Ley held her mask in one hand. “This is taking too long.”
Zeddig agreed, but: “Give her time.”
“Cutting torch.”
Gal passed that down too.
Curses and the stench of burnt hair filled the silent room.
Gal leaned over the hatch. “Raymet, are you well?”
Below, something metal snapped. Zeddig’s hand went to the club at her belt, for the small good it would do if the seals broke. Still, small good was better than none at all. “It’s fine,” said Raymet, or something possessing Raymet’s body.
Pumps surged. The hatch light blinked from red to green. Gal tested the wheel, which moved. She glanced a question at Zeddig, who nodded: “Go.”
The door opened, and they did not die.
“Phenomenal,” Ley said, and dropped into the hatch before Zeddig could stop her. Ley didn’t bother with the ladder, just fell into the passage, landing with a clang on the wheel hatch beneath. It didn’t give way, which was nice, as falling twenty feet down into the shipping container would be a bad way to start a mission. Ley shot a thumbs-up and a grin to Zeddig, who rolled her eyes. Ley shrugged, donned her mask, reddened her hair, straddled the hatch door, and cycled it open.
Light poured into the container. Their crew, their muscly crew, their cannon fodder, blinked up, shading faces with hands, save those that didn’t have eyes as such. The armored lizard-shark-dude whose arm Gal had broken at their first meeting bared bright long teeth. A skinny man in torn jeans rolled over, grumbled, tried to sink back to sleep; his neighbor punched him in the ribs and he sat up, growling. Most observed professional silence. They knew the meaning of the light. The easy part of the trip was over, the part when discovery meant at worst a little time in jail. For those who signed up dreaming of riches only to spend the next week secretly hoping the plan would fall apart before they reached the fatal bit, Ley’s arrival signaled that the time for secret hopes was over, and the time to pull their shit together had come.
Ley kicked the rope ladder down. “Good morning, friends. Time for work.”
Chapter Forty-one
“WHAT THE HELLS,” KAI said, inadvisedly, to break the silence, “are you doing here?”
“Enjoying a morning venture,” Bescond replied. The Lieutenant sat next to Kai, leg crossed ankle on knee, one arm resting on the seat behind Kai’s shoulders. Bescond flicked her pocket watch open, closed it again, turned it over in her fingers, and opened it once more. For all that opening and closing, Bescond never checked the time. “At the moment. Soon, I’ll have work. I’m glad our investigations led to similar results, though this situation suggests we have a ways to go before we achieve true cooperation.”
Kai glanced from Tara to Bescond and back. The Craftswoman set aside her newspaper, sipped her tea, and set the teacup down again. Outside, in the hall, Wreckers waited. Tentacles shifted under their dark robes. She thought she could hear them moan.
Had Tara betrayed her? Kai would have sworn the Craftswoman wasted no love on Bescond. Kai had felt her seething frustration with the Iskari, the tense mechanism of Tara’s rage allowed, for that barest moment in the stairwell, to show—but the woman sat impassive as a mountain. Kai made a mental note, if they made it through this mess, to never play cards against Tara Abernathy. “Ms. Pohala was interested in our southern assets. I offered to escort her on a trip.”
“Really.” The circle of reflected light cast by Bescond’s watch darted through the cabin: climbed the left wall, slipped across the ceiling, and vanished into the pane of smoked false day. “Over the last ten years I’ve built a list of languages I want to learn. My Talbeg serves, at best. Imperial, all the papers say, will dominate the world. Then there’s Waldan and Zurish, setting aside the sub-Waste dialects. But I’m sad to say duty guides my hand. I learn what I must to do my job. There are only so many hours in a day, and we are accountable to our Lords for the use we make of them.” She touched her shirt front, and Kai tried not to notice the writhing beneath. Bescond turned to Kai. “If this is, in fact, an exploratory mission, Ms. Pohala, perhaps it would interest you to know we are within minutes of apprehending your sister.”
Green slushy insulation surged through the tank around the passenger car, protecting them from the Wastes. A tremor in the floorboards was Kai’s only clue to the train’s size and speed, the violence of its passage. She would have fought all the ghosts and gods outside for an instant of stopped time in which to scream, but she would not gratify Bescond. The Lieutenant expected a gambler’s tell. No doubt she watched Kai’s eyes, waited for them to dart to one side, seeking reassurance from Tara, or up, into the creative recesses of her brain.
