by Giselle Ava
“Lay it out for me,” I say.
He tells me and I only half-listen, because my mind is wandering. There’s a pistol in my holster and it begins to grow warm, as if sensing the finale. I get off the communicator with Leslie Barrow and then tell the soldiers to dial checkpoint apples, where Thomas is.
“This is Cobbe,” he answers.
“Divert attention away from the southern districts,” I tell him. “Send Willcocks and Stirling there and tell them I’m on my way.”
A hesitant pause. “Affirmative.”
I look up through the rain as lightning cracks, illuminating the sky above Fortescue Plaza. There are black shapes floating amongst the clouds. Airships. I sense the ending in sight. I imagine Charles Fortescue in his great tower. There’s nowhere for him to run.
You will die, Arthur, says the whine in my head.
I am not afraid of dying, I tell it, breaking off for the south.
Unkindly Attack
Francis Burnett was born with the rare ability to move things with his mind, and he thinks about how life could have been different for him had he been born just like everyone else, as he stands outside a dress store in the outer districts of Fortescue Plaza.
Rain falls over him, drenching the cheap clothes he wears. When Francis was ten, he killed a boy outside the orphanage where he’d grown up. The boy had been tormenting him for years, and Francis snapped. He distinctly remembers the feeling of his body changing, the growth of something sinister and cold inside him.
He feels this now.
His upper arm still stings from where they injected him with the odd serum, saying it would help to stave off the long-term effects of using his powers in this battle.
What is he supposed to do?
He has not been trained for this. All he knows is there is a power inside him, something that will destroy him if he uses it.
So is this all I am? he asks himself. Just a pawn? The door of the dress store opens up and a woman walks out, her dark hair soaked with rain. She glances at him and he watches her. There are a lot of them. The word is they are going to cause a series of disruptions in the north-west of Fortescue Plaza. This is the big attack. It’s supposed to pressure Fortescue and break open their defences, leaving them exposed for a takeover.
The word is, unleash hell on them.
Francis is afraid but he doesn’t show it. It’s true that this is what they have to do, that London under the reign of Fortescue’s anti-mechanical regime is no place to live, and that they all deserve a place under London’s beautiful sky. Francis is not a mechanical but he is one of them, one of the ones they fear, with the hidden power meant only to destroy.
“What are we waiting for?” someone says.
Francis looks to where this person is. There are two revolutionary soldiers and one person dressed in casual clothing. The person talking has short hair and skinny arms; he doesn’t look any older than Francis himself, early twenties.
“Waiting for word,” one soldier says.
“Who’s even in charge?” the man asks.
“Arthur,” the other soldier says.
Arthur, Francis thinks to himself. He has heard this name before, heard from a man with an impressive white moustache who called himself a sir, that Arthur was one of the most powerful Unkindly, that he’d fought in the first war and become a mechanical, that only a few days ago he had blown up a bomb with only his mind as it fell on his head.
Francis is fighting for Arthur.
#
Leslie Barrow and the man they now call Dead George run through a district lined with bodies. There’d been an explosion and the wet ground still glimmers with spot fires.
Barrow drops behind a blackened car by the sidewalk and pops up with his rifle, shooting one of Fortescue’s officers twice in the chest. Dead George’s blue apparition hovers by him. Barrow falls back behind the car. “We have to stop that airship from taking off.”
You can see it in the distance surrounded by flashing lights, an impressive machine built to tackle the skies. Men scramble on the deck. One climbs the masthead and others hurriedly unshackle it from the restraints of the docking site. A van pulls up beside it and the doors fly open. Men retrieve bombs from the back of it and they begin loading them onto the deck.
Henry Nicholson had been monitoring the situation. He’d taken over running the spies network and was dealing in information, much as the Hopkins woman had been. Nicholson had come down with a bad case of tuberculosis and was unfit for battle.
Leslie surveys the road ahead. It’s as clear as they’ll get it.
“Let’s go!” he yells.
