Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  Pushing up the cuffed sleeve of her jumpsuit, she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead, like Abigail would have done ten years ago. New though Po was to Reece, this didn’t feel odd or unfamiliar in the least. He wondered if Po ever made anyone feel out of place, or if she was like one of her beloved engine parts that could be jimmyrigged to fit wherever it needed to fit to make the engine run smoothly.

  “I haven’t slept,” Reece admitted, because there was no harm in saying that much, and because lying to Po felt twice as wrong as lying to anyone else.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be drivin’ a bim around The Owl then, Cap’n.” Po smiled bashfully; it might’ve been a trick of the dull morning light, but Reece thought she had gone rather red behind her freckles.

  Right on time, The Iron Horse noisily slid in on its tracks, breaks shrieking, chimney coughing. Shapes milled behind the milky glass of the carriages, ready to spill out onto the platform. Hayden was probably one of the smallish shapes getting crowded further and further back in line.

  “That’s me, then,” Po said as she stood and dusted at dirt on her filthy jumpsuit that Reece got the feeling was there to stay. “I’m off to see a man about an AX734 crude undulator refinement cap. Don’t be a stranger, alright, Reece?”

  Reece watched her skip away and almost trip on one of her straggling boot laces as she joined Gus in the boarding queue. She said something to Gus, turned, and waved enthusiastically at Reece one more time while Gus glared over her head broodingly. So, probably not a member of the Palatine Second fan club, then.

  “Who was that?” Hayden asked as he joined Reece by the bim, a little breathless.

  Reece started to answer before he noticed Hayden’s face—tight, discolored, and tired. His stomach clenched in guilt. If there was a way he could do this on his own, he would do it. In a second, he would do it. The hard fact was, he couldn’t. A captain wasn’t much of a captain without a crew.

  “Hayden…don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look so good.”

  Hayden smiled and said, “It could be worse. I could smell like I spent the night in a garbage disposer.”

  “That would be worse.”

  “Did you get what you needed? Are Nivy and Gideon alright?”

  “Er…in a manner.” Hayden’s face spasmed in alarm, and Reece hurriedly amended, “I mean, we got what we needed in a manner. Crazy and The Grouch are fine. It couldn’t have been easier.”

  Hayden eyed Reece doubtfully as he hefted his leather bookscrip from one shoulder to the other with a grunt. Reece tried to keep his face cool, but even his cheek muscles were too tired to cooperate. His attempted smile felt like a lopsided grimace.

  “Something’s wrong,” Hayden guessed with a sigh. Distantly, The MA Building’s bell began tolling, counting off the seventh hour as Reece scrubbed his bleary eyes.

  “Our sample of the original serum was destroyed. We need you to recreate it from the ingredients we got you. From scratch.”

  Reece expected a lecture about safety first and taking risks, but Hayden just stared at him like things couldn’t get any worse, and sighed again.

  “As soon as possible, I’m assuming?”

  “You’re the doctor. You think our friend the Vee can afford a few hours?”

  Making a face, Hayden looked back at The Iron Horse. “I’ll need to swing by the dormitory…collect some of my supplies.”

  “I’ll meet you back at Mordecai’s.”

  “You’re skipping class again?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Reece said as he sagged onto his bim. “Given my options, I’d rather sleep on a cot than a desk.”

  Reece slept for a whole twenty minutes on Mordecai’s patchy couch before Hayden gently shook him awake, his apologetic eyes made huge and comical by the magnifying lab specs he wore.

  “I’m sorry, Reece. I’m going to need your help.”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Reece mumbled as he unwillingly came to, leaning up on his elbows. His hair hadn’t even had time to dry from his stand in the water closet not half an hour ago.

  Nivy came into the room through the kitchen’s swinging doors, artfully balancing a triangle of mugs in her hands. After handing one to both Hayden and Reece, she sat her chin on the rim of the leftover, letting the steam of the chocolate tea (Reece could recognize that smell anywhere) soak her face. Of the three of them, Reece had to say she looked the best. She had her natural wildness to help cover up her sleeplessness, but she still seemed genuinely, bafflingly, somehow alert.

