had been repeated to him that would have instilled a reverence for the men whose dignity the iron tree so blatantly violated.
The squad came to a halt at a gatehouse that stood in front of the Crucible. The guard inside exited the small structure and saluted Major Bristow, then returned to his station and picked up a speaking tube. Moments later, a bellow like the sound of a giant’s hunting horn rattled Charlotte to her bones. The Crucible slowed to a stop.
&
nbsp; The gatehouse guard reappeared. He had bundles of black cloth in his hands.
“The hoods,” the guard said to Major Bristow.
Bristow nodded, and before Charlotte realized what was happening, the guard was in front of her and her world was enveloped in darkness. An arm hooked under each of her shoulders, and she was dragged forward. Because the threat of her escape was nil, Charlotte decided that temporarily blinding captives must be a measure taken to keep secret the means of entering and exiting the Crucible’s cells. The thud of boots on packed ash transformed to a dull ring as she was pulled upward. Her toes bumped against metal stairs. As she was carried, it occurred to Charlotte that the hood prevented her from knowing where Grave was, whether he’d be placed in a cell near hers or somewhere far away. There would be no companionship in the Crucible. No commiserating or plotting.
The whine of metal hinges in need of oiling came from somewhere in front of Charlotte. Her feet no longer knocked against steps, instead sliding on a flat surface. The guards holding Charlotte halted, and she returned to bearing her own weight. Someone pulled the hood from her head, but her surroundings became only slightly brighter. She’d been taken to one of the cells. It was a small, square space. Big enough for a tall man to lie down in, but not much more.
One of the guards cut the ropes binding her, and Major Bristow stepped forward to insert the tiny key into the collar. Charlotte heard a soft click, and the collar loosened. Bristow took the collar and wound up the chain. He didn’t say anything before he left the cell. The guards followed. She turned to watch them leave. One of the guards tossed a skin of water toward Charlotte. It hit the floor close to where she stood.
An order, or an act of mercy?
Charlotte thought it more likely the former, given the strictures of this place.
The door closed, and she was alone. Charlotte sat down, staring at the locked door. The skin of water lay untouched beside her feet. She heard a rumbling and then a grinding. The Crucible began to move.
11.
THE METALLIC PUNGENCY of Charlotte’s surroundings spilled into all of her senses, as though she had bits of copper and brass resting on her tongue. Worse than the taste of metal was the ceaseless vibration of her cell. As the Crucible turned on its axis and her cell swung on its hinge, Charlotte’s body could never rest. Though the movement was slow, it couldn’t be ignored and crept inside her so that her entire being felt as though it was being shaken, gently, but without pause. Thus far sleep had been impossible. The only comfort Charlotte found was in laying her fingers against her neck and remembering she was free of the Parisian Ribbon. Its absence still brought her small relief.
Watery daylight filtered into the space through slits on the wall, slim gashes in the steel just below the ceiling. Charlotte wondered if total darkness would have caused greater torment. More fear, certainly. But she suspected that these bare openings, allowing only a trickle of fresh air and shreds of sunlight into the cramped space, induced more agony by reminding the imprisoned of an outside world from which they’d been torn and to which they’d likely never return.
Will I ever return?
Never having had so much time to ponder her own demise, Charlotte now considered her possible fates in the starkest of terms. Death? Likely. Torture? Very likely. She might even count herself lucky if the former happened without any of the latter.
Charlotte shunted aside the notion of escape, at least for the time being. The Crucible’s fearsome reputation derived in no small part from the fact that not a soul had ever escaped its mechanized cubes. Those who entered the Crucible were not seen again, except for the occasional gilded head added to the macabre ornaments of the Hanging Tree. Even if others had found ways out of these cells, Charlotte didn’t have any of the tools needed to effect an escape. She still wore her nightdress, its hem black with grime after the journey. The soles of her feet were the same shade, and dirt had caked beneath her fingernails. Unpleasant as it was, Charlotte wouldn’t waste precious water for washing.
A night and a day had passed, but no one had brought food. The Crucible had not once stopped moving. Though it was hard to judge by what little light entered her cell, Charlotte surmised that it was late afternoon. Soon enough she would be engulfed in darkness and pass another night bereft of sleep while hunger pangs stabbed her.
Better to have no food than no water.
A bellow from outside the Crucible echoed within Charlotte’s cell. She clapped her hands over her ears to block the pain of the blast. Only when the sound had faded did Charlotte take her hands away. Her body was still humming from the vibrations of the cell, but she knew the Crucible had stopped moving. Though it felt pitiful, she couldn’t suppress the desperate hope that a guard would bring her something to eat. Anything.
