Jeremiah eyed the fire axe, stepped forwards, and smashed her fist into the glass case, reaching in and seizing the weapon, heedless of the cuts and the now freely flowing blood. She’d aimed to use the axe on herself, but instead she dropped its hilt to the deck and leaned on it like a makeshift cane, gathering her breath.
She knew she was ruined, but she wasn’t ready to kill herself yet—and she wasn’t sure she could kill the Scarab. And if she didn’t, what guarantee did she have that they wouldn’t let the great metal tick fix itself upon Natasha?
The Black Tea acted genteel, but it killed something in the souls of those it conquered. And the Tea wanted the Scarab very badly. She didn’t yet know what this thing was capable of, but if her experience with Foreigners was any guide, the Scarab would get exponentially more dangerous as it matured. All that together . . . made her willing to die to keep it out of their hands.
Jeremiah seized the axe with her good hand and, using it as an ungainly cane, began limping towards the portside engine room door—then froze as she heard the cocking of the hammer of one of this world’s lethal weapons.
———
“I want to kill you,” the Owl said.
41.
I Want to Kill You
JEREMIAH FROZE. Then, slowly, she looked over at the Owl, the young Chinese psychic boy, standing at the starboard door, bruised and battered, his elaborate red dress torn, his corset ripped, one eye near swollen shut, the other eye sighting down Marcus’s pistol, held in his shaking hand.
“You are formidable,” he said in his willowy effeminate voice, hand still shaking, aim still more or less sure. “I expected to find you bound, and yet you’re free. But you did not do it on your own, did you?”
Jeremiah stared at him. “No,” she said quietly. “The . . . thing helped.”
“I want to kill you,” he repeated. “Put you out of all this misery. But I can’t. I can’t do it,” he said, lowering the gun.
“That’s,” Jeremiah said, taking a step towards him. “That’s all right—”
“If I kill you,” he said, crying now, “I’ll never see my sister again.”
“H-hang on,” Jeremiah said. “What are you talking about?”
“The future. I’ve seen the future,” the Owl said.
“And you didn’t anticipate this?” Jeremiah said.
“Commander! It doesn’t work like that; I only get glimpses,” the Owl said. “But . . . I am immune to the Tea. What role will I have in their world?”
“It’s not their world yet,” Jeremiah said, lifting herself up on the axe, then nearly falling back as the weight of the Scarab unbalanced her. “Who else can we count on? Who else is immune?”
“Only psychics and computers,” the boy said. “Me and Georgiana. And now you. Natasha hasn’t been converted yet, but they will do. And Harbinger is still free of the tea, but he and Georgiana are in the hands of the Americans.”
“So it’s you and me.”
“It’s just you,” the Owl said, sniffling now. “I’m still loyal to Victoriana . . . I am, but I am not strong enough to help. You see what they did to me, to try to make me call my sister?” His battered face convulsed with shame. “And I did it. Dame Alice knows everything now. I’m weak, Commander. I’m so weak.” The gun wavered in his hand. “I make me sick—”
“Put. The. Gun. Down. Now,” Jeremiah said firmly. “On the deck.”
“But—”
“Now,” Jeremiah said, drawing herself up. “Safety on, then kick it away.”
The boy stared at it. Then he blinked and dropped it with a small cry.
Jeremiah flinched, but it didn’t go off, and she limped forwards and kicked the gun away, nearly falling in the process. “Never pick up a gun again, hear me?” she said, shoring herself up with the axe. “Not till you can look me in the eye and tell me you won’t use it on yourself.”
The Owl blinked and nodded, crying.
“Shouldn’t you take it?” he said. “To defend—”
Then he seemed to really see her, see her with the monster on her back.
“Oh,” he said.
“No,” she said, staring after the pistol with longing. “Don’t mark me wrong. I would use it. But right now I might be tempted . . . to end my suffering before completing my work.” A brief hope flashed within her. “Boy, can you do that thing you do, get a read on . . . on my head?”
