The cries of dozens of Tremblers roared through my head. I screamed, fighting the deluge of need. Bright pinprick lights flashed behind my eyes, and I gasped, pushing back at the incoherence with all I had. Pain speared my temples from the devices and then a noise, high-pitched and throbbing, seared my mind, connecting with the Tremblers through me. Their rage, their keening voices, all went silent as they staggered, hands holding their heads. They fell to their knees writhing in pain.
Some ran from me and threw themselves against the railings and supply crates, their broken bodies quivering against the planks with hollow thuds. Stunned, I glanced at the passengers, who, unaffected but confused, crawled to their feet. Overhead, I spied Riley staring down at me from the mast with open-mouthed shock.
He leapt to the deck, his boots cracking the wood as he scooped up a child. “Abandon ship,” He shouted to the passengers. “Get to the small vessels.”
Some of them stirred, and breaking from their panic scurried for the smaller air crafts hovering next to the galleon. Others remained frozen or shouted from behind barricades.
Tremblers pulled themselves along the floor, dragging their broken bodies as they lashed out and swiped at the frantic people.
A group of women huddled in a corner caught my eye and I ran to them, shouting for them to go. Their backs to me, they did not turn at my voice, instead they moved in unison, rocking back and forth at the waist as if in some trance.
“You must go.” I reached for the arm of a young girl. She turned, and her black eyes roved in their sockets. Bright blue veins branched across her pale skin making her look like a cracked porcelain doll. I stumbled backward, horrified. Her jaw snapped repeatedly, and her broken teeth ground with her angry growls. Blindingly fast, she shot away from me and ran across the deck, holding grasping hands out in front of her. She tore up the steps to the quarter deck and flew at the sailor with the sword. The blade flashed in the sunlight, a futile blow that did nothing as the force of the girl’s tackle took him over the side of the railing. He yelled, and her keening wail echoed as they plummeted together.
I screamed, unsure of what I had just seen when the rocking women behind me stilled. They turned to face me as one, their mouths pulled into grimaces. Their bodies tensed. I moved, diving out of their way as they ran across the ship. As if spurred by some instinct, the women flew at anyone in their path, leaping with the terrified victim off the ship to their death miles below.
An old woman, surely a grandmother by her age, flew at Riley with tremendous speed. “Watch out!” I shouted.
He turned, drew his weapon, but hesitated when he saw her. She hit him with so much force, the railing behind him splintered. Grappling with her, he fell with her to the deck, holding the crazed woman at arm’s length as she snapped her jaws at him over and over, her withered hands scratching at his face.
A balloon ballast overhead burst, and the force of the explosion threw me to my hands and knees. The galleon shuddered, the weight of it sending a squeal along the metal cables holding it to the last two air sacs.
Riley skidded toward the broken railing.
“No,” I screamed.
Another shard of pain tore across my thoughts, the noise nearly unbearable. The old woman stumbled backward, wincing. Her black eyes locked with mine. She growled and lunged for me. My hand shot out defensively and I focused on the sound, my mind on fire with agony. She stopped in her tracks, panting and snarling but unable to attack.
“Are you doing that?” Riley staggered to his feet. “How are you doing that?”
The old woman turned, glanced at Riley with a final hiss, and then threw herself from the ship.
I stood motionless, horrified, my mind reeling. These were not the Tremblers I remembered. These were something worse. All around me, the fire and screams overwhelmed my senses. Black smoke from the burning air sacs stung my eyes. The movement and shouts of Riley’s men as they loaded the last of the passengers seemed to happen in slow motion.
Riley ran up to me, but his words would not register, muffled by the growing wail of need rising in my head from my connection with the other Tremblers, the others infected as I was. He shook me by the shoulders, tearing my focus back.
“You have to go, Charlotte!” Taking my hand, he pulled me toward his air ship. “Get aboard, I’ll be right behind you.”
“You are coming, right, Riley?” I staggered after him, letting him lead me.