  Reece felt worn thin, as if he could stand in front of a light and be translucent.

  They did what they could with what they had. The shop upstairs was better lit, but rather less discreet, so they had to make do turning Mordecai’s kitchen into Hayden’s makeshift laboratory. That meant boxing up Mordecai’s junk and sanitizing the whole room to Hayden’s very fastidious satisfaction.

  Hayden was spreading a drop cloth over Mordecai’s counter as Nivy and Reece scrubbed at the gritty floor with the sponges bound to their hands. Standing on a chair in the middle of the room, Mordecai worked to fasten new photon globes to his hanging chandelier.

  Mordecai coughed as he inhaled dust. “All this cleanin’…it ain’t gonna look like home in here anymore.”

  “We’re almost done, now,” Hayden promised. “If you want to go keep wa—”

  “Nah. I’d rather be in here, in case somethin’ goes wrong with the serum and it explodes or somethin’.”

  Reece thought it would make more sense to want to be out of the room pending a chemical explosion; going by Nivy’s small smile, she would say the same, if she could. If she could. His grin faded.

  “What happened to the serum, anyhow?” Mordecai asked. “Thought you were gonna at least try to bring back a copy of the original?”

  Nivy’s scrubbing turned violent, and she cringed unhappily.

  “We did,” Reece said on her behalf, “but it didn’t make it back.”

  “It’s unfortunate,” Hayden sighed. He picked his black satchel up off the floor, clicked it open, and spread it out on the counter like he was unfolding a book with pages made of tapering metal tools. “Anything I make will be more or less a rough mock up. I would’ve liked to see the serum in its purest form.” He paused, appraised the room, and declared, “I’m ready to start. Let me grab the rest of my tools.”

  Mordecai started whistling cheerfully to himself as Hayden disappeared into the living room. The sudden privacy Reece and Nivy had down on their hands and knees made Reece feel slightly self-conscious. It was the first chance he’d had to ask her alone—almost alone—about what Gideon had said in the tunnel last night.

  “Can you talk, Nivy?” he asked in a whisper so low he almost didn’t hear it himself. Mordecai went on whistling, as chipper as a spring bird.

  Nivy didn’t look up until her scrubbing brought her so close to him that their heads nearly touched. Then she raised her eyes, and with that odd power of hers, forced an answer on him in the silence.

  Relief made his words come out as a sigh. “No, you can’t.”

  But there was more to it, he could tell, because Nivy’s eyes narrowed slightly, and then her gaze intensified.

  Reece shook his head helplessly. “I’m not asking the right question.”

  “Or maybe yer just askin’ the wrong person.”

  Nivy and Reece both jumped, startled, at Mordecai’s interruption. He didn’t look down at them, just kept screwing in the photon globes, touching them with only his callused fingertips.

  “I know I don’t look it,” Mordecai drawled, “but I have been around the bend a few times. Seen a lot, you know. Been to nearly all the planets this side of the Epimetheus, one way or another. One planet in particular, I’ll never forget. Not one of Honora’s ally planets, nosiree. Big slave tradin’ planet, enforcin’ all kinda laws over the lower class. Ever heard’a Zenovia?”

  Reece leaned up off his knees, flexing his pruned hands, and sho
ok his head speechlessly. Nivy remained prostrate on the kitchen floor, bowed over her scrubbies with her blue eyes sharp on Mordecai. She looked wary.

  “Figured you hadn’t,” Mordecai continued, still intent on his work with the chandelier. “Ugly planet. Ugly government. Cruel place to live, ‘specially if you get lotteried into the slave class. Zenovia’s slaves have less rights than a bucket’a fish bait. Speech is forbidden to them, you see. They couldn’t talk back if they wanted to, because as soon as they get lotteried, they’re collared.”

  A bad taste had settled in Reece’s mouth. “Collared?”

  “Mmhmm. The collar the slaves wear is some kinda impairment technology that shuts down their vocal chords so long as they’re worn. And here’s the kicker. The slaves can’t take them off, not even off’a each other. Only their master can remove them. Fair as dirt, if you ask me.”

