Riveted

by Brook, Meljean

  But it didn’t distract him from work—he had only himself to blame for his poor performance that morning…and his memories of Annika, crying out as he thrust against her.

  God. He was doing it again.

  “That song is fine, yes,” he agreed.

  Smiling and cranking, Paolo nodded. A few moments later, he muttered while walking away from the gramophone, without having started the recording.

  Easily distracted, too. David was in good company.

  He studied the map again, the shape of the topography. What had he been thinking of before he’d lost himself to the luscious memory of Annika’s wetness against his bare shaft?

  He’d been thinking of Katla, the witch.

  “Paolo.” He carried the map to the drafting table, where Paolo sat absently eating a biscuit. Källa hadn’t brought in any food to him this morning, but David didn’t ask where he’d found it. “When Katla erupts, there will likely be a large volume of meltwater as the volcano heats the ice.”

  “And steam. Which is what we need.”

  “Yes. But look at the elevation, the probable drainage route—and Vik is here.” He pointed. The town hadn’t been marked on the map. “It will drain in other directions, too, but the primary flow will probably take this path.”

  “Yes, I see. What is Vik?”

  “A town.”

  “No, no.” He was smiling again. “I specifically asked Lorenzo. There are no settlements on that side.”

  “I was there, not a few days ago.”

  “No. There cannot be.” Suddenly agitated, he stabbed his finger at the map. “Smoke Cove is here. There is the camp. Why is your Vik not here? If there was a town, there would be a record of it. But it is not here. It is not on any of these maps.”

  Paper crinkled and ripped as he shoved the map away.

  “It is there,” David said softly.

  “You were turned about. There is nothing there. I would not harm another town.”

  David would hate for him to harm one, too. “That is why—”

  “You’re mistaken!” Paolo roared. Face red, tendons standing out on his neck—then suddenly quieting, sitting back again. In a tremulous voice, he repeated, “You’re mistaken. It’s not there. Lorenzo looked.”

  And he apparently needed to believe his son as much as Lorenzo needed to push every problem out of Paolo’s path—even if that problem might be Vik. Goddamn it.

  All right. He wouldn’t convince Paolo that the town was there. So he’d have to find another way. David returned to his table, refocused on the map, studied the location of the explosive charges. Could he give Paolo reason to relocate those, alter the pattern of the ice melting? No. That might change how the ice collapsed but couldn’t change the surrounding land or the flow of water.

  There had to be something else. He had to think of something else.

  “Oh, is it over so quickly?”

  David glanced up. Paolo was looking toward the gramophone with his brows high—surprised by the silence, but he’d never restarted the music.

  Perhaps that would be an option. Maybe they didn’t need to stop this project or attempt the impossible task of redirecting a flood. He just needed Paolo to focus in another direction, to make another project more important. Determined to help his father, Lorenzo would follow.

  What would interest him? “Lorenzo told me that you had plans to utilize the thermal activity on the peninsula south of Smoke Cove—to provide the town with heat so they didn’t have to rely on coal.”

  “Yes.” Paolo didn’t look up from the suit. “It was just a fleeting thought I had.”

  “Lorenzo said that you’d hoped to electrify the town, too.”

  “I have made many plans, and never made anything of them. It is the way of it.”

  “It’s a pity. My father once mentioned something similar when he heard of the geysers in the Yellow Rock Mountains—or using the natural steam to power the turbines instead of relying upon furnaces.” His father would forgive him this lie. “He’d always hoped to see it come to fruition.”

  “Did he?” Paolo looked up, interest lighting his expression.

  “Yes.” When in truth, David was making most of this up based on what Lorenzo had told him about the project, and their conversation over dinner the previous night. What had Paolo said to Annika about using the pipes to heat the living quarters? “He believed that every bit helps.”

  The other man nodded. “So it does.”

