“Harrumph,” the Asian man replied and hurried out into the busy lane, lugging his little crate.
Marter turned to Sabrina and smiled. “Here, little one, this is good for us. We can keep improving our stock.”
“May I go to the sweet shop?” Sabrina asked.
Marter laughed, pressing a silver coin into Sabrina’s hand. “Yes. One shilling for the sweet shop.”
“Thank you, father!” Sabrina said. Marter insisted that they call each other father and daughter ever since they had left Founders City. In Refugio they were known as Leonid and Sabrina Serafim. Sabrina was a fairly common name, especially in the north, so Marter had seen no harm in her keeping it, but the surname of Fawkes was never to be breathed again.
“Master Serafim!” the voice of a young boy cracked, high and sharp, from the doorway. The hair stood up on the back of Sabrina’s neck. “Master Serafim!” The boy was Gaspar, a street urchin whose clothes were dirty and tattered but he was well fed because he was an excellent pickpocket.
“Gaspar—what is it?” Marter asked.
“Men are coming this way,” Gaspar said. “Black cloaks and pistols.”
“How do you know they are for us?” Marter asked.
“Vadim met them at the intersection,” Gaspar answered, turning to peer into the street. “He’s leading them here.”
“Vadim,” Sabrina snarled under her breath. She should have known better. She should have known.
“Get out of here!” Marter shouted to Gaspar, then spun to Sabrina. “Get in the tunnel.”
“Not without you,” Sabrina replied, her fright making her words snap.
Marter snatched her by the shoulders. It was the first time she’d ever seen him angry, the first time he’d ever gripped her roughly. “Go!”
Sabrina obeyed. She scurried into the back room, shoving aside a wicker table and a rug to expose a trapdoor.
“Good afternoon, dear sirs,” Marter said loudly in the shop. “What can I find for you today?”
Sabrina hauled the heavy trapdoor open and paused. She crawled to a gap in the wall where, with the right side of her face pressed against the rough wood, she could see through into the shop. Marter’s back was to her; his right hand resting on one of the pistols hidden under the counter.
Five people stood in the shop, their dark forms blocking out the noise and light from the street. Vadim was with them, off to one side, looking scared. The leading man in a dark leather hat and overcoat grinned, a gap-toothed smile through his scattershot black beard, his blazing blue eyes standing out from his dirty face; he was a mercenary from the looks of the irregular knives and pistols jammed in his bandoliers. The mercenary stepped aside to allow a tall, strawberry-haired woman and two equally tall blond-haired men to advance in front of him, soldierly in their bearing, wearing black airman clothes and black cloaks, all gripping pistols.
“This would be your man, I believe?” the mercenary announced to the strawberry-blond woman.
“Yes, it’s him,” she answered without taking her eyes off Marter. “You’ve earned your reward, Mr. Hackett.”
“Ah, Lieutenant Tunney,” Marter said, a tense strain in his voice. “What brings you to my little shop? Spartak is awfully far afield for a Founders interior agent and her steampipers.”
“My rank is captain now, Marter, you filthy yellowjacket,” Tunney answered. “Where is the girl?”
“Long dead, I’m afraid,” Marter said. “Carbuncle plague. Very sad.”
Tunney’s eyes narrowed. “Put your right hand on the countertop, Marter.” Tunney and her two steampipers raised their pistols. A firing squad.
Hackett laughed.
Sabrina gasped. Marter’s head shifted slightly, a barely perceptible jerk back towards her. He’d heard her. They had heard her.
“Dead, eh?” Tunney roared.
“Run!” Marter shouted, whipping his pistol up.
The three Founders’ pistols fired as one.
Hot blood hit Sabrina’s cheek and she jerked back, her legs knocking the trapdoor shut with a resounding thud. There was no time to pull it up again. Already she’d spun to her feet and was on the run, bolting out of the box-crowded storeroom and through the tiny kitchen into the sleeping quarters. Her few personal possessions rested in a metal box under her bed—but there was no time to get it.
In the rear corridor Sabrina snatched a kerosene lamp from its hook and hurled it back into the kitchen. The glass shattered, the spraying fuel bursting into flames. She hurled herself at the back door, slamming into it and staggering backwards. The lock. The damned door was always locked.
