“Enough, Henry,” Ingrid said in a longsuffering voice, gesturing for Nivy and Reece to follow her out onto the road. “I haven’t the energy to endure your bouts of nonsense today.”
“Bouts of my—”
“Now kindly step aside. I have invited Captain Sheppard and his crew to stay as my guests, and I will not have you acting the swollen fool towards them.”
Henry's whole head went the color of a turnip as he sputtered and glared indignantly at the mayor. “Captain Sheppard,” he spat. “Did the watch tell you what ship Captain Sheppard, the Raiders take him, is flying, Ingrid? Or were you too keen to sweep them under your wing to ask?”
For the first time, Ingrid hesitated, and Reece and Nivy exchanged a look behind her back. Reece hadn't intended to bring up Aurelia's name if he could help it, but he hadn't thought it'd cause this kind of stir if he did, even with the turbine being somewhere on Leto. She was legendary only to Honora, after all, merely a nice story anywhere else.
“The Aurelia,” Henry said nastily, and Ingrid gasped.
Spinning, her face now a shade darker than Henry's, she demanded, “Is this true?”
If there ever was a time to play the Palatine First card, it was now.
“Listen,” Reece tried to make his voice soothing. Maybe he should’ve brought Scarlet along after all. “You should know I have the Grand Duke's permission to captain Aurelia. In fact.” Try though he might, he couldn't help but cringe as he extended his hand to Henry. “Reece Sheppard, Palatine First of Honora, heir to the dukeship, and rightful captain of the airship Aurelia as granted by her original owners.”
Nivy glanced at him sideways, eyebrows raised. She couldn't exactly speak for all The Heron, but she’d have to do, for now. Then again, maybe that look had simply been impressed. It was an awfully long title.
And it drew both Ingrid and Henry up short. Henry, his small, watery eyes flickering between Reece's face and waiting hand, was the first to recover.
“You mean to tell me,” he said, still flustered, “that you're simply here by coincidence, and not for the generator?”
“The generator,” Reece repeated flatly, and dropped his hand.
“Yes, the generator,” Henry echoed, mocking. “Ring a bell, does it, Palatine First? Well, you're about to find out how much those titles mean around—” He broke off hoarsely as Ingrid shot him a glare to rival one of Abigail's, expecting obedience and promising consequences at the same time. “Ingrid,” he complained. “They're outsiders! They can't be trusted! And their ship, Ingrid—”
“No. For too long we've refused to trust our allies. Our culture is dying, Henry. It is time for a change.”
Quivering with rage, Henry cast one last loathing look at Reece, gave the lapels of his jacket a yank, and marched away, muttering.
“I’m sorry,” Ingrid apologized, shaking her head. “He is a good man, but a traditionalist to the core.” Pausing, she looked at Reece, measuring him anew with a glint in her eyes that made him want to take a step back. “Are you after the generator?”
Reece truthfully answered, “We’re looking for a missing ship part, one that was auctioned off a few centuries ago. But we call it a thermal turbine.”
For a long moment, Ingrid stared at him, her mouth in a tight, hard line. She glanced at Nivy, uncertain, and then abruptly turned on her heel and started marching up the alley, beckoning, “Come. I will show you something.”
Reece waited till she'd gone a full ten steps before he slowly started following. “What do you think?” he asked Nivy under his breath as she walked beside him, staring after Ingrid with eyes little less calculating than the woman's had been.
Nivy signed out their designated gesture for the word trust, then firmly shook her head. Don't trust anyone. A good rule of thumb…if they wanted to end up like the Letoians. Friendless, and dead in the water.
They passed through a ramshackle market square where the grubby-faced peddlers were selling browning fruit and secondhand clothes, some with holes worn right through them. Where the market dissolved into artisan apartments—a blacksmith’s, a seamstress’s, a cobbler’s—the space overhead was crisscrossed with clotheslines dripping disconsolately between second story homes. All the while the houses clinging to the North and South Sheets flickered with movement and light and slow life.
