Liberty (Flash Gold, #5) (2 page)

The constable looked
toward Cedar, who wore a wistful expression. Tarnation, maybe she
should
have kissed him. It just seemed that they had more
important matters to dwell on.

“I was hoping for his
sake that all that talk of engines would lead to something more
interesting,” the constable said.

Kali narrowed her eyes at
him. “My engine is extremely interesting.”

“If you say so, ma’am.”
He gestured to the front office. “This way, please.”

Cedar watched silently, a
morose expression settling over his face. Kali’s stomach clenched.
Did he truly have plans to escape on his own? Or had he resigned
himself to his fate? Well, it didn’t matter, either way. She would
not leave him here to rot in jail—or to be hanged.

She had taken a couple of
steps toward the door, obeying the constable’s gesture, but on
impulse, Kali ran back and reached through the bars. She waved for
Cedar to lower his head. They hadn’t shared all that many kisses
during their unorthodox courting, and she wasn’t quite sure how to
effectively lock lips through bars, but on the chance that it would
make him feel less glum, she was willing to try.

His brows twitched, but
he obediently lowered his face. Kali always detested sharing
private moments in front of witnesses, but she pressed her lips to
his, the constable be damned. As Cedar returned the kiss, that
wistfulness coming through in it, he lifted a hand to cup her
cheek. Kali lingered longer than she meant to, especially with
company watching on. Despite her resolve to rescue him, she
couldn’t be positive that she would be successful or that they
would have more moments together like this.

The constable cleared his
throat, but it was something else that made Kali step back.

A thunderous boom sounded
in the distance. An explosion? Some mining accident? She gaped
toward the oilskin window, but could not see anything through the
opaque material. She wouldn’t think they would hear mining mishaps
here in the center of town. Most of the claims were miles away.

“What was that?” The
constable grabbed the doorjamb as if he expected an earthquake.

The ground did tremble
faintly in the aftermath of the explosion.

“Sounded like it came
from the hills behind town,” Cedar said, meeting Kali’s eyes. His
own eyes were grim.

“Behind town?” she
mouthed. As in the hills where she kept her cave hidden, the cave
she was using as a workshop? The cave that housed the airship she
had very nearly completed after months and months of working on it?
She swallowed. “I have to go.”

Cedar nodded in
acceptance, though he shot a glower at the locked gate keeping him
restrained. “I don’t suppose you’d like to let me out to go help,
Bellerose?”

“Sorry, Cedar. You know I
can’t.”

If they continued to
speak, Kali did not hear it. She ran to the front office, barely
able to make herself stop long enough to grab her tools and stuff
them into her belt and pockets. The odds were against that
explosion having anything to do with her or her airship. That
didn’t keep her from sprinting out the door and toward the hills
behind Dawson.

• • • • •

Kali was halfway up the
forested hill that led to her cave before she slowed down, and only
the burning of her lungs and her thighs prompted that. A pall of
smoke hung in the air, visible whenever the trees thinned. It
wasn’t her imagination—it hovered right above the ridge, right
above her workshop. All she could imagine was that someone had
blown up her airship. She had no idea who or why. Cudgel was
dead—who else remained who wanted to hurt Cedar or her? She wasn’t
the friendliest sort, but she didn’t think she had made any serious
enemies in Dawson. Not unless some of Cudgel’s men were after her
for revenge. Or what if some of those pirates had figured out who
had been responsible for crashing their airship?

Brush snapped somewhere
ahead of her, and Kali made herself slow from a jog to a walk so
she could listen. Her booby traps lined this animal path, a path
that had grown a little too worn in the months she, Cedar, and her
Hän helpers had been walking to and from town. Even with the traps,
someone might easily have found her cave. That smoke promised
someone
had
found her cave.

