Piper watched them sitting next to their parents. They looked so happy, she thought, all clustered in an intimate little group. The youngest boy had to have his mother help him hold the stick while he bit into the apple. He came away laughing with a caramel-covered chin. The woman smiled and wiped his chin with her fingers. She glanced up and caught Piper’s eye. Piper dropped her gaze.
Her shiny new leather boots filled her vision, and suddenly Piper felt tears threatening again. She clutched her father’s coat close around her for comfort. It was a warm night, much warmer than in the northern towns. She might have gone without the heavy coat, but the thought of that made her feel even worse.
For the longest time, all Piper had wanted was to escape from the scrap town and start a new life, but now that she had, she felt more alone than ever. Her father was still dead, and she was saddled with a strange, talkative capital girl with a belt full of coins who was being chased by a crazy man. They were in a town that, for all its pretty sights, was crawling with slavers, and the only hope they had for getting information was from a sarnun that Piper wasn’t even sure she could find. Her father would have known how to handle all of this, but it was too much for her.
Anna waved to her again from the carousel, and as the machine slowed and came to a halt, Piper waved back. She wiped the corners of her eyes and stood up.
Probably the craziest part of all was that she was actually starting to like this strange girl, Piper thought as Anna hopped off the grapa hound and ran toward her. Piper thought she was going to bowl right over her, but at the last minute, Anna stopped and threw her arms around Piper’s shoulders, giving her a fierce hug. Piper was so surprised, for a minute she just stood there with her arms awkwardly trapped by her sides. Tightness spread in her chest that had nothing to do with the girl’s grip.
“Careful, you’ll break me,” Piper said with a light laugh as she untangled herself from Anna’s arms. She smiled wryly. “I take it you liked the ride?”
“Oh!” Anna spun in a circle. “That was—”
“Amazing?” Piper guessed. “Fascinating?”
Anna grinned. “Fun.”
“Good. Now we need to go find Raenoll,” Piper said. “No more stalling.”
“Oh, I forgot,” Anna said, her face brightening. “I saw a sign for the place while I was on the carousel. It’s down a little alley just off the square.” She pointed to one of the paths leading out of the garden. “That way.”
“Nice work, Anna,” Piper said, grinning in relief. That was one less problem, anyway. “Lead the way.”
Anna took Piper’s hand and led her to the opposite side of the square from the candy shop and down a stretch of tunnel vault. Sure enough, three doors in was a sign that had a picture of a white eye. Beneath it was written RAENOLL THE SEER in both the Trader’s Speech and the sarnun language.
They approached the door. Piper reached under her shirt and pulled out her pocket watch. “It’s later than I thought,” she said worriedly. “I hope she’s still seeing customers. I guess we’ll find out.”
Anna looked at the watch curiously. “I didn’t know you wore that. It’s beautiful.”
“Thanks. It’s been with me a while,” Piper said. “I fixed it. That’s what I do—I’m a machinist. I guess I never told you that.”
“That must be hard work,” Anna said. “Did you have to study for a long time to learn to fix machines?”
“Not really. My dad taught me a little, but I’ve always had a knack for knowing what’s wrong with a machine. I can tell sometimes before I touch it. Then, the more I touch it, the more I know how to fix it, and the machines always seem to respond to me. Just like the watch—for some reason, it won’t work for anyone but me.” Piper laughed uneasily. She’d never talked this much about her talent to anyone but her dad. “I bet you’re going to say that doesn’t make any sense.”
Anna looked thoughtful. “No, I think it makes perfect sense. You’ve cared for it. The watch is a part of you. It feels safe with you.”
“Great. The pocket watch cares for me,” Piper said, sighing. It wasn’t quite the same as having a human care for her. “I suppose it’s as good an explanation as any for what I can do. Anyway, we’re wasting time. We should see if Raenoll’s home so we can get this done and get back to the 401,” she said. She stepped forward and rapped on the door.
“Come in, please.”
