Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  The two surviving Vees were doubled over the flightpanel, looking satisfyingly battered. A large chunk of machinery had been blown off the corner of the panel, laying bare a mess of sparking wires and leaking tubes. The incessant beeping sound was coming from the flashing blue warning button to the right of the pilot’s yoke. Bleeding bogrosh. Reece had broken the ship.

  When Nivy grabbed Reece’s hand, he jumped, inhaled a puff of dust, and choked. He looked at her, sprawled beside him and wearing a loopy kind of grin, and smiled.

  “I broke the ship,” he repeated aloud, and she nodded, scrubbing a streak of blood from her cheek. The Heron. He knew who she was now. Knew where she was from. He was a long ways yet from understanding it all, but that little knowledge lightened the heaviness in his head considerably.

  One of the Vees at the flightpanel swung around as Reece unsteadily stood, murder in his black eyes.

  “Kill them both,” the Vee still bent over the flightpanel said coolly.

  “Agreed,” his partner said, and sprang at Reece with frightening speed.

  Reece just had time to plant his feet, grit his teeth, and raise his fists.

  CRACK.

  The Vee pitched forward, stumbling over his own legs, and crashed loudly to the floor. Reece stared down at him without lowering his fists, dumbfounded. Blood was welling up through the Vee’s jumpsuit, like slowly-spreading spilt paint.

  The translocator door—its circular window shot out—opened with a clang, and Gideon, Po, Hayden, Sophie, and Hugh poured out, Gideon deftly spinning his revolver towards the Vee at the flightpanel. The final Vee joined his brothers on the floor in a pile of pale white death.

  It was mayhem. Sophie rushed Reece, and he caught her up in his arms and kissed the top of her sooty hair and clasped Hugh’s forearm. The relief had Reece’s stomach soaring; his heart was pounding like he’d run a marathon. He could hardly think for how glad he was to see them all alive and well. He looked to Nivy, who had appropriated the lone surviving lightning gun and was holding it ready, waiting beside the door, and smiled.

  The relief lasted maybe one minute before reality came rudely butting back in.

  Gid had taken the helm and picked up where the Vee left off, and Po was crawling under the flightpanel with an intense expression of focus.

  “This is bad,” she said, her voice muffled. “This is real bad.”

  “Are we going to crash?” Sophie asked worriedly, clinging to her brother and father.

  Po didn’t answer.

  “Try to avoid crashing,” Reece advised as he knelt beside one of the Vees and dug through its pockets until he found two tiny purple vials. He pocketed them and stood. “Nivy and I are going to go finish what we came for.”

  “Reece,” Hayden began, face pained. “…Be careful.”

  Reece spun and fled from the bridge at a ground-eating pace, his dress shoes clapping against shiny wooden floors. There wasn’t time to look back. There wasn’t time to look ahead. He just had to run, run and hope he wasn’t too late.

  Most of the heliocraft’s footage went into its huge, open-ceilinged ballroom, which looked up into a cloudy sky largely obscured by the ship’s balloons. Two obtruding tiers of balconies framed the room, held aloft by gilded columns, while an elevated, slowly-spinning stage in its center—like a giant music box—supported the masked orchestra. With the lights bouncing reflections off the face of the black marble floors, it looked like the dancers were stepping over a dark, quiet sea. The only thing to ruin the illusion was the snow sneaking in through the ceiling and joining the dancers in twirling across the room.

  Reece and Nivy tore from the bridge down a tight stairwell lined with black and white photographs of the heliocraft’s past captains, and ended up at the southern corner of the first layer of balconies. Reece rushed to the lip of the balcony and folded over it, breathing hard. The dancers spun and laughed and clapped—unaware—oblivious—

  He saw the duke and Abigail waltzing together near the orchestra. Abigail tossed her head extravagantly as she turned in a tight spin and then returned to the duke’s waiting arms. The heliocraft gave a rebellious little jerk in response to Po’s administrations on the bridge, but the only ones who seemed to notice were the waiters as the glasses balanced on their serving trays chimed together.