Sabrina threw the bolt and kicked the door open, charging into the cold blue light of the narrow alleyway. She croaked for breath—the blow against the door seemed to have collapsed her lungs—but breathing was less important than escaping now. She raced along the gap between the tar-paper shacks and wooden buildings, a space hardly wider than the breadth of her shoulders. Her lungs opened up just as she thought she might faint, her chest expanding in one painful heave. She charged ahead, head low, her boots splashing in the filthy, steaming, slushy black sewage streaming down a central channel, floating with dead rats and other, less-sanitary things. She could smell nothing but urine.
She heard the splashes of boots coming after her.
Dogs barked on Sabrina’s left, their fangs snapping in a two-inch gap between the ground and the bottom of a corrugated tin wall. Her breath fired white bolts in front of her face and she knew she was stupid because the Founders would have stationed someone at the other end of the alley. She was stupid not to have flung herself into the escape tunnel, the tunnel Marter and Vadim had secretly dug to emerge behind a garbage pile on the other side of the Kaminski’s hovel thirty feet away.
Vadim. He had betrayed them. And there would be a Founders’ man waiting for her at the other end of that tunnel.
The bang of a Founders’ pistol thundered behind Sabrina, the wallop of it funneling down the alley. The lead ball zipped past her ear with a rattling buzz and dinged off something metal where the alley exited into the street twenty feet ahead.
“Don’t kill her!” Tunney shouted somewhere behind, a thousand echoes behind. “Fawkes wants her alive!”
Sabrina burst out into the busy street, sliding and slipping, and cut to the right, dodging the currents of pedestrians as she’d done for years as a child. She knew how to lose pursuers, how to use the crooked streets to her advantage as child pickpockets do. Don’t look back. Never look back. She heard the shouts of the steampipers behind her, the dismayed grunts and cries of people as they were knocked aside.
Sabrina slid under a wagon, the rippled ice bruising the skin of her right thigh before she hopped to her feet and sprinted down another alley. Now that she could breathe freely she wanted to sob, to scream her heart out of her body, to throw herself down and die. But she had to run. She had to live. Because so many had to pay for what they had done, and now there were three more.
Tunney, Hackett, and Vadim.
Sabrina clambered up the bricks of a collapsed wall and dashed along the shantytown rooftops, her feet banging on the wooden planks and scrap metal. Dodging the loose coverings and tarpaulins, she accelerated and made the six-foot leap to the drainpipe of the old church and pulled herself up hand over hand. On the high church roof she scrabbled across the ice-slickened, crumbling clay tiles until she made it to the bell tower and squeezed through a hole in the belfry.
The tall, wooden square compartment which housed the old bell was just big enough for Sabrina to stretch out and this she did, lying still, waiting for her lungs and heart to ease back from nearly bursting. The belfry hole was her own private discovery. She’d hidden here before, the coin purses of angry merchants clutched to her stomach, laughing silently. The belfry had been closed up long ago and though the old rusty nails still held the original boards in place, the wood had grayed and shrunk and warped. It was all white and gray. The bird and bat guano was white an
d gray and the outside light filled the space with a hundred gray-white columns.
Sabrina heard Tunney shouting in the square below, frustration ringing in her voice as it bounced off the stone walls. Sabrina envisioned Tunney striding through the churchyard with its bare concrete pedestals, their bronze statues long gone and melted down, their inscriptions dissolving away.
“Where is she?” Tunney howled. “You promised us the girl, Hackett!”
“You had your girl!” Hackett roared. “I’m not responsible for you bungling a capture!”
“This way!” It was Vadim’s voice, frightened and high, girlish, but it was Vadim’s voice. “I know where the urchins hide!”
Sabrina lay still, breathing through her mouth now. She was glad Vadim didn’t know about the bell tower. Actually, Vadim didn’t know about a lot of things. The Founders had chosen a poor snitch.