Tremblers threw themselves at the fire eating up the aft part of the ship, ignoring the small ships that pulled away from the galleon with the rescued passengers.
“Hold on,” Riley yelled, grabbing for the mast with his other arm.
The blaring of a claxon grew near and over my shoulder, the port came into view. Too close. We were too close. The galleon shuddered as the bow crashed into the first of the harbor’s slips. Screams and the grating of wood tearing across the port’s structure made my heart stop. We’d hit. The galleon, under full inertia barreled into the dangling market. It tore across shops and stalls, leveled the pub, and sliced through the barricade as if it were nothing but gossamer. The jarring blow threw us to the decks, and I crawled on my hands and knees for the railing.
“Riley!” His eyes swam beneath a bloodied gash at this brow, but he reached for me, his mech-hand buzzing with each grasp. Taking my hand in his, he pulled us towards his vessel, fighting the stream of debris sliding down at us.
“Hurry, Charlotte.”
A revolver, tossed aside amid the panic, lay against a crate. I paused, pulling my hand from Riley’s.
He turned, confused.
I picked up the weapon and fired it at the ballast overhead. Escaping air shrieked from the hole, and the galleon shuddered beneath my feet.
“What are you doing?” Riley had his gun in his hand though he did not point it at me.
“We need to sink her.” I took aim again and his weapon rose, leveled at me.
“Wait…” He looked at me for a moment, and then his gaze snapped to the remaining passengers. Some of them clearly dying from their wounds and the fire, others with the strange blue lines visible on their throats and faces as infection took them over. “There may be some injured below.”
“It is too late.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I am sorry,” I said and pulled the trigger. The last air sac sagged with a rippling tear as I fired three more times.
“Stop, Charlotte,” Riley shouted.
Another shudder rocked the galleon. Pieces of the port’s boom arms rained down on us. Wood and glass bounced off the railings and hit us. I flinched and my gaze snapped to the rotor towers just a few hundred yards away. If they went, the whole of Outer City would plummet to the sea.
“Save who we can, sink the rest,” I said evenly. “Your words.”
An anguished growl escaped Riley’s lips, but he raised his weapon and fired at the balloons overhead. The ship shuddered, plummeting from the sky as its weight overtook the failing ballasts.
I ran with Riley to his vessel, leapt aboard, and let slip the knot tethering us to the grappling hook.
“Hold on,” Riley shouted, cranking the burner beneath our air ballast.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a man crawling up the stairs from below decks. Bloodied and horribly injured he reached out, his gaze pleading.
Riley would try to save him. Would risk his life to climb back onto the sinking vessel for one man. Outer City needed him; his people needed him. I kicked us free of the galleon.
As Riley turned, I stepped in front of his line of sight, blocking the man from view.
“Go, hurry,” I shouted as we ripped away from the plunging galleon.
Fighting against the free fall, we veered away moments before the final ballast gave way on the vast ship. It plummeted, and I peered over the side of the gondola, breathlessly watching its descent. The flames of the galleon grew fainter as it tumbled from the sky. A final explosion flared before the churning
sea swallowed it whole.
I sank back into the seat, my heart ramming. The numbness dissipated, and pain from scratches and cuts throbbed. I inspected my arm and legs, surprised to find injuries. They were not deep, but the blood flow seemed less than what it should be. Riley’s silence next to me sent a sliver of worry through my middle.
“Are you all right?” I asked him, trying to catch his gaze.
He nodded curtly, his lips pressed into a tight line. When I reached for his arm, he stiffened. Catching himself, he cleared his throat.
“You should…uh…buckle that harness,” he said glancing at me quickly before looking away again.
I nodded, observing him with a sinking heart as he maneuvered the ship into port. The sound of cheering voices and shouts of relief from the citizens lining the port slips did nothing to ease the sickness that settled in my stomach.
We pulled next to the slips, and Riley leapt off the air ship without a word and rushed over to help the survivors disembarking from the smaller vessels. I climbed down, gingerly touching the devices at my temples. A memory floated from the depths of my mind, and I stilled.
