by Charlie Nash
Bone-frozen later, when he retires from the watch to seek dreams of melting ice, a hand catches him at the foot of the stair. Bobs, his face etched with strain, draws him to an alcove where the last of the alchemist’s oven heat lingers. Amongst the fumes of black powder and acrid smoke, the smell of the roasting beds that produce the blue fire, Fingle waits for them both.
“You’ve never seen anything like it,” says Fingle, sucking an illicit half-smoke.
“Yes,” nods Bobs. “Animal and machine, induction powered through the tail. If it wasn’t so broken, it would probably try to haul itself away.”
Fortescue shudders. He’s re-lived the swarm that should have claimed him every night, but now these memories are tangled with the days just past. So he asks them about The Soldier in the snow.
“In the cell block,” says Bobs but dismissively. He shakes Fortescue by the hand, thanks for what he has brought. “Well done, man. The tail is not much damaged. We are trying to repair it. We are hopeful.”
Fortescue’s temper warms his core. He shakes off Bobs. To be in the cells, The Soldier is suspected, even after she has brought them this prize. He bets she is hungry, thirsty. And for the first time, he thinks more of her than of what his actions might mean for the resistance.
He takes SentryOne and his uneaten rations, and slips through the barracks to the cell block. The moon is full tonight, filtered behind the steely gray sky. The ill-fed guard is asleep, never stirring as Fortescue finds her.
She sits against the wall, striped in the pale bars of light. SentryOne purrs with cool breath, and Fortescue wraps his hands around the cold cell steel.
“How did you do it?” he asks. “How did you kill one, and bring it back?”
She rises and glides closer, ever closer, so that her voice will not carry. “To tell you such would be a long story,” she says. “But you know it ends here, and that is enough.”
“You were sent a long time ago.”
“Two years,” she says.
Knowledge passes unsaid between them. Two years. She is from the barracks that was lost, then, the one overrun.
His voice is a rumbling whisper. “Sent or taken?”
She closes her eyes, and he sees the fight in her; the want to tell him things that she can never tell. Classified things. Things she has done in the name of their cause. Risk and suffering and sacrifice.
He shakes his head, speaks the simple truth. “Don’t say it. You outrank me.” These words are coated in the awe he feels for her. More a soldier than he is.
She searches his face and he sees every cross of her eyelashes. “I am nothing,” she says. “What I brought is the prize.”
“They are working on it.”
Her expression flickers, and for the first time, he sees doubt in her. “I tried to warn them,” she says. “Do they know what they are doing?”
Do they know what they are doing?
Fortescue has never questioned it before. He is a soldier. He has superiors, a chain of command. He came here when there was nowhere else to go. The resistance has many like him, but the alchemists are of higher learning. Clever men, fighting this war with them. And now, they have all they need—an advantage—don’t they?
Don’t they?
They question him again as the sun is rising, a weak pale streak through the heavy sky. Snow is coming again. Fortescue feels it deep in his marrow, a sense honed from months of patrolling in the Steam Daemon’s lee. But now, he feels his confidence slipping, as if he is a lone rock in the spring, all the snow receding to leave him stranded, exposed.
“Tell us your story again,” says the Major.
So he tells it, same as before. They are satisfied this time. But only with him.
“We find no record of her mission,” says the Major. “Which means at best it was not endorsed. But we must also entertain the worst: the possibility she is a fraud. An infiltrator. An agent herself of the Daemon.”
Fortescue hears this, but not as he might have before. He knows that in two years the command structure has turned over, that records have been lost to snowmelt and mildew, that the mood of the group is volatile. He sees the fear in them, the way it bends their words; they know not what to do with her. Easier if she is a danger; they know what to do with those.
For the first time, their mood cannot infect him. He has felt what it was like to pull her from the snow, to see her duty followed through. Her resolve in the face of immeasurable risk. Because of these things, she will not leave him, a colored spot in the monochrome of his thought and feeling. And so in turn, he will not leave her to uncertain fate.