Sabrina remained in the bell tower for two days. She was cold, wearing only her ratty woolen sweater, but she didn’t allow herself to suffer. She thought of Marter, all warm memories, and she occasionally had to remind herself that he was dead. She wasn’t going to cry. She wanted no food, no water, no sleep, only a whip with which to lash the world. By the morning of the third day she started to hallucinate. The peaked roof of the tower expanded and contracted and the universe expanded and contracted with it. At times she floated in white-gray nothingness or drifted through wooden-ribbed space. She gave herself up to the comforting oblivion for a while, becoming nothing more than the whistle of the wind through the cracks, the glimmer of the ice on the edges of the cantilevered vents, the swirling peel of white paint lifted up from a board the color of an old man’s beard.
At noon on the third day in the bell tower Sabrina drew her dagger from her belt and laid it over her heart.
XXXIV
SEMAPHORE BRIDGE
At midnight on the third day in the bell tower Sabrina climbed down from the church roof and walked to the Semaphore Bridge.
Vadim—a snake-oil-salesman to the core—always wanted to make the big score, to get rich quick, and he was most comfortable with a little gang of dangerous pretenders who always gathered under the Semaphore Bridge.
Gliding across the snowy walkways, Sabrina reached the concrete side of the Semaphore riverbed, now nothing more than a big snowy concrete ditch with a bottom of yellow ice. Fires, their wooden fuel purloined from abandoned houses, burned under the bridge as they always did, warming the hands of the homeless beggars. The light of the flames gave the iron bridge and the snowbound ravine a weird, fluttering aspect, like a wavering orange tunnel leading into eternity.
Sabrina skidded down the embankment and found herself walking past knots of sleeping people huddled under mountains of blankets or packed inside ramshackle shacks, their fires burning, dozens of them, along both sides of the ravine. Directly under the bridge, the choicest spot because it was sheltered, burned the largest fire. Around it three young men and one young woman sat on old dining room chairs, sipping from ceramic mugs. Drawing her knife and holding it behind her back, Sabrina strode directly toward them.
The first to notice Sabrina was Leper, the shortest of the group, a mean streets pretender with a real home like Vadim, and he jumped to his feet.
“What the?” Leper groaned. “Vadim—look.”
The others stood up from their chairs. Vadim looked frightened, already backing up. The other two were Semyon and Birdie, shady-eyed customers, true street thugs, slick and dangerous.
“Hello, Sabrina,” Semyon said with a sleepy grin. “People have been looking for you.”
Sabrina smelled chocolate. They were drinking hot chocolate. One of them had recently come into a nice pile of money, then. “I want Vadim.”
Semyon laughed. “Why? He isn’t good-looking like me.”
“You three should leave,” Sabrina said, still advancing.
Semyon’s smile vanished. “What’s behind your back, girl?” He tossed his mug aside, sloshing dark liquid across the dirty snow. “Vadim is one of us, girl. We don’t abandon each other.”
“He betrayed me,” Sabrina said, never taking her eyes off of Vadim, who cowered behind the others.
“And he got paid,” Leper said. He threw down his mug and Birdie did the same.
“There is a fine bounty out on your head,” Semyon said, reaching inside his coat for a knife or pistol as he stepped in front of the others. “I’ll take you in, after I make you my girlfriend for a little while, first.”
If outnumbered you must run, Marter’s voice echoed in Sabrina’s head. If you choose not to run then you must act first, before the enemy thinks you’re willing to act. Take advantage of them before they can organize to take advantage of their numbers.
Sabrina kept walking straight at Vadim, Leper, Birdie, and Semyon, almost right into their fire in the midst of them.
Hit them, Marter would say. When suddenly and unexpectedly hit, even when they see you coming at the last moment, most human beings will freeze. It may be only a fraction of a second, but the brain needs time to understand, to sort out information before reacting with something more than instinct.
Sabrina planted her foot, hurling her knife at Semyon’s throat. The blade flashed once in rotation, so short was the distance between them. Semyon staggered, clutching at the knife buried in his throat. He dropped his newly drawn dagger and fell backwards. He landed hard, convulsing in the snow, his blood spurting, glittering in the air.
“You bitch!” Leper shouted but his voice squeaked with fear. He clumsily yanked a pistol out from inside his big overcoat.
