Heart of Veridon (The Burn Cycle)

by Tim Akers

  “Give me the heart,” he said. “And die as you should.”

  I put both feet into his chest and pushed. I slid off the cliff with a scrape then pitched down and back. The wind roared past me, the Reine rushed to take me in its wide, flat arms. A second later and the Angel’s arms were around me, shaking me violently.

  “Give me the heart or you die!”

  “Fuck off,” I said, but my voice was failing me. There was a lot of blood across my pants. I was battling to stay awake.

  “Give it to me!”

  “I don’t have it!” I yelled, then held out my hands. “Do you see it? No. I don’t have it.”

  He screamed in frustration and tried to drop me. I hooked my arms around his neck and squeezed. We floundered in the storm, corkscrewing down towards the water.

  “This is how it’s going to end, you bastard,” I hissed into his ear as I rode him down towards the water. “You’re going to fail, we’re both going to die, and the bitch Camilla stays in the city. This is how it’s going to happen.”

  He ignored me and beat his wings mightily. We crawled slowly up in the air. I clung to his back, tucked between his wings, and hammered his head with my bloody fists. My heart was burning with new energy. I could feel the hole in my side closing, the shreds of my cheek pinching shut.

  “I can’t fucking die, monster! You can’t do it. You can’t kill me, and you can’t kill the city. I’ll see to it.”

  “You are,” he grunted as we reached the Cliffside, “tremendously annoying.”

  We climbed higher, high above the Torch’. He turned his head to me and stared into my eyes.

  “Fly, Pilot. Fly, if you can.”

  He folded his wings and we fell. I clung to him. If I let go he would just spread his wings and fly away.

  “You’ll die, too!” I yelled.

  “I will reform.”

  “Not without the heart! Not without a body to possess.”

  He considered this. Just before we hit, he flared his wings. I crashed into a tree, the ancient high tree I had hidden behind when first I ran into the woods. He peeled away, cartwheeling as he fell. I fell through the springy, fibrous branches of the tree. Things snapped inside me, but my fall was broken. The Angel fared less well.

  When I came to the ground I lay there and spat blood. My left knee was ruined. Blood obscured my vision. The thing inside me was roaring, straining with the massive damage of my fall. I struggled to my hands and knees, and then, wavering, to my feet.

  The Angel lay ten feet away, perfectly still. His limbs were indistinct pools of boiling cogwork. His wings were flat and immobile. He stared up at the rain.

  I stumbled to the cliff’s edge and, carefully, retrieved the Cog. Using a stick to steady myself, I limped back up the hill.

  Getting up the hill was difficult. Once I was out of the woods the wind battered me, the rain blinded me. My limp was horrible, the bones grinding. I was in shock. The stone was slick under my feet. But I was free, I was clear. I held the Cog in my hands, looking down at it with a faint murmur of stunned disbelief going through my head. Something cracked behind me. Another. I turned. He was rising, coming out of the woods, cracking trees in half as he came.

  I dropped my stick, almost fell over in shock. He was emerging from the treeline, half apart, his chest unfolding, his wings expanding. He was abandoning any semblance of humanity. His two wings became four, his head was little more than a howling mouth. I saw the human body he had possessed poking through, the half-rotted corpse of a young Pilot, his face horribly deformed, his arms flapping out of the shifting geography of the Angel’s torso.

  I held the Cog up like a talisman. He was yards away still. I felt my knee realign, the impossible health of my heart knitting bones. It used the last of my reserves. I could barely stand. I looked down at the Cog. It glittered in my hand.

  What had Camilla said? Take the heart. Become the destruction of the city. Ruin the things you hate, save the things you love. I looked back up the hill. The Torch’ was a blurry shadow behind me. I couldn’t tell if Emily and Wilson were clear of the machine. I looked back to the Cog. How would I do it, how would it happen?

  My body answered for me. My chest burst open bloodlessly, my ribs folding back. A flower of steel came out of my heart, spinning. It folded open, pulsing, yearning for the Cog in my hand. I stood there in the rain, shaking, staring down at the tortured mockery of my body. My hand quivered, the Angel’s heart shivering between my fingers. Take the heart. Become the destruction of the city. Of all you love.

