Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  “They?” Reece repeated as he slid his hands under Gideon’s back and tried painstakingly to flip him onto his stomach. “What makes you think there was—bogrosh, he’s heavy!—more than one of them?”

  Face reddening with the effort of moving Gideon’s considerable mass, Hayden choked out, “His revolver was missing five rounds.”

  “Hayden, I’m inclined to believe—” Reece grunted as at last, Gideon settled on his stomach. “—you’ve been hiding a detective behind all your genius.”

  Blushing at the praise as he gingerly rearranged Gideon’s tattered arms, Hayden mumbled, “It’s just common sense. I checked his revolver while you all were bringing him in.”

  “Lucky your father and Sophie were in town.”

  “Yes. Lucky.”

  Suddenly, Gideon groaned in his sleep, quieting the both of them. Hayden set to work piecing his skin back together and sealing it with a solvable medical glue, and Reece entertained himself with thoughts of what he’d do to the person responsible for this. Thunder and lightning alternated strikes while rain tapped endlessly on the outside windows.

  After a while, Sophie came to the door with a tray of steaming teacups, peering in before entering. Her face whitened when she saw the bloody gauze and smelled the disinfectants in the air.

  “How is he?” she asked Reece in a peep of a voice as he took the tray from her and sat it on his unmade bed.

  “He’ll be juggling knives again in a couple of hours,” he assured her. He pretended not to see the short glance Hayden threw him over his bifocals.

  “Shouldn’t we have taken him to a medical facility?”

  “Hayden’s a medical facility on legs; he’s all we need.” And they didn’t need anyone asking questions about a Pan being brought in with a gunshot wound to the head. That was the last sort of attention they wanted.

  Hands playing with the fabric of her bright pink skirt, Sophie quietly said, “I’ve never seen him looking like that before. It looks like someone could break him in two, if they wanted.”

  Smiling, Reece put an arm around her and pulled her into his side, so she could rest her blonde head on his chest. “Nah, they couldn’t. You should have seen me and Hayden trying to roll him over.”

  Sophie started to giggle, but as her eyes glanced over his shoulder, she gasped instead. “You!” she yelped, very nearly stopping Reece’s heart.

  Nivy, perched with a knee bent to her chest on the windowsill in the corner, raised her head. Florescent lightning flooded the room and made her look for a second like a wild, roosting creature. Reece had all but forgotten about her, which made him shiver, because in that second she’d looked like the kind of thing you never wanted to forget was in the room with you.

  “You’re the girl from Caldonia!” Sophie squeaked, pointing.

  “Good grief, Soph,” Hayden scolded, straightening out the tin tray of tweezers and forceps he had bumped. “I almost stabbed myself with an ophthalmoscope.” He paused, looking to them with an expectant look. His face fell a little. “That was a joke. You can’t stab yourself with an ophthalmoscope. This is an ophthalmoscope.” He held out a flat, blunt instrument with a miniature photon globe fixed to it.

  After a beat, Reece laughed, and he felt Sophie melting under his arm, relaxing to the sound. “Sophie, this is Nivy. She’s a…friend of ours. Visiting.”

  Sophie quirked her head to the side and considered Nivy. “From where?”

  Reece was saved from having to lie by Gideon making an odd glubbing noise that, as it turned out, was supposed to be words.

  “Waaa…goo….onnn?”

  “I thought you said he’d be out till morning,” Reece said, leaving Sophie to join Hayden by the table.

  Hayden was too busy pushing open one of Gideon’s eyes and looking into it with his opha-whatever to answer for a minute.

  “Interesting,” he mumbled to himself, thoughtfully tapping his tool in his palm. “I wonder if his adrenaline levels—well, never mind that. I’ll put him under again.”

  “Don’t bother,” Gideon finally got out. He managed to open his eyes on his own to look first at Reece and Hayden, then at Sophie, who held his gaze. Clearing his throat roughly, he said, “Biscuits?”

  Sophie’s face split into a grin. “I’ll go make some up in the kitchenette! I’m glad you’re alright, Gid!”