Kai held her gaze level—though not too level. “Interest, yes. Why do you think my sister would be here?”
“Your sister,” Bescond said, “has been betrayed.”
Don’t look at Abernathy. “I don’t understand.” The most powerful, and difficult, words in any language.
“She and her friends have been sold—at a reasonable price, by a gentleman seeking to insure his business venture. Now that you’re along, I hope you’ll help me bring her in, let’s say, minimally impaired. I sent a Wrecker to your hotel room this morning, and was disappointed to find you gone. Now our collaboration can proceed apace. Ms. Abernathy—could you suspend your no doubt vital business to assist our endgame?”
Abernathy was a wall of cool. “The church will bill you for my time.”
“Certainly. We must aid our allies, after all.” Bescond tipped her hat.
Kai closed her eyes and breathed deep, relishing the privacy of her skull. When she opened her eyes again she found the compartment damnably unchanged. “I need to use the facilities. If that doesn’t interfere with your master plan.”
“Go ahead.” Bescond opened the door. The Wreckers did not move. “You won’t mind if one of my companions goes along? She’ll wait outside. We have the situation in hand, but one can’t be too careful.”
When Kai stood, her train ticket slipped from her lap and floated down to the ornate rug. She stooped and caught it before Bescond could. She smoothed her skirt and straightened her lapels. “Not at all.” She imagined her voice as a poison needle sliding into Bescond’s ear, slick and sharp. Not fatal poison—just painful and debilitating. The Lieutenant’s smile widened. Kai wondered if Bescond could hear her thoughts.
A Wrecker followed Kai down the hall. It did not walk so much as pour beside her, limbs churning under the robe. Kai glimpsed a face beneath the cowl: slick gray, ribbed, and moving. The shoulders, or what might have been the shoulders, slumped. “Early morning for you too, huh?”
The almost-face shifted like a mouth opening, though the movement didn’t create a mouth so much as a shallow taut dish of skin like clay pinched into a bowl. The Wrecker’s voice was the gurgling roar of surf in a narrow cleft.
Kai walked faster, slammed the restroom door shut behind her, locked it, and sagged against silk wallpaper. Ghostlight panels ringing the mirror shed the same fake daylight as the simulated windows. Staring into her own reflection, Kai allowed herself an instant’s despair.
Sleep deprivation gouged the soul, made the world seem dubious and shitty. The face of the woman in the mirror grew strange in the way of faces in mirrors. In the blurring reflection Kai saw her sister on the seashore, willing her sand city whole as the tide rolled in. Ley stood against gods and sea and the breaking of the world, until she broke herself.
If Bescond caught Ley, she wouldn’t submit. She’d fight those rubbery arms until there was nothing left of her but meat.
The Wrecker slapped the door. Of course—a wet slap was close as they could come to a knock.
“Privacy, please? Or patience?” She kicked the brass toilet handle, and the water ran.
Why was Ley doing this? What did she want from this train? Could she still, even now, be saved?
Kai read the note burned into her ticket—the ticket she’d never held, but which had, by Abern
athy’s Craft or simple sleight of hand, arrived in her lap. Not much help. She’d hoped for Craftwork glyphs, for magic to speed her way. She found a few scrawled words of advice.
Joss in second and seventh car, the note read. The Wreckers can’t smell you in the ceiling.
Thanks ever so much, Kai thought, but it wasn’t nothing.
She drew a sterile pin from her pocket, pricked her finger, squeezed a drop of blood into the washbasin, and prayed.
The Lady caught Kai’s mind in Her blue spiral hands. Kai gasped and stumbled against the sink, lost in the pleasure and pain: razor wind howled between Kai and her Goddess. A hundred thousand voices screamed against the edges of her faith, a hundred thousand tiny fingers hooked her mind and pulled the Wastes, interfering with prayer. Kai ground her teeth and clenched every muscle in her body at once—only a small high sound escaped her throat.
The Wrecker slapped the door again, and Kai snapped. “A minute, I said.”
