“Is it true? Did she stroll right into the middle of a war zone?” Dr. Gatling asked.
“Like she was on a constitutional in the park,” Olivia said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Slark shock troops meant to reinforce their western flank came across us in the ruins of Half Moon Bay. We were in the fight of our lives, surrounded on two sides with the ocean at our backs. Claudia came walking out of the south, right into the middle of the fight, and didn’t seem to see any of it.”
“Lucky you managed to get to her before they did,” Dr. Gatling said with a low whistle of surprise.
“I had to race the Greek for the pleasure,” Olivia said with a laugh. “He’s quick for such a stocky little man. Once I had her back on the tank though, it took begging, ordering, and finally threatening to get the other commanders to withdraw. Not that I can blame them—the enemy was there and the ground was as good as any to make a fight of it.”
“I would have expected more discipline from my military patients.”
“It was a momentary and forgivable lapse,” Olivia said. “Once they realized the war wasn’t going anywhere, they withdrew in an orderly fashion. The Slark gave up the chase when they realized their numerical advantage was going to vanish quickly in the narrows along Highway 1.”
“Good to hear,” Dr. Gatling said. “On a similarly hard-headed topic, would you mind terribly getting that Chinican girl to go home and at least bathe? She’s not eaten in days excepting the food I forced on her, and I can’t imagine her constant fretting over Miss Marceau is doing anyone any favors.”
“Yes, I’ll see what I can do,” Olivia said. “How is the leg, doc? Will I ever dance again?”
“Could you dance in the first place?” Dr. Gatling snapped the pieces of Olivia’s leg back together and closed the plating. “It’s in better shape than most of your Clockwork Warriors, but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of your maintenance. Tell your men, they may not feel the bullet wounds in their mechanical arms and legs, but that doesn’t mean the bullets aren’t doing damage.”
The name for the amputee army under her command, Clockwork Warriors, wasn’t provided by Dr. Gatling, but good old Bruce Coffey. Olivia knew it to be one of genuine admiration. Bruce said he intended to reference the British book and movie, A Clockwork Orange, since the men under Olivia’s command were mostly British and fancied a bit of the ultra-violence, but Olivia didn’t believe him. They were all at least partly mechanical and after the respect earned for their successful rescue mission of the commander’s daughter that didn’t seem like such a bad thing anymore.
She put her pants back on, checked her recently oiled and calibrated leg with a few bends, and headed over Claudia’s room. Esme was still in the chair beside Claudia’s bed, reading some old book likely given to her by Dr. Gatling. Olivia gave her a questioning look and tilt of her head.
“When was the last time you were home to sleep, bathe, or have a change of clothes?” Olivia asked.
“What day is today?” Esme replied, never looking up from her book.
“Wrong answer.” Olivia snatched Esme’s coat off the hook beside the door and walked it over to her. When Esme still didn’t acknowledge her, Olivia took the book from her and replaced it with the coat. “Regardless of what you might think, I’m doing you a favor. Nobody likes a disheveled, smelly woman sitting constant vigil over them.”
Esme took the coat and none too subtle hint. Before she exited, she gave Claudia’s hair a gentle caress and whispered she would return soon. Olivia waited until Esme was well out of the room with the door closed behind before she said anything.
“You can stop pretending to sleep,” Olivia said.
“Maybe I’m pretending to sleep around you too,” Claudia said without opening her eyes.
“That’s a hell of a thing to say to your rescuer.”
“Who said I wanted to be rescued?”
Olivia sighed and sat on the edge of the bed right in front of Claudia. “Open your eyes, stop being a pain in the ass, and talk to me,” Olivia said. “I’ve got a few questions for you and some news from the Ravens.”
This brought Claudia out of her faked coma. “How?”
“There was a squad of Voron Daggers in Crescent City when we sailed back through.”
“What were they doing up there,” Claudia asked incredulously.
“Investigating, I would imagine,” Olivia replied. “The camp had been wiped out by a massive mutant invasion—an odd enough occurrence to warrant their curiosity.”
