Reciprocity

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Reciprocity Page 30

by Sean M Locke


  My breath caught and my vision narrowed; I couldn’t see much, but what I did see turned diamond-bright and clear. I let my eyes see only Josef’s gondola, and then only Josef, and then only Josef’s arm, and then only Josef’s hand. I loosed the empty cartridge and watched the twinkling bit of brass fly.

  The empty 40-bore cartridge hit the soft spot between his second and third knuckles, just below the trigger guard of his pistol. He flinched as he pulled the trigger, and his shot went wild. The pistol fell from his hand, bounced once on the railing behind him, and kept falling. Josef roared, humiliation and rage plain on his face, and then he wasn’t in his gondola anymore. The damned fool was clambering up the framework of the wheel, coming after me with a will.

  Part of me wondered if he’d lost his mind. He didn’t need to climb into my gondola and risk falling to his death. He didn’t need to get on the Ferro wheel at all—there was only one place my gondola could end up, anyway. He could have simply waited till the wheel came back to the ground again and then killed me.

  I whistled at him, and he looked up, his teeth bared and his eyes wild. “Josef, baby,” I called. I wanted to curse the quavering in my voice but decided in that instant to use it. “You’re kind of scaring me right now.”

  He didn’t reply—just kept climbing.

  I held the violin case over the edge of the gondola and waggled it. “If you frighten me any further, I might accidentally drop this thing, and then your father’s carbine will be scattered all over the plaza. Wouldn’t that be a shame? Gods only know who would get their hands on the pieces then.”

  He held out a hand, his eyes wide with fear. “Wait. Don’t . . . there’s no need for that.”

  I tilted my head at him. “So you’re not going to come up here and stab me with that fancy rapier?”

  “No. No, I will not.” He smiled at me then, suddenly reasonable and civilized. “Upon my word, I will not. We will only talk. I’m sure we can negotiate something favorable for both of us. But only let me come up there. I took leave of my senses for a moment, but you are entirely right. There’s no sense in destroying the very thing I wanted all this time.”

  “Come on up, then.”

  My gondola was near the apex when he climbed in. He smoothed his hair and straightened his lapels, as if that would do anything for the soot and blood and the cigarette hole right over his heart. His face had only a little of the disdainful calm I was used to seeing. He was doing his damnedest to keep himself civil, but the tic on the left side of his face told me something else. We stood as close as lovers, my chin tilted up the plane of his chest.

  “Mevrouw Hawen, I’m gratified that you trust me enough to not throw the case away.”

  “Did I say I trusted you at all?” I had something clever lined up to say next, but a bone-rattling thud shook the Ferro wheel and set the gondola to swaying. Machinery screeched somewhere, and then stopped. We sat down hard on opposite benches and held on while the gondola swung on its hinge. As the gondola settled, I watched in mute horror as my slingrod rolled off the bench, clattered to the floor, and tumbled away into space. I had a brief panic that the wheel had come loose of its moorings and would tip right over, crushing buildings and people and dashing us to the ground. Worse yet, the wheel could stay upright and we would both go rolling away into the sea.

  But that sort of thing only happened in dime novels. The wheel stayed put.

  “Well, it appears that lunatic Pino is not yet finished throwing bombs at every living soul,” Josef said, peering down at the ground. “But one of them has gone awry and damaged the wheel’s motors.”

  While he studied the ground, I studied him. He was seated too firmly for me to think of pushing him out. That wasn’t a fight I could win. His coat had fallen open, and I could see the butt of Hendrik’s mud-covered pistol peeking out of his shoulder holster. My baton was gone, and the violin case didn’t make for a very good weapon. I grimaced and patted the bench next to me, but it was empty.

  Panic shot through me—had it fallen out of the gondola? Did it really matter?

  “Mevrouw Hawen, I expect—” Josef stopped short when he looked back to me. He looked to the floor of the gondola then, and saw the violin case sitting there. The open violin case.

  The open violin case with a violin sitting in it, broken at the neck.

  Josef stood up fast, and so did I. He roared, “What is this?”