The sounds of boots on metal came to her softly at first and then grew louder. She heard men’s voices, though she couldn’t make out their words. A slot opened on her cell door.
“Stay against the wall, prisoner.”
Very little of Charlotte’s cramped cell was not against a wall, but she shrank into a corner as best she could.
The door opened, and a man entered her cell. In the dim light, Charlotte couldn’t make out his features.
“This won’t do,” he said. “Bring a lantern.”
“Yes, sir.”
Charlotte’s pulse skipped. There was something about the man who was in her cell. His voice.
He spoke again. “Give her the bread.”
Another man came into the cell and set a bundle in front of Charlotte. She snatched it up, unfolding the cloth to reveal the loaf inside. She forced herself to tear off only a small chunk and chew it slowly, though she was mad to rip the bread apart and wolf down great hunks. She took a sip of water before tearing off a bit more of the loaf to eat.
The first guard had returned with the lantern. He handed it to the man, who watched Charlotte as she ate. Charlotte’s attention was consumed by her appetite, so it wasn’t until she swallowed that she looked up.
The bread fell from her hands.
Her mouth opened, but words died in her throat.
Coe set the lantern on the floor. “I’m told the bounty hunters didn’t harm you when you were taken. Is that true?”
Charlotte couldn’t nod. She couldn’t move.
Her mind refused to accept what her eyes saw, nor could she reconcile the contradiction between the real concern she’d heard in his voice with his shocking appearance. Coe wore the uniform of his office: Commodore Winter of the Imperial Air Force. She’d seen him dressed this way before, and yet now it was different. He was different. His bearing. The tension bleeding off him as he glanced toward the cell door.
Charlotte grappled with her thoughts, searching for an explanation other than the one manifesting starkly before her.
Coe was the turncoat.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Charlotte. Please believe that.”
Coe was speaking, but Charlotte could barely understand him. The bread she’d just eaten rolled around in her stomach.
“There are many things I hope you’ll come to understand,” Coe said.
Charlotte hadn’t planned to attack Coe. She simply did. Her muscles bunched, and she launched herself off the wall with a shriek. She took Coe by surprise, and when her body rammed into his, he stumbled back but he didn’t fall. Instantly, three guards were in the room. Two of them grabbed Charlotte and hauled her away from Coe. The third aimed his rifle at her chest.
“No!” Coe started toward them.
“Stand down, all of you.” The voice emanated from a silhouette in the doorway. The man was shadowed, his face masked by darkness, but Charlotte saw that he was very tall with broad square shoulders. Despite the noise of the scuffle, he hadn’t shouted, yet his words seemed to resonate through the cell.
The guards who’d accosted Charlotte reacted instan
tly, almost jumping back as they released her. Coe’s response was likewise physical and visceral; he stood at attention, chest lifted, one hand raised in a salute as the heels of his boots snapped together.
The man stepped out of the obscuring dimness, revealing dress that bespoke authority. His navy blue coat was embroidered with gold and adorned with an epaulette. Stars had been stitched onto the shoulder piece, denoting the officer’s rank.
Admiral.
Any questions Charlotte had as to this man’s identity were dispelled by his features. His face was a weathered reflection of characteristics she’d come to know as those of Coe and Jack, though she could see immediately that Coe bore a stronger resemblance to Admiral Winter while Jack favored their mother. Charlotte even caught a ghost of Linnet in the height and sharpness of her father’s cheekbones.
Admiral Winter had dark mahogany hair shot through with silver. His bicorne was tucked under his arm.
“At ease.” His second order prompted the other soldiers to drop their salutes, but none of them appeared to relax in the least.
The admiral’s gaze fell upon Charlotte, lingered there but a moment, then turned into a scowl when he looked at Coe.
“Considering the ruckus I heard from outside, one would think you had a formidable adversary in this cell,” Admiral Winter said. “And yet the only prisoner I see is this girl. Tell me, Commodore, how is it that you allowed your captive to attack you?”
Coe understood his father didn’t want an answer and looked at the floor in shame.
“Perhaps I underestimate your foe.” Admiral Winter turned his attention back to Charlotte. “Lady Marshall’s reputation does precede her.”
Charlotte refused to quail under the officer’s scrutiny and answered his hawklike gaze with a steady glare. Something that might have been amusement flickered in Admiral Winter’s eyes. He smiled.
“Courage or bravado?”
The Turncoat's Gambit Page 7