  Nivy gripped Reece’s forearm and pointed frantically across the way. Nearly all the balcony box seats were full, but kitty-corner to them and up on the second tier of balconies, there was one that looked empty. Except it wasn’t. Looking twice, Reece could just make out the crest of a bald head topping the balcony railing by a few inches…someone was kneeling behind a gun, its barrel propped almost invisibly against the black railing…

  He couldn’t move fast enough. His body had trouble keeping up with his feet as he sprinted up a winding staircase and leaped over the indignant gentleman he tripped on his way. He reached the second floor and turned right down a corridor exposed on one side to the wintry night and its swirling snowflakes. He outran the snow.

  The door to the Vee’s box seat was slightly ajar. There was no time for subtly, or even for thought. Reece threw himself through the door and at the Vee, whose eye was pressed up to the scope of his gun. The impact of their two bodies colliding made a sickening thud. Reece’s momentum kept him going right over the balcony railing, and he clutched the Vee, as much for stability as to keep him from touching the gun, but the Vee was falling too…they were both of them falling together…

  Shouting, Reece desperately flung out his arms and tried to grab the edge of the railing even as it dropped away from him.

  With a bone-rattling slap, his arms instead caught the railing of the balcony below. He dangled from his armpits on its rim, his feet wildly trying to run in midair, and heard, even over the alarmed shouts of the couple who were scampering out of the box seat, a solid, fleshy thump as the Vee collided with the marble ballroom floor.

  The orchestra’s music cut out shrilly as a deep, shocked silence rose into the winter air. And then someone screamed.

  Grunting with the effort of pulling himself to safety, Reece looked over his shoulder as absolute panic came over the ballroom’s fleeing, yet essentially trapped, occupants. The empty space between his feet turned his stomach. Even though he had a firm grip on the railing, he didn’t look down for long. The Vee had landed on his head, and the copious amount of blood did different, even more uncomfortable things to his stomach. He rolled himself over the railing with a grunt.

  The Jester gave a frightening jolt, and Reece caught himself against the wall as he overbalanced and staggered. Waiters’ trays across the ballroom toppled one after the other, shattered glass and liquor splashing to the black marble, adding to the bedlam.

  Making use of his lurch, Reece fell into yet another run, his limbs feeling almost drowsy. He was fading fast; he didn’t need Hayden’s medical savvy to understand that the human body wasn’t meant to run at highs like this. He was going to need something inhuman to finish out this fight.

  He wheeled around a corner just as Nivy exploded out of the stairwell to his left, her blue eyes wild, her dark hair pasted to her forehead in strips. It looked like she’d done her skirt a savage hemming job; it had been ripped away below the knee, showing her bare feet. Skidding slightly, she fell into step beside him, her wardrobe modifications helping her keep pace.

  She had a hard time sprinting and signing in any great detail (Reece kept tripping over his feet just trying to watch her), so she kept it simple. She swept her hand in a wide gesture indicating the airship, then brought her hands together in a resounding clap that imitated a crash.

  Reece made a noise halfway between a groan and a growl. “We won’t let that—”

  She dismissed him with a sharp chop, and as they took another skidding turn, pointed. Reece caught a glimpse of Hayden fleeing up the staircase to the bridge, and realized with a sinking feeling that he must have come from delivering news. Bad news.

  They were going t
o crash. And it was his fault.

  He was forced to slow at the last winding stairwell. With all the frightened guests clawing past each other in their haste to clear the ballroom, there was barely space to breathe in the narrow passageway. Reece pressed against the tide of them and wondered with a pinch of panic in his gut if he had doomed them. Killed them like he’d killed the Vee.

  “There must be escape pods,” he said, desperate.

  He and Nivy tumbled out into the ballroom together. She grabbed him by his jacket and pulled him into the shadow of a column that shielded them from the chaos. Panting, she peered intensely into his face and shook her head in answer to his question. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  Nivy’s grip on his arm suddenly became an anxious vice. Glancing at her, Reece leaned around the column, and despite himself, shivered. Like a tower in the middle of an angry sea, Eldritch stood on the raised orchestra platform over the milling people, smiling an almost feline smile. He was staring right at Reece and Nivy’s hiding spot.

