Breath of Earth (29 page)

“Oh, hell.” Fenris scowled at them. “I'm breaking the tie. I say airship.”

“You just want to chase another airship and prove yours is better,” said Cy.

“I don't need to prove it. I know it.” Fenris patted the mahogany dashboard. “So, Ingrid, what exactly do these not-so-Hidden-Ones look like?”

“The one in our area is said to be a massive double-headed snake,” she said.

“A massive double-headed snake!” Lee brightened in that particular teenage-boy way, even through his bruises.

The truck drove out of sight. Anxiety twinged in her chest. Maybe they should have followed that instead, but she couldn't miss a chance to confront the man who had murdered so many in the auxiliary.

“Massive? How massive?” asked Cy.

“I don't know. It depends on how old the fantastic is, I suppose. In Japan, the magical sort of namazu is said to be so big that his head is under Hitachi and Honshu's on his back.”

“The ship is lifting off!” Fenris practically cackled. In anticipation of movement, Ingrid grimaced and pressed a hand to her stomach. Cy stood, stooped, and squeezed past her.

“Which way are they going? I can't see!” cried Lee.

“North,” said Fenris. “Probably want to check on their handiwork. There's plenty of cloud cover for us to trail them.”

“Here, miss.” Cy pushed a tin into her hand and slipped back into his seat. Ingrid opened the lid and found divided sections of ginger cookies and salted crackers. She knew from Mama's pregnancy that these were foods to quell an upset stomach. Cy and Fenris had taken care to pack this for her first airship flight.

“Thank you,” she murmured, and sat back to eat.

“Are you sure they won't see us?” Lee leaned way over Fenris's shoulder to look out, and Fenris applied a quick jab to Lee's torso to force him back. Lee crumpled with a whimper. Ingrid stuffed the rest of a cracker in her mouth and dove to the floor, motioning Cy to stay seated.

“Oops. Sorry. Forgot about the ribs,” said Fenris.

“Forgot? Forgot! Because I always look like this?” Lee moaned and returned to his bench seat. More turbulence rattled the craft.

“Buckle up,” said Cy, reaching for his own harness. “The crosswinds here can be pretty strong, and the heat of those fires will affect the weather up here, too.”

Ingrid slipped on the harness, wincing at the strain in her
shoulder. Lee cringed in a similar way. Clouds thickened as though they flew into a pillow. Jostled and exhausted as she was, the lack of a landscape made her nausea even worse. She shut her eyes and shoved cookies into her mouth. They were hard, store-bought, and not at all as good as the ones Mama used to make at Christmastime, but after all the foulness, they tasted divine.

“Damn,” Cy whispered, the word almost lost against the soft purr of the engine and gushing vents.

She couldn't help but open her eyes. The clouds had cleared and afforded them a view of San Francisco from another angle. She hated looking, hated the sight of it, yet she couldn't look away. The patchwork blocks of the city she loved were slowly yet surely being eaten away by flames. Not even the fading blue fog could hide the devastation. The waterfront looked utterly gone, most of the dirigibles cast away or blending with the omnipresent blackness. Smoke suffocated the morning sun and cast a strange red glow.

“They're not turning to Oakland, not unless they're doing a wider pass to come back,” said Fenris. Clouds whipped against the window and stole the view again. Ingrid couldn't even imagine how Fenris remained so cool and in control while flying blind.

“Are you sure they didn't see us?” she asked. Lee's hand snaked over to grab a fistful of crackers.

“Am I sure? Of course not. But it's unlikely. We're in their blind spot, and in clouds. And before you ask, we don't have a blind spot. I have mirrors, see?” Fenris pointed to disks located at various angles along the console and directly overhead
where the glass met metal and showed a tinge of frost. Since she wasn't in his seat, Ingrid hadn't noticed that they were actually mirrors and not simply more dials. “Also, we're at about max elevation for an airship because of temperature regulation. No one is over us, and if they are, we have viewers at the back that I'm sure Cy will check on sporadically.”

Cy took the hint and unbelted again. “Because Cy loves walking like a hunchback through these hallways,” he said, deadpan, as he walked past.

“Our next airship will be a Tiamat with nice high ceilings, then, huh?” Fenris yelled back.