Voices, garbled but familiar, leached through the liquid of my tank as I slipped deeper into unconsciousness.
I fear this line should not be crossed with her, Viceroy. To toy with eternity, we invite deadly consequences…
5
I stumbled amid the rubble of a transport frigate as the stiffness of my joints threw off my balance. Working my hands opened and closed, I wrinkled my nose when the breeze from the sea pushed the odor of burning flesh and rubber across my path. I picked my way between gaping holes in the deck left by the fire, and the bodies of those who did not survive the collision with the galleon, and ran my gaze along the branching blue marks marring the necks of the victims. This was new. It was not what had happened to me, and I chewed my inner cheek, worried that the Trembling Sickness had mutated again.
First, as the poisonous vapors created by the additive used to prolong our dwindling coal supplies, and then as the concentrated affliction festering in the lungs of decaying Tremblers, the disease, already a deadly threat, may just have become more potent than ever. We needed to find answers, and we needed to find them quickly.
The fire had killed many of the Tremblers. Driven mad by the desperate need for heat, they hurled their bodies at anything hot—steamworks, boiling machine pipes, and of course, fire. Lawmen, in their long leather dusters, walked among the prone bodies, hoisting the dead out and over the railing to plummet to the sea. Others had a more gruesome job. Tremblers that had been thrown from the galleon lay keening amid the debris of other ships. Their cries were cut short at the crack of rifle fire. This sent chills pebbling my skin.
Riley moved in the corner of my vision, leaning down over prone passengers and whispering with Kiril, his deputy. I stepped on a weak section of decking and my boot plummeted through to my knee with a clatter. Both men looked over at me, Riley’s gaze snapping to the others wandering the wreckage. He cleared his throat, furtively touching the back of his hand with his glove. I pulled my sleeves down covering the mechanica there, and turned to avoid being seen by others milling around.
Scratches on the planks at my feet, the trailing ruts of desperate victims of the crash, clawing to keep from falling to their deaths, marred the deck. The galleon’s fire had spread on impact, leaving a dozen ships with scorched masts and sails. Wreckage from crates and barrels used to barricade against the approaching collision lay in pieces across most of the harbor slips and other ships. Blood and clumps of hair on the deck of the frigate told of a chaotic, horrific fight to escape the fires and flying Tremblers who rained down on the unsuspecting merchants.
All of it turned my stomach and yet seemed strangely familiar, as if I’d stood on a savaged vessel like this before.
Riley wandered next to me, his voice gravelly with fatigue. “How’re you holding up?” he asked. “I, uh, lost track of you after we got back.”
“Fine.” I nodded to the body of a man lying mangled at our feet. “You have a problem.”
“Little bit of an understatement, isn’t it?” Riley rubbed his face with both palms. “This is a disaster.”
“Have you seen this before? The markings?” I pointed to the dark blue veins protruding from the man’s neck like thick wires.
Riley shook his head. “Only the kind you…your symptoms. Not this.”
“You have to quarantine the survivors,” I said softly. “Until it is clear what you’re dealing with. This man may have been thrown from the galleon or he may be a newly exposed victim who died suddenly. There is no way to be sure. They seemed to turn so quickly this time. In minutes. Am I losing my mind, Riley? Did you see it too?”
“No…I saw it.” Riley rubbed his face with both hands. “I’ll talk to Doctor Bartlet and see if we can empty out one of the inns to house the passengers until she can clear them.”
Kiril called from across the deck. Riley tipped his hat to me and walked over to his deputy. They spoke, Kiril glancing at me over Riley’s shoulder occasionally. There was something distinctly hostile about the way he always seemed to keep his eye on me. I wondered how long my identity would remain hidden or if those in the Order who sought me were the real threat.
A noise from below pulled my thoughts. I squatted and peered down into a hole in the deck. The fading sun merely cast strange angles of light down into the hold, but a shift in the shadows caught my eye. Riley and another man were hoisting a body over the railing, and Kiril had his back to me. I hesitated for a moment, but another soft shuffle spurred me to move.