  “Sorry, Josef,” I said, hands clenched at my sides. “That was a nasty trick. Maria has the carbine, and she’s gone away with the trade regulator who shot you. But don’t worry—”

  “Don’t worry?” Josef showed me all his teeth and grabbed my collar. “Our family is ruined.”

  “Not yet. You could still play things smart, Josef,” I said, fighting to keep the panic out of my voice, and fighting to keep my hands moving slow. “That regulator isn’t interested in ruining you. He wants to keep that weapon out of circulation. He told me he would take Maria and the carbine to Bacigalupi Tower. Mission accomplished. We can all go home now and clean up our messes. All right?”

  “You,” he said, his eyes narrowing to slits. “You are in league with the trade regulator, or you are lying to me. Why else would you know what he wants? And what would stop him from looking into the matter of the aker dust later? If you are lying to me, I should kill you on principle alone. If you are the trade regulator’s creature, I should kill you so that you don’t make trouble for me later.”

  “Whoa, Josef,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender. “You said you wouldn’t kill me, right? Gave your word.”

  His grin bulged out his cheeks, breaking the beautiful planes of his face. “I gave my word that I wouldn’t stab you, like you asked.”

  He shoved me backward into the bench with one hand and hauled out Hendrik’s cannon with the other. The barrel touched my nose just as I got the flare gun’s turned brass spout pointing at his chest. He stood there, and I sat there for a long moment. We stared at each other and into the barrels of each other’s guns. That damned dime-novel standoff again.

  I should have been thinking of something. I should have seen my life pass before my eyes, or had some kind of religious experience, or pissed myself, but I didn’t do any of those things. All I thought about was the ticking clock in Donatella’s office: the coming and going of the next Great Abatement, the marking of seasons, the passing of an hour. The ticking of ten minutes.

  “What do you intend to do with that, rotten beggar?” Josef asked. “That thing may scorch my clothes, but the armor will protect me. Your master’s pistol, however, has one round left in it. It will do for you, one way or another. So spare me the inconvenience of a new wardrobe and just put it down. Die gracefully.”

  “Okay.” I dropped my elbow and let the flare gun point up and away from him. “I can probably do that. Only . . .”

  “What?” he sneered. “Some final request? Last words to send along to my sister?”

  “Tell her I hope to see her again when this is all over with. Dinner at Drie Appels, maybe.” I laughed at the confused scowl on his face. “I might die gracefully. But not today.”

  I closed my eyes tight and pulled the trigger. The world exploded in light and heat, enough to burn through my eyelids. Josef screeched in pain and surprise and reeled away from me, but didn’t shoot. I opened my eyes, couldn’t see much for the glare, and snatched his gun hand. There was no chance of manhandling the thing away from his iron grip, so I pressed the hot barrel of my flare gun into his wrist. He screamed again but didn’t drop the pistol like I’d hoped.

  A shot rang out, deafening me and burning my face and neck with spent powder. I’d heard people say “near miss” before, like it was something that didn’t hurt, but by the gods it hurt a very great deal. The bullet didn’t touch me, but the shock of hot gases and burning powder pummeled me like a cricket bat. The wooden bench shattered under the weight of lead and flesh. Splinters shredded my coat and lacerated my back, but I didn’t feel the pai
n.

  I surged up out of the bench and launched into Josef’s belly with my shoulder, slamming him into the opposite bench. Our feet tangled with the violin case, and we scrapped, tangling like a pair of baited carnosaurs. There was no skill in our wrestling—it was all rage from him and desperation from me. The violin and both of our guns went over the edge, and the gondola’s hinge creaked and moaned.

  He got on top of me, his knees straddling my hips, his full weight pressing on me. Even as he was beating my face with his fists, I could see the glorious yellow light of the flare above us, floating gently on its parachute, and I knew the Air Corps would be here soon. One blow knocked a tooth out. I let him hit me once more, and his momentum pushed his arm just where I wanted it.

  I grabbed his arm with both of my hands, squirmed to my side, curled my knees up like a cooked prawn, and pushed hard. My knees pushed his right leg one direction, and my ass pushed his left leg out the other. I bucked and pushed and tried to get on top of him to teach him a thing or two, but the gondola kept swinging from our weight and spoiled my idea.