Bobs wakes Fortescue from an uneasy slumber, where dreams have been of crackling footsteps on the thin skin of a crevasse.
“They have fixed it,” says Bobs. And nothing more. But Fortescue hears doubt, and Bobs does not head back to the lab. Instead, he takes the bend at the end of the hall, towards the alchemist quarters he shares with Fingle, a backward glance inviting Fortescue to follow.
He pulls a sleeping SentryOne against his chest, but his bones ache with portent, and the cat’s claws dig into his neck. The first snow whispers down as he reaches the alchemists’ doorway. Bobs braces his hands on the chamber’s open window sill.
“What?” asks Fortescue.
Bobs rakes a hand through his hair. “I think we should have waited.”
“Why?”
“We don’t understand enough.”
Fortescue has never heard an alchemist doubt before. His teetering world tips its last edge. The snow will melt. And he will not sleep again until the night has passed into a new morning.
She is waiting by the bars, head turned as if listening. He sees the turmoil inside him reflected in her eyes, that she shares the fear the world is about to fall under their feet.
He braces his hands against the bars. “How was a senior rank approved to go into the field?” he asks her.
Her silence tells him that she was never approved. Then she says, “I was an experiment. A volunteer.”
Fortescue nods; it must have been so. His voice finds the quiet between their heartbeats. “You were not expected to survive.”
“No.”
“But you found a way.” He swallows. “Are you one of the Daemon’s?” He asks as though there is a chance: that he can extricate himself, forget her if she is part of the enemy, even though he knows it is futile.
“I am not. But I learned how to survive there. How to be useful; trade myself for their purpose. I learned their signals … pipe, wall and skin, it’s all the same. How the Daemon thinks. How it uses every chance to starve us out. How it chooses its moments.” Her eyes flit and she shudders. “I am changed.”
As the flakes gather silent around his feet, he asks, “Did you intend to die in the snow?”
“It would perhaps have been for the best,” she says. “The Daemon would not have allowed me leave without a plan of its own. I turned back, so many times. Each step made the risk seem too great. I sat on the drift. I meant for the cold to take my choice. Then when I woke, I remembered what it was like to be here. Why I had gone to begin with.”
Warmth trickles inside Fortescue’s chest. There is a cant in her words, a tiny nod of possibility that he changed her decision to die. He shakes it off, angry at himself. She would never allow such a weakness.
Her eyes harden into ice chips. “I had hoped that the alchemists had learned these years. That they would know this is an enemy that thinks just as they do. I needed them to be that smart. I tried to warn them.”
Fortescue’s teeth grind. He is a silent soldier, one who’s seen how the command structure works. The hunger for knowledge to one-up the enemy—that’s what drives the officers. They would not have listened to caution from someone they did not know. “The alchemists are under command, now, more than ever,” he says. “They do what they are bid.”
She sighs, silent for a thought-strung moment before she speaks. “They should not have reactivated the drone.” Fort
escue sees now how her fingers rest on the bars, the longest three like soft antennas.
His bones carry frost into his heart. SentryOne leaps from his shoulders and streaks the hall, a running shadow on high alert. For Fortescue feels now through the floor what she has felt with her fingertips, what SentryOne detects with his whiskers. The dozens of running feet, through pipe and sewer and every crawlspace.
The Soldier’s skin is moonlit pale, the despair of home lost writ in the pull of her cheek. They are an island afore a wave, now. Fortescue knows he has reached a cusp he never knew existed. The one where he chooses his fate, and hers too. Perhaps the last decision he can ever make. He takes the keys from the sleeping guard and opens her door. “Wait here,” he says.
Fingle and Bobs have the freezing fear, clutching their quarters’ doorway. They already know what everyone does. Crawlies are coming. No one will leave alive. But Fortescue has survived once; he knows it’s possible with two things: fire, and a way out.
