by Carrie Patel
At some point, she felt her neck moist with tears.
She must have endured this ritual a dozen or so times before Geist tugged at her elbow.
“We must go,” he said. The others split up and took off, perched upon the cycles from the wall.
Malone brushed at the dampness on her neck. Geist saw her examining her wet fingertips. “You do a great thing with us,” he said. “They honor you.”
But she was too embarrassed to ask why. Besides, it felt wrong to celebrate, with Lachesse and the others dead and with Jane and Arnault still so far away.
She followed Geist to the row of cycles. “What happens if Arnault does reach this vault?”
“The greater problem is what happens after. I told you the vault is the place of an ancient cure, yes? Some believe it holds much more. Weapons. Knowledge. Ancient means of considerable potency.”
“Some believe,” Malone echoed. “But you don’t.”
He pulled a cycle from the wall and swung a leg over the frame. “I do not know, and I do not wish to take the chance. Besides, if others believe, then what does it matter if these things are not there? The gouverneurs will tell the people what they want to hear, und the people will believe. They will spend boocoo blood, time, and money on the campaign und on the appearance of progress.”
There was something Malone was missing – she felt its absence like a hole in her pockets. “What campaign?”
An uncomfortable silence followed. Geist balanced on the cycle with only his toes touching the ground. “The campaign to destroy Salvage und the Pest – the buried cities,” he said.
Malone blinked. “What? Why would–”
He scowled at his handlebars. “This disease I explained to you? The one that destroyed your civilization und nearly destroyed ours? You created it, with unnatural medicine und grotesque experiments. You–” He broke off. “Forgive me. I know this was not your doing, but that of your ancestors.” He sighed. “You see how contagious this manner of thinking becomes.”
Malone thought back to the early discomfort Geist’s crew had displayed around her. “But why destroy us now? That was, what, hundreds of years ago?”
Geist’s laugh had a vicious edge to it. “Only hundreds, I should say. Such time feels long, perhaps, when you have no history. But we have held on to the things we remember. I told you things have not been so good here, ya? Difficult problems with more difficult solutions. They divide us. But uniting people against a common enemy? That is easy.”
Malone took a deep breath. She smelled a familiar scent of musk and amber. For a moment, she wondered if some of Lady Lachesse’s perfume had rubbed off on her, but there was no way it could have survived her dive into the sea.
“Why tell me now?” she asked. “If you wanted my help against a threat to the buried cities, why not tell me what was at stake when you picked me up?”
He laughed again, and this time he actually sounded amused. “We liberated you from a gibbet, Malone. I was knowing little of your circumstances or temperament. Maybe you would have been happy to see the ruin of the ones who hanged you! Und even if not, would it not have sounded as though I was telling you wass you wanted to hear? Would you have esteemed me?”
She probably wouldn’t have, and she might not even now, except for the rigid horror she saw on Chernev’s face as he pulled a cycle free, the red shame creeping up his neck as he pretended not to eavesdrop.
And then there was the coastal wall and the arsenal of airships. She could easily believe that a people who built those things had both the will and the means to lay waste to Recoletta and the other buried cities.
Her pulse beat faster. “Then why are we chasing Arnault? We should go straight to the vault. Demolish it.”
Geist’s eyebrows rose in amusement. “The vault is impermeable. It cannot be destroyed.”
“Anything can be destroyed.” Malone thought back to Sato, threatening the Library with his strange, unquenchable fire.
“Not by means at our disposal,” Geist said. “Besides, a person such as Roman is much easier to destroy.”
Unease festered inside her. She considered the cycles and the leather-wrapped wedges that passed for seats. They looked like a fast ticket to a hemorrhoid. “We’re not going all the way on those,” she said. It was a prayer more than anything.
Geist laughed. “I am afraid not. We must make the journey to Nantes-Neugeboren, but after that we will take the rail to Nouvelle Paris. We must sneak aboard – I must confess that it will not be a comfortable journey.”
Chapter 22
Heir To The Throne
Jane awoke to frantically whispering voices. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed since dinner, but it was still dark outside. After the meal, the stewards had folded the table away and expanded the seats into a pair of narrow but comfortable beds. Roman had still been paging through her book and its descriptions of marvelous machines and their fantastical journeys.
Many of which, if the stories were true, had been built and planned by the hands and minds of the pre-Catastrophe Continent. The same ones that had raised defenses against the buried cities – or whatever they’d been at the time – and perished or survived in the aftermath.
He’d been describing one of the sites where these contraptions had supposedly been constructed – a half-flooded land with names of long, loping syllables – when Jane drifted off.
Now, as she twitched aside the velvet curtain, the stewards were whispering amongst themselves and rousing passengers from their compartments, apologizing with their hands tented before them.
No, they weren’t apologizing. They were receiving something. Small, leatherbound booklets.
“Hey.” Jane nudged Roman. “Wake up.”
His eyes opened and focused on her, instantly alert.
But before she could say anything further, a soft rapping came from just outside the curtain. “Excusee, mister, madame. I must now see your identification, pleece.”
