by Devon Monk
“House Silver will stand responsible for Robert Twelfth’s decisions with House Orange for a full year,” Reeves said. “If he fails, we will settle his debt and appoint a suitable head of House from within House Orange.”
The silence in the room said more than words could. Reeves Silver never did anything out of charity. Of course, neither did any of the other heads of Houses. There was something in this for him. But for once, Slater didn’t know what it was.
“So witnessed,” John Black said. “So shall the decision stand for review in one year from this date.
“As for the matter of the galvanized, they will be surrendered to House Black for imprisonment until a final vote is taken.”
“I didn’t agree to that,” Welton Yellow said.
“Nor did I,” Gideon Violet said.
“Gentlemen.” John Black dropped the formalities. “I don’t give a damn what you want. Two heads of Houses are dead—killed by galvanized. Turn yours in to me so they can be locked up and observed, or be prepared to step down as head of your House. You know it’s within my abilities to force this issue.”
“Come to my House to force the issue, then,” Gideon Violet said, “and you will be refused. The galvanized who stands with me is not a killer.” He stood and stormed out of the room.
“Well”—Welton Yellow clapped his hands together once—“this has been fun. Just a delight. Good day, all.”
“I expect you to bring me Foster First, Welton,” John Black said. “Or I will come for him.”
“Will you? I wonder how many men you will be willing to lose when you try to take him from me.”
“Do you really want to find out?”
Welton and John glared at each other; then Welton smiled, smug as a cat. “I think I do, actually. Sorry, John, but Foster is mine to care for. He will never be thrown in prison. Not while I’m alive. I’d prefer if you didn’t fight me on that. It will only end up messy for us both.”
John studied the boy. Slater knew the head of Defense had a soft spot when it came to Welton Yellow. John had been a friend to Oscar Gray, who seemed to see the good in every worthless and weak person in the world. Too many years had softened the head of House Defense. A weakness Slater intended to exploit.
“You know it’s my job, Welton,” John Black said evenly.
“I know.”
“Then I will be seeing you soon.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“Is there anyone else who wants to make this difficult on themselves and their House?” John Black asked.
No one answered.
“Good. This meeting is convened.” He stood, glanced at Slater, glanced at Reeves Silver, and shook his head. Then he also walked out of the room.
“Robert,” Reeves Silver said as the other Houses left the room. “Attend me.”
Slater narrowed his eyes at the man who thought he was his owner.
This might not be how Slater intended the takeover of his own House to play out, but these circumstances would still work in his favor. Reeves Silver was a liar, a thief, and a clever man.
But, then, so was Slater. Reeves Silver wouldn’t be a problem once he was dead. Slater would see that day come very, very soon.
After all, he had already put plans in place to kill Abraham Seventh and Matilda Case. The best assassins in the world were on their trail.
One more death on his hands would be no trouble at all.
3
The world was different when you found me. Now I’m a part of the fight, a part of making things better.
—from the diary of E. N. D.
Quinten Case opened the back of the van. “She’s in,” he said breathlessly, the curls of his hair sticking up around the edge of his stocking hat. “Let’s go. Keep your faces down, and don’t talk until we’re clear.”
“Do you think we’re being watched?” I asked.
Quinten shrugged. “We’re in a city, so one must assume.”
I covered Abraham’s face; then we scrambled out of the van, keeping our heads tipped down. We carried Abraham quickly across the concrete parking lot, the earthy scent of a wood fire hanging thick on the stillness and fog. We entered the back room of the shop.
At first glance it looked like a receiving and mailing room for a legitimate business. Boxes, tape, and other packing goods filled the shelves. It smelled of paper and glue and just a hint of moth repellent. It wasn’t a large space, but the ceiling had enough lights to chase most of the shadows back to the corners.
Corners into which cameras were mounted.
The door automatically locked behind us with the teeth-vibrating hum of black-market tech snapping on. Gloria had enough scrubbers, locks, and blocks to keep the Houses off our trail for days.
If we had days.
“This way,” Quinten said. He strode down the aisles of boxes and bookshelves.
Left Ned gave me a raised eyebrow and a look.
I answered both by starting off after my brother.
Neds and I handled the stretcher, me at Abraham’s head and him at his feet. This place was a lot bigger than I’d thought. It was also spaced so that it was fairly easy to maneuver a stretcher through the corridor.
Finally, Quinten turned right, down an aisle that was narrower, created by shelves with file boxes stacked tight and high on both sides.
At the end of the aisle was a wide wooden door. I didn’t see any cameras, but that didn’t mean they weren’t here.
Quinten tapped on the door, and the door slid into a pocket in the wall.
Gloria, whom I’d only ever seen on screens, gestured for us all to enter, then closed the heavy door behind us.
Her face was smooth, dusty olive skin framed by long, straight hair that shone glossy black. Gloria’s eyes were bright, brown, and wide. She was shorter than I expected, a bit curvier at the bust and hip, and even more beautiful in person.
“Matilda,” she said. “Please put him there for now.” She pointed at a wide table on one side of the room. “We will need to be quick.” She crossed to the computers near that table and flicked through screens.