“Did they say who they were?”
“Just the officer, Captain Dylan Watson, and I believe one of the others had the last name of Garcia.”
“I know them,” Claudia replied flatly.
“Yes, they seemed to know you too, and they were under the impression you were dead.”
“It would have been better if they’d gone on thinking that,” Claudia said.
“They also had some rather unfortunate news from Tombstone…”
“Wiped out to the last woman?”
“It didn’t sound like it, but they did specifically mention Veronica…”
Claudia began tearing up again, she couldn’t help it and didn’t feel the need to hide it in front of Olivia. She knew, on some level, she knew all along, but hope is sometimes a surprisingly difficult creature to kill. She’d cried over Danny and she’d certainly cried over Liam, but there was a strange heartbreak to her tears over Veronica. There was just something about the Raven Queen that spoke of an unduly difficult life, and Claudia, like so many other women who cared for her, wanted to give her some of the happiness so clearly denied to her for so long.
“Loving me is a dangerous occupation,” Claudia said.
“What do you mean? How could you have had something to do with her death if you didn’t even know she was dead?”
“True, I guess, and you could probably say the same of Danny. Perhaps it would be truer to say trying to love me is a waste of a life destined to be cut short, which should stand as a warning to you and Esme, and should have stood as one for…”
“For…whom?”
“Nothing, nobody, I’m tired.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re simply knackered from sleeping for nearly four days, but I’m afraid we’re not done here yet.”
“I do not want to talk about it.”
“That’s fine since I’m not even sure what it is,” Olivia said. “We will talk about us though, and if we must, we will talk about Esme. Do you realize what she and I both underwent to bring you back?”
“I’m sure my father played no small part in all of it.”
“Your father has a city of more than a hundred thousand people to protect,” Olivia snapped. “He did what he could, but he is not just your father anymore. He is everyone’s father now.”
The implications stung. Claudia didn’t want to think of her father choosing between sacrificing his daughter or saving more than a hundred thousand lives. He’d clearly made such a choice though and he’d chosen the city. A small, insidious part of her felt betrayed.
“I made it clear to you both that nothing was exclusive,” Claudia said, choking back a fresh round of tears already stinging at the corners of her eyes.
“Your honesty was greatly appreciated, but it didn’t stop you from doing your best to romance and seduce us, nor did it keep us from believing you might one day care for us,” Olivia said. “I saw through you, held my heart back to see if you might stop with the games and take me seriously as a person one day, but Esme made no such preparations. She is in love with you because she ignored your words and believed your actions. You don’t have to love and cherish either of us, but for fuck’s sake, stop playing with our hearts.”
“You’ll both live a lot longer if you forget about me.” Claudia pulled her blankets up tight around her shoulder and rolled over to turn her back on Olivia.
Olivia left in a huff. Claudia could hear Dr. Gatling ask after her when Olivia was in the hallway
. Before the door swung closed, she heard Olivia say, “Physically still fine, but I’ve managed to make everything else much worse.”
†
Claudia hadn’t lied about being tired. She’d slept out of pure exhaustion and only after reassuring herself she wasn’t alone and it wasn’t dark out. Even still, when sleeping in Esme’s presence during the day, nightmares plagued her slumber. With Esme gone and night coming on, Claudia was determined to stay awake, especially since the tower darkened at night to prevent easy targeting by Slark artillery.
Before the lights went off for the night in the building her father came to her room with a companion. Her father looked as tired as she felt although in reasonably good spirits otherwise, which was apparently the work of the dog following closely at his heels. The lanky German shepherd appeared to have something of a limp on the mend, but otherwise looked happy in his surroundings so long as Commander Marceau was nearby.
“Who is your friend?” Claudia asked, forcing levity to her voice at an extreme personal cost. She’d never had strong feelings one way or the other about dogs until the night when the mutant hounds attacked her and Liam. Now they frightened her and harkened back to one of the darkest nights of her life.