  I fell, my belly slamming against the floor of the gondola, and Josef wasn’t anywhere near me. He slipped, slid, and the rage on his face melted into terror as he fell from the gondola. Iron fingers grabbed at my forearm, and I nearly went over with him, but I braced my feet and knees against both benches and stopped. We hung there for a long time. My legs burned from holding our weight, and his feet kicked the open air.

  My arm ached and burned as Josef held on; my bones creaked from the strength of his grasp. He looked up at me, and I looked down at him. Neither of us said anything. If there was ever a time for someone to say something defiant or nasty or triumphant, it should have been just then.

  Blood leaked from my nose and face and soaked Josef’s grip on me. He began to slip.

  Below him, deep in the spokes and beams of the wheel, a fire raged. One of Pino’s bombs? A forgotten cigarette? Whatever had happened, the fire had been going for some time. Wood and steel groaned and snapped as the Ferro wheel staggered, dying underneath us.

  Smoke tickled my throat, and Josef fell into a coughing fit. His grip failed. Without thinking, I grasped for him and caught only air, and he tumbled away. His hands snatched at the air like he might pull me down with him, or pull himself up some imaginary rope back into the gondola. I watched him fall, my mouth open and dry, and waited for him to break himself on the whitewashed spiderwork of the wheel.

  Something small and fast darted among the wooden gantries and support beams. The ornithopter intercepted Josef’s fall: a barnstorming pilot sitting fore, and a burly, quick-thinking passenger sitting aft, both wearing Air Corps flight suits. The man on the back of the ornithopter twisted in his seat and strained mightily as he hauled Josef’s limp form across his lap. The flyer bobbed and dipped under the increased weight. After a gut-dropping second or two, the pilot recovered, and the little flyer sped away.

  I took about three seconds to marvel at his luck before I remembered where I was.

  I backed my way into the center of the gondola and knelt there. My ears rang from gunfire, I bled from a dozen shallow cuts, and smoke burned in my throat. My soot-stained hands lay curled in my lap. I was missing a fingernail on my left hand, and that bled, too. Everything ached, and I was so damned tired. But I’d done what I meant to do—get the carbine out of the Lower, and get Maria home safe.

  It was just about time to call it a day.

  Something groaned below me, and something else snapped like rifle fire. Hot wind swirled around me as my gondola shuddered in place. Would I fall and dash my brains out on the charred ground? Or would I break every bone in my body on the way down on the spokes and support beams? Or would it be smoke inhalation, way up here? Could I climb down before the wheel disintegrated and let the fire turn me into a greasy cinder?

  Would it hurt?

  I’d gotten a taste for making choices for myself over the last day and a half. Choices that Hendrik and Kasper didn’t have a say in. I’d gotten a taste for it, and I liked it. Right in front of me was another choice I could make—my last one. I decided I would make that choice standing up. Wind buffeted me and pain lanced through my ribs as I struggled to my feet, making me sway in the already unsteady gondola.

  A man’s voice called out from somewhere overhead, above the hot, howling gale. I looked up, over my shoulder, and saw someone haloed by a bright, actinic glare. I didn’t see many details—a gloved hand, a leather helmet, goggles, an Air Corps flight suit. The cavernous interior of an airship. A skiff, Maria had called it. I shielded my face from the glare and took an involuntary step back.

  “Easy, take it easy,” the man hollered. “This thing is going to fall apart like a matchstick house.”

  “The cavalry,” I said.

  The uniformed man scoffed. “Hardly, mevrouw. Horses can’t fly worth a damn. Now come on!”

  I didn’t wait for him to ask again. Somehow I gripped his forearm, and somehow I got one foot onto the ramp. With a final groan and snap, the Ferro wheel collapsed behind me.

  Chapter 20

  The first thing I remembered after my ride on the Ferro wheel and the airship was the sweet, delicate smell of goddess lilies. It almost, but not quite, covered the nostril-scorching stench of bleach and rubbing alcohol. Which almost, but not quite, covered the stink of loneliness, desperation, and fear of death. I wondered for a few minutes or a few hours why I was sleeping in Donatella’s solarium, and if I’d been put in a bed just like hers. Did someone have to stoke a little steam engine to push my bed around on tracks? Did I have a ring of trumpets around my head, spraying medicine at me to breathe?