  A voice spoke up from the doorway, cutting through Reece’s speeding thoughts. “Her necklace…” Hayden suddenly joined Reece and Nivy on the floor, wearing a lab coat, his goggles, a pair of tight rubber gloves, and an expression that looked ill. “Nivy, is that…is that what happened to you? Are you a…slave?”

  That image felt off, skewed. Nivy, a slave forced into silence by a lottery and a master and a piece of shiny new technology—Reece didn’t believe it, even before Nivy started shaking her head. She stuck up her chin proudly, and there, around her neck, Reece saw the black ribbon she never took off. It had never been particularly pretty, but it had never struck him as ugly, as it struck him now.

  “You’re not a slave, but the collar works the same,” he said darkly. “It keeps you from speaking. It cuts off your voice.”

  Abigail and Liem’s voices in his memory: “Nivy doesn’t speak.”

  “She’s a mute?”

  “She doesn’t speak.”

  Had Liem known?

  Nivy hesitated, then nodded, running her thumb over the band above her collarbone without any particular fondness.

  Hayden seemed stricken, staring at her throat. “Can we take it off you? Is there a way?”

  “Seems to me,” Mordecai said dryly, “if she’d wanted you boys to try, she would’ve told you what that collar did from the start in her own way.”

  “Why? I’m sorry, Nivy, but…who chooses not to be able to speak?”

  “Someone with something to hide.” Nivy frowned at Reece’s tone of voice. “Your own people collared you in case you were captured by Eldritch. So you couldn’t speak about who you are or why you want Aurelia back.”

  Reece had never dreamed that not being able to talk was convenient for her. What better way to guarantee her secrets’ safety than to wear one of those bleeding collars? What sort of person…he stopped that thought. He was overreacting because he’d started counting Nivy as a sort of tenuous friend, a surrogate crew member. A crew didn’t keep secrets of this magnitude from each other.

  Even as Reece simmered at her, Nivy cautiously reached out a hand and touched the top of his head, then brought the hand back to her chest to cover her heart. The gesture didn’t make sense, but Reece knew what was at the heart of it. She was sorry.

  Nivy repeated the gesture to Hayden, who was like putty in her hands. “I understand, Nivy,” he said with feeling. “Well…as much as I can, I suppose. We really have no idea who you are, do we?”

  Nivy outright grinned at him as if to say, “No idea at all.”

  The kitchen fell uncomfortably silent. Mordecai occupied himself with disposing of old photon globes while Hayden, seeming embarrassed, returned to arranging beakers, wash plates, and crucibles on the counter. Reece realized they were waiting for him to say something.

  Standing on legs bruised from scraping over the hardwood floors, he studied Nivy’s earnest expression and sighed. “I guess you didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Nivy rolled her eyes, and Reece read in her face, Of course I didn’t.

  “I just thought we were going to start trusting each other.”

  She started reaching for his head again, and he batted her hand away, trying not to smile, now. “I guess it’s a good thing you can’t be bought with apple pie alone,” he allowed grudgingly.

  An acrid smell made Reece’s throat sting, and he looked over at Hayden, who at the counter, was transferring droplets of green liquid from one beaker to another filled partway with purple. As green curled into violet, the liquid sizzled angrily, and the smell grew more defined, almost rubbery.

  “Should we leave you to concentrate?” Reece asked, hoping for a yes as he covered his mouth and nose.

  It was a minute before Hayden replied, he was so focused on those tiny green droplets. “It doesn’t matter either way. I’ll be experimenting for quite some time to even figure out what half these chemicals are. I mean, doesn’t this look like hydroburotane to you?” He picked a yellow bottle up between his thumb and forefinger and showed it to him, his magnified eyes widening to disconcerting proportions.

  Reece stared at it. He didn’t want to say what he thought it looked like. “Sure, yeah. Hydro…burrow…tang.”

  Hayden turned back to the counter and started working again with feverish but precise speed. “Get some rest, Reece. I’ll wake you when I have something.”

  It was three hours before Reece rolled off the couch, startled awake by the sounds of frantic shouting and Pantedan curses. He opened his eyes regretfully and stared up at the ominous purple cloud clinging to Mordecai’s low ceilings.