  The Angel was rushing me, roaring. Become that, I thought, become him to destroy him.

  I wouldn’t. I would stand on my own and die on my own, but I would not become the dark angel Camilla dreamed of being. That was what the city was looking for, Sloane and his people trying to throw off the Church, the Church trying to keep the city in line with its secret, hidden girl. I wouldn’t.

  I willed my chest to close, and it did. The Angel was nearly on me. I turned and ran, my head down, my body screaming.

  The Torch formed up in front of me. Wilson, damn him, was still there, tugging Emily off the contraption. She was naked, the needles and half-grown cogwork weighing her down. He saw me coming and straightened up, a question in his eyes. A second later he saw the Angel behind me and started pulling roughly at Emily’s bonds. There was no time. No fucking time.

  I fell as I reached the circle of brass around the Torch. I went down on my hands and skidded across the stone, my hands tearing. I could tell, even in that split second, that my heart was spent, forever spent. It hung in me dead. Whatever it had been, it would no longer repair me as it once had. I was happy with that, even as my skin came off my hands in sheets.

  I ended up against Sloane’s shredded body. Wilson was yelling, firing hopelessly at the monster at the Torch’s ring. I fumbled to my knees. In searching for the key to the contraption, Wilson had emptied Sloane’s pockets. His things were spread out before me: some photographs, his leather gloves, a thin knife, and a dueling pistol. I picked up the pistol.

  The Angel reared back and leapt over the Torch. His body was deformed, held together by nothing but rage and the rotting corpse of that poor cadet. I held the pistol in both hands, took careful aim, and fired. The bullet sailed true, smacking in to the middle of the flying horror. I cycled the chamber. It wasn’t necessary.

  The Angel made a cracking sound, like thin ice breaking. He howled, howled with the wind and the rain. He fell against the wide arms of the torsion pendulum, squatting above Emily’s limp body. His face was breaking apart. His scream reached the sky, his rage fleeing his body. The cracking sound became a crescendo of a thousand tiny bells, shattering in their first and last note. He burst like a pillar of salt, struck with a hammer’s blow. Cogs rained down across the Torch, slithering over the stone and our bodies by the hundreds, the thousands. When he was gone, there was nothing but the rain and pools of snowflake cogs, clumping together on the stone.

  I looked down at the pistol. Bane. Sloane had been packing Bane.

  WE GOT EMILY off the contraption and, carrying her between us, started down towards the hangar. The machines that grew out of Emily’s skin were greasy and ashen. They flaked off when we touched them, no more substantial than wet paper. I worried about what was beneath the skin. Something we’d have to figure out when we got back down to the city.

  “What happened?” Wilson asked.

  “I think I died. Or something. We’ll figure it out later.”

  “You’re bleeding a lot,” he said. “Is that thing in your heart doing okay?”

  “I don’t think so. Seriously, we’ll talk about it later.”

  “And your face. Man, that’s some serious scarring.”

  “Are you telling me I’ll never be beautiful again?”

  He chuckled. “You were never beautiful in the first place. You were always ugly and violent and cruel. Now you simply look the part.”

  “I’m having the best
time with you, Wilson,” I grunted as we made our way down the hill. “We should do all this again.”

  “Anytime,” he said.

  We got closer to the hangars and stopped. There were lots of guards, clustered around the entrance to the Academy. They didn’t seem too anxious to get close to us.

  “We have a reputation,” Wilson said. “How are we going to get out of here?”

  “Over here,” I said.

  I led him to the nearest hangar and inside. The Thunderous Dawn was still half unmoored. I pried open the crew door and dragged Emily inside. We took her to the mess hall and lay her on a table.

  “They’re going to look in here eventually,” Wilson said. “We can’t hide here forever.”

  “We’re not hiding. We’re escaping.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is an airship. We’re going to fly out.”

  “But you can’t pilot, remember? You’re broken.”

  “And you’re twisted. But I can fly a little. If memory serves, I was able to get my first ship nice and high in the air before we fell out of the sky.”

