“I will protect them from the consequences of my choices.”
Gustley paled. Students did not speak to the headmaster in that hostile tone.
Eldritch’s eyes narrowed, looking strange paired with his amused smile. “You are a fascinating specimen, Reece Sheppard. I wish you the best. I will grieve the day when no one is there to protect you from the consequences of your choices.”
I bet you will, Reece thought.
“Sorry,” interrupted a Westerner voice, sweet and soprano. “But did you just say Reece Sheppard?”
Gustley, spluttering his objections, was pushed aside by a wink of a girl with a face that tickled Reece’s distant memory, with freckles and white-blonde hair braided over her shoulder. Her cheek was smudged with the same black oil peppering her grey jumpsuit.
“Oh, there you are!” She beamed at Reece. “Almost didn’t recognize you. Agnes told me to introduce myself, said you’re really clever with engines. Well, Agnes don’t say that about nobody, so I thought that even though we’ve kinda already met, there wouldn’t be no harm in meetin’ again.”
“Er—” Reece glanced sideways at Eldritch, who was gazing down at the Westerner girl in clear contempt. “Hello?”
“Hi!” The girl stuck out a dirty hand. “I’m Po Trimble, remember?”
“Er—”
“Wanna grab some lunch? I hear they’re servin’ crab cakes today.”
“Sure?”
“Swell!” Po faced Eldritch for the first time, and her freckled face turned cool. “You have a nice day now, Headmaster.” Then she turned on the heel of her clunky black boot and started up the stairs of the banquet hall, as self-possessed as any lady would have been despite her appearance of having just crawled out of a gut engine bypass.
Watching Po give the Headmaster of The Aurelian Academy the cold shoulder left Reece feeling as speechless as Nivy, so he hadn’t quite gathered his scattered thoughts back together when Eldritch suddenly reached out and clasped his wrist.
“Good day to you, Mr. Sheppard,” his whisper rattled. He pressed something smooth and rectangular into Reece’s captured hand, snapped his fingers at Gustley, and left. Strolling between the students in his tall dark suit, he looked to Reece like a terrible bat trying to blend in among bright birds.
Reece gazed down at his old gun, feeling a jarring spike of alarm as he recognized it, and then shoved it under his jacket. Anger crowded into the space between his scattered thoughts. It had all been a game of wits between him and Eldritch, and he had just lost terribly.
XII
It Only Gets Deeper From Here
Reece caught up to Po in the buffet line serving vegetables, and grabbed himself a plate even though his appetite had sunk to the pit of his stomach. Po saw him, and after spooning herself a glob of orange squash, went ahead and spooned him a helping as well.
“Trust me,” she said brightly, “just put a little sweet cream on top’a that, and you’ve got yourself the healthiest dessert this side of the Epimetheus.”
Blinking, Reece said, “Uh, thanks. Listen. What was that between you and Eldritch? You seemed—”
Po sighed and gestured with a serving fork with a carrot skewered on one of its tines. “A mite unfriendly, I know. But with Eldritch, you gotta…what’s it called?...establish dominance. You gotta do that straight away, or he’ll walk all over you.”
She took off again at a brisk, bouncing walk, veering towards the bread line. Reece hopped to stay on her shadow and tried to remember where he’d heard that chirpy voice before.
“Have a lot of experience with him?”
“Not really. Just one really bad one, when I told him I was quittin’ The Owl.” In the bread line, Po picked out the butt of a greenish loaf of bread and settled it next to her squash, careful to keep the two foods from touching.
“Quitting The Owl?” They drifted towards the pasta line. “You mean you’re not a student here?”
“Oh, heck no! Haven’t been since I was a Fourteen! I dropped out to help my brothers with their shop in Caldonia. Eldritch didn’t like me leavin’, to be honest. Agnes had told him I was a prodigy, and he wanted me to be The Owl’s prodigy, not nobody else’s. So we got in a bit of a spat when I told him I was goin’ and he couldn’t stop me.”
When Po seemed satisfied with the eclectic foods she’d gathered, she led Reece to one of the two-person tables under the hall’s tall, pointed windows looking out at The Owl’s busy sidewalks. A waitress came and poured them glasses of dark green limeade, and Po said thank you and told her to have a wonderful day. Being with Po, Reece felt as if he’d accidentally fallen onto some other planet. A planet of chirpy birds and meadows and rainbows.