Piper could swear she heard the voice, accompanied by a watery echo, with her ears, though in actuality the sarnun had projected the invitation into her mind. Piper reached for the door handle, but the door swung open on its own, startling her. Night eye blossoms growing along the walls illuminated a set of stairs leading down deep into the earth.
“Piper, are you sure about this?” Anna said. “Her voice hurts my head.”
Piper reached out and found Anna’s trembling hand waiting for her. “We’ll be fine. I’m right here with you. I’m not leaving.”
As she said the words, Piper heard the truth in them, and in that moment, she made a decision that silenced all the thoughts that had been running through her head lately. She wouldn’t abandon Anna for a belt stuffed with coins. That’s not who I am, she thought. She would help Anna get to the capital and do what she could to protect her from the wolf. Maybe in the end there would still be a reward in it for her, and she could get started on her new life.
Piper squeezed Anna’s hand reassuringly, and they descended the stairs.
“You want to run that by me again, Green-Eye? I’m a little bit confused.” Trimble picked up a hot coal and tossed it idly from hand to hand. Beside him, Gee stared out the window at the silver lights of Tevshal’s merchant district.
“I just asked if you’d seen them come back to the train, Fireman. It’s a simple question,” Gee said irritably.
“Oh, I understood the question, just not your reason for asking it,” drawled Trimble. “I thought you wanted to get rid of those girls.”
“I do,” Gee said. “The older one’s got a temper that’s just waiting to blow like one of your experiments, and the younger one … well, she just never stops talking. If they’re working for Aron, I’ll eat my wings. They’re hiding something, I’m telling you.”
“So why do you keep looking for them out there?” Trimble threw the hot coal back into the firebox and turned to check the boiler pressure. Sweat poured down his face. He pulled down his goggles to keep the moisture out of his eyes.
“Just because I want them off the train doesn’t mean I want them to end up on the slave market,” Gee said, absently rubbing the scars on his neck. “I’m not a monster. I mean … you know what I mean.”
“Never said you were, my friend.” Trimble wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Jeyne’s checking the boxcars to make sure everything’s in place for Cutting Gap. She won’t need you for a while. Why don’t you fly over the city, get some air? You might see them.”
Gee snorted. “Why bother? She said she didn’t want me to protect them.” He remembered the look on Piper’s face when she’d shouted at him, her voice filling that tiny vestibule. Brown eyes burning, she’d looked at him as if she hated him. Her expression conjured a memory of a time, years ago, when he’d looked and shouted at Jeyne Steel the same way.
“What do you expect me to do? I don’t have anywhere else to go!”
Gee shook the memory away.
“Well, if you’re not going out, do you want to help me shovel some of this lovely ash?” Trimble asked hopefully. “Wonderful stuff, really—heavy gray dust everywhere, smelly, makes you cough. It’ll be fun.”
“Actually, maybe I will make a few circles around the town,” Gee said hastily, unbuttoning his shirt. Anything was better than shoveling ash. “Just to make sure no one else is trying to sneak onto the train. Can’t be too careful.”
“Of course not,” Trimble said dryly. “I’ll be here covered in coal dust and sweat if you need me.” He sighed theatrically and reached for a shovel.
Ge
e slid out the window and dropped into the shadows beside the engine. He was more comfortable transforming under cover of darkness. Chamelins weren’t a common sight, even in the midlands and the north, and they tended to remain in human form for the majority of their life spans. In many ways, it made life easier. In his beast form, Gee couldn’t speak in any language humans understood, and he was more susceptible to illness and infection. More than anything, the transformation itself was what kept chamelins in their human forms. Witnessing a human change into a beast was an unsettling experience for the other races. They tended to react with fear at best, violence in the worst cases.
Gee had heard stories of chamelins killed by mobs in the south where the people mistook them for monsters. Though he felt relatively safe in these lands, Gee avoided transforming when he could, and at all other times he tried his best to hide until the change was complete.
Heady floral scents filled his nostrils, and the noise coming from Tevshal grew louder as Gee’s senses shifted. He spread his wings and took off, soaring over the 401’s nose and into the town, trusting the darkness to conceal him.