  For the first time in her life, Annika didn’t feel comfortable while driving a troll. It was impossible with Lorenzo standing on the ladder behind her, breathing down her neck, and twenty-five laborers crammed into the hearth chamber.

  Barely a word passed between them—not at all like the laborers who’d come from Castile to Smoke Cove in Phatéon’s hold. Though Annika hadn’t seen much of them, she’d often heard them, the songs they’d sung that she couldn’t understand, full of hope and the promise of work. Perhaps Lorenzo’s presence stifled any chatter now.

  The sun hadn’t yet risen when they left the camp. Annika followed a worn path, lit by the lanterns at the troll’s nose and shoulders. The route had been well used, but she still stepped carefully. Sharp cracks from the ice had sounded throughout the night. It was impossible to guess when a crevasse might open, creating a gaping death drop where there’d only been ice the day before. They traveled north, away from the tower and capsule. After five miles, she reached the mouth of a rounded tunnel.

  “It stretches ten miles south again,” Lorenzo said. “The men work around the clock.”

  Then he’d have done better to build crawlers instead of trolls. The walls of the tunnel were smooth and high enough for the troll to pass through on all fours. The flat, rough floor would provide adequate traction. But it was still better to have tracks or sled runners on ice rather than feet.

  She slowly approached the entrance. “Did you drill this tunnel?”

  “No. The drill is for the vertical shafts and boreholes. We tried melting through, but the water refroze too quickly, and extraction became a problem. So we’ve resorted to old-fashioned labor. The men are digging through.”

  “Through the ice?”

  “And rock. I’ve brought in foremen from the Lusitanian mines to oversee the work. Theirs is the nearest in expertise. They’ve done a fine job so far, don’t you agree?”

  Expertise? The Lusitanian mines had a terrible reputation—using infected laborers smuggled in from Horde territories because they could work longer and be fed less. If digging these tunnels was anything like laboring in the mines, it was no wonder these men looked downtrodden.

  Annika only shook her head, unease lifting the small hairs on her skin as they entered the tunnel shaft. The lanterns threw golden light across the rounded blue walls, and ahead for almost twenty yards. Beyond that, all was darkness.

  “There are a few turns where we decided to dig around the rock rather than blast through, but you’ll see them before you have to avoid them.”

  Unnerved by the enclosing ice, the dark ahead, Annika didn’t answer.

  Lorenzo didn’t seem to care. “I must say, though we’ve had men in that seat for months, they don’t drive with half the confidence and skill that you do. Even Källa, when teaching them, didn’t drive as well.”

  Of course not. Källa saw the trolls as a tool or a weapon, something she used. When Annika drove, she saw the engines as a heart and the machinery as muscle and sinew, extensions of her own—and when Annika was in the seat, the troll had more of a brain.

  She would not tell Lorenzo that, however.

  “I was surprised when I realized that you are the rabbit sister she told us about. I didn’t know when I read about Annika Fridasdottor in Kentewess’s journal that you were the same woman. It’s fascinating to know now. It makes me even more curious about you.”

  Annika didn’t intend to satisfy that curiosity.

  “I had wondered what sort of woman would be with Kentewess. Eithe
r she thought so little of herself that she settled for less than a man, or she was grateful for it—the sort of woman who likes to crush weak men beneath her heel. But when I realized who you were, I wondered if you were like Källa, using him for your own purposes. But you’re not any of those things.”

  The troll’s right foreleg slipped. Annika steadied it, said through gritted teeth, “David’s not less of a man.”

  “It also interests me that you know anything about what makes a man, never having seen one. Oh, yes. It was quite simple to figure out what Källa never said. About why she led us away from the upper peninsula.”

  Annika’s heart thumped, her pulse pounding in her ears.

  “She was protecting them, I realized.”

  Then Annika didn’t need to confirm it.

  “Do you know the lengths she will go to protect them? I didn’t either, but I wondered. So I found out.”