Foliage rustled, and Kali
stepped to the side of the trail, ducking behind a fir tree. She
didn’t usually carry a pistol—she left the shooting and killing to
Cedar—but she
did
usually have a couple of her smoke nuts
with her, homemade grenades that clouded the air and sprayed
shrapnel. Unfortunately, she had left her stash behind in her
workshop, figuring the Mounties would search her and question their
presence. She had figured right, but that left her without anything
resembling a weapon now. For lack of a better option, she unhooked
her hammer from its belt loop.

Footfalls sounded,
someone jogging down the path. Those footfalls sounded light. A
woman? Wanting the element of surprise, she resisted the urge to
peek around the tree to look.

A bronze-skinned boy
limped past her hiding spot, never looking toward her. Soot
darkened his buckskin clothing, as well as half of his face, and a
cut on his chin dribbled blood.

“Tadzi,” Kali blurted,
recognizing him.

He halted so quickly he
nearly tipped over. “Kali!”

“Did you come from my
workshop?” She stepped forward to grip his arm—he looked like he
needed support. His mussy black hair stuck out in all directions,
and blood spattered his tunic. Was that all from the cut on his
chin, or had he received other injuries? “What happened? Are you
fit?”

He stuttered a few times
before finding the words to reply, and when he did, he used Hän
instead of English. “The cave is buried in rocks! I heard someone
trigger one of your traps, so I ran outside to check. Before I
found him, someone made the—” he groped in the air with a
scratched-up hand, then switched to English, the native language
probably lacking the necessary words. “There was an explosion.
Right under the cave, I think. I didn’t see exactly. I don’t know
who or how. But the noise was so strong, it knocked me over. Then
rocks started flying everywhere. A boulder almost crushed me!”

Kali knew she should
check him over and take a moment to comfort him—Tadzi was only
eleven—but his words drove horror into her heart. Waving for him to
follow, she raced up the trail, once again running at full
speed.

“Where’s Cedar?” Tadzi
called from behind her.

With his limp, he was
quickly falling behind, but Kali couldn’t slow down, not until she
reached the cave. “Jail,” was all she shouted back.

He might have asked
something else, but she didn’t hear it. She sprinted the last two
hundred meters and would have kept going at that speed, but a giant
boulder blocked her path. It was the first of many. She scrambled
around it, climbed over another, and then had to pick her way atop
rocks and rubble that buried the trail, a trail she had walked down
just an hour earlier.

When the hillside that
held her cave finally came into view, she stopped to gape. She
could barely call it a hill anymore. The entire shape of the ridge
had changed from peaks to a saddle, with rocks and dirt tumbled
down the side of it. Trees that had stood earlier lay on their
sides now, branches broken and gnarled roots exposed. Her cave, if
it still existed at all, wasn’t visible. She stared dumbfounded at
the spot where it had been. The rockfall had completely buried
it.

“Do you think the cave is
under there?” Tadzi asked, limping up to her side. “And the ship? I
was working on the sewing this morning for the big balloon.”

It crossed Kali’s mind to
correct him, to inform him it was called an envelope, not a
balloon, but she couldn’t manage to speak. What did vocabulary
words matter if the entire ship had been destroyed, crushed by the
rockfall? Given the amount of destruction all around them, she
couldn’t imagine that the cave remained intact. She had never
thought to reinforce it. Who would?

“I wanted to see it fly
so badly,” Tadzi whispered, his voice tight. “I wanted to escape
this place. To go somewhere that I could carve and people wouldn’t
think I’m a useless—” He wiped his eyes with a dirty, bloodstained
hand. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Kali rubbed her own face.
She felt too stunned to cry, but that would come. Already, the
feeling of defeat washed over her. She had worked so hard to build
her ship from scratch. She’d ordered special parts from the United
States, parts that were expensive and slow to arrive. There was no
way she could build another airship before winter. She wasn’t even
sure she could build another airship
ever
. With Cedar in
jail, she wouldn’t be getting fifty percent of the bounties he
collected anymore. She never could have afforded the parts without
that coin.

“Kali?” Tadzi said. “I
didn’t see who did it. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”
Kali looked at him, at the tearstains streaking his dirty cheeks.
“Nobody else was up there in the cave, were they?” Sometimes
Kéitlyudee, the girl she and Cedar had rescued from the pirates,
came to help, and there had been other Hän people who had come out
at times to assist with the construction of the hull and the
decks.