  As soon as she’d planted a kiss on top of his head and scampered out of the room, Gideon clenched his eyes shut and made a sound that Reece had never heard from him. One of bone-deep agony.

  “Forget it.” Hayden opened the leather satchel at his feet and started digging around, causing a cacophony of rattling glass. “You’re going back to sleep.”

  “No, that ain’t it.” Before Hayden or Reece could stop him, Gid leaned up and swung his legs over the edge of his bed. He winced when he saw the backs of his arms, running with veins of glue. “If I’m here, that means they must’a got away, huh?”

  “There was no one else around when Father and Sophie found you.” Snapping on a fresh pair of medic’s gloves, Hayden checked Gideon’s pulse, eyes, and ears.

  “Lay mushta mood bear bed,” Gideon rumbled around the tongue depressor Hayden was forcing into his mouth.

  Reece put a hand on the overeager doctor’s shoulder to keep him from gagging Gid. “Come again?”

  Gideon spat out the depressor with a sour face. “I said, they must’a moved their dead.”

  “Dead?” Hayden gasped. “You…you killed them?”

  “A couple, anyhow.” He eyed Hayden, all the more menacing for the new scar dividing his left eyebrow in two. “They was gonna kill me, Aitch. Did what I had to.”

  “But surely you could have, I don’t know…shot out their kneecaps instead?”

  Remembering not to forget Nivy again, Reece glanced back at her. She was peering out into the storm with her forehead pressed to the window, for all the world, seeming oblivious to their conversation. Sophie came in with biscuits for Gideon, and then her big brother, blinking in surprise at his pocket watch, sent her to the guestroom where their father and Mordecai were staying for the night.

  “Girls in the dormitory,” Hayden tsked under his breath, dividing his anxious look between Sophie’s retreating back and Nivy. “What next?”

  Reece didn’t want to know the answer to that. They’d been through enough turbulence as it was; surely now that he and Hayden had been drafted, things would calm down until they were shipped out for off-world training, wherever that might be. He was going to guess on Castor or Leto, two of Honora’s ally planets. Castor had tropical jungles and giant lizards, and Leto, well, he kind of hoped it wasn’t on Leto. For a few reasons, but mostly, he didn’t like the thought of it always being night there.

  There was a heavy quiet hanging over the suite as Reece cleared off his desk and spread out the physical clues he had to study—just the ancient book and Liem’s cufflinks. Nivy came and stood at his shoulder, her hands tucked into her armpits. He didn’t think he was imagining her eyes widening ever-so-slightly as they found the book.

  “I’m not crazy,” he told her, laying one protective hand on the worn leather tome. She twitched. “Aurelia’s emblem is here and here, on these things Liem left behind for me to find.”

  “That we think he left for you to find,” Hayden interjected from where he was fluffing a pillow for the bed he was making Gideon on the couch.

  “Okay, we think. But it was also on your capsule. And a little more than twenty-four hours ago, we had our run in on the Aurelia herself. You were there looking for something, weren’t you?”

  Her chest rising with a silent sigh, Nivy lifted a hand and tipped it from side to side. More or less.

  “Don’t forget about the gun,” Gideon muttered through his teeth as he limped towards the couch.

  Reece slapped his palm on the desk, energized by the reminder. “I’d forgotten about the gun. Can I see it?”

  Gideon paused above the couch, looking on the verge of tippin
g over onto it. He touched his hip as if remembering something, then, scowling, spat, “They must’a taken it. I had it when I left Mordecai’s.”

  Twisting around with sudden liveliness, Nivy threw out her hands, then propped them in fists on her hips. When Gideon, Reece and Hayden returned her angry look with blank shares, she rolled her eyes and made a gun with her hand that she shook vehemently in Gideon’s direction.

  Gideon went as red as a ripe cherry. “It ain’t my fault! You don’t gotta get all—all—prissy!”

  Even though it was hard to concentrate with Gideon growling at Nivy pretending to use her fake gun to shoot him, Reece was able to seize one of the niggling questions floating around in his head and voice it. “Why would they want the gun? Nivy?” She looked back at him, expression dry. “Got an answer for us?”