Circling the area once or twice couldn’t hurt. Whether or not the girls wanted his protection, Gee was responsible for the passengers on board the 401, and he took his job seriously. Over the years, he’d learned to trust his instincts, and tonight he felt a sense of foreboding in his gut. Something bad was about to happen.
At the bottom of the stairs, a hallway branched off to the left and right. Night eyes lit the way in both directions, but Piper felt an invisible pull, like a string around her waist, drawing her to the left. Beside her, Anna fidgeted as if she too felt the phantom string.
They walked slowly down the hall, Piper casting nervous glances behind her every few steps, though she didn’t know exactly why she was anxious. Maybe it was because she had heard the sarnun’s voice in her head, yet so far, Raenoll’s house appeared to be empty.
The hallway ended, opening up into a sitting room with a large rug laid out on the earthen floor. A padded bench and two comfortable-looking chairs took up most of the space, and white sheets covered the curved walls and ceiling. It made the room look stark and uninviting. Only a handful of the night eyes lit the room, so the space was dim, but Piper could see, and feel by the damp chill, that there was no fireplace, and she shivered.
It was a few moments before she noticed, seated in one of the chairs, a shrunken old sarnun woman. Her dry, leathery blue skin barely held her bones, and her feelers were nearly all calcified. Only two remained mobile, and they lifted toward Piper and Anna in a feeble greeting.
Piper nodded in return. “Raenoll?” she asked.
The woman nodded. “You are welcome here,” she said. The echo of her mind voice seemed louder now that they were in the same room. Piper wondered if sarnuns were able to communicate with each other over long distances, speaking from city to city, country to country. She tried to imagine all those voices traveling hundreds of miles, overlapping and jumbled.
“We’re sorry for coming here so late,” Piper said, “but we aren’t going to be in Tevshal very long, and we need your help.”
“I understand. You have an object for me to identify?” Raenoll asked.
Out of the corner of her eye, Piper saw Anna squirm. “Not an object,” she said firmly, “a person. See, my friend here has lost her memory. She doesn’t know who she is or where she comes from. We were hoping you might be able to … look at her, or something, and see if you can tell us about her.”
Raenoll gestured to the bench and waited for Piper and Anna to sit down. “I can promise you nothing,” she said. “My power lies in reading purpose—destiny, if you will. The purpose of an object is fixed. Its destiny rarely changes, and so it is a simple matter to divine where it has been and where it is going. A person is mutable, an entity that changes and evolves. Their destinies are similarly uncertain, but occasionally I am able to catch glimpses, flashes of their purpose and future.”
“That’s all we ask,” Piper said hopefully.
“A challenge of this nature undertaken so late at night—it will of course affect the price.”
Piper had been waiting for this part. Sarnuns were master bargainers, and though they couldn’t read human minds, they read their facial expressions so well that it was almost impossible to bluff them. Piper knew they had enough money to meet any price Raenoll named, but she had no intention of letting a sarnun grandmother wring them out. It was a matter of scrapper pride. “Sure, sure, the extra coin’s a given,” she said, “but you just said you can’t guarantee results. I don’t buy a fish if it smells rotten, and I won’t hand over a fistful of coins for a machine I don’t even know will work.”
“You would like a test, then?” The sarnun’s feelers swayed back and forth in what looked to Piper like a considering motion. Finally, she answered. “Accepted. Give me an object that is dear to you.”
Piper reached inside her shirt and pulled out the pocket watch. She took off the chain and handed it to the sarnun. “This came from Scrap Town Sixteen in the north,” she said.
“You are a long way from home,” Raenoll said as she took the watch. It looked big and heavy in her shriveled hands. Piper had heard sarnuns were so physically weak that they couldn’t lift anything heavier than a soup pot. There were other stories, though, of what they could move with their minds.
“What can you tell me about it?” Piper asked.
Raenoll’s feelers brushed the watch face tentatively. She closed her eyes.