The answer suddenly rang like a bell inside his head. Where he knew her from. He almost choked on his limeade as he realized, “You rode beside me on Bus-ship Ten, didn’t you? You were the little mechanic girl!”
Po looked down at her food bashfully, stirring her squash and noodles together. “Is that all you remember me from?” she asked. When Reece said nothing, stumped, she glanced up and blushed. “I sat behind you in class before I left The Owl.”
“Which class?”
“Um. Beginner Aerodynamics. Alien Anthropology. Literature and Composition.”
“Huh.”
“Arithmetic I and II. Honoran Economics. Zoology,” Po continued. She put down her fork and narrowed coffee-colored eyes at him as he cringed. “What kind’a person takes eight classes with someone and doesn’t bother rememberin’ their name?”
“Eight? We had eight classes together? What were the other two?”
“Piano and Paintin’.”
Vaguely, very vaguely, Reece recalled a tiny blonde girl playing a jaunty saloon tune in Amateur Piano and getting rapped across the knuckles by Tutor Clevenger. He’d been a Thirteen then, in the midst of turning his parents and Liem against him. He’d burned most of the memories from that period out of his mind.
He and Po proceeded to talk mechanics and aviation over first and second helpings and then dessert. Being an airship mechanic, Po had a natural affinity for ships, but she hadn’t flown on much but bus-ships, so begged Reece for story after story about Nyads, Dryads, Furies, Kraken, and even the mysterious Spectre ships of the Veritas. To Reece’s great envy, she and her brothers had been hired three times to run diagnostics on Aurelia, and had even done work on the Afterquin.
“I don’t care if she’s the oldest ship there is. Engines like Aurelia’s can’t be duplicated. The Afterquin’s just…” Po groped for words, gesturing. “Honestly, I don’t know how we ever made it to begin with.”
Gnawing on the end of his fork, his forehead gathered in concentration, Reece asked, “Po, how much to you suppose Aurelia’s been altered since she was decommissioned?”
“Altered? Wha’dya mean?”
Reece put a foot up on the windowsill and glared into the sunshine. “Don’t you think it’s strange she never had escape capsules? If she’s the elite, why didn’t she have a way to save her crew in an emergency?”
Po chewed on this for a moment, slowly dragging her fingertip over the whipped custard left on her plate and then sucking it clean. “Well,” she drawled, “here’s what I think. You know how Aurelia’s designed to look so pretty? She ain’t like them heliocrafts with all their unnecessary bells and whistles. She’s simple. Well, all the ships that came after her had capsules, but they were the exterior kind that fixed under the wings and hugged the sides of the ship like leeches or somethin’. Aurelia wouldn’t’a had that design, because it wouldn’t’a been keepin’ with her simplicity. But she could’a had pods inside’a her to be shot out the hydraulic hatch on her belly. We always assume that that hatch is for loadin’ cargo. But it could’a also been for sendin’ cargo, primarily escape pods, out in a hurry. Hey, where are you goin’?”
As Reece pushed in his chair and started pulling on his jacket, he said, “It was really good meeting you again, Po, but I’ve got to go.”
“Where?” She checked the unwieldy watch on her wrist that looked like it had been crafted out of scrap metal. “We’ve got class in ten minutes! Reece? Reece!”
But Reece was already jogging out the door, leaving her alone with a frown, two trays, and a pile of dirty dishes.
Reece had been right in assuming Gid, Hayden, and Nivy would return to Praxis—he’d figured Hayden wouldn’t keep Nivy at the dormitory for a second longer than he had to. He found the three of them in Mordecai’s small backyard, surrounded on all sides by a fence of unkempt hedges. Gideon was kneeling with a piqued face beside his bim, trying to fix a new rear tire to it, while Hayden and Nivy were sitting in a hazy patch of sunlight, sharing Hayden’s datascope.
Reece stopped before Gideon and his bim and frowned. “Is she salvageable?”
Gideon grunted as he jimmied the rear rotational pin with a clock wrench. “She’ll run. But those bleedin’ sisquicks did her a number.”