Behind the door, the Wrecker made a seafoam grumbling noise, and flowed back against the opposite wall.
She prayed once more and felt, through the static of those screams, Izza straining against the train’s speed, felt Izza’s fear and awe and freezing metal beneath her fingertips.
The Wastes burned and froze and tore her mind to shreds.
It’s a trap, she prayed as loud and clear as she could, and collapsed. Glass broke. She’d fallen forward in her swoon, and her skull cracked the mirror to a web of light. Blood leaked down her forehead. Fuck. The Wrecker rattled the door, but the latch held. “A minute, godsdammit!”
Kai scrambled up onto the toilet tank and the sink, pressed the ceiling panel, and, when it gave, pulled herself up into the train’s guts. She smelled spent lightning and burned air. Cars seven and two—fore and aft. Fifty-fifty shot. Trust to luck. Reason hadn’t done much for her so far.
She scrambled into darkness as, behind her and below, the Wrecker tore the washroom door from its hinges and found her gone.
Chapter Forty-two
EVERYTHING WAS GOING ACCORDING to plan, which really pissed Izza off.
When the security hatch opened overhead, she blinked against the sudden frozen Wasteland light, and stared up at the silhouette woman with the red hair and the mask, the woman who had to be Kai’s sister in disguise. “Rise and shine,” Ley said. “Many hands make light work.”
The team swarmed up the rope ladder with pirates’ ease, muttering jokes and curses and prayers. Isaak kissed the stone around his neck before he climbed, and Izza’s stomach twisted as she followed him.
They donned hats and jackets, and woke elementals wired within—not enough heat to save them from the Wastes’ cold, but they’d take the edge off so long as no one left the circle. While they suited up, Izza reviewed the delvers on whom their lives depended. Zeddig she liked: square, stern, strong, steady. “We’ll form a perimeter. Stay inside, and you’ll survive. Stray, and we won’t save you. Watch the train. Don’t look into the sky. Never look at the landscape. The things out there can sneak in through your eyes.”
She did not know others’ names: a tall inscrutable Camlaander, a young sharp Talbeg woman, bald and pacing, nervous, adjusting explosive bolts on the exterior hatch. And Ley.
Izza had seen Kai’s sister in the meetings. There, Ley kept still, watching the plan unfold. Now that stillness thawed to motion. She was everywhere, fast as a reflection, reviewing gear, correcting harnesses, circling, doubling back. “Young for this line of work,” she said as she passed Izza, and set a hand on her shoulder, reassuring: Ley read her nerves as a first-timer’s.
“Not really.”
Nothing funny about that from Izza’s angle, but then, she supposed Ley’s laugh didn’t have much humor. “Can you drink?”
“Better than you.”
“We’ll see, on the other side,” she said, and hooked her thumb back toward Isaak. “Take care of that guy. He looks jumpy.” Isaak, of course, looked like Isaak: six feet and change of sharp teeth and scales.
“I will.” For the first time, she felt a pang of guilt. She was here to help Kai find her sister, but on the other hand—this was an adventure, they were in the shit together, Izza and Isaak and the goon squad and Ley and Zeddig so unconsciously regal, the kind of person Izza had wanted to be when she was a kid, before she’d lost those childhood dreams in the passage of a knife across a throat. In a few scared hours they’d emerge with fortunes to spend, or, if they were wiser, invest. (They weren’t wiser, any of them, but a girl could always dream.) She was breaking the sacred fellowship of thieves. (Which was another lie you told yourself, that there was a sacred fellowship of thieves, that you weren’t just a dangerous person who hung out with other dangerous people and hoped none of them would ever decide they liked your guts more on the outside. The Lady blunted that lie, created a real community, but then, none of these people worshipped the Lady save Isaak, and she already trusted him. Someday she’d find who invented this whole adulthood idea and kill them slow. You lost track of the lies you told. Speaking of which, Ley was lingering—she seemed to need one of those lies self-professed adults asked for from time to time. So.) “You don’t have to worry about me.”
The small bald woman burst the hatch and they emerged into the cold. Ten goons huddled between four women, they crept along the train, hair whipped and eyes stung by the wind. They jammed their boots against the steel, and looked at their feet, or, when they had to scurry across cables between the cars, at their hands. Never at the sky, never at the horizon, never at the Wastes.