The stairs leading down into the lower decks creaked with my footsteps as the scorched wood strained under my weight. I slid a palm along the splintered rail, jerking away when the slickness of blood moved beneath my skin. Wiping it on my skirts, I bent, picked up a piece of wood from the railing, and held it at my thigh as I descended.
Shafts of sunlight sliced the darkness from the broken deck above. Dirt and smoke wafted in and out of the streams of light causing the view to flicker and fade. Something moved, a lurch in the shadows paced my heart up. Minuscule shocks triggered a pulse of tension in my long muscles, and the wood cracked in my grasp.
Riley’s voice sounded overhead, and I glanced up momentarily, squinting to see him through the broken deck. Smooth whirring in my head sounded. I blinked, startled when my vision brightened to a vivid violet. It was like looking through the goggles I once made in my father’s lab. Treated with a chemical wash, the hue refracted light in a way that enhanced the dim light.
Disoriented, I reached out with my hand and caught sight of the silver within the device on the back of my hand glowing bright in the darkness. The scrape of wood in the corner focused my riotous thoughts, and I hunched down, descending the remaining steps in silence.
The figure moved. I crept forward, concentrating on the tendrils of need Tremblers emitted as they reached out but found nothing. Flattening myself against the wall, I waited, watching the form as it shuffled amid the debris. I reached down, grabbed a piece of rubble and tossed it in the direction of the silhouette. He moved blindingly fast, and the shing of metal as a sword unsheathed echoed around me. Even in the bowels of a ship, in the dark of night, I knew him.
“Ashton Wells,” I hissed and hurled the stick at him as hard as I could.
He ducked it easily, stepping into the light and emerging like an apparition from my tragic past. Piercing dark eyes trained upon me as his powerful stride closed the distance between us. Betrayal, hurt, and a peculiar relief flooded my muddled mind.
“Missed me, I see,” he murmured as he secured his weapon.
Though he did not wear his chest plate armor, nor have his cloak from his knighthood in the Order, the long, dark hair brushing his chin and the lithe figure was unmistakable. Hand to my head, I strained, managed to disengage the violet lenses, and blinked up at him. A revolver strapped to his chest told me he knew of the warrant for his capt
ure up here.
“I shall aim better in the future.”
A slight smile pulled at the corners of his mouth, but something had left a shadow behind his eyes. A burden…perhaps, regret? “Good to see you as well, Charlie.”
His familiar voice sent my pulse racing. Deep and velvety, it brought with it a host of tumultuous memories. I remembered clutching my arms around him as we flew from a rooftop, his strong grip holding me at his side during a heated battle in the night sky, a searing kiss when I was sure we would die in the next moment.
“What are you doing up here, Ashton?”
“Looking for you.”
“Why? What are your plans for me this time?” I took a step backward, unsure of my reaction to him. I had once loved him. Then hated him. Such strong emotions never truly dissipate. They evolve into scars upon your soul. “Who did you bring?”
“I am alone.” He put his hands up. “No one knows that I am here.”
“I am more interested in who knows that I am here.”
“No one knows,” he repeated.
“You did,” I countered.
“I know you.” Gaze sliding over me, never hesitating, never stopping on the devices. His eyes locked with mine and the intensity of his presence took my breath away.
“So you found me. I am not dead.” Needing to get away from his pull on me, I turned and wandered the area. The bodies down here were nothing more than charred remains that turned my stomach and offered no answers to my many questions. Ashton joined my search, but his lingering gaze bore into me as did his silence. I finally faced him. “I find it hard to believe that you just happen to be here when this tragedy occurred. What are you really doing here, Ashton?”
“I had hoped you would be here. But what spurred me to risk your wrath and the price Riley put on my head to come to Outer City was to warn you both of this very possibility, but…” his gaze slid over the remains of the merchants at the bottom of the steps. “I was too late, it seems.”
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