The room was clean, white, clinical. It didn’t look or feel like a back-alley kind of operation. This was a top-notch medical facility. The machines, equipment, lights, and cabinets with glass doors that revealed carefully labeled containers weren’t homey, but the place was well stocked and capable of handling all sorts of medical disasters.
“I can scramble your signals out to a five-mile radius,” Gloria said.
“That’s not far,” Quinten said.
“It’s the best I can do. You wouldn’t have been tracked over water—the signal is too erratic—but here on land, they will try to lock on to you. The faster we debug you, the better.”
“Debug?” I asked, easing Abraham, stretcher and all, onto the table. His skin had gone a deeper yellow, with bluish shadows around his eyes and mouth. If we didn’t get that Shelley dust out of his system soon, it was going to do irreversible damage.
“Every House bugs their people,” Gloria said. “Quinten is carrying four bugs. How many Houses did you get loaned out to?”
“Several,” he said with a sigh, pulling off the beanie and dragging fingers through his curls.
“And Mr. . . . ?” she turned away from the screen and gave Neds a questioning look.
“Harris,” Right Ned supplied.
“You have one bug.”
He nodded.
“But you don’t, Matilda,” she said. “So that’s lucky for you.”
“What about him?” I asked, pointing toward Abraham.
“His vitals and systems are under such distress right now that I can’t tell.”
“Shouldn’t we stabilize him?” I asked.
“First we have to pull those bugs. Or I won’t have any time to fix anyone, because we’ll have half a dozen Houses knocking down the doors.”
Quinten stepped forward. “Do me first.”
Her gaze searched his face and I thoug
ht there was a question there, the way her eyes settled unflinchingly on his. I thought there was an answer in the tip of his head, the softening of his mouth, which her gaze slipped down to study.
I had no idea what they were not talking about.
If I had to guess? My brother had spent time here for more than just the medical training she offered. He had spent time here for her.
What else would have brought such sudden calm and focus to him? What else would have shadowed his eyes with old pain?
“It will hurt,” she said quietly, still not looking away from his mouth.
“I know.” His lips slipped up into a rueful smile.
She seemed to remember that they weren’t alone in the room and straightened a bit. “This way, then.” She took him to what appeared to be a lit shower stall at the far side of the room.
That was my cue to look away. Seriously, if my brother was about to get naked, I didn’t want to see it.
“You knew about bugs?” I asked Neds.
He shrugged. “Didn’t think about it, really,” Left Ned said. “It’s so commonplace. You get owned by a House, you get bugged. Everyone’s bugged.”
“I’m not. House Brown doesn’t bug,” I said.
“Yeah, well, House Brown isn’t so much a House as a handful of people who don’t have the sense to stop fighting a war they lost a long time ago.”
“Freedom isn’t something you give up on when you’re tired,” I said, as the implications of bugging clicked through the tumblers of my brain.
“That means House Silver knew you were out on my farm for two years,” I said.
“He sent me there to keep an eye on you,” Right Ned said, as if admitting a guilt he would rather forget. “Didn’t take a bug to track me down.”
“And every time Quinten came home, he was sending a signal to whatever House had last claimed him?”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Left Ned said. “Your place has scramblers like I’ve never seen before. I’ve told you this before: there’s something in the soil out there, Tilly. Something that messes with the laws of the world.”
“Why, Neds Harris,” I said, putting a little grin behind my words. “I thought you said you didn’t believe in magic.”
“I don’t. But there’s strange nanotech in your dirt and mixes of minerals that do things to things.”
Things like Lizard, who was stitched up out of reptile parts the size of a house, wings included. Things like the pocket-sized sheep that never aged and grew wool that could catch up and save spare minutes of time.
Things like the life thread spun out of the minerals and who knew what else in the creek, and onto spools in my father’s laboratory beneath our old pump house.
The same thread that held me together and made it so I could feel.
The same thread that was holding Abraham together.
All of it coming from the land my parents had tried to keep secret and refused to give up, even when it meant their death.
“Sadie and Corb were with us,” I said, catching a quick glimpse of Quinten stepping into the booth and lifting his arms out to the side, his stance wide. He still had his clothes on, so that was good.
Gloria closed a door that became a screen and displayed his body as if it were made of a map of roads and twisted electrical wires.
“And?” Left Ned asked, bringing me back to the conversation.
“If anyone was tracking our bugs, they will find Sadie and Corb.”
“You heard what she said,” Right Ned said. “Can’t track over water. And don’t worry about Sadie and Corb. They know how to lie low. They knew what they were getting into. It isn’t just your head that has a price on it, Tilly. Abraham is the one person the Houses will turn the world inside out to find. They’d like to get their hands on you, but he’s an accused murderer.”
“He didn’t do it,” I said.
Right Ned nodded, but Left Ned just looked down at his shoe the way a person does when he’s trying to be polite enough not to point out that you’re fooling yourself.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Right Ned said.
Which sounded like he agreed with his brother more than with me.