“This way,” Ingrid said sharply when she caught Reece staring in interest at a wing of the overgrown factory—which she called The Plant—that was marked on its double steel doors with a poisonous red X. She led them past the forbidden doors and to a wing squeezed between the baker’s brick shop and a boarded-up warehouse that looked like it had once been a hospital.
“This is not the quickest way to the heart of The Plant,” she admitted as she pulled out a fat ring and started sifting through its collection of keys. “But it will help us avoid any more Henrys.”
Once she’d found the right key, she unlocked a narrow, windowless door painted to blend in with its walls and waved Reece and Nivy on through. In blink-worthy contrast to the subdued greys and browns of outside, the inside of the wing was all white, from its low ceiling to its painted floors.
“What is this place?” Reece asked curiously, trying to imagine what a long empty hallway might be good for besides running up and down and screaming. He was tempted.
“One of our emergency evacuation centers. We have not had to use it in some months, thank goodness.” Closing the door behind her, Ingrid started down the corridor, the heels of her boots ticking like a loud clock. “The generator, you see, creates a safe box around the city, a shielding mechanism that keeps out the Rippers. The Rippers have broken the boundaries before, when our truce has failed, and these wings are a last holding point. They would risk destruction, coming so close to the generator. It works at a specific frequency only the Rippers can hear.”
“Like a dog whistle.”
“Hardly,” Ingrid said dryly as she paused before a pair of padlocked doors. “I've never known a whistle to burn out a dog's nerve endings. Look there.” She jabbed her chin at the doors' twin rectangular windows and stepped back to make room for him. “I can take you no further, but the generator is rather impossible to miss.”
It only took Reece one look through the window to decide he was in trouble. He didn't know turbines or generators, but he did know Aurelia's design, her gold and wooden look. The tubular hunk of metal sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the white domed room had that look. Men and women in more olive uniforms like Mayor Petric's bustled around the room with scrolls beneath their arms, never coming within ten feet of what Reece was sure was his turbine.
“Well?” Ingrid prompted.
Reece turned to Petric. “I'd like to send for my mechanic, if I could. I'm sorry to say I don't have much of an eye for engines.”
He hoped his confused face would stand up to Petric's scrutiny; she seemed to be trying to glare right through to the back of his head. “In the morning, perhaps,” she said finally, her voice a little too light. She gestured them back towards the exit. “It's late, and I promised you food and rest. No work can be done on your ship until the Rippers sleep, in any case. You can find your way back to the up-downs? I must see to Henry before he plants too many rumors…that man will be the end of my term, the Raiders take him. Ask the guards at the up-downs to escort you to the boarding house. They will show you the way. Goodnight, Captain Sheppard.”
She abruptly left them there, standing before the doors to the outside while she strode away at a march that seemed hurried but smooth at the same time. The whole thing was strange, and Reece didn't need one of Gideon's telltale bad feelings to warn him to be on his toes, with Ingrid as much as Henry or anyone else. Why would she leave them? And so close to The Plant.
“Nivy.”
Nivy looked at him as they stepped outside together.
“I need you to follow her.”
Unsurprised, she nodded and immediately began backing up, facing the wing and flexing her
hands experimentally.
“Just see where she goes and what she says to Henry and then come find us. No sidecar adventures,” Reece firmly added when she smirked. This might be the sort of thing she used to do for The Heron all the time, but he wasn't The Heron. And these weren't The Kreft…they were something else.
With an “alright, alright!” expression, Nivy took a few running steps till it seemed she would collide with the side of the wing, then leaped, kicked off the wall, and grabbed the lip of the roof, her feet scrambling. Reece glanced over both his shoulders, on guard. By the time he'd looked back around, she had gotten her footing, dived to the next low rooftop, and come up from her landing roll to begin sprinting away.
XI
Evacuation Now, a Guidebook
The blanket was itchy. Usually that wouldn't have bothered Hayden—and he wasn't really complaining; it was cold in the barracks, or boarding house as they were supposed to call it—but tonight, it was just one more thing keeping him from sleeping. He rolled over, exhausted but restless, and tried to muffle the sound of Mordecai's wheezy snores in his pillow. Gideon's provided a deeper, coarser harmony from a few bunks down.