“What—oh!” The Owl hesitated, then stepped forwards, hands raised. Jeremiah lowered her head, and he touched his fingers to her temples, grimacing with distaste as he tried to read her without having to touch the thing. “What . . . what do you want me to see?”
“You read the human mind, don’t you?” Jeremiah said, as his fingers gently, gingerly probed her skin. “Meaning, the human brain. Birmingham said this thing had invaded half of mine, but I still have most of my faculties; perhaps there’s hope we can repel—”
“Oh!” the Owl said, jerking his hands away. Jeremiah looked up, and in the horror and pity in his eyes she had her answer. But he gave a reading anyway. “Much of your brain is still intact, but its mouth has unfolded, a metal tree growing in your head, sending out wires wreathing your tissue like vines climbing a façade. Roots are . . . are digging in, and flowers are beginning to blossom—”
“No hope to weed it out, then,” Jeremiah said grimly. “Options? We have the ax—”
“We can’t kill the Scarab,” the Owl said. “As pathetic as it looks now, it can heal from almost any wound. And if we kill you, they’ll just put it on Natasha—or me.”
“It can survive the transfer?” Jeremiah said, grimacing as she thought of the mouthparts of the Scarab ripping their way out of her. “Even after it’s eaten so far into me?”
“For now,” the Owl said, also grimacing. “For a while yet, until it pupates. Then it’s vulnerable. We need to keep it out of their hands until . . . until it can be dealt with.”
“I have come to the same conclusion,” Jeremiah said. “And . . . if my uncle and the Tea both wanted it so badly, I have come to the conclusion it must be dealt with.”
“Yes,” the boy said. “If the Tea spoke true to itself, once grown and merged with its technology, a Scarab is almost invincible—”
“How?” Jeremiah said. “Details, boy. What, what is this thing we’re fighting?”
“I just gathered fragments, but . . .” The Owl’s eyes darted away from her, the thing. “A walking factory of death. Metallic hide that’s both impervious and regenerative. Burning blood that can transmute any atom. Seething flesh that can synthesize any substance, no matter how foul—”
“If they’re that powerful,” Jeremiah said, “why do they need bloody hosts?”
The Owl swallowed. “Why . . . why do we need to eat?”
“For nutrition,” Jeremiah said. “But if this thing—”
“No. Not for nutrition,” he said. “Ever since Victoria turned dark, we’ve been able to deliver nutrition entirely through the blood—and those that choose that life are stronger. No . . . humans eat for pleasure. As for the thing . . . I get the strong sense the Scarab love to burrow.”
“Blood of the Queen,” Jeremiah whispered. “No wonder the Tea thinks them monsters.”
“It’s more than that,” the Owl said. “The Scarab are powered by the fire that burns at the heart of stars. They can generate aetheric power which scours the Tea from all flesh. Natural enemies, the Tea fears the Scarab like nothing else—but desires them like nothing else.”
“Why?” Jeremiah said.
“The Scarab have aeons of knowledge written into their metal hides. They can fashion any device imaginable from the flesh of their own bodies,” the Owl said. “But this is the key to everything they make: the Scarab are the power source for their own technology.”
&nb
sp; “So only the Scarab can use it,” Jeremiah said. “Clever.”
“Yes,” the Owl said. “Unless you could trick it. Unless you could bend a Scarab body to your own will. The Tea believes Christopherson found a way. It thinks he planned to lobotomize that one as it pupates and seize a crèche of its technology; they plan to do the same.”
“God,” Jeremiah said. “So the only thing for me . . . is to go over the side.”
A subtle silence fell, as if a noise heard only at the back of her mind had ceased—then she realized it had been a real noise, at the nape of her neck. The thing had gone strangely quiescent. She couldn’t hope for continued cooperation, but for the moment, to escape, they were uneasy allies.
Or perhaps it had merely paused a moment . . . to digest.