“No, it was just me
today.”

“Good.” Kali gazed around
the torn hillside, wondering if she should look for clues as to how
this had been accomplished. She couldn’t imagine how much black
powder had been required to cause so much destruction. Perhaps
dynamite had been used? Even so, it would have taken a lot. The
rockfall ran for at least a half mile in each direction, with the
scarred ridge up above completely altered.

“How come Mr. Cedar is in
jail?” Tadzi asked.

“A mistake.” Kali didn’t
feel like explaining Cedar’s complicated past to the kid, not now.
Still numb, she picked her way up the slope in the direction where
her cave had been. “Will you stand watch? Let me know if someone
comes?”

Tadzi’s head came up. “Of
course.”

She had better not take
too long—he needed to be patched up. If she could have accessed the
cave, she could have found some bandages. She’d been sleeping up
here and had far more supplies here than in town. She didn’t even
keep a room down there anymore, not with the prices in Dawson so
exorbitant these days, and just had a few things at Cedar’s place.
It occurred to her that this could have happened during the night,
while she had been sleeping inside. At least she hadn’t been caught
in the cave-in. Somehow, she couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to
consider that a good turn.

Surprisingly, the way
grew less rubble-filled as she drew closer to where the cave had
been. A crater of blackened earth came into view, smoke wafting up
from several spots. This had to be the place where the explosives,
whatever they had been, had been detonated.

If she had thought it had
been a mistake or bad luck that her workshop had been caught in
this, the crater assured her otherwise. It was so close to the cave
that she had no doubt it had been the target. She was
half-surprised the miscreant hadn’t set the explosion inside, right
under her airship. Perhaps her booby traps had convinced the person
not to get that close. Hadn’t Tadzi said that one of the traps on
the path had been triggered?

Too bad Kali hadn’t
passed anyone screaming and hollering with a bear trap clamped onto
his ankle.

Out of the corner of her
eye, Kali glimpsed a small flash of blue that came from the center
of the crater. When she turned toward it, it disappeared. She
frowned, wondering if her eyes had betrayed her. Though the area
inside of the crater lay mostly clear, there was still some rubble
and some charred rocks and wood, so she couldn’t see everything
from the rim.

She crouched down,
holding her hand over the charred and smoking earth, trying to
gauge if she could walk on it. Heat bathed her palm, and the ashes
were unpleasantly hot when she touched them, but she wore
thick-soled boots. Besides, people had walked across coals three
thousand years ago in India, hadn’t they? She remembered reading
that in one of her father’s books.

She risked jogging across
the scorched earth toward the middle of the crater. The smoke
rising all about her and the charred rock and dirt convinced her
that more than black powder had been responsible. Probably more
than dynamite too. She had heard that boom a good twenty minutes
ago. The crater should have cooled by now.

Another flash came from
behind a rock up ahead, and for an instant, Kali glimpsed a tiny
streak of blue lightning. A cannonball settled in her belly, and
her pace slowed, despite the smoke wafting up all around her. She
had seen that lightning before, usually crackling about some tool
she had made and powered with a few flakes shaved from her block of
flash gold.

When she could see over
the rock, she halted. A coin-sized melted lump of gold lay atop the
blackened earth. Another tiny streak of lightning spurted from the
center of it. Compared to the usual power that emanated from the
gold, this was definitely weak. She couldn’t tell if the power
source had been damaged beyond repair, but as she stared down at
it, she realized she wasn’t looking at a piece of flash gold that
had been shaved from a larger block. She was very likely looking at
all that
remained
of the block.

“No,” she whispered.

Though aware of the heat
seeping through the soles of her boots, she could only stand and
stare. Unless this was somehow the block that Cudgel had hidden, it
had to have been taken from her workshop. Taken and then used to
blow up the mountainside. Her workshop… her airship…
everything.