The Heartreader's Secret

by Kate McinTyre

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  © 2018 Kate McIntyre

  http://kate-mcintyre.com

  Cover Art by Amalia Chitulescu

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  SMASHWORDS EDITION

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  To Erin,

  For as long as I’ve been telling stories, you’ve been my rapt audience.

  dward Edison, leader of the Floating Castle Project, froze in the last steps of a waltz.

  His sylph had just shivered.

  “Oh, Doctor Edison!” His partner blinked up at him. “The music is still playing! Do finish the dance with me?”

  Her voice came from a thousand miles away. He waved her off like a pesky fly. In the corner of his mind where bound elemental spirits lived, the sylph was firmly tied off; nothing moved. Had he imagined? He prodded and poked at her like he was pushing his tongue against a loose tooth. Her presence snarled at him, but she could do nothing more: she was spread-eagled, restrained at all corners by the four other sylphs tethered to her. Three more tethered into to each of those. Another two to those. Every damn spiritbinder worth their salt was in the net, and his little wind princess anchored them all. The keystone, the nexus, the beating heart of the web.

  She shouldn’t be ruffling like lace in the wind. She should be immobile, trussed up tighter than the Solstice goose, bound in the four cardinal directions. She shouldn’t—she couldn’t be—

  Her essence hissed at him, and she bucked up against her restraints. He could almost see her physical form, wings beating and multifaceted eyes blazing defiance.

  His heartbeat burst into a gallop.

  Gods.

  The most important thing, he reminded himself, was not to panic. He reminded himself not to panic as his gaze started to go black at the edges. He reminded himself not to panic as his throat closed. He reminded himself not to panic as his shaking hand pulled out a handkerchief to mop at his face.

  You are panicking, his rational, scientific mind informed him dryly.

  Yes, the part of him that was panicking agreed, and he scanned the room as desperation clawed out of his gut and towards his mouth.

  His dance partner fluttered nearby, her mouth moving in concerned questions, but he gazed over her shoulder. He locked eyes with Helen Westlake. Her pupils dilated, and she lifted her skirts, hurrying his way. He tried to keep his face schooled into pleasant blandness, but he wanted to sink to the floor, clutching his head.

  “Edison,” Doctor Westlake gasped as she approached his side. “What’s going on? My—”

  Edward seized her arm and drew her away. More than a few heads had turned to follow her approach, and they turned farther to watch them sweep dramatically away. Doctor Westlake glanced behind them. Edward heard her gulp. “My daughter,” Westlake finished in a hushed whisper. “She’s… agitated. I believe that she’s picked it up from yours.”

  Another set of footsteps approached, and another doctor fell into step beside him. “I’m experiencing the same thing,” he murmured.

  Edward reached up to push hair off his forehead. His gaze landed on the grand staircase, and he steered his growing group toward it. In his head, his sylph tugged and struggled. A sense of wrongness settled onto his chest, crawling across his skin, turning his stomach. The sylph… there was something the matter with her. Her mind felt….

  He gritted his teeth against it.

  “Georgie is a good girl,” he said faintly. He was aware that there were four spiritbinders flanking him, now. The four whose sylphs were tied into his. “I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding.” Between the five of them, they made up the entire foundation of the net. It was—

  He swallowed hard, gritted his teeth, and shoved the sense of his sylph away. This was all just a mistake. A hiccup. It could be fixed. This was all being blown terribly out of proportion, and it could be fixed.

  They reached the top of the staircase. Helen seized his arm and looped it with hers. “What is going on, Edward?” she demanded, her voice very low. “Your Georgie is flapping like a flag in the wind. She should be utterly immobile. Don’t say otherwise; all of us feel it. What is happening?”

  “I need to see to the monitoring station,” Edward said. Despite the cavalcade of feeling roiling through his body, he managed to sound almost entirely calm.

  “Do we need to evacuate?”

