The Guild Conspiracy

by Brooke Johnson

  “What’s your game?” she asked.

  “Game?”

  “Why not report me to the minister and be done with it? Go back to whatever it was you were doing before they assigned you to me. You must have more important things to do than follow me around for the next few months.”

  “Do you want me to report you?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” she snapped. “You know what will happen to me if you do. What I want to know is why you haven’t yet.”

  He held her gaze a moment longer. “My orders are to prevent you from sabotaging the quadruped project—­and I plan to follow those orders—­but since the quadruped isn’t in production yet, the probability of you doing anything to sabotage it is unlikely. If you can assure me that this has nothing to do with the quadruped, then I see no reason to report you.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  He considered it. “I could give you my word as a British soldier.”

  “Not good enough.”

  Cartwright shifted against the wall and studied her, his steely gaze unyielding. “It’s clear you have enemies here, Petra. Why, I don’t really know. But I don’t have to be one of them, not if you don’t want me to be.” He unfolded his arms and offered his hand. “Let me prove it to you.”

  She drew back a step, regarding him warily. He seemed sincere enough now, but that didn’t change the fact he was a soldier under Julian’s direct authority. She couldn’t trust him. Even if she did tell him the truth, there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t report her mech and her subcity office to the Guild—­and then that would be taken from her too.

  “And if I refuse?” she asked.

  He lowered his hand. “I’m not going to threaten you, Petra,” he said, the familiarity in which he kept using her name irksome. “But if you don’t tell me . . . if you insist on sneaking around and hiding things from me, I’ll have no choice but to report your actions to the Guild. My orders are clear. If I don’t know for certain what you’re up to, how can I tell my superiors that you aren’t doing exactly what they fear? Agreeing to keep quiet about something unrelated to the quadruped is one thing, but if you’re caught out of bounds, it will be more than just you who gets in trouble. Now, I’m willing to risk that. But I need to know what I’m risking it for.”

  “You would be so willing to trust me?” she asked. “After everything you’ve been told?”

  “You said you weren’t what they claimed.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then prove it.”

  There was a hint of a smile at the edge of his mouth, and she was reminded painfully of a warm summer day, when a dark-­haired engineer had challenged her with those same words, daring her to prove her skill, to trust him when she had no reason to believe that he was telling the truth.

  “We don’t have to be enemies,” he went on, offering his hand again. “You can trust me, Petra. At least give me the chance.”

  She stared at his outstretched hand. Could she? Could she trust him? This soldier, who was so willing to disregard his orders to keep a secret, not even knowing what it was? If she trusted him, and he betrayed her . . . it wasn’t only her freedom she would lose. He could condemn her to death.

  But if he was sincere, if he was willing to trust her, to keep her secrets as long as they had nothing to do with the quadruped, perhaps she could give him this chance. Perhaps she could even gain his loyalty, prove to him that she wasn’t a traitor, that she wasn’t an anti-­imperialist allied against the Guild. It couldn’t hurt to have an ally in the Royal Forces, not when everyone else in the world was against her.

  “All right, Officer Cartwright,” she said uneasily, stepping forward and taking his hand with a firm shake. “It’s a deal.”

  He smiled. “Please . . . call me Braith.”

  Petra led Braith across the first floor, keeping to her usual paths as she navigated from the dormitories to the main workshop and down the stairs to the storage wing on the far side of the building. No one saw them. It was well after hours and no one was working or wandering the halls this late at night.

  Neither of them spoke until they came to the end of the storage hall, where she found the panel to the dumbwaiter chute left slightly ajar. Rupert must already be in the subcity office, waiting for her. Not wanting to risk being caught by a stray engineer, she reached forward and swung the door open wide, the hinges creaking loudly.

  Braith joined her at the open hatch and peered into the cavernous chute. “What’s this?”

  Petra couldn’t help but smile, remembering Rupert’s answer the first time he brought her here. “Our ride.”

  “To where?”

  “You’ll see.” She pulled the lever and brought the dumbwaiter platform to their level, the gears and pulleys whirring loudly until the lift stopped with a loud clunk. Grabbing the edge of the opening, she hauled herself onto the platform and sat with her skirts tucked under her knees. She glanced up at Braith, still standing in the hall. “Well? Are you coming or not?”

  He grinned briefly and climbed onto the platform next to her, admiring the exposed gears, wheels, and cables running up the length of the chute. “Up or down?”

  She pulled the door shut and pressed the control lever forward. The drive motor hummed, the gear trains spinning into motion as the pulley cords whirred beside them. “Down.”

  The lift rumbled downward, sinking deeper into the subcity with each passing second. Braith raised his eyes to the shrinking square of darkness far above them, and Petra caught herself staring at him, trying to puzzle him out. He wasn’t just another soldier in a red uniform, another of Julian’s pawns. But what did that make him instead?

  Electric light spilled into the dumbwaiter chute as the lift reached the bottom of the shaft, and Petra braced herself for the jerky stop. The platform clanged against the landing, and Braith knocked his head against the wall, the same as she had done the first time she rode down with Rupert. She bit back a smile and climbed out. Her damaged mech sat in the middle of the floor, the plating on its right arm snarled and twisted from the fight with Bellamy.