  “Jacob! This is a Flight of the City Line. It’s a battleship. You can’t just… fly it out of here.”

  “That’s okay. I wasn’t really intending to fly, exactly. Come on. Get her secured here then find someplace to buckle down. I’ll be up top.”

  The Dawn was a newer design. It took me a little while to find the control room, and longer to get buckled in. There are usually OverMates and Ensigns to help with this stuff. I could have used Wilson’s help, but I didn’t want him getting nervous. Spoil my concentration. I lay down in the coffin, clipped in the few connections I could see, then lay back and let the automated integration process do its bit. Still a moment of sickness when the visuals irised into my eyes. My chest unfolded again, but the hungry flower was dormant. Everything fit, much to my surprise.

  My heart hammered loud in my chest, then my body disappeared and my soul sucked off into the manifold. I filled the ship, dwelt in iron and the butane heat of the burners. I felt cramped in the close burrow of the hangar. There were people around, more than just the three of us. I was being boarded.

  I groaned against the wooden walls of the hangar. My mooring lines strained and broke. The anti-ballast slithered against the ceiling, popping shingles off the slatboard roof. I angled toward the door, just cleared the archway. It was a close fit. I clacked open the voxorator.

  “Wilson, we’ve got boarders.” My voice tore from my throat in flat iron pipes. I forgot what it was like, talking straight from your soul into the vox.

  “I’m on them. You’re sure you can get this thing airborne?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s going to be great.”

  In truth, I already felt the queasiness of the decoupling. Last time I’d flown, last time I was ever supposed to fly, I had locked into the manifold and then lost control. Worse, it felt like some malignancy spread through the ship the longer I stayed hooked in. An ensign had pulled me out of the coffin, minutes later than he should have. No one else got out.

  I didn’t want that to happen this time. I’d just get us off the Torch’, get us close to the city. Getting out of the manifold would be tricky, but once I was out hopefully the ship would just crash and we could get out. Hopefully.

  I took us out of the hangar and off the Torch’. There was gunfire. I registered hits along the main deck, some that went into the anti-ballast. Adjusting for the loss in lift was easy. I’d forgotten how good I was at this. Without thinking about it, I was flying again, flying like I’d always wanted to, like I’d always dreamed. Since I was a kid.

  The darkness filled me quickly. I knew what it was this time, the spirit of the girl Camilla living on in her dissected organs. She lashed out blindly through the manifold. I couldn’t stay in here any longer. We were well on our way down, tipping over the Ebd and crossing into the city proper. Veridon spread out below us. Warning sirens were spinning up all across the city. I doused the burners, spun up the running lights to give people a chance to get out of our way, then started to decouple from the manifold. I went to the vox one last time.

  “Wilson, status?”

  “We’re going down kinda hard!” he yelled. His voice was nervous. Imagine that, my anansi friend scared of falling out of the sky.

  “That’s okay. How are the boarders?”

  “They’re everywhere. I’m on the main deck right now. Should I get to a crash seat?”

  “Oh, yeah, definitely. How’s—”

  The vox cut out. I decoupled. The sockets pulled from my eyes with a sickening wrench, and my heart slid shut. I sat up and tried to cough out the rusty taste in my mouth. The room was perfectly dark. The burners were guttering just beyond the bulkhead above. The air smelled like burning oil. The floor pitched at a horrible rate. I got up. There was something else in the air, something familiar. Summerwisp.

  Emily was at the door, leaning against the frame. The engine sprouting from her chest had crumbled away. The blisters of metal along her arms seemed to have reasserted themselves though, and a ghostly halo sprouted from behind her head.

  “Em, love, are you okay?” I asked. I was standing by the coffin. The ship was shuddering down, the pitch of the floor getting more and more precarious by the second.

  “I’m fine, Jacob. You saved the Cog?” she asked. Her voice was weak. I had to strain to hear her.

  “Yeah, I’ve got it.” I pulled the Angel’s heart out of my coat. There was a spattering of gunfire from one of the lower decks. I could hear the sirens from the city below, drifting thinly up through the ship. “Things are about to get difficult, Emily. We need to get you settled. Come on, come with me.”