  “Even if she does, she can’t give it to you until I teach her how to write. And she can’t very well learn to write without getting some decent sleep, which I am currently prescribing for all of us,” Hayden said, taking off his bifocals, stretching out on his bed, and pulling his blanket up over his head with finality. “Doctor’s orders.”

  Reece was the only one with an early class the next morning, so while the others were still traipsing through slumberland, he was packing the datascope containing his class notes into his satchel and hurrying about the suite with his hair standing every which way and only one of his pant legs tucked into his boots. At the last second, he scooped up the mysterious book and Liem’s cufflinks. He rarely went anywhere without the cufflinks anymore; any time he noticed their slight added weight, he made himself remember Liem, wherever he might be. The cufflinks felt heavier than usual in his pocket today.

  He heard someone stir as he opened the suite door and turned to look at Nivy in her nest of blankets in the corner. Her eyes were open, staring enviously at the book beneath his arm. When she met his stare, she gave her head a short shake and then rolled over in her blankets. He wasn’t sure she’d been entirely awake, but the longing in her eyes had seemed lucid enough. He locked the suite door behind him.

  Campus was big enough that students in The Owl’s crisp black dress were never crowded, but still, there was a distinct feeling of busyness coming back from the holiday, when everyone had new tutors to impress and new classes to tackle. The students Reece walking with on his way to the engineering building hurried as much as he did. As he hurried, he tried spitting in his hand and smoothing down his hair to no avail. All it did was draw revolted looks from some pretty Sixteens who had been smiling at him a second ago.

  Airship Engineering III was taught by a papery old lady in an olive drab jumpsuit named Tutor Agnes. Reece had seen her around before, usually in deep discussions with burly mechanics that had come seeking her advice. Her short, curly white hair was tucked back in a handkerchief.

  “The airship,” she began in a voice like dusty chalk as she circled the glass-walled classroom with her hands behind her back, “is the soul of pioneering, of exploration. And it is the only body that can survive the vacuum of space, which would kill you and me by explosive decompression in a matter of moments. It is a marvelous being, is it not?”

  “Yes ma’am,” the class intoned, Reece included. He glanced around at his classmates as he tapped his data wand on the edge of his desktop. It was mostly the old crew, students who’d been at The Owl for aviation from the beginning.The Ailey brothers, Silas and Jesse, caught his eye and grinned while Molly Brewer glared over his head, ignoring him.

  “Everything we do in this class will be on the clock,” Agnes continued, still prowling from desk to desk. “When your crew is depending on you to fix their ship and save their lives, there can be no hesitance. You must learn to deal with the pressure.”

  Molly raised her hand importantly. “Ma’am? We’re not studying to be mechanics, we’re studying to be pilots.”

  Agnes paused, then sniffed disdainfully and raised her reedy little voice so that it carried to the back of the room. “Mark this down, all of you, if you please.” There was a soft whirr of datascopes powering up. “There is a reason a captain is called the captain, not the pilot, when he is in charge of a ship. A captain is not just a pilot. He is the doctor. The cook. The mechanic. He is a chameleon of duties, the paramount of which is understanding the workings of his vessel and not being an ignorant passenger who simply believes a wing will swing to port when ordered to without knowing why. Also, Ms. Brewer? Mechanics save lives every day. It is a noble calling. If you cannot stoop so low as to aspire to be one in my class, you may take your things and kindly leave so that I do not have to get angry every time I look at you.”

  That was when Reece knew that he and Agnes were going to get along very well. Behind Molly’s back, Silas and Jesse gleefully bumped their fists together.

  Agnes was a pusher; she expected nothing short of excellence out of her students, even the ones who didn’t have a mechanical bone in their body. Reece himself had never been much good at fixing ships, though he understood their workings well enough. Real mechanics, ones like Agnes, were good because they had a knack for it, not just the sense to hook a snozzle to a thrunge plate.

  “Mr. Sheppard,” Agnes forebodingly clicked her clocker to cut its ticking short, “that was shoddy work, for the time you put into it.”

  Reece held up the undulator he’d reassembled, squinting at it. “I don’t think it looks that bad.”