“As if you'd trust anyone other than me to be crew!” Cy called. Fenris grunted in reply.

The craft rumbled again. Ingrid rubbed the back of her hand against her forehead. It came away sticky with sweat and blood. Her body temperature, along with the necessary heat of the craft, made her feel swampy. A glint of light caused her to look out of the cockpit again. They had cleared the smoke and another patch of clouds. Below lay the fast oval of the smaller airship. Dark spots—cows, she guessed—moved through the blue miasma that coated the hills. A jagged line in the earth caught her eye.

“A fissure!” she cried. “That's far larger than the one in downtown.”

“They're landing!” yelled Fenris.

With heavy steps, Cy returned to the doorway. “Maybe they're meeting compatriots out here? And, Fenris, some of the vents at the back weren't angled right, so the mirrors iced over.”

Fenris dismissed this with a flick of his wrist. “It's her maiden voyage. There're bound to be some problems. What's our plan? Are we landing, following . . . ?”

“A ground confrontation isn't in our favor,” said Cy. “What weapons do we have? One rod . . . ?”

Lee managed to flare back his jacket enough to show a pistol holstered by his armpit.

“And me,” Ingrid added quietly.

Cy nodded. “And you.”

“It'll be damn hard to find a mooring tower out here, anyway,” said Fenris. “I don't think cattle can manage a tether line.”

“What was it you were saying about ground landers before?” asked Cy.

Fenris gave him a quick gimlet eye. “They might crash and burn yet.” He checked his mirrors. “However, we've lost our cloud cover, and no one else is in the sky here. If we're going to stand out, let's be extra nosy. Ingrid, can you see anything big and serpentine in that hole in the ground?”

She unsnapped her belt just as the craft made another lurch. She gripped a handle and willed her stomach to obedience as she looked over Fenris's shoulder. The
Bug
had dropped substantially. Trees looked alarmingly close. Fenris pointed straight ahead, and Ingrid forced her eyes that way.

Since she had grown up in the company of geomancers, her only experience with fissures had been in textbooks or moving-picture presentations at the auxiliary. By any scale, this crack in the earth was massive—a minimum of ten feet in width, as broad as twenty in spots. The energy flow here was
so potent that blue poured out of the chasm like a waterfall in reverse.

She could well imagine Mr. Sakaguchi and other wardens being outright giddy about such a discovery, but if they had been here, this never could have happened.

“Looks like that's their destination,” said Fenris.

She studied the figures that disembarked the craft. Thick magic eddied against their knees. The lead figure was a tall man in a brown suit. Next came a woman with a high coil of black hair, toting a tripod and several other satchels.

“That's Victoria Rossi!” Ingrid looked back and forth from Rossi to the crevice. “Oh! Of course. She wants to photograph the Hidden One.”

“Are you saying that they just leveled San Francisco and now they're going to stop and take pictures?” asked Lee, incredulous.

“She already spent the past few days taking pictures all over the city, showing it as it was. As it should be.” Emotion choked her voice. “The mayor's graft killed her photography business. She wanted revenge. If she can actually photograph a Hidden One—well, her career would be set for life.”

Victoria Rossi had preserved all the beauty of San Francisco on film, and then willingly assisted in its utter destruction. Ingrid's hand curled into a fist as heat bloomed across her skin again.

“That man there might be the one you eavesdropped on at Quist's?” asked Cy.

“Maybe. I never saw him.”

Airship turbines churned overhead as another man
debarked. As soon as he stepped onto the ground, a slight blue sheen overlapped his form.

“That's a geomancer!” Ingrid gasped. “It's Mr. Thornton!” Relief left her limp. He was alive and he looked well enough. He wasn't shackled—indeed, he looked dapper as ever. He turned, one hand holding his bowler hat in place, and scowled up at them.

Ingrid's relief was quickly replaced with dread. Mr. Thornton didn't look like a captive. He wasn't a captive.

The man she'd overheard at Quist's had a British accent, and Mr. Thornton . . . He had never fit her image of a Thuggee with his pasty complexion, groomed mustache, natty suit, and a red rose near his lapel. No weighted scarf. No cries of glory to Kali. But the modern Thuggee cause? The fight for his beloved India? Yes. It described him so well, and she had never allowed herself to see it.