  Horror crawled in Annika’s stomach. What had he done? Every horrible story she’d ever heard about the ways that men could hurt women flooded her memory. But, no. He hadn’t threatened her yesterday because he already knew what David’s response would be.

  Knowing she played into his hands by responding, not caring, she asked, “How?”

  “I gave her a choice between Heimaey and your village. She chose Heimaey.”

  By the gods’ tears. Lorenzo couldn’t be a man. He couldn’t be a human. Only a monster could do such a thing. “To kill one village or another? That’s no choice.”

  “Oh, it was. She could have refused to choose between them and leave the burden all on my shoulders. She didn’t. She took the burden of responsibility in exchange for certainty. It’s admirable, I suppose. Self-sacrificing. All that mattered to me was that the suit worked. The rest was just interesting.”

  And Källa should have broken her promise and killed him there.

  No, Annika realized. Källa would have broken her promise and killed him there. Her sister knew that Lorenzo had something wrong in him, and probably suspected worse. But if he’d threatened Hannasvik that directly, she wouldn’t have hesitated.

  “What choice did you really give her?”

  “No choice. I asked her what she would kill, if she could. She told me that she’d kill the dogs.”

  Yes. That was Källa.

  “Now you think, ‘He is deranged. He is inhuman.’ Will it make killing me easier?”

  Annika actually thought it would. But David had said he called himself an observationist. Perhaps that was all that Lorenzo wanted—to see what reaction he could prod from her.

  “Do you actually believe anything you said about David?”

  “No.” There was a smile in his voice. “I have not quite figured you out. Who killed the watchman, I wonder? You or Kentewess?”

  Would he retaliate? They’d killed one of his men. “I did,” she said.

  “See? Now you lie, probably to protect him. I know it was Kentewess. His neck was broken. If you had killed him, you’d have used something to do it with. Källa used to say that you are the rabbit, that you’re only brave inside a machine. I think you’re braver than she said. I don’t think she was all wrong, however. You’ll use a tool, but only because you recognize that you’re weak.”

  Källa wasn’t wrong—and as she traveled through the tunnel, Annika gave serious thought to killing him with the troll at the first opportunity.

  The end of the tunnel appeared, lanterns flooding the tunnel with light. Men with pickaxes chipped away at the wall. Others carried blocks and wheelbarrows full of ice to a train of carts that stood on sled runners rather than wheels.

  If Lorenzo left the troll, she would smash him in front of these laborers and face whatever came next.

  He must have realized it. After she set the machine down and the men began filing out of the chest hatch, he told her to come out of the seat.

  “You must stoke the engine, of course,” he said. “Also, once a day, you will drag the carts out of the tunnel to dump them. You will be responsible for securing the train to the walker. I don’t trust them to do it properly.”

  In truth, Annika didn’t either. The men appeared exhausted. In their place, Annika didn’t know that she could properly secure anything. Her mind never worked well when she was tired.

  Why would he push them this far? Was this just cruelty of the same sort as in the Lusitanian mines, or was he hoping to see what they would do?

  “A pitiful sight, aren’t they?” Lorenzo stood beside her, looking over them. “They are interesting, too. Some men whom we’ve brought from Castile to Iceland thirst for blood. Some just want to work, take pleasure in earning their wages, in being strong. If you kick them down, they get up and keep going. Very few ever kick back…though some are beginning to.”

  Good. She hoped they eventually kicked him down, too. “And that is the reason you have so many guards.”

  “You see well.” He glanced at her, then back at the men. “But I don’t need guards for these men. If you knock them down, they stay down until you tell them to get up again. And they’ll stay up until they fall down. I hope to see what it takes to make them get back up on their own, to kick back. I tell the foreman to punish them for the slightest infraction. But no matter how unreasonable it is, these men never fight back.”