  He didn’t know who’d spoken, but he whirled so hard that he jerked Helen near off her feet. “No,” he snapped, and all four of his subordinates gave him looks that were halfway between studied blankness and… terror. “No,” he repeated. “I… I have this under control.”

  But he wasn’t sure that he did.

  The monitoring station showed a single green light flickering wildly in the centre of the net. Doctor Westlake reached out and touched the tiny light with a delicate finger, her other hand pressed against her throat. She looked up and met his eyes. “Edward,” she said.

  “Give me a moment,” he commanded. The light fluctuated in time with the presence in his head. Cautiously, he allowed himself to investigate it again and flinched away. She was a tiny little fishing boat riding a roiling storm, barely held together, and her aura had a needle-sharp intellect and a complexity of feeling that made his gorge rise in the back of his throat.

  She should not be bound, he thought suddenly. She needed to be free. He didn’t have—no one had the right to dissect and pinion a creature so alive. It was against every law of nature. He struggled to maintain her tethers, even as everything in him begged for their release.

  “Edward,” Helen Westlake said again, more forcefully. “What is happening? You need to do something!”

  “I’m thinking!” he snapped, and his mind went in circles.

  He could rebind her. No, he couldn’t, because his binding tethered all the others. Everyone could rebind, then he could rebind, and—no, because the Castle would not stay Floating. They should evacuate? Gods, no. Absolutely not. He could just imagine what would happen if they took such a course! If they set the Castle back down, it would all be over. Francis Livingstone’s goons would be proven right, the very world would change forever, and….

  Actual terror seized him for just one moment.

  He struggled his way out of its grip.

  “Has anyone spoken with Michael Buckley?” he asked. He tried to sound very calm.

  His subordinates exchanged glances.

  “I have,” James North volunteered. His gaze flickered between the others. “He hasn’t said anything. Only that he was honoured to be making the celebratory speech. You know how Michael is. Pleased as punch with other people’s work, ready to take all the credit for it.”

  The usual chuckles didn’t come. Edward closed his eyes. He recalled the serious look in that windbag’s eye as he’d pulled him aside after one of the gatherings at the Buckley estate. We need to talk, Buckley had murmured. His voice had echoed eerily in the empty dining room. Their wives had laughed, delicate as wind chimes, in the nearby parlour. I’ve been on a mission from Combs. Surveillance. He thinks that there’s a faction in the reformists. Terrorists. Real, actual dangerous folk. And now that I’ve been loo
king into it… I think he was right. I need you to take a look at what I’ve uncovered and see if there’s anything to it.

  Edward had brushed Buckley aside. Livingstone’s rabble was made up of weak or useless categorizations, of lost souls who felt the world leaving them in the dust, of bleeding hearts looking for a cause. They weren’t capable of anything but talk, and Michael Buckley was a delusional fool chasing ghosts as he fell beneath the shadow of his own growing irrelevance.

  Edward wrestled with his sylph, pinning her down, exerting all the mental force he could, his fingers twitching and his face twisting into a grimace. It wasn’t natural, what he felt from her. Complex emotions! Jealousy, guilt, embarrassment. Far beyond the pure id of an elemental mind.

  Her mind felt… human.

  And in the face of something unnatural, any natural explanation must be thrown aside. Which meant: sabotage.

  “Get Buckley up here,” Edward murmured, sweat dripping down his forehead.

  “Edward,” Helen breathed. He felt her at his side. “What exactly is happening?”

  “I need to speak to—”

  The sound of his heartbeat in his ears.

  Then: a vicious shrapnel of feelings and ideas ripped through his mind. He felt his thoughts and then his emotions and then his very identity blasted, shredded. Heartbeat in his ears. White roar of noise. Static and furrows ripped across a wasteland of consciousness. The meat that held him inside teetered. Hands grabbed him. Heartbeat in his ears.

  Edward!

  He snapped back.