  Was I locked inside my own head, forever unable to move or talk?

  Panic clawed at me, and all my limbs and fingers and toes tingled like I’d licked a come-along. I sucked in a breath and sat up fast. My shoulder burned and screamed at me for it, and a thousand little cuts and bruises said hello. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I bit my lip hard to stop from crying out. After I caught my breath, I took a quick look around. The vase of flowers at my bedside table, the white sheets, the rolling tray within arm’s reach all told me I was in a hospital, and I was in a private room.

  A good hospital, then—not the usual sort of filthy death trap most folks wound up in, if they were unlucky. But a clean, tidy death trap still wasn’t any place I wanted to be. I tried to piece things together, but it was an evil, evil puzzle, and I had the worst hangover I’d ever heard of. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I could have drunk the whole River Lieflijk and asked for seconds.

  A man’s coat and fedora lay across the little table for visitors, and the chair had a newspaper in it. It showed the nighttime skyline of an amusement park, lit not by electric lights, but by fire. The headline screamed GRANNIS ISLAND INFERNO, and under that: FAULTY GAS LINE TO BLAME, SCORES DEAD. I sighed and didn’t bother trying to get the paper. I knew what kind of lies it would have, and anyway, my shoulder hurt.

  The washroom door opened, and Felix limped out, his hair artfully mussed. And good old Felix, he managed to make even the cane and sallow skin look dashing. He grinned at me and hobbled over to my bedside. “The hero awakes.”

  I said something unprintable to dismiss that hero business. “So. A gas line blew at Grannis Island?”

  Felix nodded. “Good thing the storm chased nearly everyone out before the accident.”

  “I’m surprised a fire could catch at all, what with the soaking rain earlier.” I closed my eyes, but what I saw was a damn sight worse than the hospital room lights, so I gave up on that idea. “If I was a suspicious person, I’d wonder if someone made a special effort to torch the place and hide evidence.”

  “Who could say?” Felix asked as he sat, a bland smile on his face. “These things happen.”

  I scoffed, but I couldn’t blame them. Who would want to explain all those bodies, all those bullet holes in the clapboard buildings? And then a small sense of relief flooded through me
—if the place was burned to a crisp, then all the Cantabile-marked bullets and casings would be melted to slag.

  Maria and her family were off the hook.

  “Talk to me, Felix. What happened? Did Maria make it out? Is Josef alive? You lock him up?”

  He held up a hand and shook his head, and then pressed a white buzzer set into the wall. We waited for a little while, and he dodged every one of my questions and made small talk instead. He told me about the latest ladies’ hats to come out of the Middle Terrace, speculated about whether pinstripes would come back into fashion for men’s jackets, and other such nonsense I didn’t much care about. Would it kill him for once to stall me by talking about cricket or football?

  I was pondering whether I could brain Felix with his walking stick when the door to the hall opened.

  Wolfgang entered, holding a pitcher of water and a glass. He gave Felix a crooked smile and a nod before entering. For a guy like him, that was a declaration of undying love. Then he pursed his lips when he saw I was awake and poured me a glass of water.

  I might not have liked him much on a normal day, but I could have actually hugged him then for bringing me a drink. I drank slowly and looked a question, a hundred questions, at him.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re gonna tell you some things and ask you some questions. You probably got questions for us, too. So let’s hash it out. You game?”

  I nodded and set my water glass down, folded my hands in my lap real nice. Smiled at him, even.

  “First things first,” he said, and pointed a finger at me. “You’re gonna recover just fine.”

  I made a noise and threw up my hands, and the second part of that was a terrible idea. My shoulder and neck caught fire, and I thought I felt something tear. “I don’t give a damn about that. Tell me—”

  “Shut up,” he said, not unkindly. “We’re gonna do this in order. Now, the medics were at you all night last night, and you’ve been sleeping the whole morning. You’ve got some nasty splinters and powder burns on your face, neck, and shoulder. Got a pair of shiners, a broken nose, and a missing tooth from some kind of beating you took. One broken rib. Miscellaneous bumps and bruises.”

 

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