  Rupert sat at her desk, slowly twirling a spanner in his hands. “About time,” he said, jumping to his feet. “I was starting to think—­” He spotted Braith and turned toward her with a frown.

  “I know,” she said, cutting him off before he could say anything. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have much of a choice.” She crossed the office and sank against the desk, folding her arms across her chest. “He caught me trying to sneak down here and it was either tell him what I was up to or give up on the fights, and I’ve worked too hard for this to quit now.”

  “You could have lied to him.”

  “Maybe . . .” she said, eyeing the soldier doubtfully.

  Braith surveyed the cramped office, his gaze sweeping over the desk, the jumble of subcity equipment stacked against the other side of the door, the crates filled with mechanical parts, and finally the mech. “So this is what you snuck out for?” he asked, glancing up at her and Rupert.

  She nodded.

  “What is it?” he asked, circling the machine. “I don’t recall you pitching anything like this to the Guild.”

  “That’s because I didn’t pitch it to the Guild,” she said.

  Rupert leaned close. “It’s a risk getting him involved,” he said, keeping his voice low. “What if he tells someone?”

  “He won’t,” she said, hoping it was the truth. “He’ll be in as much trouble as us if his superiors find out he was here. You’re just going to have to trust me on this. I’ll take full responsibility if it turns out I’m an idiot.”

  “Is it a prototype of some sort?” asked Braith.

  Rupert shook his head warningly, but she ignored him. She pushed away from the desk and joined the soldier in front of the machine, resting her hands on her hips. “It’s a battle mech.”
>
  Braith frowned. “A battle mech?”

  She faced him, the truth sticking in her throat. Rupert was right. It was a risk telling him, but if she wanted to keep fighting in the tournament, she didn’t have much of a choice. She needed Braith on her side.

  “If I tell you . . .” she said slowly, “you can’t tell anyone else, all right? You can’t mention it to any of the other soldiers, not the colonel, not the Guild council or the minister—­especially not the minister. Not a word. No one can know about this.”

  He regarded her with a frown. “But what’s it for?”

  “The other students . . .” she started, nervously wringing her hands. “They’ve formed a sort of fight ring in the recreation hall, kept secret from the professors and the Guild.”

  “A fight ring? Here?” A slow smile broke across his face, but then he narrowed his eyes, his gaze skeptical. “But what does that have to do with you? And this?” he asked, gesturing to the mech.

  “Well,” she said, a little hesitantly. “This is my fighter.”

  “Your . . . fighter?” He glanced from her to the machine, a frown inching across his brow. “Wait, you fight? With this?”

  “How else?” she asked, trying not to laugh as she crossed the room to her supply of spare parts.

  Rupert joined her, fetching a rod of welding metal, goggles, and a portable blowlamp from the toolbox as she collected several small squares of plating from one of the open crates.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he muttered. “If he tells anyone—­”

  “I know,” she whispered.

  They exchanged frowns, and he dug through one of the drawers, fetching two pairs of gloves, a set of pliers, and a spanner. “I don’t like it,” he said, handing her the smaller pair of gloves.

  “I didn’t expect you to.”

  She set the fresh sheets of metal on the floor next to the mech, donned her gloves, and sat down to get to work. Rupert offered her the pliers, casting a suspicious glance toward Braith as she started peeling the plating away from the mech’s arm.

  Braith watched her pry the metal apart, exposing the hidden weapons and contraptions beneath the plating. “And you built it?”

  She shrugged. “Rupert helped.”

  “Don’t be modest,” said Rupert. “I barely touched the thing. She’s the mechanical genius here. Not me.”

  “So you fight against other machines?” Braith went on, pacing a circle around the mech. “Other engineers?”

  “That’s the gist of it,” she said, assessing the damage to the inner mechanisms. There was a bolt loose in the mech’s frame where she had taken the brunt of Bellamy’s final attack against her. She held out her hand and gestured toward one of the spanners next to Rupert.

  “Are you any good?” Braith asked.

  “She’s the best,” said Rupert, passing her the spanner. “But not if we don’t get this repaired before the next fight.”

  “When’s that?” asked Braith.

  “Saturday,” she answered, tightening the bolt “We don’t have a lot of time.” She set the spanner aside and wiped her hands on a grease rag as she peered into the metal carcass, noting the bent rods and warped gears that would need to be replaced before the next fight.

  Braith watched her work. “And the rules?”

  “No projectile weapons or use of steel in construction,” she said, returning to her work. She carefully removed one of the damaged gear trains and set it aside. “But once you’re in the ring, anything goes. If your mech goes down—­stalls out, keels over, whatever—­you have fifteen seconds to resume the fight or the match is lost. Last mech standing is the winner.”

  The soldier nodded. “And how many fights have you done?”

