Authors: Tim Akers
"The boat that I was on. That sunk under me, that boat? The Badge can't seriously hold me responsible for what happened there." I had a picture in my head of the lines of Badgemen, lined up and firing into the water. All hands lost. Of the pearl-white bodies boiling out of the river, clawing onto deck, the howls of the captain as they broke into the cabin. Lost or unaccounted. "They have to know what happened. Right?"
"Says here there was a fire on board. Something you brought on as cargo went up in flames when you tried to use it." He was staring at me, not looking at the paper. "Says here you started the whole thing."
"How does it say that, officer, if all hands are lost or unaccounted?"
He was about to answer me when the door rattled and another man came into the room. Smooth-looking guy, his Badge uniform tailor-fit to his broad shoulders and substantial arms. Guy like him, you expect to see calluses on his knuckles, or at least the crooked evidence of a broken nose. His hands were folded at his waist, smooth and white.
"Well, that's what makes it a conspiracy, doesn't it?" he said. His voice was clipped, his enunciation perfect. He walked past the clipboard man and peered down at me on my dirty little bench. "Other people, working together. We don't need to talk to anyone who was on the boat to know what you did there, Jacob. We just have to talk to the people you planned this with. So. Just to be clear, you are Jacob Burn."
"We've been through this. You were probably listening from the other room."
"Of course. But statements require official witnesses. Listening from the other room does not qualify as witnessing, in a court of law."
"Am I making a statement, then?" I asked.
He smiled tolerantly, then held out one hand, as though to help me up.
"You are Jacob Burn," he repeated.
"I am."
"And you transported a device onto the ship known commercially as the
Bandycoot
. And that device was provided to you by a third party, with the intention that you would activate it at a predetermined time and place."
"Why do you think they named it the
Bandycoot
?" I asked. "It seems like a terrible name for a boat. Isn't that some kind of rat?"
"Mr. Burn, please answer the questions as asked." His hand stayed in front of me, unwavering. "They are simple enough questions, aren't they?"
"Simple enough, sure. But tricky. 'Yes' can mean a lot of things." I leaned back against the wall, wincing as my shoulder touched stone. "I take it you're Matthew the Joker. Or do you prefer Matt?"
Officer Matthew gave the clipboard man a disapproving glare, then turned his attention to me.
"Let me summarize things for you, Jacob. We know where this device came from. We know who had it made, and we know they provided it to you. We have spoken to the people involved."
"You have?" I asked. Once again I heard that beetle-driven voice in my head, the pipes thrumming in time with his every word. "That's interesting."
"We have. Their involvement with the Council is well known to us. Their interest in you and your family is well documented. Believe me, we understand." His hand inched forward, palm up. "There's nothing we can do for you, though, if you don't help us first."
I looked from his hand to his face, earnest with officially mandated concern. Clipboard man stood at his side, looking nervous. I smiled.
"What the hell are you talking about?" I asked. I didn't like where his questions were going. Mostly because I didn't like it when the Badge pretended to care about me, like I was in danger and they just wanted to help out. That I was in danger was beyond question. I kind of assumed they were the ones putting me in it. My memories of the past hour seemed to revolve around officers shooting at me, chasing me and then arresting me. Awful clever way to show concern.
A wave of disappointment washed over his face. He turned to the clipboard man and shrugged.
"Get some kind of statement out of him, then file the paperwork. The charges will stick long enough for us to get to the bottom of this."
And then Matthew the Joker left. Clipboard man grimaced at me, shuffling his papers. We were quiet for a long time before he did anything.
"You're going to contest the charges, then," he said.
"Is that going to matter?"
"No, Jacob," said a voice from just beyond the door. "It's not."
We both looked up as she walked in, clattering.
"Hello, Angela," I said. "You're looking like a nightmare."
Not a nice thing to say, but I had no reason to be nice to Angela Tomb. And she had no reason to be nice to me. We had taken turns almost killing each other for the last couple years. I had done a better job of it.
The Tombs were one of the Founding Families of Veridon. Like most of the Founders, they had fallen on hard luck in recent years, and were struggling to maintain their grip on power in the Council. Their Right of Name guaranteed them a certain amount of sway, and they were lucky to still have it. Lots of Founders had mortgaged their Rights, once they had nothing else to sell. Burn was no exception. Our Right was all we had left. Gave us a seat on the Council, and certain privileges in the city. It wasn't much.
Patron Tomb, Angela's many-times-great grandfather, had done an unexpected thing, though. He sold the Tomb Right generations ago, before Angela was even born. The Right would pass into other hands as soon as the elder Tomb breathed his last. Those were the conditions of the contract. The unexpected thing was what Tomb had done next. He hadn't died. Turns out the Tombs had access to some arcanely morbid technology. The old man lived on, sealed up in his namesake, living a life of dying every day.
A couple years ago, something similar happened to Angela. She and I had... well. A disagreement. Something to do with that business with the angels that had everyone thinking I was crazy. And that disagreement ended with her falling off a balcony and landing on the cold, hard stone. Last I saw of her, there was a lot of blood, and a lot of angles under her skin that didn't look natural. A season after that, and Angela walks into the Grand Chamber of the Council. Looking like a nightmare.
She was wearing the formal engine. Before her accident, Angela had been a pretty girl, the kind of pretty that only a life of privilege could manage. Delicate, in a cultivated way. And that pretty was still under there, under the metal and tubing, burdened by a brass tank that groaned and gasped whenever she talked. The bulk of the engine had been disguised to look like a ballgown, a wide dome of metal leaves that mimicked ruffles and crenellations and bustle. Angela was clamped into this device at the hips, her legs apparently either clipped away or curled fetal inside. She moved smoothly across the floor, some collection of a hundred tiny feet tapping against the stone like an army of piston-driven centipedes. The metal leaves of the dress flexed and hissed as she came at us, parting briefly to reveal exhaust vents that puffed steam into the room. She settled before us and smiled. Horribly.
