by Tim Akers
I took four squatting steps to the door before I remembered the feet on the stairs and threw myself back into Emily’s room. The front door began to flex under officer’s boots, flakes of plaster dusting down from the jambs like snow. I fired twice into the door and then winced as a shot from across the street splintered the bedroom window sill and sprayed the room with splintered glass. I leaned over and, bracing with both my feet, flipped the mattress over and against the window. Better that they fire blind. The pounding on the front door started again. I belly-crawled over to the fireplace and scooped up the iron poker. Another bullet came through the window, dust and feathers puffing out of the mattress, wood splintering from the bed frame. I wedged myself into a corner of the bedroom and started hacking at the plaster ceiling. Emily lived on the second floor of a two-story building. When I got to the plank slating I climbed on a chair and put my fist through, depending on the laced bone conduit of my Pilot’s interface to hold me together. There was a lot of blood, the skin flapping back from my knuckles, but I got through. I pulled myself up into the darkness as they cleared the front door.
The attic was dark, and it was hot. There was only a little light, coming in from the gable vents. I had plaster dust in my eyes and mouth, and my hands were bleeding all over my gun. The floor of the attic was just beam framework over slating, so I balanced carefully toward the vents. A spattering of fire came up through the floor, the Badgemen getting damn desperate. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t follow me up, all of them too precious to be the first one to stick his head up into the darkness.
I kicked the vent out and shimmied up onto the roof. It was all of two heartbeats before the goons across the street shot at me. Hard to miss with a rifle like that, but they did. I rolled down the opposite decline of the roof, hooked my leg over and crawled, slowly, too slowly, down the drainage pipe and into the street. People had cleared out, all the gunshots and kicked out architecture had scattered folks. The Badge came out of the building, just about the time I was putting my boots on the ground.
I didn’t bother aiming, just shot, cycled, shot, bullets nicking off the brick wall of Emily’s building. I was on my heels, backpedaling so fast that I was falling. The Badges dropped to the ground or ducked behind doors and barrels. I only counted four of them, but there were more inside.
I finally came down on my back, rolling around the corner of the building and coming up on my knees. I realized that my last couple shots had been dry, the cylinder empty. Kneeling, I dumped the hot shells into my lap and started to quick load, keeping one eye on the building front. The Badges started to peek out. I had a brief memory, kneeling like this in the empty room of the Tomb Estate, fumbling bullets into this gun as that thing came down the hall. I thought I could hear the dry rasp of wings on wallpaper, blinked and realized I was frozen, a bullet pinched in my fingers, the Badge slowly creeping across the street towards me.
I snapped the cylinder closed and fired hurriedly. Luck put the bullet into one of the Badgemen, into the meat of his arm. He fell and the others crouched and started firing. I scrambled out and ran down the street. I wasn’t sure how many shots I’d loaded. Not a full cylinder, surely, and one fewer now. I looked for a place to pull off and finish the load.
I darted around a corner and dragged to a stop. There was an iron carriage, the shutters riveted shut, parked across the avenue. It was cold, the chill washing off it in sheets, breathtaking in the day’s freakish heat. I had never seen such a thing. I was cold just standing here. There were Badges all around it, leaning against walls or talking quietly among themselves. They were dressed in winter gear, heavy gloves on their hands. Their skin was pale and their faces were puffy, like they hadn’t been sleeping well. They looked up.
I shot the closest one, stepped forward and put my shoulder into his chest as he staggered, knocking him into one of his boys. The rest started to draw, but I kept my gun low and shooting. I fired three times before I heard that horrible dry snap of an empty chamber. The Badges were down, either bleeding or behind cover. There had been other shots, I slowly realized, and my chest and leg were hot. I looked down, saw that I was on one knee, saw red, red blood running down my shirt.
I stood up, staggered, stumbled past the carriage. Someone was yelling and I turned. The street was incredibly close, a tunnel of buildings and a burning sky pressed down. The Badges were hidden behind the iron box of the carriage. I waved my pistol at them, shuffling backward. My chest was tearing itself apart.
Another carriage rolled up, pulling between me and the iron box. Its engine clattered like shuffling plates as it idled. I put my hand on the side. There was a lace of blood between my fingers, and I winced as the door opened. It was Emily, and she was waving that wicked little shotgun at the Badges.
“You’re making a lot of noise, Jacob.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. My voice sounded flat in my head. “We’re having a little party, me and the Badge.” I coughed and pain lanced through my lungs. “You joining us?”
“No, no, I think we’ll be going now. Get in.”
“Not sure I should. Where you been, Em?”
She grimaced. “Get in or get fucked, Burn.”
“I gotta choose? Any way we could arrange both?”
Emily cuffed me and jerked my collar. I rolled into the carriage and lay down. Emily closed the door and, with one last look down the street at the iron carriage and its lurking guard, drove away.
I woke up with most of my ribs broken and some guy’s bloody hands fiddling with the damage. He was a tall guy, thin, his skin paper smooth and his face long and narrow. He was formally dressed, the cuffs of his sleeves neatly folded back and pinned in place. His arms were all bone, like the meat had been sucked away. I didn’t know him, so I tried to sit up. The pain knocked me down before I’d gotten very far into it. It felt like my lungs were stapled to the table. I moaned and rolled my head to one side. Emily was there, her hands folded in her lap. She smiled a little.