  He gestured toward a laborer who had bent over, the head of his pickaxe braced against the ice floor as if stopping to catch his breath. A giant of a man in a gray fur hat and coat, the foreman approached him, brandishing a club. Annika expected a warning. But the foreman simply struck, a sharp thwack! across the top of his head. The laborer staggered, but didn’t fall. The other men didn’t stop, didn’t look around.

  The foreman raised his arm again.

  Too shocked to believe what she was seeing, Annika could barely speak. “Stop him.”

  “He’s not even in the steel suit that they use in the mines. With their numbers, they could overpower him. They don’t even try.”

  She balled her fists. Did he want a reaction from her? “Stop him!”

  Lorenzo called out. The foreman looked around. Behind him, the laborer lifted bloody fingers from his head.

  “We’d better get him back into the walker with the others and see that he receives proper attention, yes?”

  Sick with the horror of it, Annika nodded.

  “You’re very kind, Annika Fridasdottor.”

  No. Just human.

  She returned to the troll, never hating anyone so fiercely in her life. It shook through her, swelled through her chest and stung her eyes. Lorenzo climbed the ladder behind her. Could she do anything from here? No. But twenty-five men were inside that chamber. Every single one must have reason to hate him.

  Why didn’t they kill him? Why didn’t they revolt as Källa believed they would? What were they waiting for?

  Whatever Källa had seen in them, Annika couldn’t see it now. Only men who’d been beaten and hurt. Only a monster who’d taken pleasure in hurting them.

  She started the troll again, fighting back tears of rage and sickness. Lorenzo wouldn’t squeeze a single drop from her. She would never give him that satisfaction.

  And yet she must be already. Her breath came short and fast. Her control over the troll was failing, the foreleg sliding, the rhythm off, everything swaying, off balance.

  No. That wasn’t her. This was a quake.

  Sudden terror iced her chest. She dropped the troll into a squat. Violent jolts rocked through them, the lanterns swinging wildly, pure darkness ahead. Sick with fear, Annika gripped the levers, praying that the tunnel didn’t collapse.

  Her stomach felt on the verge of vomiting when the shaking stopped a minute later. Her limbs were heavy, impossible to lift, to start moving again—fearing that with a single step, the ice would shatter around them.

  Behind her, Lorenzo said, “Well. We made it through that.”

  That was enough to get her going again. Smashing down on the stompers, she drove the troll hard through the tu
nnel, desperate to be out—and away from the monster behind her and the horror she’d seen.

  She almost cried with relief when the faint light appeared through the dark. The sun had risen while they’d been beneath the ice. She didn’t care that it all but blinded her as she emerged onto the glacier path.

  A two-seater balloon was flying toward them, two figures in the cart. With her heart in her throat, she recognized the second man. David.

  “And look at that, now.”

  Lorenzo sounded surprised, but she wasn’t. David would have felt the quake. He’d known she was in the tunnel. Of course he would come.

  Or perhaps he was surprised that David had convinced a guard to take him.

  “You might as well stop, then. A few minutes of sun would do us well. And we can send our bleeding man back in the balloon. It will be faster, and I’m sure Kentewess will not mind riding with us.”

  Annika knew that Lorenzo just wanted to see what happened, wanted to observe them together. She didn’t care. As soon as the balloon landed, she ran to David. His arms closed around her, and the tears she’d been stopping had to come now. She buried her face in his shoulder.

  David didn’t let her hide. Gentle fingers tilted her chin up. Dark concern shadowed his face, deep worry. “Are you all right?”

  Throat blocked by a sob, she nodded.

  “God, Annika.” He clutched her to him. “I was terrified. I could only imagine the glacier falling in on you.”

  She’d been terrified, too. But she wasn’t now. Only relieved, so relieved. She was all right. With David, it wasn’t just riveting need. The world around them was falling apart, but there was something good here in his arms, something perfect.

  And she knew exactly where home was.

  She caught his face in her hands. “I love you.”

  His lips parted. He stared at her, his gaze full of disbelief and hope, as if he thought he’d only imagined the words. So she said them again.