  “Just one,” she said, digging back into the mech’s inner mechanisms. “My next match is against Darrow. He’s the third top contender in the tournament—­lost to Selby in the semifinals last tournament. He’s known to fight dirty.” She dismantled another warped linkage and removed it from the machine. “I’ll need everything I’ve got when I go against him in the ring.”

  And she still didn’t have a strategy.

  She had relied on the element of surprise for the first fight, but no one was going to underestimate her again, which filled her with a measure of pride. She had already shown that she could stand toe to toe with the best of them. Now she just needed to prove it a second time.

  Braith stopped his pacing, drumming his fingers against his arm. “You know what will happen if you’re caught with this, don’t you? This is a weapon. A very dangerous and very illegal one.”

  “Yep.” She turned another bolt and motioned for Rupert to hand her a different spanner, glancing up from her work to meet the soldier’s eyes. “So let’s make sure I don’t get caught.”

  A slow grin broke across his face. “What can I do to help?”

  CHAPTER 8

  The night of the second mech battle arrived, and Petra sat in her dormitory, impatiently counting the minutes until she and Braith could escape to the subcity office unnoticed. Rupert would be waiting for them there, running the final checks on her mech before the fight. They had finished the repairs only that morning, working through the night.

  It was almost ten o’clock when Braith finally knocked. “You ready?”

  Petra launched off her mattress and joined him in the hall, already wearing her boyish disguise. Braith was dressed down in a shirt and trousers, his hair tousled and face scruffy after a few days without shaving. Out of uniform, he looked like any other student at the University, and she could almost forget what he really was. Still, he had kept his word so far. He hadn’t mentioned the mech or her secret subcity rendezvous with Rupert in any of his reports, and she was starting to suspect that he enjoyed it, sneaking around, skirting the rules. He had that sort of anti-­authoritarian air about him, an odd quality for a soldier, but perfect for Petra. In a different life, they might have been friends.

  They reached the subcity office half an hour later. Rupert was waiting for them, the repaired mech ready for transport.

  “You checked all its systems?” Petra asked him.

  “Twice. Everything is in order.” He glanced at Braith with a frown and leaned close, lowering his voice. “You sure we can’t ditch him? The other engineers won’t be happy about an outsider attending the fights—­especially if they realize who he is.”

  “He promised not to tell anyone,” she whispered, examining the repaired arm. The plating rippled under the light, dented by the many hammer strokes that had reformed its shape. She tested the manual release on the newly added claw, and four sharpened metal fingers unfolded from the mech’s fist. “Besides,” she said, retracting the claw. “I don’t have much of a choice. Either he goes with us, or I can’t fight. That was the deal.”

  “I still don’t get why the Guild put you under watch like this. Taking you out of your classes to focus on the project, I can understand, but a military guard? What are they afraid you’ll do?”

  She shrugged, the truth burning behind her teeth. She couldn’t tell Rupert what was really going on—­not about the quadruped or her hidden sabotage, not Julian’s suspicions or his threats. The truth was far too dangerous, and she wasn’t about to drag him into it too. Rupert was her best friend. She wouldn’t condemn him to that fate.

  “I know that look,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  She tried to maintain a straight face, but Rupert knew her too well. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “But I can’t. Not this time.”

  “Why not?”

  She pressed her lips into a firm line and glanced over her shoulder at Braith, leaning against the desk with his arms crossed. “I just can’t.”

  “Petra—­”

  “Is everything ready?” asked Braith, stepping away f
rom the desk.

  “Looks to be,” she said, swallowing against the feeling of guilt in her chest as she turned away from Rupert. “We should make our way to the recreation hall. I don’t want to be late.”

  She moved aside and Rupert met her eyes over the mech, the tightness in his brow suggesting that the conversation was far from over. She hated to keep secrets from him, but she had no choice. The truth would only make him an accomplice in her sabotage, and she refused to drag him into this, knowing what would happen if she was caught.

  Braith and Rupert wheeled the mech to the dumbwaiter chute and hefted it onto the platform, pushing the machine into the far corner.

  “There,” said Rupert, wiping his hands clean. “We should all fit now.”

  “Can the lift hold this much weight?” asked Braith.

  “You could always take the stairs,” suggested Rupert.

  Petra rolled her eyes. “We’ll fit.”

  The three of them squeezed around the mech, huddled together shoulder to shoulder. Rupert pulled the lever, and the dumbwaiter inched upward, the additional weight putting a strain on the drive motor. Petra could feel the tension in the pulley cables as they climbed. The gears groaned and whined, the lift creaking and vibrating as they ascended, but the cables held, and after a slow, stifling crawl, they reached the top of the chute and climbed out onto the sixth floor, mech in tow. Then they piled into the next lift and ascended two more floors before emptying out again.

  Petra stopped outside the door and laid a trembling hand on the arm of her mech, her heart thumping heavily in her throat. Facing Darrow in the ring wouldn’t be easy. He was one of the best engineers in the school and not afraid to fight dirty; the carnage of his last match was ripe in her mind. She would have to be smarter, faster, and a hell of a lot luckier to win. The slightest mistake could lose her both the match and what little respect she had earned since winning the first fight.