“We should've thought to bring some local vibration dampeners,” someone whispered.
Hayden opened his eyes. Without his bifocals, Reece was a fuzzy shape silhouetted against the boarding house's window.
“What are you doing up?” he asked, feeling around under his bed till his hand found his spectacles. He pushed them on and leaned upright, careful not to bump his head on the low springs of Mordecai's mattress above. The old man gave a snuffling snort.
Reece stared out into the valley with one leg folded up to his chest and the other dangling off the side of the large trunk serving as a window seat. “Nivy's not back yet.” He played his fingertips over the candlestick on the windowsill, making the flame wink in and out.
Hayden lowered his bare feet to the stone floor and rose to join him, worriedly peering out the window. Fewer than a dozen windows on the distant South Sheet still had candles burning in them, and the leeks, as Reece called them, had all gone out when a loud gong had sounded some two hours ago.
“I'm sure we would have heard something if she were in some sort of trouble.”
“I sent her to spy, Hayden. If she's in some sort of trouble, it's exactly the kind the Letoians won't tell us about.”
Slowly sitting down on the other end of the trunk, Hayden said, “You don't trust them, do you?”
Reece looked at him. “Should I?”
“They are our allies. Petric sounds alright. She took you to see the turbine.”
“She took me to see their generator. And I'm ninety-nine—no, ninety-eight—no, ninety-nine percent sure she was just testing me.” Making an agitated noise, Reece went on in a low mutter, “But why would it matter to her if their generator turned out to be a turbine? She knew before ever taking me to The Plant that it didn't matter if the two were one and the same…she'd never give up the generator, either way. She was looking for something. Looking for me to confirm it was a turbine. Why?”
“Maybe you should ask Scarlet.” When Reece snorted loudly—loudly enough to cause a brief break in Mordecai's snores—Hayden insisted, “She understands people, Reece. And she's good at puzzles.”
Reece leaned back against the wall and crossed his ankles, reclining. His smile-lines were deep grooves in the candlelight. “Is that what you two have been up to? Solving puzzles?”
His face burning, Hayden said, “It's not like that. Scarlet is…” He listened, carefully counting the sounds of deep breathing and making sure everyone was asleep. “She's really clever, and with the…you know, the glamour fading…she's becoming a good friend.”
“But you still want to impress her.”
“Oh, definitely.”
Laughing, Reece leaned upright, squinted out the window, and began undoing the bolts to open it. Hayden followed his glance and jumped. There was a face—Nivy's face, thank goodness—staring through the glass at him. She ducked out of sight, making room for Reece to swing the window out over her head, then scrambled in to sit with them on the trunk, breathing hard.
“Any luck?” Reece asked.
Nivy nodded grimly and brushed a strand of sweaty hair behind her ear, staring without blinking at the bunks. Po and Scarlet's bunk, to be exact. She pointed—once at Po, curled up on the top bed with her freckled face mashed into her pillow, and once out the window, down at Leto City.
Reece must have worked out an interpretation ahead of Hayden, because he asked, “What for?” while Hayden was still frowning thoughtfully out the window.
Hayden winced, sympathetic, as Nivy opened and closed her mouth soundlessly, looking frustrated. Another good thing about getting to The Ice Ring…it meant she'd finally be able to take off that horrible collar.
“Is it Petric?” Reece guessed. “Did you see something with Petric?”
Shooting him a grateful look, Nivy nodded and outlined a shape with her hands—a tall box with lines running away from it.
“You want Po to look at the turbine.”
“Now?” Hayden reached, pulled the scratchy wool blanket off his bed, and wrapped it around his shoulders. However humid it was above ground, down here, it was as chilly as a coolant pantry. “But it's bound to be under guard. If we were caught sneaking into The Plant in the middle of the night…” He trailed off distractedly as Nivy charaded writing something down. He might not have Reece's uncanny interpretation skills, but that one seemed fairly self-explanatory. Hurrying over to his rucksack, he rummaged about for a square of parchment and a pen and handed them to her.