“This is Roger,” her father said. Roger wagged his tail as if to confirm. “I think Olivia intended him as a gift for you, but he’s been spending time with me while you were recovering from your most recent adventure.”
“You should keep him,” Claudia said. “He looks like a good soldier at your side.” She wanted to say she thought her father was who Olivia probably really wanted to give the dog to, but she assumed that would simply confuse him and wouldn’t make her feel any better.
“I believe you are right,” her father said. He snapped his fingers in front of Roger’s face. The dog sat at attention and stayed stock still while the Commander crossed the room to Claudia’s bed. “I am tortured by the choice I made to stay with the city rather than come for you.”
Claudia took her father’s shaking hand and smiled to him. “You would not be the father I know if you sacrificed lives to save mine. I could have left with my men…I should have left with my men.”
“The time you bought them…” Her father sat on the edge of her bed, wrapping his other hand around hers as well.
“…I could have bought for them while remaining with them,” Claudia finished for him. “As I find out now, the Hungarian brothers died anyway when one would not leave the other’s body after he bled out, and there is…” Tears again came to Claudia’s eyes and she couldn’t even look at her father anymore.
“What happened out there?” he asked softly.
“What does ‘skate’ mean?” Claudia asked.
“Shorthand for message runners during the liberation of the city. We’d long since run out of paper to write things down on, so the runners had to memorize their messages. Slark truncated to SK and attack down to AT—they used the mnemonic device of making little sentences like ‘skate down Market’ to remember the information. Skate stuck around after as a way for veterans of that fight to call out a Slark attack. Why do you ask?”
“He said they were resourceful like that.”
The lights for the entire building went off. Claudia jumped when the room descended into darkness. Her father gently caressed her hair and reassured her that she was safe with him there. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the faint glow of LED displays on the hospital equipment around the room, although she wasn’t hooked to anything but an IV anymore. Roger let out one bark, which caused Claudia to jump again. Commander Marceau snapped his fingers once, silencing any further reports from the dog.
In the relative darkness, feeling the safety and protection of her father surrounding her, Claudia closed her eyes and spoke. “There was a man in the wilds, the shooter from Tractor 17,” she began. “He sacrificed himself to save me.”
She couldn’t see his look, but she could feel it. He didn’t believe her, not entirely anyway. She should have known he was too shrewd to take her blank comment as the deeper truth of what was bothering her.
“If you say that was all, I will believe you,” he said.
It was a good father answer, and enough to make her think she shouldn’t keep things from him of all people. “I cared for him,” she said. “In such a short time, it is difficult to say how much. I felt warm and safe with him. It was overwhelming.”
“I see. And now you are lost in what to do next?”
“Yes.”
“Had he survived, had he made it back with you, what would you have done then? What would you have told Kingston and your donut shop girl?”
It was a question she hadn’t dared ask herself now that the possibility was ripped from her and if anyone but her father had asked her at any other time, she likely would have lied. In the dark, holding his hand for strength and stability, she felt she could tell the truth.
“I would have told them I wanted to be his, if he would have me,” Claudia said.
“That is a truth, and an important one, but it is not the truth you must tell people,” her father said. “You keep that truth for yourself to know what was taken from you. If you lie to yourself in this, pretend as though it might have been anything lesser than it was, you dishonor his memory and your feelings. It will hurt to know what you lost, but you will not lose capacity to feel. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Claudia said and she truly did. So much of what her father was made sense in light of this advice. “You know you would have spent the rest of your life with mother had she lived—when she died, you didn’t simply lose her; you lost the lifetime with her you could have had.”
“You do understand.” Her father gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. They sat in silence for awhile under the weight of the discovery. “Your feelings for this man might never have blossomed, or they might have, but it is important to know you wanted them to.”
“But knowing what we lost, how do we move on, Papa?”
“This is the second question to lead you to another, more important truth,” her father said. “You did not think I would leave you with a deep emotional cut, clean but still open, did you?”
“Of course not, Papa,” she said with a tearful little laugh.