“Gladly,” says Dead George as he rips the car off the ground and flips it out in front of them like a shield. Leslie charges forward, Dead George at his side. Rain hails down and bullet fire cracks with blinding white lights. Leslie was never meant to fight. He wasn’t built for fighting. He wasn’t there during the first war. But Fortescue has ordered bombs to be dropped from that airship and they need to stop it. Leslie was never meant to fight, but he can fly.
“I used to pilot my uncle’s plane,” he told Nicholson earlier.
In between coughs, Nicholson managed to respond, “Ever piloted an airship?”
And Leslie shrugged. “Planes, airships, I see no difference!”
He’s looking at it now and he’s thinking, It’s bigger than I thought.
They reach the ship and Dead George jumps on top of the car with his rifle in his ghostly arms, spraying bullets across the loading site.
“I’ll cover you!” Dead George yells.
Here goes nothing, Leslie tells himself. Drawing in a deep breath, he launches himself off the road and flies fifty feet in the air, leaping over Dead George’s bullets. The car lifts with the force of it, but then settles. Rain screeches around him, trapped in his odd gravitational ambit. Lightning explodes in the sky and smashes into him, causing him to glow.
Leslie Barrow hails bullets from above.
Blood splashes in the rain puddles. Fortescue’s soldiers scream and duck for cover. The last bomb is hauled onto the airship and it begins to take off with a great roar of steam. Leslie lands at the very edge of it, shooting half the guys on deck.
He jumps aboard, energy pulsing off him. Bullets strike him and are flung off. He’s standing between three guys, and he needs to get to the hull. The ground is falling away beneath him as the airship ascends. He sees Dead George below, growing smaller and smaller.
Three guys against one.
Leslie starts by throwing his rifle at the first guy with such force it cracks his neck and the guy goes flying. Bullets spit and Leslie throws up a kinetic field as well as a number of wooden planks ripped from the deck, trapping the bullets. The soldier curses. Leslie throws two of the wooden planks, impaling him with both. He chokes on blood and crumples. The third soldier stares at Leslie with wide open eyes and does not move.
“With apologies,” Leslie says, “I must take this airship.”
The soldier steadily lowers his rifle. “Have it.”
Leslie flings him off the edge of the airship.
With that taken care of, he strides to the hull and kills the guy who’s manning the controls. He yanks out his radio and screams into it: “This is Barrow. I have the airship!”
Henry Nicholson’s raspy voice comes back: “Take it to the skies!”
Jerking the controls to the left, he swings from the district and takes flight. Rain smashes the sails, the heavens spitting against his face. Leslie Barrow shouts in glee as the storm crescendos and an orchestra of thunder and lightning erupts in the beautifully chaotic sky.
#
Sir Willcocks and Roy Stirling are waiting for me outside a theatre several streets into Fortescue Plaza. Thunder crashes and my walking stick slips in a puddle, nearly sending me buckling over. I won’t stumble. I won’t fall. I am Arthur and tonight I will kill Fortescue.
“How far is it?” I ask them.
“It isn’t
far,” Stirling tells me in a solid voice. His rifle reflects raindrops and streetlamps, and the frost that settles over London in the early hours of the morning.
I nod and begin walking down the road, sticking to the sidewalk. People who have nothing to do with the battle poke their heads out of houses and storefronts, but there’s been a lockdown, and the streets are empty but for papers and mist.
You can see the sun poking over the horizon.
It’s a Tuesday, I think to myself.
People are waking up on the outskirts of London and they will never know what’s about to happen. In time, they will write about the fall of Charles Fortescue and the rise of a new London. If I’m to die here, I think to myself, how will they perceive me?
Today will begin like every other day, with the rising of a sun. Children will laugh in the streets. A woman will make tea. A man will read the papers. A girl goes to school. A boy sits down to write an essay. It’s another Tuesday in London, and that’s all it is.
Except today, Charles Fortescue will die.