“Who’s the guy?” I asked. My voice sounded ragged, and the pain in my chest bundled up again.
“Wilson. He’s a friend of mine, Jacob.”
“Wilson,” I grunted. “Wilson. You were part of that group of blockade runners, during the Waterday riots. That Wilson?”
“Different guy,” he said.
I started to pull myself up. “All respect, Emily. I don’t get cut by someone I don’t…”
“Stop being stubborn,” she said, pushing me down. I told myself I was struggling, but honestly I just collapsed. “You’re in pretty awful shape.”
“You’re in dead shape, son.” Wilson smiled and shrugged. It was a complicated shrug, like he had a collection of shoulders under his white smock. He turned away and I saw a hunch that covered both shoulders and traveled down his back. Anansi then, trying to fit in with the regular folks. The anansi were a spider-like people who had populated the cliffs around Veridon for years before humans had found their way to the delta. They resisted when we moved in. There weren’t many left, and most of those were in positions of virtual slavery to various academic and governmental organizations. Anansi had an uncanny knack for technology, for all that they lived in caves and ate their meat raw.
“I’ve seen worse,” he said, “but not in people who were talking.” He turned back to me, holding something that looked like a prehensile corkscrew. I saw the other signs of his type, the tiny sharp teeth, the hooked talon fingernails. He smiled. “You should hold still.”
I did. The next bit hurt a lot, and I probably passed out for the bloodier parts. Next clear thought I had was hunger, and I was sitting up in some kind of stiff chair. Wilson was looking at me curiously, like he wasn’t sure what I was. I nodded to him.
“Thanks for taking care of me. Kind.” I found it hard to talk, like I was short of breath from running. Wilson smiled that tiny teeth smile again.
“It’s the sort of kindness money can buy, Mr. Burn. Money and curiosity. You really should be dead.”
&nbs
p; “PilotEngine.” I waved at my chest. “Keeps the meat going so the zep doesn’t flip out in case the Pilot gets hurt in bad weather or war. In some ways, a Pilot is the only important person on a ship.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He was wearing city clothes now, a tight vest and dress shirt. The hunch was more pronounced. It shifted while he talked. “You’re no Pilot, Jacob Burn.”
“Fuck you, okay. I know my history, I know what happened. I remember. I don’t need people telling me.”
“Excuse me.” Wilson folded his arms. “Let me step in. I don’t know anything about you. Okay? Maybe you’re some kind of crime world celebrity or something, but I don’t fucking know. I find your reaction amusingly self-important, but you need to just listen to me. You’re not a Pilot.”
I stared at him. I didn’t know what to say.
“Not a Pilot. But, the Academy?”
“Oh, you might have trained to be a Pilot. But that,” he pointed one long, sharp finger at my chest. “That has nothing to do with piloting. Not in the immediate sense, at least. How much do you know about biotics?”
“Biotics. Like the Artificers Guild?” Like the Summer Girl, I thought.
“Right. Specifically, in how it relates to cogwork. Their relationship.”
“It doesn’t. I mean, they’re separate sciences,” I said.
“Separate sciences that do similar things.” He walked slowly around the room, and for the first time I became solidly aware of the space I was in. It looked like an operating theater, the surrounding tiers of seats dusty and abandoned, disappearing up into the unlit heights of the room. The ground level operating room had been strewn with the stuff of a house: a desk, two chairs, random narrow tables that held all manner of devices, even a bed shoved up against the circular wall. The tiled floor was grimy with mildew, and a few thin rugs had been set down around the perimeter. Wilson stopped by one of the tables and picked up a tiny jar. He began to unscrew the stopper. “Not so separate, once. The Academy, as you say, trains Pilots. But once it served a more civilian purpose. Do you know what this is?”
He held the jar out in front of me. It smelled, a sharp stink of decay and dry vomit. I wrinkled my nose and glanced inside. There was a blanket of crushed leaf, and a shiny beetle rooting around inside. Wilson plucked it out with two sharp fingers.
“Engram beetle,” I said.
“Yes. An engram beetle.” He held it in his palm and presented it to me. The beetle’s back was smooth. It hadn’t been imprinted yet. “One of the few remaining practices from the old Academy. Left over from a time when the institute was committed to learning, to exploring the world around us. But now all that’s left is the Artificer’s Guild, and their little entertainments.”
“I wouldn’t call them little. The engrams are pretty incredible.”
“Nothing compared to what they could be. What they were before you were born, before the Church… nevermind. Bitterness clouds my argument.” Wilson held up his hand. The beetle was crawling around his knuckles, eventually climbed its way to the top of his finger, clinging to the talon. “Biotics is the study of the living form. What it can do, and what it can be. The patterns found inside, and how those patterns can be used to change the form.”
“Sounds like the Church.”
“The Church is interested in the pattern without. The Algorithm of the Unseen, as their Wrights are fond of saying. They try to divine a pattern from the cogwork they dredge up from the river, the scraps that come downstream, and they seek to impose that pattern on the world.” He flourished the beetle, waving it at my face in slow circles. “But there is already a pattern. Here,” holding up the beetle, and then waving at me, then at himself, “And here, and here.”