“Let’s get on with it, then,” Jeremiah said.
“I’ll be your vanguard, ma’am,” he said. “Just . . . tell me which way to go.”
With seven minutes to go, Jeremiah and the Owl took the Falconers’ thermionic blasters and slipped out the starboard hatch, the boy going first, her limping after. The cool air of the service corridor felt good on her face after the stuffy cargo chamber, but between the droning hum of the engines and the rush of the air, Jeremiah could see why no one had heard her struggling to escape.
They paused at a junction, and Jeremiah winced, leaning on the axe for support. It wasn’t so bad, really, with her improvised cane; it was like carrying a huge pack, a huge heavy pack made of clanging metal which was slowly eating you from the inside out.
The boy began moving forwards but then cried out as a pair of Falconers appeared, several minutes early for their shift change. Trembling, he raised his blaster, the Falconers raised their voices in alarm—and then fell to the deck as Jeremiah dispatched them with two quick shots.
Leaning on the axe, Jeremiah glared, aiming her own blaster down the hall. They couldn’t hide the bodies; the Falconers had fallen too far off. They’d just have to be quick. The Owl looked back at her fearfully, and she said, “Just—keep—moving.”
Under the hum of the engines and the clanking of the transfer gears, they moved forwards. Near a service door an odd smell stung her nostrils, and Jeremiah realized the Scarab was reacting to a waft of the Tea. They hurried on.
With one arm over the Owl’s shoulder, Jeremiah limped up the steps to the starboard Falconer’s deck. The boom operator lifted his head, then whirled—then fell back to the grille under simultaneous blasts from Jeremiah and the Owl.
“You’re getting better,” Jeremiah said. “We’ll make a Ranger of you yet.”
“Not in my future,” the Owl said. “We’re here. What do we do now?”
“You throw the latches,” Jeremiah said, sliding her ax through the handle of the door, then using the piping to support her as she limped over to the wingpacks. “I’ll be there directly.”
She stared longingly at the butterfly wings the Falconers used; Jeremiah wished she could take one rather than a parachute. She knew from experience it wouldn’t work, but she so desperately wanted to fly—so desperately wished that taking to the air didn’t make her upchuck.
For that matter, she desperately wished she wasn’t being eaten alive by a half-metal bug, or that she didn’t have to jump from a moving airship to keep that bug out of the hands of her former friends who planned to use it for God knows what. She dragged a parachute off the rack, clutched it to her chest, and stumped back over to the boy.
“The door’s ready to open,” he said. “All I need do is throw the lever.”
“All right,” Jeremiah said. After some struggling, she found there was no good way to put on the parachute, so she reluctantly stretched out one of the straps and wound her good arm through it several times. “Get ready to throw it wide. The moment I’m out, pull the ax, dash across the corridor into the ballast chamber, and crawl to the forwards access. If they don’t see you, go back to your chambers. If they do . . . the space is cramped. It will put off your beating for half an hour.”
“Do . . . do you need help?” the Owl said.
“No way to get this over my back,” she said, hooking the other strap over her shoulder and hugging the pack as best she could. “With all this extra weight, I’ll probably break this arm when the chute deploys, but, oh well,” Jeremiah said, with a half-smile.
The drop doors opened with a creaky whine and an intense blast of air; they had to be doing thirty knots, over a city that sparkled with lights—lights that meant buildings she could slam into. Not the best conditions for a drop, but the sudden roar of air through the chamber brought attention and pounding at the door.
“Change of plan, boy,” she said, patting his head. “Hide behind the motor housing there. Tuck those skirts, or they’ll see you; stay quiet as a dormouse, though, and they’ll never hear.”
Jeremiah turned and looked at the city sliding by, hesitating. The pounding grew more intense. Something heavy slammed into the door, and the ax cracked. Jeremiah decided not to wait to see it burst and stepped out into the night.