#
John Montgomery stands up in his tent and walks to the communicator on the table. He picks it up as Vanessa watches him. She scares him, that one. Scares him terribly.
A young soldier is watching him from elsewhere in the room, wet from the rain. His message was that the Unkindly were ready. Montgomery draws a deep breath and makes the call to each camp. It’s time to send them in and secure the tower. He knows this is going to end in bloodshed. He knows what happens when you get these people involved, and he knows he is about to create an entire new generation of broken men and women.
But this is the way things are in London, 1923.
As he connects to the first camp, he imagines Fortescue inside his great ivory tower, and he imagines the fear on the man’s face, the powerlessness. What can you do when an army of three hundred and six Unkindly bear down on you?
“This is Romeo,” the voice responds.
John Montgomery’s hands are shaking. It doesn’t matter who you are, is what he thinks, and it doesn’t matter who you’re fighting for or what the stakes are, who’s counting on you and who’s going to die and who’s going to live. It doesn’t matter where you are, in the city and in history, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve done it before. It doesn’t matter if they’re you’re orders or somebody else’s. It doesn’t matter how well thought-out is the plan.
When it comes down to it, making the call turns your stomach. Making the call makes you question everything that has led you up to that moment. Making the call makes you wish somebody else, anybody else, could make it for you.
Montgomery wets his lips. “Release them.”
“Affirmative,” responds the man at Romeo.
Montgomery calls the next camp. “Release them.”
And then he says it again. And he says it again.
And when he breaks the connection and returns to his seat, he lets go of all the tension in his neck and shoulders, drops his head and closes his eyes, waiting for it to end.
The Tower of Fortescue
There’s a whine in my ear and it knows everything I’ve ever done. It knows the fractures in my heart. It knows my greatest fears. It knows what I am, and what I will become. This whine has been here ever since the revolution fell apart. It wasn’t there before, not when I was a child, not when they found out what I could do and then drafted me into their war. Everybody turned against me. I lost everything. We fought for them, and they tossed us away like we were nothing. And maybe we are nothing. But today we rise up.
The whine goes silent, for there’s nothing left to be said. All that’s left to do is climb the ivory tower of Charles Fortescue, and then kill him.
As around us, London burns.
Lightning crashes down on the city and I see a plume of fire spray into the sky. Imagine three hundred and six people with supernatural levels of power colliding with the might of a lightning bolt. Imagine all that power concentrated in one place.
The air becomes thick with smoke.
The sun turns red and we’re setting off bombs, wreaking as much havoc as possible so that we can push deeper and take Fortescue Plaza. And I look around at the destruction as we push towards the ivory tower, and I hear the screams and the shouts and rain is hailing from the sky with bouts of thunder and lightning, and London burns, and this is my fault.
But this is how it has to be.
Two soldiers step out of a pub ahead. I lift my pistol from my holster and shoot the first guy clean in the neck. His head snaps back with theatre and he falls to the ground. Another gunshot cracks and the second guy goes down. Sir Willcocks lowers his pistol and strokes his moustache. Thunder rumbles and we continue to the tower.
The red sun is rising over London, casting a crimson glow across Fortescue’s ivory tower. We hit it from the eastern wing, using a map John Montgomery gave us. White stairs ascend to the arched entrance. The doors fly open and a man appears. It’s not fear on his face, it’s confusion. It’s when you’re looking at the thing the textbooks don’t teach. He doesn’t even have time to raise his rifle, nor scream words from his half-open mouth. Stirling kills him.
We step over the body, into the ivory tower.
I have Montgomery’s map photographed in my mind. The halls and the corridors, the secret nooks and crannies, the path we’re going to take to kill Fortescue.
There’s an elevator we need to reach.