“Still sounds like the Church to me,” I grumbled. “Is this going somewhere?”
“It is,” he said and smiled. “Your engine, supposedly designed to allow you to impose your will on the mighty zepliner, is something else. All cogwork derives from the patterns of the Church, and yet this is something different. Something I have never seen, and I have seen a great many things. It is a pattern.” His smile was uncomfortably bright. He presented the beetle, “That I wish to understand.”
“The Academy installed it. Ask them.”
“They are not here. Beetling is nothing to be afraid of, Jacob Burn.”
I looked around the room, desperately. My chest hurt like hell, and Wilson’s eyes were exceptionally bright, his teeth exceptionally sharp. “Where’s Emily?”
“She’s not here either. Take the beetle. I only want to imprint the pattern of your heart, to see what has been done to you.”
“I told you, it’s a PilotEngine, the Academy installed it.”
“They may have, but I assure you.” He leaned into me, close. His breath smelled like old linen stored too long. “That is no Pilot’s Engine. If it were, you would be dead. The Engine can do many things, and yes, it is designed to provide the Pilot with a great deal of resiliency. But nothing the Church can produce would have saved your life today. So.” He took my chin in his hand and forced my jaw open. He placed the beetle delicately on my teeth. I struggled, I put my hand on his wrist but in my weakened state his muscles were like iron bands. The beetle scurried forward, clicked against my back teeth as I gagged to keep it away, and then it was down, it was forcing its way down my throat until all I could feel was a dry scuttling in my lungs and heart.
I fell back against the table, the light leaving my eyes, the darkened ceiling of the theater swelling down to fill my head and I was gone.
Chapter Six
The Daintiest Whore
Emily was leaning across me, her breasts smashed against my ribs. I tried to make a joke and coughed instead. It sounded like a rusty winch, that cough. She sat up suddenly and put her palm in the middle of my chest.
“You look horrible,” she said.
“Feel it.” My throat was sandy-dry. I put a hand to my mouth and felt sticky blood on my lips. “Nice friends you got.”
Emily shrugged. “Wilson does his things, and he does them well. You should feel lucky that he owes me. His services are expensive.”
“My debt.” I tried to sit up, but the pain in my chest was too much. “Where is he?”
“Out. Some things he needed. He wanted to wait until I was back. Didn’t want to leave you unattended.”
“And you? Where were you, while your expensive friend was stuffing bugs down my throat?”
“Some errands.” She leaned away from me and looked around the theater. The room looked brighter, but that might have just been my tired eyes. “Strange things going on, and I have interests to protect.”
I coughed. My throat was a little better, but not well. Felt like I was breathing glass. “You want to errand me up some water?”
Emily stood up and got me a glass, poured from a tap in the grimy wall. She sat next to me on the bed while I drank. The water was warm and cloudy. It tasted like blood. That might have just been me.
“Better?” Emily asked. She was standing by the bed with her hands on her hips.
“Some.” I tried to sit up again, and it went better. My chest felt like a stack of very precariously balanced plates, cracked and tottering. I put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. Her skin was cold. “What the hell’s wrong with me?”
“Wilson said something about the bug not reading right. And you’re mending fast, like nothing he’s seen.” She carefully shrugged off my hand, took the empty glass and set it on one of the work benches that circled the room. “The healing is taking up a lot of you, all at once. Here it is.”
She came back to the bed, holding a stoppered bottle. She presented it to me, turning it so the bug inside clinked against the glass. “Make any sense to you?”
I peered in at the bug. The beetle was dead, its legs curled up like burnt eyelashes, its back shiny and black. The pattern scrawled across its shell was complicated and unfamiliar.
“What do I know about engrams?” I peered at
the pattern on its back. When you took foetal metal for an implant, the docs had you memorize a pattern for the living steel to imprint upon. That pattern should somehow be reflected on the beetle. It had been a while for me, but the bizarre scraping in my hand looked like nothing I’d seen before. It hurt to look at. “Mean anything to you?”
“Mm,” Emily said, her lips pursed. “Means you’re one complicated son of a bitch. Wilson thinks maybe the beetle was bad, or the massive damage in your body threw it off. He insists you couldn’t make anything with a pattern like that.”
“Well.” I slid the beetle back into the bottle from my cupped hand, put the stopper in and set it by the bed. “That’s a mystery for another mind. How’d your errands go?”
“Poorly. Lots of Badge out there. Most folks are just staying low. You’ve made a hell of a mess out there, Jacob Burn.”
“I have. Did you get in touch with Cacher?”
“No,” Emily said quickly. “I was… his business and mine don’t cross, right now.”
“Business.” I grimaced. “He seemed pretty worried about you, last I saw him.”
“Well. Maybe with good reason. Hanging out with you seems to be a world of trouble.”
She was leaning against the bed, her arms crossed, just a crack of a smile leaking across her face. I smiled and put a hand against her elbow. She didn’t move it.
“Hanging out with me has always been trouble. Why should now be any different?”