Sabrina rolled, grabbing Semyon’s dagger out of the snow. She sensed the blade was ill-weighted but she had no intention of throwing this one. Springing up in front of Leper, she knocked aside his gun hand and thrust Semyon’s dagger deep into his stomach. Leper shuddered, his eyes wide and dark and peering into hers. She wrenched the blade around inside of him. He jerked and gurgled, mouth splayed wide open, and fell to the side. Sabrina lifted the pistol out of his hand as he dropped.
Birdie turned and ran.
Vadim was already running.
Sabrina cocked the pistol. A thundering roar rose in her head, deafening her, making the world shake beneath her boots. Chunks of snow dropped in reams from the trestles above. She realized a train was passing overhead, the locomotive pounding over the bridge. In the shadows dozens of faces looked at her, dirty faces poking out of blanket piles and holes in the tarpaper shacks. These people would do nothing. All they wanted was to ransack the bodies once Sabrina left.
And they were welcome to it. Sabrina was already on the run, scrambling up the embankment, her boots kicking apart the crumbling footprints Vadim had made just seconds before. Birdie was out of sight but Sabrina didn’t care. Birdie could go. Sabrina leapt through the snow like a gazelle. Ahead of her, Vadim stumbled and shambled, gasping and weeping, slowing himself down as he clawed with his good hand at whatever weapon he’d stored inside his coat.
Vadim cut down an alley but Sabrina was already on him, catching up to him so fast it surprised her. She stopped, raised the pistol and fired. The gunpowder flash lit up the high brick walls, the discharge ringing sharply. Through the burst of black smoke Sabrina saw Vadim hurled forward, his arms and legs flinging out as he landed on his stomach and sent up a wave of displaced snow.
Sabrina tossed the pistol aside and approached Vadim, stepping over the red streak he had left behind as he skidded across the ice. The wall masonry dripped with blood. The ball had blown Vadim out from the inside, from back to front. Vadim gasped, face down, the hurl and ebb of his last agonized breaths puffing the snow back and forth around his cheeks.
Bits of things lay scattered in the snow; irregular chunks of pink and white and pale yellow—Sabrina realized they were cookies, wrapped in wax paper, blasted out of Vadim’s coat pocket. They had been a sweet reward for betrayal, like the chocolate, bought with Marter’s blood money.
Sabrina knelt alongside Vadim and
yanked at his blood-soaked coat until she found his coin purse, fat and heavy, and jammed it into her own pocket. She was going to need money now. Vadim’s form went rigid as Sabrina stood up. She heard his death rattle, saw his muscles lose so much tension the body almost dissolved into the snow.
Sabrina stood still in the silence, the blast of the gun and the thunder of the train echoing in her ears, her heart racing in her chest. The moon, a bright haze within the clouds, cast a silver-blue light upon the world and looked alien after the warm orange fires of the ravine. Snowflakes drifted down thick and soft and unaffected. Tomorrow the footprints would be gone, the pools of blood frozen, the bodies no one cared about buried under the white.
One down, Sabrina thought. One down and an army to go.
Sabrina froze.
Someone was behind her.
Sabrina spun around. A figure stood night shadows, heavily cloaked, so indistinguishable through the snowfall it seemed there might not actually be someone there.
But she was there.
It was Elizabeth.
***
Sabrina woke from her dream with a start. Staring at the dark luminiferous aether tubes on the ceiling, it took her a moment to remember where she was; her quarters in the undersea city of Atlantis. It was quiet. The dark sea gurgled outside the viewing window. Air hummed gently out of an overhead vent. She rose from the bed into a sitting position. Welly and Buckle were both asleep, Welly on the divan and Buckle flopped in a plush chair with his boots on. She was truly surprised that Buckle had managed to get some shut-eye.
“Are you well, Sabrina?” Penny Dreadful asked, a breathy metallic whisper.
Sabrina saw Penny standing in the area of the secret passageway, her amber eyes glowing in the dark.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Sabrina whispered. “Be quiet now, so as not to wake the others.” Sabrina swung off the bed and moved into the bathroom. She shut the door and, plunging both hands into the silver basin, splashed cold water her face. She breathed through her nose, feeling droplets of water trickle down her neck and soak into her shirt collar. She looked at herself in the mirror: the person staring back at her seemed a stranger.
Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3) Page 20