Liberty (Flash Gold, #5) (10 page)

“Would a mad trapper have
gotten poetic about Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and
Magnetism?” Kali asked, pointing to a page.

“Depends on
how
mad he was.”

Kali snorted. “This is
amazing. Why would she have left her notes here?”

“Maybe she thought she’d
get caught blowing up the mountainside and didn’t want to risk the
Mounties getting ahold of a book filled with such scintillating
topics.”

Kali flipped through the
pages, then froze about a quarter of the way into the journal. Long
seconds passed as she stared down at scribbles and equations. They
made no sense to Cedar, but the lump sketched in the margin looked
vaguely like a lump of ore.

“Is that—” he
started.

“Flash gold,” Kali
breathed.

“It’s not the recipe, is
it?”

“I… I’m not sure. I need
to go through this carefully. When we met her, she said she’d
worked with my father, right? Been his partner on the project? At
least early on.”

“I’m not sure
met
is quite the word for the encounter we had with her.”
Cedar rubbed his backside, remembering those tiny bullets biting
into it.

“What if she has all the
same notes that he had?” Kali whispered. “What if the secret is
right here within these pages?”

“Why would someone who
wanted to destroy the flash gold—and make sure nobody else ever
made any—keep instructions on how to create it?”

“I’d never throw out my
notes, especially if I discovered something important.” A wistful
expression crossed Kali’s face. “Not that I’ve ever done anything
important. Making gadgets to ride around on isn’t exactly
groundbreaking.”

“Kali. First off, your
gadgets
are
important, and they’re damned clever too.
They’re much more useful than anything some stuffy scientist in a
stuffy laboratory would come up with. Second, you’re eighteen.
Nobody expects a scientist to be groundbreaking until she’s at
least twenty-five.”

She snorted. “I’ll never
be a scientist. Not with my lack of education.” She turned the
page, her gaze never leaving the journal as she spoke to him.

“It’s not like you can’t
get some formal schooling once you get out of here.” Cedar had not
had much formal schooling himself, so he couldn’t speak of how
useful it might be, but she was smart enough that she might enjoy
it.

Kali shook her head and
flipped another page.

He almost opened his
mouth to try again, to assert that she had plenty of time to make a
difference in the world, if that was what she wanted, but his lips
faltered, and the words died on his tongue. How was she going to
enroll in school somewhere if she was a known criminal? How would
she publish papers, if her name and face were on post office walls?
He rubbed his face, holding back a groan. Had he ruined her life by
letting her rescue him? It wasn’t as if he could have stopped her
from within that jail cell, but if she’d never met him, she never
would have been tempted to turn criminal.

With a lump of regret
thickening in his throat, he started toward the front window,
intending to look out again to make sure they didn’t have any
company. On the way, he accidentally kicked the corner of the box
of firewood.

A click sounded behind
him, followed by a
ker-thunk
as a trapdoor fell open on
the other side of the fireplace. The spot where he had detected the
hollow.

Kali lowered the journal
and dropped to her knees to peer into the darkness. “There are
stairs here going down to a room. I’m going to take a look.”

“It’s darker than
midnight down there. Might want the lantern.”

Cedar walked toward the
table to fetch it, but remembered that he had wanted to check
outside and swung over to the window on the way. He thought it
would be a cursory glance, but he cursed when he spotted movement
out near the pond. Someone was pushing through the reeds near the
dock, someone wearing the red uniform jacket of a Mountie.

“Kali, it’s time to go,”
Cedar whispered.

She had disappeared down
the stairs and did not hear his whisper. Instead, she called back,
“Cedar, come look. Someone did some mining down here, and she’s
using the hollow for a workshop. This is where all of her goodies
are. I think that’s a table for alchemy—there’re all manner of
potions on it. Are you bringing the lantern?”

Cedar ducked below the
window, so he wouldn’t be visible if the Mountie looked toward the
cabin, and crouched by the trapdoor.