She wrote for a long time—full minutes—before finally thrusting the parchment at Reece. He pulled it out of sight to read with a frown for at least as long as she'd been writing, his face carefully neutral. Hayden looked on curiously.
“What does it say?” he asked.
“It doesn't matter.” Reece handed the parchment back to Nivy with a significant look. “We can't leave without that turbine. We'd never make it out of the atmosphere, let alone into the Perseus Stream. I agree there's something off about Leto, but they could threaten to cook us up and serve us on a side of rice, and we still couldn't go until the turbine was secured. We're stuck. Great. And now I'm craving rice.”
Frowning, Nivy tore the parchment in two, wadded up the pieces, and angrily threw them at the window. They bounced off and rolled to a stop by her feet; she stared down at them, her eyebrows pushed together.
“Look,” Reece said, pausing to glance searchingly at Hayden, his expression conflicted for some reason, “I'll have Po and Scarlet go down to the city with you first thing in the morning, but that’s the best I can do for now. Just…try to get some sleep.”
Nodding unhappily, Nivy dragged her feet over to the bunk next to Scarlet and Po's, crawled into it, and stiffly rolled over with her boots still on. With a sigh, Hayden sat down on his bed, hugging the blanket to his arms and watching Reece as he snatched the candle from the windowsill and walked it to his and Gideon's bunk. He looked the kind of tired that Father often looked: not simply ready for bed, but whittled down to the bones-and-skin strength that kept a person walking after the muscles had been worn away.
“Reece?”
Reece looked up from untying his boots, eyebrows raised.
Grimacing, Hayden clumsily changed what he had been going to say. “How…how long do you think we'll be gone?”
Looking amused as he gave his left boot a tug and then let it plop to the floor, Reece remarked, “Homesick already?”
“I guess.”
Hayden carefully folded his bifocals and tucked them under his bed before lying down. He stared blurrily up at the spirals of Mordecai's bedsprings. Sophie had probably put in a few hours at the postal office this morning. After that, she would have worked in her vegetable garden until dinner, brought in some fresh nimblegreens to put on the table…maybe played with her owl, Benjamin…
&nbs
p; As long as Hayden could picture those things, he could stifle the sting of wanting them in person. “I wouldn't go back yet, if I could,” he said, “but I do miss it. Sophie's cooking. The smell of grass. Little things you don't notice until they're gone.”
“Sophie's cooking,” Reece repeated fondly. He disappeared from Hayden's sight as he flopped back onto his bed with a grunt. “Biscuits and chocolate tea.”
“The rain,” Po spoke up sleepily, “I miss the rain.”
“I miss the sleep,” someone else snapped, and Hayden belatedly realized Gideon's snores had dropped out some time ago. “The kind you can only get when no one's talkin'.”
With a laugh, Reece blew out the candle.
Hayden restlessly waited and listened for the sounds of the others dropping off to sleep again. Gideon's snores returned with a vengeance. Reece muttered unconsciously. He couldn't be sure about Po or Nivy, but they weren't the ones he was worried about—they weren't like Reece and Gideon, always holding back the worst from him.
Retrieving his datascope from under his pillow, he used its buzzing screen to light the floor, searching. His fingertips brushed one wadded-up half of Nivy's message; it crackled noisily in his fist, making his pulse race. With the note and datascope together in one hand, he wriggled under his covers and ducked his head to read. His breath caught. The note was just three words.
Leave. Now. Danger.
He never found its other half.
Between the Creeds' snores and his reoccurring nightmares about the Rippers cooking him up in a pot of rice, Hayden didn't get much sleep. It didn't help that morning in Leto City resembled the dead of night as much as night did. He wouldn't have known it to be morning at all if it weren't for the smell of strong tea tempting him awake, and the sound of Mordecai merrily whistling “Blue Skies in Buckets”. Candles and leeks, flickering orange and dirty white, had been lit throughout the boarding house.
The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) Page 15