With the weight on her back whipping her round, it wasn’t a normal drop, and she felt her gorge rise as she spun round and round into weightlessness. Beneath her, the glorious electric lights of the city whirled around her, a blur of windows and streetlights and trees lit with their soft glow.
Jeremiah released the chute at once: she had no drop zone. It did not break her arm, as she’d predicted, but, before it had fully deployed, before she had fully slowed, the momentum of her unbalanced spinning began twisting its straps.
Then the chute tangled upon itself, and she dropped like a stone.
———
“Oh, bugger me,” Jeremiah said, as she fell towards stars and forest.
42.
City of Ghosts
JEREMIAH MOVED through the city like a ghost, wrapped in a gossamer robe she’d made from the torn remnants of her parachute. She didn’t know how she survived the fall; she only knew she hurt, she was still food for the monster, and above her, in the broken, bloodied branches, had been just enough fabric to pull and tear down into a makeshift cloak that hid the both of them.
This kind of life was familiar to her, using the city against itself, skulking through culverts and storm drains and in the tangled messes between rows of houses. But this glorious city of light had a hidden sin, running like termites through the trees that sprang up between the lighted lots: discarded men and women, lost souls without homes or hope, stumbling through the same spaces she was using to defend herself.
The vagrants were thin, worn, often drugged out, but the fear in their eyes—the fear the sharp-eyed showed when they caught a glimpse of the thing shifting on her back—told her the monster was not just there, but getting worse and too unusual to go unnoticed.
In the early light of dawn she stumbled out of a neighborhood of terraced houses into a small open-air market built around a five-pointed intersection. Here the shops were edgier, the populace more daring—and the vagrants more numerous; that gave her a few precious minutes before her appearance would draw enough notice to turn into discovery.
Crouched behind a pillar near the edge of a concrete wall, she spied what she needed: a vendor setting out clothes and backpacks on the racks of an outdoor stand. When his attention was diverted, she bolted forward, seized the largest, least colorful pack, and darted behind the shop into the grimy alley to disguise herself.
The black pack was decorated with odd soft spikes that seemed useless, but it looked big enough to cover the bulk of the creature, so she ripped the underside of it open and slipped it on over the monster. Painfully she stretched her arms through the straps, but as the straps settled on her shoulders, she felt the weight of the thing taken up by the bag, and she could have sworn the twitching thing settled, as if it felt grateful to no longer have to grip and bite and clutch.<
br />
As the monster relaxed, Jeremiah felt something still pinching her head. She reached up, a metal feeler brushed her hand, and she flinched, but her fingers kept going until they touched what she hoped she would find, the one piece of clothing she was still left with after all her adventures: her goggles. No one had wanted to get close enough to the monster to remove them.
Jeremiah pulled her goggles down sharply, shouldered her backpack, and stared off into the city, her thin torn shift tattering around her, parachute cloak floating in the breeze. Now she was just another crazy drunk, invisible to all.
Seizing a broken mop as her staff, she limped off into the dawn.
———
AT FIRST THE PLAN wasn’t coherent: just get away, remain unseen. If she fell into the hands of the Black Tea Society, they’d let the Scarab drain her until she was a husk, as likely would Lord Christopherson. He could use her as he planned to use the cow—almost certainly the same plan, with more knowledge and sophistication. Neither she nor the Scarab wanted that.
And the Americans . . . well, if how they treated their street people was any indication, life was cheap beneath the surface of this glittering metropolis. They’d hand her over to her uncle in a second in exchange for his invisible airship.
Or just kill her outright, for nothing more than the thin shift on her back or the chance to grope what was beneath it. Apparently the backpack was hiding the thing well, for in a back lot three vagrants cornered her, one with a knife, one with a broken bottle, and one with two grimy hands.
But she’d played this game before. She let them get close, then dispatched them with the mop. The two armed ones fled once she disarmed them, but grimy hands tried to press on anyway, and she was forced to break his left knee.
Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine Page 31