“Un minoot,” Roman said. He mussed his hair and rubbed some color into his eyes. When he pulled back the curtain, he looked raw from interrupted sleep.
“I am needing to see your identification,” the steward said, writhing under Roman’s cranky glare. The young man mustered a weak smile of insistence.
With a guttural sigh, Roman began fumbling around the compartment, muttering to himself.
Jane picked through the blankets and pillows, too, pretending to fish for the identification she did not have and praying the young steward would ignore her.
Just then, Roman’s muttering rose to a grumble. “Where are the bags? I left them right here. If you lost–”
“Ya, it was those two!” called a familiar voice. Jane glanced up from her search and recognized the gray-haired man who had accepted their bribe earlier. “They had no ticket, no documents. I merely assumed–”
“Wass you assumed is clar enough,” said another voice. A woman stood between the steward and the usher, her back ramrod straight and her shoulders forming crisp right angles beneath her uniform. “You,” she said, turning her probing stare on Roman and Jane, “must produce your documents at once. Or explique their absence.” Her voice carried none of the discomfort and apology of the steward’s.
Roman’s face split in a guilty, sleepy smile. “Pardon. It is our anniversary, und I only wished to take my–”
Jane’s fluttering heart nearly stopped when the woman grabbed Roman by his shirtfront and hauled him from the bed.
“It is he,” the gray-haired usher said, licking a sudden glistening of sweat from his upper lip.
“That is not possible,” said the young steward. “He is much too tall. Und where is the scar?”
But whatever doubt flickered between the two men didn’t reach the woman. “He will spreck,” she said. “Bring the woman.”
The steward and the usher each grabbed one of her arms and hauled her out of her refuge and toward the door. Startled, curious faces peered at them and whispered from behin
d curtains.
For now, Jane allowed herself to be pushed along and tried to calm her racing heart with deep, steady breaths.
They went up the stairs to a plain, cramped deck that looked like the equivalent of the servants’ passage. Jane ignored the bickering of the two men escorting her and listened instead to the questions the woman was hurling at Roman: What are you doing on this ship? Who are your associates? Where is he?
She racked her sleep-fogged brain for answers, but all of this was making less and less sense.
They kept pressing forward, past stewards and crew members whose visible anxiety mirrored Jane’s own, until they reached a cramped storage room insulated by the rumbling and chuffing of machinery overhead. It reminded her of the tiny cabin in which she’d first been questioned on Salvage, only this woman did not appear to have any of the patience of her interrogator.
Her heart sank.
The two men shoved her against the wall next to Roman and backed away with downcast eyes. Eager to disengage themselves from whatever happened next.
The woman was still looking between her and Roman with a stare like a hot poker.
“You were courageous und foolish to attempt this again. Especially after killing so many of our comrades.” She rolled up one sleeve.
Jane didn’t know what the woman was talking about. She seemed to recognize Roman, but this wasn’t the welcome Jane had expected for an absent prince. Either Roman was just as confused, or he simply thought silence the wisest course.
Meanwhile, the usher was still staring at Roman with puzzled absorption – like he recognized him, but he couldn’t figure out how.
“You must know it is not you we cherch,” the woman said, adjusting her other sleeve. “Tell us where he is, und you will be handled well.” The alternative was as clear as the scars on the woman’s now-bare arms.
There had to be a misunderstanding. And yet Roman said nothing to correct it.
“You.”
Jane felt rough fingers on her chin as the woman turned her face up.
“Tell me. Where is he?” The woman’s grip was slick with sweat – however angry she was, she was nervous, too.
Jane kept her own gaze steady and told herself that this was no different from a hundred other situations she’d faced in Recoletta, with seething whitenails demanding explanations for crises she knew nothing about – incriminating stains on husbands’ trousers, missing silver, empty brandy decanters. This was no different.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
The woman considered her a moment longer, holding her chin with a strong but clammy hand. Finally, she released her and focused on Roman.
“But you are knowing precisely wass I am talking about,” she said. “Look at me. Tell me.”
But Roman kept his head down and his mouth clamped shut.
The woman wound back and hit him in the gut.
He doubled over, holding his stomach and gasping in pain. He was still bent forward when the woman spoke.
“Where is Geist?”
If their three captors hadn’t been so intent on Roman, Jane was sure they would have seen the surprise on her own face. She remembered the name from the wanted poster – the man with a scar, who had stolen and crashed an airship.
What she didn’t understand was why these people thought she and Roman had anything to do with it.
Roman must have heard the name, too. But still he said nothing, and the woman hit him again.
This time, he cried out with a sound that chilled Jane’s blood. Knowing that he was still holding it back made it all the worse.
“You know something,” the woman said. “Spreck.”
Jane silently begged him to comply.
Instead, Roman gave the same noncommittal shrug she’d seen from him a thousand times before.
The woman hit him again. “We have many hours still to go before Nouvelle Paris. One way or another, you will talk.” This time, she didn’t wait for Roman to answer before punching him again.