  Reece had known it would come to this. Just as Scarlet had foreseen, the duke was trapped on the heliocraft, and Eldritch’s plan hadn’t died with his assassin. He knew Reece would never stop being an obstacle for him now—that he’d have to kill the son before he could ever get to the father.

  It just so happened, Reece was coming right to him.

  “Nivy, listen to me. You have to find the duke and Abigail. You have to protect them. There might be other Vees, other assassins. I’m going to Eldritch.”

  Halfway through his speech, Nivy had begun stubbornly shaking her head, refusing to accept what he was saying. Now she shoved him hard in the chest so that his back bumped against the column and all the minor injuries from Eldritch and the burstpowder explosion burned with sudden insistence, as if reminding him of his mortality. Kind of them.

  “Stop it, Nivy!” Reece snapped. “If the duke dies tonight, The Kreft win, do you get that? If you want to fight them, you have to protect him! Now do it!”

  After a pause, Nivy—holding him with a fierce stare—squeezed his arm, nodded, and dashed away.

  Reece turned and found Eldritch still watching him from the revolving dais, his face…expectant.

  Struggling to keep his hand steady, Reece reached into his coat pocket and pulled out one of the small stopped vials. He ducked behind the column, his back pressed against it for support. He didn’t know for sure this would work—all he had to go off were the musings of Hayden, like ghostly echoes in his memory. “A compound like the serum’s is extremely unforgiving on the body. From what we know if it, its effects are instantaneous…no drug should be able to work with that kind of speed.”

  He lifted the vial to his lips, ripped out its cork with his teeth, and drank.

  It was like drinking hot grease. Scalding, thick, gelatinous. It tried to clot in his throat as he alternated gulping and gagging, his eyes clenched closed, his whole body trembling with the effort of keeping the stuff down. He could feel it hitting his empty stomach like a drop of liquid fire. Reece’s knees gave way; he crashed to the floor, his arms wrapped around his middle, and dropped the empty vial

  Suddenly, the drop of fire in his stomach exploded, and heat shot through all his veins, painful but invigorating. He could feel every sinew in his arms drinking in the explosion, gaining strength from the force of it. As he twisted on the floor, he realized he felt…light. Too light. As if he’d been walking with weights before, weights that the explosion had destroyed. He experimented, lifting a hand, and it moved a little faster than it should have.

  The heat lingered in him, like the remnants of a supernova settling into place. He tried to lean up slowly, testing out what felt like a whole new body, but shot up instead, as if jumping awake. He felt spry, flexible, weightless. Also…he still felt a little sick. When he breathed, the air tasted hot.

  Propping his back against the column, Reece tucked in his knees, held his breath, and pushed. His back slid up the marble, and he teetered, not on legs that were weak, but legs that were a little too eager to respond to his promptings. He glanced over the ballroom and judged by the slight shifts in the guests’ positions that he couldn’t have been down for more than a minute.

  He would have liked to say that the serum had boosted, more than anything, his confidence, but he felt ungainly and unsure—a little bit like he’d hit puberty again, horrifically.

  But he was faster, stronger, aware like he’d never been before. He’d take that, and do what he could with the rest. Clenching his fists, Reece turned to face Eldritch.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a streak of black. He recognized the signs from fighting the Vee at Mordecai’s, but now saw them clearer, reacted to them better. He spun and brought up his arms to where his elbows could guard his ribs and his fists protect his face, Rule One of his Gentleman’s Combat class.

  Charles Eldritch materialized to a stop three feet in front of him. Reece blinked. He’d always pictured the headmaster as a stooped bat. Well, the bat had un-stooped—and now he loomed, towering over Reece with a wide-eyed, feral kind of grin.

  “Ah,” Reece said.

  Eldritch threw a backhanded swing, and Reece was still so stunned that he took the hit to the side of his face without trying to block. Grunting, he stumbled sideways, and his new, untried balance, while catching him, also disoriented him. He spun to face Eldritch and forgot to bring up his hands, and the headmaster’s thrusting kick sank into his stomach, sending him soaring backward.

  He slid on his back across the marble floor. The serum didn’t stop him from feeling the invisible imprint of Eldritch’s boot in his gut, or the itching burn on the side of his face, but it did keep those things from overwhelming him. It suppressed them.