He grabs Fingle and Bobs. “Where do they keep the blue fire?”
But they are not soldiers who can act with fear in their veins. He has to shake them. “Where!”
A single finger points to the alchemists’ rugged stair. Fortescue scrambles down the dim recess, lit on the wicks of blue fire lamps. The lab is bare, but for the cold, coal-fire bed, and the paltry rack of precious vials, holding the blue fire, a clear liquid like fresh melted snow. All they have. He dumps every one into a flask, the vapors bending his senses, numbing his fingertips. He hopes it is enough.
Fingle and Bobs are pressed against the wall when he rises from the stair. The whole barracks has fallen into quiet: the silence of hiding, of concealment, of attempted survival. Fortescue knows it won’t be enough.
He grabs their collars and hauls them to the cell block, with its wooden floor. They can hear the swarm, now. Scratching steps that scuttle and search. Then a shape leaps onto Fortescue’s back, and the nightmare terror lances through his neck. He spins to slam the crawlie against the wall, then hears the hiss in his ear.
“Goddamn it, SentryOne.”
The cat only digs his claws in harder, as if he’s holding tight for the only way out.
The Soldier is waiting by the bars, a silhouette in the moon’s pale glow.
Unnaturally calm. “You should not do this,” she says.
Fortescue throws wide her cage. He can think of nothing else; she is in his thoughts the way the cold enters on a winter’s night. “The fort is lost,” he says.
“And we are trapped.” She casts an eye at Fingle and Bobs, who have slumped shivering against the cage.
He shakes his head, even as the scampering echoes down the long hall. He kicks the guard’s stool to show the trapdoor into the cellar.
“Going to ground is worse. They leave nothing behind,” she says. But still, she pushes Fingle and Bobs to the door, and down into the darkness. Fortescue snatches the flask of blue fire and sloshes it across the hall end. The wood smolders, a hell-fire heat rising from the slick. He sees them then; the racing snouts filling the walls and floor.
“Come on,” he begs the blue fire.
With a woomph! it catches, blowing Fortescue against the cage. He rolls for the trapdoor as the fire consumes the hall. He falls, his knee taking the stone-hard jar.
He pushes up, through air thick with cold. They must get out before crawlies find a way in, through drain or pipe. And before the blue fire spreads like unholy wind.
The cellar ladder rises into the outside world, the grate frozen in place. Fortescue shoves it with his shoulder, feeling tendons stretch and pop. He sends the others ahead of him, out into the snowdrifts under the midnight sky. Only now they are outside can they hear the shrieks. But they are clear. A chance. As if hope is too much, he stumbles and cannot rise again. His knee is finished; shoulder, finished. “Go. Run!” he yells.
The alchemists vanish into the snowy night, but The Soldier stays. His heart wrenches with the lost chance of knowing her more. “Go,” he begs.
But she is under his good arm, hauling upwards. He struggles. “You’ll never move fast enough if you help.”
But she will not abide him giving up, will not leave him behind. He understands this, even as he hates it. They are soldiers first. Everything else second.
They stumble through the snowdrift; it is too easy to see where Fingle and Bobs have gone. They will be followed. So she hauls him towards the broken high-ground where the asphalt and grass are dim and snowless.
“There’s a sealed refuge this way,” he gasps between breaths. But he can feel SentryOne’s claws tightening, the feral hiss building inside the cat. The crawlies are on their tail.
They fight on until the mouth of an alley where SentryOne’s hiss becomes audible. The Soldier stops. Turns his face to her with the flats of her hands. “You pulled me from the snow,” she says. He sees the glint in her eyes. She thinks she owes him.
“Don’t,” he says, desperate. “Take SentryOne and go on ahead. Bobs and Fingle—they need you. Command needs you.” I need you.
Her smile is sad. She glances over her shoulder. “I lived in their tunnels for two years,” she said. “I can give you time.”
A sickly horror grips Fortescue about the gut. “No.”