Ice crackled in Izza’s nose when she breathed, though she felt fierce equatorial sun against her skin. She’d heard sailors talk of northern cold, the chill of long dark nights and a shrinking distant sun. This was not that. This was Craftborn winter, cold that tore the soul, cold become insatiable hunger.
And the cold spoke.
There were voices, small and thousands, chittering, screaming, like a city’s worth of rats stuffed in a hydraulic press. She did not hear them with her ears. They called to her as the Lady called, they spoke as She spoke, and Izza, priestess, back-alley queen, crouched low and focused on her hands and feet.
Save us, they called, and promised her riches and sex and glory if she would but kneel, and nausea wrenched her gut and she wanted so badly to look—
Ahead, she heard a prayer.
Isaak, head down, shoulder against the wind, clutched the Lady’s stone in his claw, and he spoke, in his childhood Talbeg so close to Izza’s own, Her words. Lady shelter me. Guide my steps. Help me help myself, and help me help my friends.
She joined her voice to his. Her steps grew straight and firm, not by miracle, but by knowledge: there was a fellowship, not of thieves, but of the ignored and suffering, and she had built it. If she failed here, others would carry on the work. But she would not fail. Look how far she’d come.
She trusted to the Lady, opened to Her, and steadied. They reached the car behind the swollen locomotive. She prayed, huddled with the others, as the bald woman drew her tools and bent to open a hatch.
Izza sheltered in the Lady.
So when the Lady spoke, Her voice hit with the force of thunder, and Izza fell.
She struck the train’s curved steel skin and her body scraped a broad trail through frost. Her stomach lurched. Honed reflexes and monkey instinct directed arms and legs abandoned by conscious mind. Fingertips snagged weld seams in steel plate, but her body’s godsdamn weight tore her free again. Free and falling, falling—the world a whirl, one third train, one third sky, one third Wastes she could not allow herself to see. And as she fell the train sloped downward, and she fell faster, and thought failed beneath a chorus of uninventive curses.
Human minds being human minds, some grim fatalist tendency that really should have focused on survival still took the time to note: you can always trust Gods for shit timing.
She called to the Lady but there were too many screams, some of them hers, and she could not compose h
er soul. One last riveted line in the steel approached. Past it, no hope. She curled her fingers into claws, turned, caught.
Her numbed fingertips bit, tore, slipped. Arms jerked in their sockets. One hand bounced free. She anchored one boot against the train, but the other skidded against sheet ice. Tiny invisible fingers stroked her skin. The voices deafened in their chorus, in their promises. If she let go, they’d catch her. If she turned around, if she asked—
Izza pushed with her leg and pulled with her fingers, but the seam wasn’t deep enough to give her the leverage she wanted. She kicked the ice, but it would not break, and the kick almost broke her grip on the seam. And she forced herself to think about the pain in her wrist and shoulder, about the slow loss of strength, about the cold, about falling, about anything but those whispers. One finger slipped. She strained with her free hand, couldn’t quite get it over the seam, tried again—
Someone caught her wrist.
She tugged against the grip in those first few seconds—dumb and desperate, unable to control her instincts. She was screaming, she’d been screaming, and she looked up into Ley’s eyes.
The woman still wore the mask. That unnatural red hair whispered loose from its braid. But the disaffection, the mockery, was gone. She held Izza over the abyss, teeth gritted, splayed spread-eagled against the steel, anchored by a rope at her belt tied to, gods, to Isaak, barely visible over the horizon of the train, and in that moment, despite all masks, Ley looked just like her sister.
Isaak dragged them up, one step, two. Izza’s boots found traction. Her fingers hurt, her shoulder. Her lungs burned from the cold. She was babbling, she realized, speaking languages she didn’t know. The Wastes played her like an instrument, and she spoke in their tongues.
Ley drew a glowing knife from her belt and rapped its blade against the train. Even that second’s impact parted the steel, and green slush seeped out, twisting into weird tendrils and shapes. That would be a problem, Izza thought, with the idle calm of the almost dead. But, triggered by impact, Ley’s knife opened like a flower, and Izza stared into its threading silver patterns, and the voices stilled, and she was, briefly—
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