  “Mother Deorwynn,” he gasped, pushing Helen’s hands aside and struggling to a sitting position. “Oh, have mercy.”

  “What happened?”

  Her voice sounded as if it was coming from underwater. He swallowed and his ears popped and crackled. He waved her off, swallowing hard, over and over, listening to his own eardrums explode, rocking himself as the blasted terrain of his mind slowly mended.

  Helen’s nails dug furrows into his wrists. “I’m unraveling.”

  “The floor shook when—” one of the others said.

  “Shut up! We know!” Helen screamed. She focused on Edward. “What happened?”

  His shattered mind continued to knit back together, and he wished it would stop.

  “Pure emotion,” he gasped. He could feel that moment, crystallized. His sylph bursting under the pressure of complex, human feeling, something so far beyond simple, wild joy or rage that her riotous mind had split apart like a rotten gourd. “For just a moment, Helen, she—she was human.”

  “You need to bring her under control!”

  He nodded weakly. He reached out to the loose tooth of his sylph. No. Missing tooth. Bleeding void. She was gone, along with half his other bound elementals. “Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, Gods.” He met Helen’s eyes and saw sick despair written in her heart. “She’s gone.”

  And we’re all dead.

  h, bollocks!” Miss Emilia Banks shouted over the hiss and whine of the boiler. “Olivia! Quickly! You need to tighten that gasket before the water reaches, or—”

  Too late.

  Olivia Faraday, approaching the pipe that ran alongside her as if it were a chicken she was trying to catch with her bare hands, did not tighten the gasket before the water reached. She yelped and leaped back at the warning blast of steam, but wasn’t fast enough to dodge the stream of hot water that erupted with force into the bodice of her velvet gown. “Ah, bloody hell, Em, what—”

  “I told you—” Miss Banks gasped, wrapping her hands around a massive gear-like wheel and turning with all her might. The surprisingly large muscles in her shoulders and arms bulged, the wheel squealed, and Olivia danced away from the spray as if it were acid.

  “My gown!” Olivia protested as the pressure began to lessen. “Ah, my shoes! Oh, hell, Em, that’s bloody hot! Look at my shoes! These are suede, you monstrous woman!”

  Emilia panted, turned the wheel again, and the massive copper tank finally ceased sounding as if there were thirty angry cats inside. She turned on Olivia, who stood beside the now slowly-leaking pipes. She folded her arms. There was a long smear of grease across her dark cheek.

  Olivia stomped a foot. It made a squelching noise. “Just look at this! You barbarian!”

  Miss Banks turned her nose skyward. “I told you to tighten the gasket if needed.”

  “And then, without waiting for confirmation, immediately went to work! I’m still not entirely sure what a gasket actually is!” Olivia raised her chin.

  “The large, copper gear, Olivia, please. I thought you liked getting wet.”

  “I like rain! This is not rain! This is wanton destruction!” Olivia spread her arms, water dripping from her hands and the red velvet of her gown.

  It was all just too ludicrous like they were in a play and Olivia had been cruelly stabbed. She showed her bloody hands to her betrayer, mourning her cruel demise, and Chris lost his composure. Something very much like a giggle erupted from his nose.

  Both women whirled, hands on their hips. Chris pushed up his specs. He stepped carefully away from the puddle spreading toward him and cleared his throat. “Is this why you wanted us to come by, Miss Banks?” he asked, moderating his voice to innocent curiosity. “Manual assistance?”

  She cracked a smile. He was at least half certain that the hand she raised to scratch her nose was, in fact, hiding laughter. “No, of course not,” she said, “though you have both proved invaluable lab assistants.”

  Olivia folded her arms and glowered. “Oh, yes, I can see that! What the devils are you even working on, Em?”

  Miss Banks tilted her head. “Can’t you make sense of it on your own?”

  Olivia snorted, but her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as she surveyed Emilia’s lab. Chris followed her gaze, curious himself. The copper piping was familiar enough, but not so much the boiler, a lurking monstrosity of a thing, or the great gouts of steam pouring forth. Or the fact that the pipes didn’t seem to lead to anything, tub or toilet or sink.