“Kali, we’ve got company
coming, and the guard spider isn’t likely to stop it.”

“
Now?
I want to
look around.”

“It’s a Mountie, and
there’s probably more than one.” He was probably one of the
trackers Cedar had been thinking of earlier, leading a party of
men.

Kali poked her
soot-covered face out of the hidden nook. “What if you shut the
door and join me, and we hide down here until they give up
searching for us?”

“You want to trap us in
the lair of a mad witch?” Cedar frowned at the dusty floor of the
cabin. The tracker might be able to pick out his large footprints
among the smaller ones that Kali and Amelia had left.

“There are
tools
down here, Cedar. Tools I could borrow to make some
Mountie-distracting gizmos.”

Though he hated the idea
of letting himself be trapped, he could hear the plea in her voice
and suspected she might not listen to reason and leave with him
even if he said it was too dangerous to stay. He took a step onto
the stairs but halted when the baying of a hound drifted through
the door.

He backed up. “Sorry,
Kali. They’ve got dogs on our trail. They’ll find us, even through
a hidden trapdoor.”

She cursed lengthily, but
walked up the stairs as she did so.

“At least you’ve got the
journal, right?”

That earned him a long
sigh, followed by an unintelligible grumble.

Cedar waved for her to
duck low as they crossed to the doorway. He trusted the shadows
inside the cabin would make it difficult for the Mountie to see
them through the window, but they didn’t need to take risks. The
door wasn’t visible from the pond, so he led the way out, then
headed toward the trees out back, keeping the cabin between them
and the Mountie, and keeping his eyes open as well. The tracker
might
be in the lead, but the team could have split up,
too, and there could be more men searching behind the cabin.

Shouts sounded from the
direction of the pond, and the hound bayed again, enthusiasm for
its job coming through in its sonorous voice. It was definitely on
their trail, and it was excited about that.

Cedar and Kali jogged a
half mile through the trees in silence. As he turned into a stream,
hoping the water would confuse the dog for a while, he couldn’t
help but think again about how Kali was only in this predicament
because he had talked her into helping him with his bounty hunting
the winter before.

“I’m sorry I got you into
this,” he apologized as the icy water flowed around their
ankles.

To his surprise, she
smiled at him. She couldn’t be happy about leaving that workshop
unexplored, so that must mean...

“You’re not planning
something, are you?” he asked.

“Planning to offer this
back to Amelia—” Kali waved the journal, “—in exchange for the last
chunk of flash gold.”

“You think she knows
where it is?” Cedar had been wondering if Cudgel Conrad had been
working with a witch ever since he had discovered the invisibility
powder. Maybe he’d had a relationship with Amelia.

“If she doesn’t yet, she
will. She’s persistent.”

“What if she won’t give
it to you? What if she threatens to blow it up first?”

“Then I’ll promise to use
her notes to make more of the stuff. Lots more. I’ll threaten to
sell it to governments all over the world, since she seemed
terrified of that.”

“Do you think you can do
that based on her notes?”

“I don’t know. I’m not
magical in any way, and I think that’s an element in making the
flash gold, but she can’t possibly know what my father told me or
what notes of his I have. For all she knows, I may have been lying
to her before when I said I didn’t know anything about it. I could
tell her I know a real witch that I could work with.”

“So, your plan is to find
her and lie to her,” Cedar said, listening for the baying of the
hound over the gurgle of the stream.

“I believe it’s called
bluffing.”

“We don’t have any idea
where she went from here,” Cedar pointed out, remembering the skid
marks on the dock. The flying contraption had landed there the day
before, but he had no way to know where it had gone from there.

“It’s a good thing I have
a tracker then.” Kali gave him a pointed look.

Cedar tried not to feel
bleak, or that he wouldn’t be able to meet her expectations. He
wanted
to meet them. He owed her.

“We’ll find her,” he
said, though he had reservations about how well that would go,
especially as he stepped out of the stream and turned them back
toward the ridge and toward Dawson. He was very aware of the baying
of the hound in the distance.