“They did you a number, too.”
“Yeah,” Gideon smirked, “but I heal.”
Hayden joined them, running his hands through his hair tiredly. Reece peered over his shoulder at Nivy, who was manning the datascope on her own, tapping its screen and every once and a while shaking her head with a silent sigh.
“So. Can she spell ‘troll’ yet?”
Folding his arms over his chest, Hayden mustered up a stern look, pointedly ignoring Gideon’s chuckle. “Probably. She’s doing well, considering your unreasonable expectations. I mean, we have no idea where she comes from, let alone what the typical means of communication is there. For all we know, her people may be accustomed to…to drawing on cave walls or—”
“Drawing!” Reece shouted, startling Hayden as he grabbed his shoulders. He turned about and barked, “Nivy, come here!” Catching Hayden’s disapproving look, he exasperatedly added, “Please!”
Taking her good old time, Nivy moseyed over, handing Hayden his datascope so he could check her work. The glance she cast Reece had the look of a challenge; it made Gideon return to working feverishly on his bim, and Hayden focus on the datascope with undue amounts of concentration.
“Don’t give me that look. You brought this on yourself. Just as soon as you can tell me what I want to know, you’re free to go wherever you want.”
Nivy stopped him with a short flick of her fingers, then started signing, one gesture at a time, until he figured out what she was trying to say. She wanted to strike a bargain. Her answers, for—
“A ship?” Reece repeated incredulously. “You’re kidding, right? A ship? Can you even fly?”
She pointed at him, pretended to steer a yoke.
“Me, fly you? If that’s your asking price, you’d better have a lot of answers for me. First I’d have to find a ship, and then I’m not even licensed to fly in the Streams, so…” Rummaging around in his satchel, he produced a piece of carbon paper and a quill. Nivy gazed at them suspiciously. “It doesn’t have to be anything fancy.”
With a sigh that picked up and then dropped her shoulders, Nivy took the quill, flattened the paper out on her palm, and gave him a look.
“Okay,” Reece began, scratching his head. “Uh, tell me where you came from.”
She stared at him, flatly disbelieving, then put her pen to the paper, drew a circle with some blotches on it, and shoved it back at him. A planet.
Reece made a face as behind him, Gideon snorted. “Very informative, thanks. What Stream is it near?”
Nivy scrawled a big X on the paper.
“None?”
Reece was a little skeptical about that. The Streams went everywhere in Epimetheus. There were several that were popular—the one that lanced around Honora, the one en route to Oceanus, Castor, and Apollon, and the handful that looped around the sun—but there were hundreds more that weren’t as well traversed, Streams that could be dangerous, Streams that pulled unwary travelers into the Voice of Space and left them stranded. Planets that weren’t near Streams typically weren’t inhabited.
“How’s that work?” Gideon wondered aloud from under his bim.
“Well, Atlas’s coordinates could have been preprogrammed into her capsule by its operating ship. Then there wouldn’t necessarily have been a need for a Stream to carry it in the right direction,” Hayden explained, glancing at Nivy for confirmation. She nodded.
“Did your capsule somehow come from the Aurelia?” Reece butted in. The emblem on the capsule, the book, the cufflinks—that was the thread that ran through all the puzzle pieces, the one thing that connected Nivy to Liem to Eldritch.
After a pause, Nivy shook her head, but stopped him with a sharply-aimed finger when he tried to go on. She put on a very pointed expression, willing him to continue on the path he’d started down.
“Did it come…” Reece squinted, concentrating. “…from Aurelius?”
The expression grew more pointed, and she stared into his face in her intense way, as if trying to burn her thoughts into him.
“Not from either of them, but from a ship like them? Exactly like them?” More yes’s. That shouldn’t be possible. The Aurelia and The Aurelius were the original airships, the only two of their kind, more mother and father than brother and sister. There couldn’t be another. “Where, Nivy? Where is the other ship?”
Knowing this was a climactic moment for Reece, Nivy dramatically pointed at the drawing of her planet.
“But if your ship is just like Aurelia…and it came from your planet…”
Nivy set to drawing again, connecting quick, sketchy lines, sweeping the quill in a loop. She thrust her hand out and presented her finished piece to Reece.