Mr. Thornton had been the one who had closed down the basement for so-called fumigation. That's where the bombs had been planted. His car at the workshop had kermanite from the auxiliary vault. It was
him
.

He had boarded his taxi as he left the auxiliary knowing Ingrid would go back inside to die. That everyone he and she knew in the building would die.

And now he had destroyed the city. Destroyed her city.

“They see us!” Lee squealed.

The first man pointed at them with something clutched in his hand.

“And that's them shooting at us,” said Fenris.

The airship turned sharply, the window shifting to a
blurred view of brilliant green trees and rounded hills. Ingrid clung to the seat's headrest with both arms. The floor vibrated so fiercely that the cracker tin danced across the floor. Ingrid's teeth rattled together.

“Don't expose the broad side of the ship!” snapped Cy. “It makes us a better target!”

“Thank you for stating the obvious, copilot,” said Fenris. “I think you should start looking around for a mooring tower.”

“I thought we weren't landing?” asked Ingrid.

“Yes, well, that was before the
Bug
was shot.” Fenris remained eerily cool as he checked gauges and popped the binoculars back into their overhead box.

“Shot!” Images from matinee newsreels flashed through Ingrid's mind, of massive conflagrations that burned everyone to a crisp.

She could get them out alive, though. If she could walk Cy beneath the ocean, she could shelter them through a crash landing and fire. Ingrid was stunned at her own calmness. This seemed minor compared to everything else that had happened in the past day.

“We're not losing air.” Cy leaned over the panel. “It clipped a horizontal stabilizer on the left side, meaning—”

“We're slightly less horizontal and stable while in flight,” added Fenris.

The airship rocked again. From where she stood, Ingrid could see the tension in Fenris's slender arms. Lee emitted a small moan. He was doubled over at an odd angle, his lips moving as if he prayed.

“We could make it to Mill Valley, I think,” said Fenris.

“You think?” Lee squeaked, vibrations dragging out the words.

“If we do that, we'll lose them!” cried Ingrid.

“That man hit us with one shot. He's good, a marksman,” muttered Cy. His head jerked up. “There! A tower.”

The black metal structure stood just across the lot from a domed Russian Orthodox church. It looked to be a converted windmill, rather skinny, but sufficient to dock a smaller-class dirigible. Ingrid guessed they had to be a half mile from the fissure. There were no other vehicles close by. Farms scattered across the hills. By the look of things, there were more cows than people.

“Here's where it gets tricky,” said Fenris. “The tower's not staffed. I'll need to drop someone to moor us.” The
Bug
hovered over a dirt road. Dust lapped against the trees.

“I can't let Mr. Thornton get away,” said Ingrid. “He's not a captive. He did this. The auxiliary. The earthquake.
He can't get away.
”

Cy shook his head. “Ingrid, they already fired on us—”

“Fenris, please,” said Ingrid.

“Oh, damn it, don't start with the ‘please.' There was a field back there and some trees blocked the view from that crack in the ground. I can probably drop you there—”

“This is suicide!” snapped Cy.

“Mr. Thornton killed almost everyone I know!” Ingrid shouted. The betrayal caused a fierce ache in her chest as if she'd been stabbed again. Heat flickered from her arms. “Maybe this man with him is the one who shot Mr. Sakaguchi! I can make a shield, I can protect myself.”

She could hurt these people, too. Out here in the middle of nowhere, she could fling a pressure wave that could knock them all flat and may even ignite the ground lander airship. She
knew
she had the power to do it.

She had always wanted to use her power. Truly use it. Mr. Thornton and Miss Rossi were not getting away.

“If you're going, you're not going alone,” said Cy.

She glared. He'd try to stop her. “But—”

“If they're off on a gallant suicide mission, I can moor the ship,” said Lee. He unholstered the gun and shoved it at Cy.

Cy's lips curled in disgust but he accepted the weapon and dropped it into a coat pocket.

“Meadow it is, then,” said Fenris, bringing them out of a hover and back around. The ship hugged the ground, Fenris's arms rigid as steel as he fought to keep the
Bug
level. The treetops looked so close she could have sworn they'd brush the bottom of the gondola. “Cy, make sure everything's secure since the hatch will stay open.”