  Most unfamiliar of all, of course, was the total lack of any telltale spirit-glow. He should be used to it now, he knew, but Chris still felt a little thrill at the thought that Miss Banks had gotten the water all the way from the boiler to Olivia without an undine’s help, and heated it without a salamander.

  Olivia paced about, tracing the lines of copper piping and mumbling to herself. Her precious suede shoes trailed through leaking water, and Chris turned his gaze to Miss Banks, unable to watch any fine things further destroyed.

  The engineer pushed her smart little golden specs up her nose and folded her arms. Her black eyes glimmered as she surveyed the room. “You took off your wrap when you came in.”

  Olivia paused mid-step and tilted her head. “Well. Yes. It’s warm in here, with that boiler acting like a gigantic tea kettle… hm. But even over here, it’s actually quite… because—” Her head snapped up, her eyes sharpening. “Because of the pipes!”

  Miss Banks nodded, pleased Olivia had followed her logic.

  “Well, that’s brilliant.”

  “I hoped you’d think so.”

  “I…” Chris smiled tentatively as both women turned to look at him. It was pleasantly warm inside, a nice reprieve from the brisk, windy autumn day they’d taken shelter from, but… He rubbed the back of his neck. “What is this about pipes?”

  Olivia’s teeth gleamed as she laughed. “Ah. Always a half-step behind, Christopher.”

  “Really, Olivia, be kind,” Em insisted. “You’re a truthsniffer. You catch on quickly. Mister Buckley, let me explain, please. I’ll be doing it a great deal if I can iron out the last few difficulties. I’ll need to convince people to put this in their homes, after all!”

  “I do find myself curious,” Chris admitted, tracing the dizzying maze of copper with his eyes.

  “It’s a system meant to replace salamander-driven heating systems,” she began, settling into her professorial voice.

  Not for the first time, he tho
ught that she’d have made a fine teacher if she was willing to reveal her categorization and take actual employment. Assuming, of course, that teaching was even one of her approved professions. For all Chris knew, she was a mere wordweaver like him. Her surname was Banks, Olivia assured him, because she kept her secrets as well-guarded as any vault.

  “The boiler keeps the water in a constant heated state. Then I use a series of pumps, powered by steam, to push the boiling water through the copper piping. Ideally, the system will involve piping through the floors rather than the walls, in a sort of coiled pattern, covering the entire area. Heat rises, after all. The end result should be a system of heating that efficiently covers an entire area without the use of a single elemental.”

  Her mahogany skin practically shone with pride. Chris couldn’t help but smile in response.

  “And it’s practical,” Olivia slid in, looking around, picking out new details Chris couldn’t see. “Something people can point to, something they’ll want to have installed in their own homes!” She tapped her nose playfully. “This is why Doctor Livingstone wanted you in his movement, Em,” she said slyly. “Banging on about alternative technologies is perfectly fine, but no one is going to listen unless you show them something. Something they can use. Something like this.”

  Miss Banks inclined her head. The motion was elegant and measured, but Chris could pick out the slight darkening of her ears where she coloured in delight. “That is the intent, yes. The good doctor has used his connections to choose several spike houses on prominent skid rows where we can install the system and provide heat to the all-too-many Darrington folk without homes this winter.” She sighed and deflated slightly. “If,” she amended, “I can get this done on time and fix the blasted gaskets!”

  Chris smiled gently. “This all seems rather less complex than the automobile you made. I’m sure it’s well within your capacity, especially when it’s for such a noble cause?” He winced at his cringing tone. He liked Miss Banks. He liked her very much. And yet, her elegance and intelligence made it very difficult for him to speak to her one-to-one, without using Olivia as a sort of relay. At the sound of his quiet voice, Olivia snorted, but Miss Banks gave him a kind look.