  It made Reece feel powerful. Not invincible, but definitely a little reckless. With a powerful thrust, he kicked himself up into a crouch, the chaos melting into a blur around him. He only had eyes for Eldritch, who was moseying his way, humming tunelessly. Reece’s serum-enhanced ears allowed him to pick up on the eerie sound. His heartbeat, loud and plodding in his ears, sounded strangely in time with it.

  Eldritch suddenly sprang forward, seeming to disappear in the second it took for him to close the distance between him and Reece. Instinct, more than experience or training, told Reece to feint to the right and then dodge to the left. As Eldritch followed the feint, Reece brought his knee around in a kick. Eldritch bent his back to an impossible angle, and the kick grazed the air above him. He tried to sweep Reece’s standing leg, but Reece spun out of the kick, stepping out of range.

  For a while—the serum jumbled Reece’s awareness of time—it was give and take, neck to neck. Eldritch’s strikes crept in between Reece’s defenses because he fought like a snake, his movements sinuous, then snapping. But each of the backhands and knife-edge chops and good old-fashioned punches Reece threw felt as strong as the pounce of a nightcat; there was power packed behind each one, power that, he was glad to see, troubled Eldritch…at least at first.

  As they broke off a flourish of attacks and stepped apart from each other, Eldritch spat a broken tooth into his hand and stared at it as though perplexed. Reece tried to play off rubbing his side with a grin.

  “I’ll clean the rest out for you,” he offered. “That way you can replace them all at once.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” Eldritch said lightly as he tossed the tooth aside and sighed. “This body was beginning to show signs of wear anyways. It’s nigh on time I replaced it.”

  Reece blinked.

  With a glint in his eye, Eldritch spun and threw out his long leg in a hooking kick that would’ve gladly disjointed Reece’s head from his neck. Reece leaned back to let the foot brush the air before his face, and then when it had passed, seized it about the ankle. Then he planted his feet, laced his fingers together, and swung the leg like a bat. Eldritch whipped around him, taking flight as Reece released the leg and let him soar like the old bat he was.

  He soared, but
he didn’t crash. Instead, he turned his tumble into an aerial roll and finished it out neatly, the tails of jacket settling back into place as he stood from his landing crouch. Reece wanted to rattle off a few secondhand Pantedan curses, but he settled for grinding his teeth and bringing his hands back up, fists clenched.

  “You see our dilemma, Reece?” Eldritch asked, not even winded as he threw a maelstrom of punches that forced Reece to walk backward as he blocked. “As a force, I am much more powerful than you. Even in this feeble body I wear, I have a natural edge. But now that you’ve taken The Veritas’s drug, we are quite well matched, for while I am still stronger…this body lacks the stamina that yours has in its youth.”

  Eldritch was just trying to distract him, but he did have a point. Reece hadn’t yet wrung all the potential energy out of his muscles, but Eldritch clearly hadn’t either. Reece caught one of Eldritch’s arms and tried to twist it into a lock. Eldritch, chuckling, wrapped his long fingers around Reece’s wrist and threw his guard to the side. Reece barely dodged a torpedo-like punch that he was sure would have shattered his ribs.

  “What will happen if you kill me, Reece?” Eldritch asked. “You think only to save your father…to free your ridiculous planet. What of the Epimetheus Galaxy? What of The Kreft? Will they really leave Honora alone? Will they spare the rebels?”

  Reece’s dress shoes skidded as The Jester creaked and leaned heavily to the left. Chairs and abandoned wine glasses skated across the ballroom in eerie imitation of the departed dancers. Just as the lights in glass brackets on the room’s columns flickered as if frightened, Eldritch pounced, his inhuman strength giving his jump supernatural height, his expression one of rapture, of bliss.

  The lights went out.

  It was like before, with Reece’s balance. Stimulated by the serum, his eyes made instant, automatic adjustments to allow him to see clearly in the spotted moonlight. The unexpected clarity off balanced him, and he wavered. It was all the opening Eldritch needed. His fist came down like a hammer on Reece’s shoulder, and more than the actual impact, Reece felt the grinding snap of his collarbone breaking.