From the waist up, and in a dark room, Angela could be mistaken for a normal girl at a party. But that would require a very dark room. From the front she looked merely stiff. She was wearing a subdued blouse, tightly corseted and complementing the enameled leaves of her locomotive dress quite nicely. I assumed those leaves could be changed out, because I had seen her in the formal engine a dozen times, and never had the color been the same. A concession to the girl she had been. None of her movements were natural, and the reason for that loomed behind her like a stalker. From the bustle of the locomotive dress sprouted a brass tank and tower that reached to just below the nape of Angela's smooth neck. The tower looked like a kebob of brass spiders, their legs sinking smoothly into Angela's back, twitching as she moved, either assisting her actions or dictating them. The last of the spiders held the Lady Tomb's head like a precious egg, delicate brass pistons clutching the line of her jaw, spreading like a corona across her skull. Her hairdresser put a lot of work into integrating that machine with Angela's sun-golden locks, and they did just enough of a job to make it truly vile.
When she smiled, there was nothing human to it, like a doll that could switch one face for another. Angela looked at us with diamond sharp eyes and raised a hand, almost offering it to me, but not quite. As though she were prepared to receive a kiss or deflect a blow. I shivered at the carefully formed familiarity of the action, and the utter sterility of its precision.
"Such a charming boy, Jacob." She looked down at me, crossing her pretty arms across her chest. "But never the smartest."
"Never the luckiest, either. You here to gloat over my predicament, or is this a social call?"
"All of my calls are social calls, Jacob."
"Then you're here on business." I stood up. Angela was the kind of girl who made society her business. Society and trying to run the city, whatever the cost. The clipboard man retreated to the corner of the room. He could be snide about famous people, but he knew to get out of the way when the players started to play. "What business could you and I possibly have?"
"Let's at least pretend to follow the niceties, shall we?" she said. Her voice was like air emptying through a wet valve. "How have you been? Keeping busy?"
"I've been great, Ange. Poor, kicked out, in a lot of fights and forgotten about. But great." I smiled my happiest smile. "Mostly I haven't been dead, Lady Tomb. How about you?"
She stiffened, if that was possible for a woman who was mostly metal and the memory of flesh.
"You can be clever if you like, Jacob. But there's no need to be rude."
"You shot me," I answered.
"You threw me off a balcony," she countered.
"You fell off a balcony. I just happened to be there. Either way, I seem to have come out ahead in that deal."
She raised her eyebrows, accompanied by a symphony of twitching from the spiders that lined her back. "I suppose you did. Though I think we'll have to wait for the final account to be settled before we compare scores. Have we given up on being polite, then?"
"I have to be honest, Angela. I never put a great deal of effort into it."
"No. I suppose not." She pulled off the long silk gloves that she had been wearing and draped them over her arm. Her hands were extraordinarily thin, and held together by narrow splints of some glossy black material that shimmered whenever she flexed her fingers. "I don't suppose either of us really did."
She looked tired. Hard to see the girl I used to know in this contraption, the girl I grew up with, went to balls and summer estates with. But she was still in there, wrapped in brass and some ugly history. Most of our social circle spun apart on reaching adulthood. We were no different.
"What do you want, Angela?" I asked, quietly. She looked at me with her tired eyes, then snapped out of it. Pulled the gloves back on and straightened her back.
"You keep turning up in interesting places, Jacob. I'll admit, after our last little trouble, I was pleased that the Council was able to make a fool of you. That no one believed your side of the story. You disappeared into the city, and I was hoping that was the last of you." She dragged her eyes away, seeming to notice the clipboard man for the first time. When she looked back at me, there was none of the little girl in her face. "For a while I even thought you might have left the city."
"I thought about it. But what would I do downfalls? I'm not a farmer."
"No. Not much of a frontiersman, are you?" She cocked her head at me. "It'll always be the city for you. But I had my hopes. Anyway. Then you started showing up, you and that bug."
"Wilson. His name is Wilson."
"I don't care what his name is, Jacob." Back to Angela the nightmare, now. Angela the Tomb. "You and your friend started making an appearance in certain reports that I get. And then you made a new friend." She spread her hands wide. "And now we're here."
"Ezekiel Crane," I said, nodding. "Though I wouldn't call him a friend."
"Is that his name? Because he's someone whose name I do care about."
"Tall, thin guy, glasses?" I made an unfolding motion. "I mean, really tall."
"We've never met. To me, he's more a presence in the data than he is a person. It became clear about six months ago that someone else was moving levers around in the city. I've been looking for him ever since."
"Well, you just missed him. That house you were at, just before the factory fire? He was there this morning." I thought of the beetle-swarmed corpse, that voice. "Or some part of him, at least."
"House?" Head cocked again.
"I assume that was you, with the Badge. Down in Nettingway, by the bar where the iron girl found us. You know all about that chase, right, and the Badge cornering us in the factory? How she burned it down, and I got picked up." I spread my hands in careful mimic of her action. "And now we're here."
Nothing for several heartbeats, her face and body carefully neutral. Finally she offered me her arm, like we were at a ball.
"You say the most fascinating things, Jacob Burn. We're going to have to talk this through, you and I."
I took her arm with a bow. Halfway to the door, the clipboard man cleared his throat. This surprised me.
"There is the matter of the charges against his lordship, ma'am. We have a list here..."