The blank room suddenly came to life, startling Piper.
A man’s face appeared on the white-sheeted wall closest to Piper. Piper turned, her hand automatically reaching for her knife before she realized the man wasn’t real. It was only a blurry picture fading in and out but with more details slowly appearing in the background. Gradually, the picture widened, covering all the sheets in the room like wet paint poured across a canvas. Objects took shape. Behind the man loomed an immense square tower and the largest clock Piper had ever seen. A river flowed nearby, and other figures walked in and out of the picture, but they were mostly indistinct shapes, little blots of gray and black.
“The man who owned this watch cast it off in the river,” Raenoll said, opening her eyes. “Broken beyond repair, he said. It drifted away, forgotten, and when it came to you in this world, it was in pieces.”
The scene was a wonder, Piper thought. She folded her arms, forcing herself to look at Raenoll instead of the sheets. She didn’t want the sarnun to see how captivated she was by the moving pictures, but it was almost impossible not to stare at the man and the strange, ominous-looking tower rising behind him. Beside her, Anna watched the images with her hands half covering her eyes, her mouth open in awe.
So much for subtlety.
“You put on a good show,” Piper admitted, and thought she saw Raenoll’s feelers vibrate in the sarnun equivalent of a smile. “But how do we know you didn’t just dream all this up to impress us? Maybe you show these same pictures to every stiff-hip trader who comes knocking.” Piper didn’t really think that was the case, but she had to try the bluff. She didn’t want Raenoll to know how impressed she truly was by the stunning sights the sarnun had put on display.
Abruptly, the pictures on the sheets disappeared, and the sarnun’s voice rang shrill in Piper’s mind. “You call me a charlatan!” she screeched, and Piper winced. “Would a charlatan know that you tried three times yourself to cast off this watch, and three times you failed? It owes you its existence. Without you it is broken beyond repair.” The sarnun’s feelers moved agitatedly around her face. “Would a charlatan tell you that, scrapper child?”
Piper was too shocked to come up with a clever reply. Raenoll knew her whole history with the watch—it was as if the sarnun had opened a window into Piper’s mind. She felt Anna tugging on her sleeve. “What’s wrong, Piper?”
“Nothing,” Piper said, recovering her composure. “I just realized this is going to cost a l
ot more than I expected, but she’s the real thing.”
The sarnun’s feelers vibrated again. She handed the watch back to Piper. “Shall we say twenty?”
“Agreed,” Piper said, wincing. She’d never paid so much for anything in her life. She pulled out the money belt and counted the rectangular coins, then gave them to Raenoll. “Tell me about Anna,” she said.
“Now come over here, child,” Raenoll said, gesturing to Anna. “Sit before me.”
Piper felt Anna shrink from the sarnun. She’d been expecting this too. She gave Anna a reassuring smile. “Anna, remember what I said. I’ll be right here with you. You’re safe.”
“I’m not afraid of her,” Anna whispered.
“Then what’s wrong?”
Anna looked at her nervously. “What if she shows me something bad? What if I’m a bad person—another wolf?”
“That’s impossible,” Piper said, and she meant it. Anna was a mystery, it was true, but Piper had never sensed any deception or malice in her. She grinned. “It’s true you talk funny, you eat like a grapa hound, and you’re incredibly annoying, but I’m actually starting to get used to all that.”
“But—”
“What I’m saying is, you’re not a bad person, Anna.” Piper squeezed her hand. “Trust me. I’ve got excellent instincts for these things.”
Anna nodded, but still she moved slowly to sit on the rug in front of Raenoll. The girl looked like a fly cuddling up to a spider, Piper thought. The sarnun leaned over so her feelers could brush the top of Anna’s head, and Anna tensed, but she didn’t draw away.
“Close your eyes,” Raenoll instructed. “Try to clear your mind and think of nothing at all.”
Obediently, Anna closed her eyes. Piper watched the blank sheets hanging on the walls around them, her own body tense in expectation.
The Mark of the Dragonfly Page 11