“Knowing what you lost, and knowing it is lost forever, what will you say now that you know you cannot have what you wanted?”
“That I must stop being childish, I must stop seeking attention for the sake of attention, that Esme is too timid to stir my passions and that Olivia is too withdrawn to truly know as I would wish to know her.” She’d had plenty of time to think about the answer to a question she didn’t believe anyone would ever ask her over the past four days. The words weren’t kind to anyone, herself included, but she felt better simply saying them.
Roger leapt to his feet at a sound in the hall too soft to alert either Claudia or her father. He let loose with a barrage of snarls and barks. Claudia’s father snapped around to the door and flicked on his flashlight. For a brief second, Esme’s face was illuminated in the crack of the doorway before the door slammed shut.
A sinking realization came over Claudia—Roger’s first tentative bark, the one silenced by her father’s snapping fingers, had signaled Esme’s arrival. The Mouse couldn’t be silent enough to sneak up on such an alert dog, but clearly she was more than capable of eavesdropping on Claudia and her father long enough to hear several emotionally damaging things.
“Would you like me to go get her?” her father asked.
“So I might say…what? Beyond what I have already said?”
“In truth, I do not know,” her father said. “I have only ever loved two women: my wife and my daughter.”
“And they both loved you in return…” Claudia murmured. “I know unrequited love. I know what it is to adore someone you cannot truly have. I simply don’t know what to say as she never said anything to me.”
“Patience then, rest and think,” her father said. “In this, as with many things
, haste can lead to errors.”
It was the same lesson the Owl apparently failed to teach her in Carson City. She was still making the same impetuous mistakes she’d always made and now it had cost her Liam. She needed to learn patience before her recklessness took anything else.
Chapter 27:
Lights Going Out in a Dim World.
Olivia went to her bar for solace after her disastrous conversation with Claudia. The floor was reasonably clear and nobody seemed interested in dust ups anymore. Many were still out on militia work and anyone present was likely on break from hard fighting. Bowlers, top hats, and bare heads tilted toward Olivia when she walked in. The truce between her and Bruce had filtered down to the respective sides and they were all suddenly friends.
Bruce Coffey wasn’t the captain of the couple thousand militia members yet, but the writing was on the wall. Cavanaugh’s brutal tactics, which matched Hastings’ almost perfectly, didn’t seem to mesh well with Commander Marceau’s directives. The term ‘extinction war’ was on everyone’s lips again, and Marceau’s new focus was to maintain as much human life as possible while still inflicting casualties upon the enemy. A safe battle that resulted in no human losses, but also only killed a dozen or so Slark was much preferred to bloody attrition—the new glory came from survival. Bruce professed his support for Marceau’s preservationist mentality as most of the men in the militia were personal friends. Olivia didn’t know if this was truth or simple lip service, but she did believe Bruce would tow command’s line better than Cavanaugh. She voiced her support for the change that seemed inevitable.
If Commander Marceau was battered by the storm of the reignited war, her own father was floundering on the edge of sinking. She’d only seen Professor Kingston twice in the week of resumed conflict. The first time was when he came to the surface to check the electrical systems of the sea wall defenses on the bay side after the mutants knocked out the auto turrets and weapons. He pronounced them unfixable by human hands. The Transcended, as he’d explained it, were just that—too far above humanity for humanity to understand them or for them to understand humanity. He could no more fix what they had built than he could describe God’s bathroom. With that, he’d returned to the lair miles beneath the earth to walk among the robots that were so unknowable. Olivia had gone down to visit him after returning from retrieving Claudia. Their conversation went much the same as most of their conversations did, but with an added edge of tension. She wanted to see if he could convince the Transcended to work on the wall if it was cleared of Slark and mutants. Things quickly deteriorated from there. He couldn’t talk to the Transcended because they were above language now. He was sick of people asking him to violate the barrier between humanity and those above humans with the concerns of war. They’d transcended trivial things like violence and war. He didn’t even think he could make himself understood to them on such a matter.
The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2) Page 24