  “Cap’n!” Gideon roared as he rushed through the room with a pail of dirty water in either hand. “You’d better come quick!”

  Clumsy with half-asleepness, Reece tripped to the swinging kitchen door and hurled himself through it. It would have been better if he’d waited for his feet to come to their senses—there was an ankle-deep layer of yellow foam covering the kitchen floor. With a wordless scream, Reece slid through the foam, crashed into Gideon’s wall of a back, and fell.

  “Get up, get up!” Hayden shouted from where he was trying to stop a strangely endless flow of foam from erupting out of an impossibly small beaker by cramming a dinner plate over it. “It will eat through your clothes!”

  As Reece thrashed, Gideon doubled over and grabbed him by the front of his waistcoat, heaving him to his feet. Reece could smell the singed threads of his shirt. What was worse, his back was startling to prickle.

  “Water!” he bellowed, trying to peel his shirt off before the foam ate through to his skin.

  Skidding in the foam, Gideon grabbed a bucket of water and turned it upside-down over Reece’s head.

  And that was just the first incident.

  After the foam, there was the concoction of liquid that froze Hayden’s hands together. Next came the black goop that bubbled like tar. At one point the kitchen started smelling like an old shoe, and it turned out the smell was from an airborne chemical that had traits similar to a hyperactive compulsor’s.

  “Open the vents and try to flush it out!” Hayden said shrilly upon realizing what the smell was. He fanned a glove before his face. “Where is Gideon? Probably off polishing his guns somewhere—no no, I didn’t mean that! Hurry up with the vents!”

  Reece, standing on the counter and trying to open the airvents that had long since been rusted shut, snapped, “You could get up here and help instead of waiting uselessly on the sidelines like you always—ugh, I’m sorry, that’s not—”

  “Uselessly! I’m tampering with dangerous chemicals for you while you sit back and get your forty winks! I didn’t sleep at all last night either, you know!” Hayden violently smacked his glove against the counter, stared at it, and then whispered, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  As Nivy leaped up onto the counter with a butter knife to help Reece with the vent, she looked at him, opened her mouth, and then closed it. He saw her throat constrict as if she’d had to swallow her words. He could have asked her anything, anything right now if the collar wasn’t doing its job to a T. In Gideon speak, it was fair as dirt
.

  “Reece,” Hayden suddenly cried, throwing himself into a kitchen chair, “I do get airsick, I’m sorry I never told you! I’m a liar! A terrible liar!”

  Reece held out his hand for Nivy’s butter knife and started wrenching the creaking vent out of the ceiling before Hayden could altogether lose his head. Relief washed over him as the vent split and fresh oxygen replaced the old in his lungs.

  “That’s not all!” Hayden bemoaned, dramatically dropping his head into his hands. “Do you remember when we were Thirteens, and you and Gideon were going to skip our Honoran History class but Tutor James caught you? I ratted on you! I’m sorry! I didn’t want you to go to the Mead Moon Festival and leave me behind!”

  “We weren’t going to go to the festival without you.”

  Hayden raised his head. “Really?”

  “No, that was a lie. I was testing to see if the chemical’s gone. I think it’s clearing out.” Reece hopped down from the counter and wiped his rust-stained hands down the front of his shirt with a sigh. “Look—”

  “I know.” Hayden started straightening his goggles and pulling his gloves back on, avoiding meeting Reece’s eye. Reece thought he was just embarrassed over what had been dredged to the surface (he didn’t bother confessing that he and Gideon had always known about the airsickness and the ratting) until Hayden looked up with a deeply troubled frown. “I don’t know if this is going to work. The formulas I’ve tried so far have had fairly harmless results—”

  “I almost died in acid foam.”

  “Well, there’s that.” Hayden pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes. “Reece…I can’t make that serum. Someone’s going to get hurt if I keep trying.”

  “What if you had some help?”

  “From who?”

  Reece’s eyes wandered in the direction of the back tunnel, and Hayden made a thoughtful if uneasy sound.

  “The Vee?”

  “If anyone knows something about the serum, he does. And I think he’ll be eager to save his own neck, if we gave him the chance to try.”