Our death march is a haunting symphony of thunder and lightning and screams and shouts and bullet fire. Willcocks on one flank and Stirling on the other flank. Lights shatter under our gunfire, exploding with flame and glass. Opulence is torn down, ruin in its wake. A soldier in a black coat falls to the carpeted floor with bullet holes in him. I step over him clumsily, my walking stick making round dents in the red carpet. Portraits on the walls glare at us. The ivory tower has had a long history and many men have sat in its highest tower.
“Look out!” Stirling yells, and I duck as a bullet cracks and a man flies backwards, his black-clad body smashing into one of these portraits, shattering the glass.
I catch my breath, extending to full height.
The room shakes with a rifle gunshot and a bullet goes through Stirling’s back. He spits out blood and falls to the carpet. I whip out my pistol and shoot the guy just as he lets off another bullet, which smashes into the ceiling and causes debris to sprinkle over him.
I catch a momentary glimpse of Stirling’s dead body.
There’s no time.
I follow Willcocks up through the tower of Charles Fortescue without looking back. My body is sore but there’s adrenaline surging through it. My walking stick carries me across the carpet. We ascend a shallow set of steps with a chandelier on the ceiling.
A soldier rounds the corner on us at the top and Willcocks puts a bullet through his face. It rips his jaw from the socket. I leap over the body and we enter a carpeted corridor with a vaulted ceiling, marble statues lining it, the elevator at the end.
Bullets choke and bodies collapse in puddles of blood.
Something strikes me in the side, biting off a chunk of flesh. I gasp, careening forward and barely keeping my feet. I glance over my shoulder and see a group of black-coats converging on us. Willcocks wheels around and puts himself in front of me.
“Get to the elevator!” he screams, firing his rifle.
Bullets fly back, striking him all over, and yet he stands. His blood splutters on me as I race as fast as I can through the corridor. Another guy appears in front of me and fires his gun, the bullet striking my shoulder. Pain blasts through me as I lift my pistol and return fire. My bullet misses, smashing into the elevator. Smoke shoots off it. Bullets are hissing past me from behind. The guy ahead fires again, narrowly missing my face. I shoot him in the chest and then the throat and he falls in a pile of death. My hand claps the call switch for the elevator and the doors slide open immediately. I glance back to Willcocks, on one knee.
One soldier puts
a bullet in his head.
I step into the elevator and the doors shut. I drop my pistol and crash to the floor, my walking stick clattering out of my hand and rolling to the other side of the lift. I feel the earth retreating as the elevator ascends the tower of Fortescue. There’s no sound but the ghostly ring of gunfire in my ears. I can imagine the scene outside. London on fire. Bodies lining the streets. Innocents screaming. Our revolution, pushing ever closer to the tower.
I feel that sickness surging inside me. I don’t intend to make this long. I’m going to walk right in there, take care of whoever else is guarding him, and then finish it. I don’t expect there to be any fanfare. I don’t intend to create any. I just want to be the one who does it.
There are thirty floors and we’re moving past number eight.
Look how far we’ve come, says the whine.
I rest my shoulders and inhale slowly. Floor ten.
We’re still here. We persevere.
Floor fifteen and I grab my shoulder. Blood soaks my hand. My hand finds my side where that bullet bit off my flesh. There’s blood all over the floor of the elevator. I hear thunder crashing and it tells me we’re higher than we’ve ever been before.
Floor seventeen.
Arthur, is this really what you want?
Freedom for our people. Equal rights. After today, we will no longer be the waste they’ve made us ever since the war. We will no longer be their weapons. We will be free to walk the streets like all the others. But most of all, Charles Fortescue will be dead.
Do you even care about them?
Floor twenty-four.
Do you care about any of them? Or do you just care about killing Fortescue? Why do you hate him so much, Arthur? What did he ever do to you?
He’s caused me so much pain.
Stop blaming them, Arthur.
Floor twenty-eight.
I grab my walking stick and lift myself off the ground. It sways underneath me and I’m thrown into the wall. Thunder strikes. Lightning cracks and the lights in the elevator flicker for a brief moment. I slide my pistol in its holster. I close my eyes.