  “That’s because you’re an amateur with little aptitude and no flair for the art. I once taught a Twelve who did that in twenty-two seconds.”

  “Twenty-two seconds? Really? Wow. Give him my congratulations.”

  “Save your wit for the engine room. And you can tell her yourself. She is doing a guest lecture for me in our afternoon session.” Agnes smiled; her wrinkles turned into well-used smile lines, and for a second, she looked more like a grandmother than a hard old crow. “Now, let’s see you disassemble that in thirty seconds. Remember, at thirty-five, the heat compressor will combust and burn you and your crew alive.”

  When class broke for lunch, Reece wasn’t the only one who stumbled out of the room glassy-eyed and with engine grease on his face. Campus was busier now that it was midday, but most of the students were on their way to the great pillared banquet hall where meals were served four times a day. Reece weighed his hunger against his desire to see how much more Hayden had been able to teach Nivy this morning. He’d probably think clearer on a full stomach.

  Rolling up the sleeves of his jacket, Reece merged into the stream of students on their way to lunch.

  “There you are,” someone with a breathy voice said, startlingly close. “You are a very difficult young man to track down.” The hand on his shoulder felt strangely like a restraint.

  Glancing up, Reece tried to keep his face from showing the panic suddenly streaming through him like waves of electricity. Headmaster Charles Eldritch, so lean he seemed almost skeletal, had a slight stoop in his back from putting his head level with Reece’s.

  “Me, Headmaster?” Reece affronted an easy smile. “Sorry about that. With just getting back from holiday—”

  “Was it a very eventful holiday, Reece?” Eldritch’s lips curved, patronizing. The portly Robert Gustley was shuffling along behind him, scrubbing the sweaty forehead showing beneath the rim of his bowler cap with a handkerchief.

  With blood pounding in his head, Reece made himself shrug. “Well, I assume you heard about my brother, Liem.”

  “Indeed I did.” Eldritch gave his shoulder a pat. “A most terrible thing, the kidnapping of the Palatine First. Honora is a sight to behold. Your brother’s face is the only thing on the evening wireless waves.”

  “It is terrible,” Reece agreed carefully, evenly. With the headmaster hunching over one of his shoulders and Gustley panting like a racehorse behind the other, he was starting to feel a little crowded. “But whoever is responsible will get what’s coming to him. The duke will see to it.”

  Eldritch chuckled as he st
raightened to his full height. “Alas, but I do not think the duke has much power there, my boy. Not anymore. Perhaps back in the day when we had kings, not dukes, but these last eleven generations, Parliament and its democracy have been Honora’s origin of power.”

  They were coming up on the banquet hall and its tall white steps, where several dozen students were spread out with books or trays of food in their laps. Reece stopped walking to face his stalkers with a frown.

  “Why were you looking for me?”

  “I wanted to congratulate you on your induction into the Honoran military,” Eldritch crooned, extending a slim hand with a gaudy ring on one of its fingers. “I just heard this morning. You must be thrilled at your luck. It seems you’ll be piloting a ship after all.”

  After a pause, Reece shook the hand. “Thank you, Headmaster.” He tried to release the handshake, but Eldritch clung to it, covering Reece’s hand with both of his.

  “The final stretch of a student’s career at The Academy is pivotal, Mr. Sheppard. Often, he or she is tempted to let…distractions…hinder their focus. But distractions can be dangerous.” Eldritch’s eyes suddenly flashed, and he gave Reece’s hand a cold, unwelcome squeeze. “For your career, I mean. The last thing you want to do is disappoint your parents.”

  “Well,” Reece freed his hand, “I’m wouldn’t say the last thing. I mean, it’s down there, but certainly not below becoming a traveling mime, or eating someone I know.”

  Eldritch’s smile tightened impatiently. “Then your friends. The Rices, the Creeds. It is sadly true that the ones dearest to you are the ones hurt the worst by…bad choices.”

  He was threatening. Threatening Reece’s friends. Stepping up toe-to-toe with Eldritch, Reece glared into his face, his sunken eyes and sunken cheeks, imagining how Hayden would bemoan this story when he heard it.