  I reached out a hand to guide her out of the control, putting the Cog back in the inside pocket of my coat. I wanted to get us on the main gunnery deck, to one of the crash chambers. It’d be a good evac point, once we came down. Wilson could manage below decks.

  “Difficult. Yes.” She took a step forward. Light from the emergency lights danced off her halo. I saw that she had two small wings, one above each shoulder. They were each a foot long, delicate, ephemeral things of diaphanous beauty. Silver veins ran down her face, and her eyes were moon bright pools of empty light. She raised her hands. “I’m sorry, Jacob. She’s the only body you left me.”

  The Angel leapt forward. Her hands tapered down to whisper thin blades of incandescent light. He took a swipe at me, missed and took a chunk out of the coffin. Elsewhere, an impact alarm started going off. We hit something, the airship twisting as it went through some tower or tenement and continued on. Emily came towards me, her hands on fire.

  I did the smart thing and ran. There was an emergency exit to the control pod. I slapped the panic button and blew the door, then ran out onto the decking of the evac deck. The ship was pitched at such a radical angle that the cityscape seemed to spread out in front of me. We were rushing past at a tremendous rate. Our angle of descent almost perfectly matched the city’s own downward elevation towards the Reine. As I ran down the evac deck towards a glide boat, we skipped off a warehouse roof, digging a wide, grinding trench in the shingles before we bounced back up into the air. I looked back. Emily was following me sluggishly.

  When he fell apart, back up on the Torch’, some bits of the Angel must have survived and infected Emily. Her new and vulgar implants were much less settled than my own. Perhaps that made her more susceptible. Perhaps they were designed to be particularly welcoming to the Angel’s infection. Either way, something of him was in her. It couldn’t be much. Her transformation was minimal. Enough to try to kill me, though.

  I got around the evac deck and climbed down to the main gun deck. The cutter turrets were battened down and the shell cabinets were locked. Not that I needed a weapon that big. I hoped. I found a service box and clacked it open.

  “Wilson! Where are you?”

  “Occupied on forward observation.” Grunting, and gunfire. I heard it twice, both throu
gh the vox and from the front of the ship. “You still in control?”

  “No. Look, that thing has Emily. She’s trying to kill me.”

  Silence.

  “Wilson?”

  “I heard you. Where?”

  “Main gunnery. Get up here.”

  The vox clacked shut. Emily was down the stairs and walking towards me. I kicked open the service box and pulled out the revolver. Familiar gun, even if the inscription was different.

  “Are you going to shoot her, Jacob?” she asked. “Your pretty girlfriend?”

  I fired once, kicking splinters up out of the decking in front of her. She smiled, that smile I was so comfortable with, but not her smile anymore.

  “I don’t think so, Jacob. And it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  She surged forward, arms out. I hesitated, the revolver in hand, the sight on her forehead. At the last second I flipped the pistol over and clubbed at her arms. The blades touched my skin and I yelped. Blisters formed across my forearm. I jumped back, but she kept coming.

  “There, there, Jacob. It’ll heal. Just give me the heart and we can all get back to life. You can have your girlfriend back.”

  But it wasn’t healing. I was right. The thing in my chest had given up, faded out. My arm was on fire, and it was going to stay that way. I pulled the Cog out.

  “This thing? This is what you want. How can I know you’ll let her go?”

  “I won’t need her anymore. And really, Jacob. What choice do you have?” She held her bladed fingers against her cheek, resting the infinite sharpness on her skin. Blood broke out, running down her chin. “Tell me how beautiful she is, Jacob. How lovely she is.”

  I tossed the Cog onto the decking. It skittered, then lay flat. I took a step back.

  “Go ahead. Go on, take it. I want out, that’s all. That’s all I’ve ever wanted in this godsdamn deal.”

  “That’s all any of us want, Jacob.” She stepped forward, hovered in anticipation over the Cog. She knelt and touched it lightly on the edge, a shiver going up her arm. She picked it up, and her chest burst open, flowered, beckoned the heart.