Three black airships floated over Dawson and the
Yukon River. Kali did not see the blue American craft anywhere. Had
it been shot down? Had it fled? What exactly was going on in
town?

She and Cedar were
looking down at Dawson from the top of the ridge, about two miles
from where the massive landslide had happened. They hadn’t circled
back to check in with Kéitlyudee or to see if the scavengers had
found anything. It was too risky, especially in full daylight. She
and Cedar had left the cabin as quickly as they could, and it had
been about an hour since Kali had last heard the baying of the
hound, but that didn’t mean that the Mounties weren’t still
tracking them.

She drummed her fingers
against her pocket where she had tucked Amelia’s journal. Though
pleased to have discovered it, if she couldn’t locate the woman
before she destroyed the other chunk of flash gold, then Kali
couldn’t try her bluff. She had to either find Amelia, or find the
flash gold first. Unfortunately, she had no leads on either of
them, and as amazing as Cedar was, he couldn’t track someone in the
air, not unless Amelia was kind enough to bang against trees along
the way again.

“Those ships don’t have
any government markings.” Cedar had been scrutinizing them since
they’d come over the ridge. “I wonder if someone is trying to use
force to take something from the city. Would gangsters or pirates
be so brazen as to come in during the middle of the day?”

“Any chance they’re
Cudgel’s people?”

Kali didn’t care that
much about who was piloting the new airships or what they were
doing. She had too many problems of her own that were keeping her
mind spinning. If she found the flash gold Cudgel had stolen from
her, she could use it to build something new that could take Cedar
and her out of the area at a decent speed—another self-automated
bicycle or perhaps a steamboat. She could also consider trading it.
It was the only thing of value that she had left, but it was of
tremendous value. They could get far with the proceeds from selling
or trading it, and she might have enough money to buy parts for a
new airship. As much as she dreaded the prospect of starting from
scratch, she would do so if she had to. One way or another, she
would fulfill her dream and fly around the world in her own
aircraft.

“That’s an interesting
notion,” Cedar replied thoughtfully. “His organization
was
big. Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean there’s not some
lieutenant that stepped forward and took charge. They did have that
scam going in the area, scaring people into selling their
successful claims cheaply. Maybe that was the first step of some
bigger operation they were setting up.”

Movement in the sky west
of the city drew Kali’s eyes. Her breath caught. A flying machine
with large, mesh butterfly wings flapped over the river, heading in
the direction of Dawson. Kali had seen that machine before.

She gripped Cedar’s arm.
“It’s her.”

“Going to visit town?” he
asked. “Or to visit the other airships?”

“If those
are
Cudgel’s people… remember that invisibility powder?”

“Oh, I remember it
well.”

“When we first discovered
it, I wondered if some witch might have made it.”

Cedar nodded. “As did
I.”

“What if she’s been
working with Cudgel’s people all along?” Kali asked.

“Would she have known him
all along?” he asked skeptically. “I think Cudgel may have had that
invisibility powder for years, since he was powerful good at
eluding me, no matter what country I tracked him to. There were
times when I was sure I had him, and he disappeared on me.”

“I don’t know where she
lived before coming here, but maybe someone else made the powder
for Cudgel before, and he had the recipe, and somehow he and Amelia
met when he came to Dawson. She could have been here all summer,
biding her time until she was ready to find me and destroy the
flash gold.”

Kali ground her teeth,
glaring as the one-person flying machine bobbed through the air
like a bumblebee drunk on pollen. Despite the haphazard flight, it
covered the distance quickly, soft puffs of black smoke wafting
from the vent behind its rider. It wasn’t heading toward the city
but toward one of the black airships. On the deck, someone came to
the railing and waved to her, inviting her to land on the open
deck.

“Wonder how Cudgel found
her,” Cedar asked. “And why would she work for him to start with?
She was mighty righteous when she was lecturing you about the evils
of flash gold and saying she wanted to destroy the stuff for the
good of the world.”