Abraham was so still on that table, I couldn’t even see his chest rise and fall. My heart clenched in fear, in sorrow. I didn’t want him to die. Didn’t want to watch him suffer.
What I wanted was to touch him, to wake him up and see that sardonic grin on his face and spark of humor in his eyes. I wanted to tell him it was going to be okay. I wanted to ask him if he really did go into House Orange and kill Slater Orange for the heinous treatment Slater had given Robert Twelfth, a galvanized who was Abraham’s dear friend.
Abraham was the galvanized who had led the other galvanized through the Uprising that had put them at war with the Houses. He’d also been the one who had led the galvanized into the peace negotiations and the eventual treaty that had bargained away galvanized rights for the chance for human freedom—House Brown freedom.
I’d seen him angry. I’d watched as he casually cut off a man’s ear just for talking to him wrong.
So, yes, I could imagine he could be pushed to killing someone without suffering a lot of regret. Especially that sadistic prick Slater Orange.
But if Abraham were found to have murdered Slater, it would dissolve the treaty between the galvanized and the Houses they served. It would send the galvanized into prisons, or, worse, they could be reduced to nothing but their immortal brains, locked away conscious but alone for years.
I couldn’t see Abraham risking himself and risking the other galvanized that way.
I rubbed my hands over the cold shiver that ran down my arms. That kind of isolation would drive anyone mad.
“Mr. Harris?” Gloria said as she helped Quinten out of the booth. “You’re next.”
Quinten had always been an almost manic force of energy in my life. While he was capable of holding very still and being very quiet and thoughtful, when left to his own devices he defaulted to smiling, laughing, and going on long, muttering rants about things I never could understand.
My brother was charismatic, caring, and brilliant, all of which had made him the de facto leader of House Brown.
But the man who walked out of that booth was a shaken pale shell of the man in my memories. His eyes narrowed in pain as he pushed away Gloria’s concern, walked to the nearest chair, and eased himself into it.
Left Ned took up a lungful of air and let it out quickly. “Faster, the better, Doc,” he said as he strode into the booth.
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
I walked over to Quinten. “Are you all right?”
He sat with his forearms resting across his knees, white sleeves rolled up, as was his habit, his dark gray vest unbuttoned, his hair wet across his forehead. He laced his fingers together and hung his head, every line telegraphing exhaustion. “Yes,” he said, not very convincingly.
“Can I get you anything? Water?” I put my hand on his sweat-dampened shoulder, and he put in the effort to tip his head up and squint at me.
“I’ll be fine. It just . . . stings.”
“You’re shaking.”
“It stings a lot.”
I rubbed his shoulder gently, wishing I could do more for him.
I glanced over at Neds. The road maps and wires that spread out through his body were more compressed and knotted than Quinten’s.
Gloria didn’t seem the least bit bothered by that. She tapped at an intersection of lines at the side of Left Ned’s neck, and that area grew larger. I didn’t know what she saw there, but it must have been what she was looking for. She pulled out a small instrument shaped like a cross between a pair of scissors and an oversized medical syringe and set it carefully against the screen. The lines and roads lit up, and Neds stiffened as if they’d just been shocked.
Left Ned grunted through clenched teeth.
She twisted the device, like she was twirling a fork in noodles, then yanked.
; Left Ned grunted again, and Right Ned sweated in sympathetic pain. That one bug did more than sting. And my brother had had four bugs removed.
“Maybe you should lie down,” I said.
“Maybe you shouldn’t worry so much,” he said.
I made a face at him, and he managed a smile.
“Just a moment longer while I look for any other bugs,” Gloria said softly as she manipulated the screen though several other settings.
I didn’t know how we were going to get Abraham in there. He wasn’t conscious. He couldn’t stand. At least he wouldn’t feel the thing being removed.
“That’s it,” she announced. “You are clean. You may step out, Mr. Harris.”
She opened the screen and Neds walked out of the booth a lot more steady on their feet than Quinten. Left Ned threw me a glare, like this bug thing was my fault, but Right Ned just rolled his eyes, letting me know his brother was in a surly mood.
“Now,” Gloria said, strolling over to me, “let’s have a look at your companion. I’ll need a set of hands.”
Quinten pushed against his thighs, trying to stand, but didn’t make it.
“I got it,” I said, pressing down on his shoulder. “Rest.” He didn’t argue, which was just another sign of how much the procedure had taken out of him.
I walked over to the table where Abraham was lying. “Don’t know how we’re going to get him in the booth.”
“We aren’t,” she said. “This won’t be as pleasant, but he’s galvanized and unconscious. He shouldn’t feel anything.”
She opened a drawer at the foot of the table and pulled out a roll of shiny translucent material. We each took a corner of impossibly thin material, drew it up off the roll, and spread it across Abraham over the blanket that still wrapped him.
I was careful not to touch his skin, even though none of his skin, except his face, was exposed, for fear my touch would make it so he felt his injuries.
Touching me gave the galvanized the ability to feel their bodies, which were usually numb. I thought it had something to do with the threads that stitched me.
“Just tuck the film under his chin,” Gloria said, “and back around his neck as far under as you can reach.”