Her face turns cold, all but her cheeks in their blooming red. “That’s an order, soldier. Go.”
Fortescue has never broken his heart before, but it does right there under the frost-flaked sky. “I won’t leave you,” he says.
“Then I must leave you.” She kisses him swiftly, a tiny ring of heat on his chilled cheek, and whispers a leaving into his ear.
Then she is gone into the Steam Daemon’s night, too swift for a lame man to follow. Fortescue wants to holler after her, but the cavern in his chest claims his voice. And instead, with no choice, he hauls himself towards the refuge. The night rings with the screech of crawlies, louder and louder until he is shut inside.
In the aching cold, he strikes a supply match, a single bloom of heat in the dark.
Three faces, three survivors.
And as he waits, he hears the words she whispered.
I survived once. I will again. I will find you when the snow melts.
Arachne
Before he served the carbon age, Tobias was a spy. That brief career began under the heavy hand of his uncle, who ran the Grim Maiden iron foundry on the banks of the Thames. Toby’s first job was shoveling coal into the feed chute for the Maiden’s tethered dragon, an enormous indentured beast with red-black scales and broken flapping ears, who ate coal and shat ashes and melted iron with its breath. As he humped the black rocks to and fro, Toby avoided looking in the dragon’s eye, for it revealed a melancholy beast with sour disposition. Even black-handed and lowly, Toby hoped he was not destined for a similar fate.
He took steps to ensure it. He hid papers in his pockets marked the Royal Academy, smudge-marked and dog-eared, but lovingly read over and over. He’d found them deep in his uncle’s bin, but this, and his aspirations to leave the Grim Maiden forever, were two things he never revealed. As his uncle tirelessly reminded, these were difficult times.
For the Grim Maiden stared across the river at the Spinning Jenny carbon factory, edifice to edifice, great competitors, both supplying steam-harnessing boilers and pipes. But while the Grim Maiden worked in fine iron and steel, the Spinning Jenny wove theirs from black carbon thread and resin, which put his uncle in dangerous blue funk.
“This carbon!” he declared, gesticulating as he paced just out of reach of the dragon, mustache quivering in time with his vast belly. “It’s no match for steel in the joints you see, but they’ll solve that soon enough. I was cheated in this damn deal. Damn those Academy men!”
Toby’s senses tweaked at the mention of the Academy and a deal, but he hovered uncomfortably with a half-shovel of coal, knowing one of the stolen Academy papers (on the evolution of higher species using transalimentary tinctures) was protruding from his pocket.
He had seen the Spinning Jenny boilers being floated down the river, so light they could be moved by a single man, and with the black criss-cross allure visible through their transparent skins. The Grim Maiden tanks frequently broke the axles of delivery carts. Toby knew this because he’d been reading his uncle’s papers, late at night, when the factory was quiet. He also suspected, from yellowed correspondence, old invoices and hints in the man’s diary, that the Spinning Jenny and his uncle had once been partners.
All this he kept firmly to himself. His uncle was a clever man, but with a vein of intractable cruelty, like a smoky line in quartz. Tobias often caught the dragon, who was regularly on the end of the lash, sizing the man up with a murderous eye.
So, now, Toby didn’t know whether to keep moving and be shouted at for not listening, or listen and be shouted at for not working.
His uncle leaned in close, fingering the paper hanging from Toby’s pocket. “What do you think, boy?”
Caught, Toby’s stomach flamed like a furnace. “About what?”
“Think you’re clever, don’t you, boy? Are you working for the Spinning Jenny? Did you help them take my business? Answer me!”
Toby’s thumping pulse beat his throat closed. He watched a sweat drop track across tangled veins at his uncle’s temple. Did his uncle know about him taking the papers?
“Lucky,” his uncle said a moment later, wiping the sweat into his greasy mustache. “A guilty man always protests innocence. Still, this habit of overreaching your station must be stamped out. More work, that’s the answer. Useful work.”