After he had looked at it, he turned to sit on the house’s back stoop, dropping his head into his hands. Aurelia was Honora’s. She and Aurelius were cornerstones in Honoran history, the blueprints for every Honoran airship. But Nivy’s drawing of Aurelia’s famous emblem had been connected to her planet by a thick, resolute line.
“Aurelia and Aurelius came from Nivy’s planet.” Saying so aloud felt like a betrayal of everything he’d ever believed.
“You sure?” Gideon muttered, and Reece heard the insistent flapping of Nivy’s drawing as she shook it for him to see. “Yeah, but how can you really know that? Those ships are a couple hundred years old.”
His hope snagged by the question, Reece dragged his head up to see Nivy’s response. Glowering at Gideon, she pointed at herself, pointed at Aurelia’s emblem, and then made her hand soar like a ship till her finger came down and landed on the depiction of her planet.
Hayden made a fascinated noise even as he sat by Reece and put a consoling hand on his shoulder. “She came here to retrieve The Aurelia. To take it back where it belongs.” He peered up at Nivy, squinting as if he were examining her through a micro lens magnifier. “I assume that’s why you were on Aurelia two nights ago. You were seeing if she could still fly.”
“Just a bleeding second.” Reece’s heart did a strange upbeat number in his chest, undecided between nervousness and excitement. “You said you wanted me to fly you back to your planet. You didn’t mean…on The Aurelia?”
Hayden gasped. “Reece, you can’t!”
“How would he get back?” Gideon asked Nivy darkly, as if that was the biggest hitch in her plan. “That’s not the issue!” Hayden exclaimed, voice as tight as a piano string liable to snap at any moment. “She could send him back in an escape capsule, but Aurelia, the single greatest artifact of Honoran history, would be left there. Reece could be executed for a theft like that!”
“He’d have to get caught first. I wouldn’t let him get caught.”
“That doesn’t change anything. What we’re talking about…it’s practically treason!”
“Not if Aurelia wasn’t ever ours to begin with. Sounds like we might’a stole her first.”
“Oh, now you want to be all noble—”
“Shut up, both of you!” Reece shouted, making them jump. “Nivy?” She glanced at him, seeming a littl
e frazzled by the intensity of Gid and Hayden’s argument. “Would you walk with me?” She nodded and squeezed between Gideon’s broad chest and Hayden’s red face, which were at a level.
There wasn’t enough yard to walk to find privacy, so Reece led her around the building and onto the pedestrian walkway, teeming with shoppers in their garish hats and bustles and men in their shirtsleeves and suspenders. They walked in silence for a time, Reece entertained by Nivy’s absorption in the bright things she saw in the storefronts, bells and baskets for push bikes, top hats in all colors, antique bound books, all sorts of automata...he was going to guess that wherever she was from, it wasn’t like this.
They stopped at a frozen dairy stand, and Reece ordered them scoops of vanilla and ginger melted over apple pie, his favorite. Nivy stared down into the tin bowl cupped between her hands with a look of pure rapture.
“Okay,” Reece began, waving with his spoon for her to join him on a bench tucked around the corner of the red and white striped stand. “Have I earned the right to start asking questions again, or do I need to get you some more ginger for that?”
With an almost-smile and a mouth full of white cream, Nivy nodded for him to go ahead.
“Look, just need to be clear…” Reece searched her face. “I don’t trust you, and I know you don’t trust me. You ran when I would have asked you to stay, and it’s made things difficult. Maybe that’s on me. I haven’t exactly been Captain Courteous these last two days; I know that. But I’m going to tell you everything now, Nivy, because I’m making the choice to believe you. You’re going to have to believe me too, alright? I need you to. I can’t help feeling like we’re running out of time. Both of us.”
Though Nivy seemed engrossed in cleaning the bottom of her bowl, she gave a jerk of a nod. So he told her. About everything from Bus-ship Ten to meeting Po Trimble. Laid out, the story sounded fragmented, holey, because he was still missing pieces. The question was, which ones?
“…Hayden and I have been drafted to be cleanly disposed of at war. Eldritch has probably figured that no one will notice if Gideon gets killed the old-fashioned way, being a Pan and all.”
Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) Page 13