The air left him in a pained groan. He retched and spat blood on the floor.
She socked him again.
Jane was aware of a voice yelling, “Stop! Stop!” She didn’t realize until the others turned to stare at her that it was her own.
“You have remembered something?” the woman said.
Roman was still bent forward and coughing, a crimson-flecked pile of vomit at his feet. He couldn’t – or wouldn’t – speak, but Jane was aware of him shaking his head.
It didn’t matter. She couldn’t keep watching this. Besides, one way or another, they were already caught.
“He’s Roman Arnault,” Jane said. “He’s Faraj Arnault’s descendant. We don’t have any documents because we just came from Salvage and the buried cities.”
Roman heaved and threw up again. Whether it was at the sour smell of his vomit or the nagging sense that she’d just betrayed him, Jane felt as though she might be sick too.
The steward had a queasy look as well. The usher was hopping from foot to foot as though he might soil himself, saying, “I knew! So familiar, that face.” His excitement curdled to horror as he realized what that meant, who he’d been complicit in assaulting.
The woman was quiet, studying Roman’s downturned face. After several seconds, she knelt. “Forgive me. You have been gone for so long, I did not know–”
Roman coughed a final time and wiped his mouth. “There is nothing to forgive.” Jane felt a twist in her gut as he regarded her.
“We will see that your wounds are swiftly tended to,” the woman said, her eye twitching. “Anything you require, we shall provide.”
Roman was tugging his shirt back into place and straightening his sleeves. Without even a glance of request, the steward snapped a silk handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and passed it to Roman, who dabbed at a spot on the embroidered cuffs.
“A finger of brandy and some privacy,” he said. “You will allow us to return to our compartment, and you will not speak of my presence here. I desire to reach Nouvelle Paris with as little fuss as possible.”
The woman bowed her head even lower. Her throat bobbed with an anxious swallow.
“Is there a problem?” Roman asked. His voice carried the razor-thin suggestion of a threat.
“We are making all possible haste for Nouvelle Paris, but we must signal the gendarmes to receive you, Senure.”
Roman took a slow breath through his nose. For a man who had always dodged any appearance of authority, he now wore it surprisingly well. “I am not making myself clear.”
“It is for your own security.” The woman shook her head. “Forgive me, I thought you already knew. There was an attack weeks ago. On the palast at Versailles. Most of your relations passed.”
Roman’s shock was little more than a tightening around his jaw. “Most?”
“Your great-uncle was unexpectedly away. Julius Rothbauer.”
Roman’s face paled a shade. He pressed his lips into a hard, grim line. Something was different about him and the calm, determined authority with which he was receiving this. “Has the murderer been apprehended?”
The woman coughed to mask her surprise. “Senure, no. That is why we – why I was so eager to apprehend you. The culprit – Geist – he stole a top-of-the-line airship from the Nouvelle Paris moorings und evanoosed. But there are reports of him in the area. We can take no chances.”
Watching Roman receive the news, watching his blue eyes frost over, Jane suddenly realized who this change reminded her of.
It was Augustus Ruthers. The man she had shot. Roman’s other great-uncle.
Chapter 23
Nouvelle Paris
Geist’s network gave a new meaning to the term “organized crime.” They’d stopped an eastbound train – what the Continentals called a “rail” – outside of Nantes-Neugeboren after nightfall by dragging a fallen tree across the tracks at a long straightaway. While the crew cleared the debris, Malone, Geist, and a ha
ndful of his followers had slipped into one of the cargo compartments at the back of the train. From their hidden passage to the forged identification, to the carefully timed arrival and departure of people whose names and roles she didn’t know, Geist’s operations put all of the petty smugglers and gangs she’d chased in Recoletta to shame.
Perhaps that professionalism made it feel less like she was working with the criminals now.
But as she watched them, she came to realize that this was not so much a testament to Geist’s organizational genius as to the extent of his support. He had found a rift in the world around him – just as Sato had – and he had pried it wider and carved out a niche within it.
Still, none of the planning, organization, or discussion had prepared her for the chaotic grandeur of Nouvelle Paris.
Malone hadn’t realized that cities could be so big. From her vantage point atop the Porte Nord mooring tower, all she could see were the tangled, migraine-inducing roofs and arches of the city stretching into the distance. Even that, Geist had told her, was only part of the sprawl.
Nouvelle Paris wasn’t a city. It was several cities built on top of one another.
When she thought about it, the strangest part wasn’t the jumbled architecture or the hybrid language or even the strangely opaque people. It was the way they inhabited their ruins – they built through them and around them, wove them into the strange fabric of their city.
Recolettans would have burrowed as far as possible from their relics.
And yet, for a people so comfortable resting among the bones of their dead, they were paranoid about the “Pesteland” and the warlike, diseased savages they assumed lived there. Already in her short time in the city, she’d seen street performers dressed as hairy, snaggletoothed villains; flimsy paperbacks imagining the adventures of Continental explorers across the sea; and posters bearing the images of men and women promising to protect good, honest people from the western menace.