Liberty (Flash Gold, #5) (3 page)

“Why?”

“Kali?” Tadzi called from
the edge of the crater. “Your feet are smoking.”

Kali almost left the
melted gold where it was, but it was all she had left. She pushed
her hand up into her sleeve and used the material to insulate her
fingers as she picked up the sad lump.

The warmth on her soles
had grown intense, so she turned and ran out of the crater.

“What did you find?”
Tadzi looked curiously at her sleeve.

“The destruction of my
hopes and dreams.”

The mangled lump reminded
her of the one person she had met who had wanted to see the flash
gold destroyed, that woman who had once worked with her father as
an engineer and alchemist. Amelia had been her name. She and Cedar
had defeated her, but not easily. Months had passed since she had
been swept down that river, but she could easily have survived.
Maybe she had come to complete her self-appointed mission.

“Huh?” Tadzi asked.

Kali sighed. “Can you go
talk to the Hän and see if anyone is willing to help clear rocks?
I’ll pay...” She trailed off. She had a few coins on her, but her
stash had been in the back of the cave. If someone had found her
flash gold and gotten past all of the booby traps she had around
it, then stealing her coin purse would have been simple. The
majority of her tools were buried in there too. “I think I just
need a favor,” she amended, sighing again. “Think anyone would be
willing to help for free?”

“I’ll check.”

When Kali had first
rescued Kéitlyudee, many of the Hän had been appreciative, but
gratitude wasn’t a currency that lasted as long as gold. Kali had
no idea if anyone would come to push boulders around. Would she
even find anything buried in the rubble if people
did
help? Anything worth digging out?

Frustrated, she glowered
around at the abused landscape. She had never craved violence or
had urges to kill people, but nobody had ever wronged her to this
degree. Even Sebastian’s betrayal seemed almost innocuous compared
to this. She had the urge to track down Amelia or whoever had done
this and pummel the person senseless with her hammer. Many
times.

“Too bad the only man I
know who tracks people is in jail,” she muttered.

“What did you say?” Tadzi
asked.

Kali looked at him.
“You’re still here.” She had been too busy fantasizing about
pummeling and hadn’t realized he was still standing here.

“I wasn’t sure if I
should leave you here alone. What if whoever did this comes
back?”

Her first thought was to
point out that a boy with a limp wasn’t going to be much help to
her if the intruder returned, but she bit her tongue to keep the
comment to herself. It would hurt his feelings, and he had already
suffered enough on her behalf. Besides, didn’t people underestimate
her and what she could do all the time?

“You’re right.” Kali
patted his shoulder and pointed toward the trail, what
remained
of the trail. “Neither of us should stay here.
You need to head back to Moosehide so someone can patch you
up.”

“And so I can find help,”
he said brightly.

“And so you can find
help.” Kali wished she could manage some brightness of her own.
Maybe he believed that all they had to do was dig out the cave and
everything would be tucked inside of it, undamaged. She wished she
could believe that.

“Where are
you
going?” Tadzi asked.

“To plan a jail
break.”

• • • • •

The cell did not offer a
lot of room for pacing. That was unfortunate, because Cedar was a
man of action, and the confinement bothered him more than the idea
that his death might be looming somewhere up ahead.

No, he wasn’t going to
accept that this was the end for him. He had finally gotten Kali to
agree that they were officially courting. With Cudgel gone, he was
ready to go on with his life—his life with
her
. He would
find a way to escape.

A scrape and a thump came
from somewhere overhead.

Cedar frowned up at the
knotty pine ceiling. He could reach the boards and had already
tested them for weaknesses. They, like his entire cell, were
sturdily put together.

Another thump sounded,
and he thought of Kali’s interest in helping him escape. He had
meant what he said—he did not want her to risk becoming a criminal
herself to help him. Having Pinkerton detectives and bounty hunters
after you was no way to go through life, even if she eventually had
an airship in which to flee the law.

Still, a little thrill
coursed through his veins. Maybe she cared about him too much to
heed his words. Maybe she was up there right now, cutting a hole in
the roof.

Except those thumps were
quite loud. Wouldn’t she work more quietly? And wouldn’t she have
waited until deep within the night to attempt a jailbreak? The
shadows had deepened inside his cell, and sunset might be
approaching outside, but he could still hear the clip-clop of horse
hooves in the street and the occasional yells of men on the
boardwalk outside the window.

The door leading to the
front office thumped open. Cedar assumed an indifferent expression
as someone in a Mountie uniform walked into the hallway, trailed by
the constable who had escorted Kali earlier. The newcomer brought a
lantern and hung it on a hook just outside Cedar’s cell door. Cedar
recognized him, even though they had only spoken once.

As the man turned toward
the cell, his graying hair and mustache neatly trimmed, his uniform
tidy, his weathered face cool, nerves tangled in Cedar’s belly.
Commissioner Sam Steele. The man who had apparently decided Cedar’s
past crimes—
supposed
crimes—in the United States were not
worth overlooking, despite all of the felons Cedar had brought in,
despite all of the
good
Cedar had done for the Mounties.
Granted, he had been paid well for the bounties he had collected,
but he couldn’t help but feel bitter that the Canadians, his own
people, wouldn’t believe him over some interlopers from another
country.

“Commissioner,” Cedar
said, not letting his disappointment and frustration show.

“Kartes,” Steele said,
his voice as cool as his face.

Another thump came from
above. Cedar kept his face neutral, though panic flashed through
him. If that
was
Kali…

But the commissioner did
not bat an eye at the noise. “They arrived more quickly than I
expected,” he said. “I haven’t talked to Detective Thomas yet, but
I get the impression they were already sending someone up to look
for you.” For the first time, Steele’s gaze shifted upward.

“They’re coming in
through the roof?” Cedar asked, that sense of panic increasing
within him, not because he worried about Kali this time, but
because the ramifications of Steele’s words were sinking into his
skull. He was about to be transferred to the custody of the
Pinkertons.

“Their airship is docking
up there. Apparently, nobody in Dawson thought to build a better
place for aircraft to come in. Not that we get many people who can
afford to come over the pass that way.”

Cedar barely heard him.
The thumps on the roof had taken on a new meaning. He didn’t know
whether it would be easier or harder to escape from the Pinkertons
than the Mounties, but he did know that he wouldn’t have anywhere
to go if he escaped while aboard an airship. It wasn’t as if he
could grab a life preserver and hop over the side.

“Sir,” Cedar said, “I’m
not a criminal. I was wrongfully accused of the murders in San
Francisco.”

“Yes, criminals are
always wrongfully accused. Especially when they’re behind bars or
the hangman’s noose is settling around their necks. Besides,
witnesses saw you shoot a man in the back outside of a mill that
you lit on fire.”

“That was Cudgel Conrad.
Surely, you were able to identify him once you had the body.”

“And what about the
people in the cave? And the men who were killed in the mill, as
well?”

“Those were
his
men. If they weren’t known criminals yet, they were working for
one.” Cedar gripped one of the bars, his fist tightening. Steele
hadn’t denied that they had identified Cudgel. So, what was this
about? Though he was getting the sense that his arguments were
pointless, that Steele had taken a dislike to him from the
beginning, he added, “If you let them take me, you’re losing
someone who’s been helping your people catch
real
criminals.”

“The law’s the law. The
United States already found you guilty in a trial. The punishment
is death. They’re here to take you back and ensure you pay for your
crime. Even if I approved of your vigilante justice, I wouldn’t
interfere with them. Dawson is growing into a respectable city.
We’ve no call for bounty hunters here.”

Steele snorted, stirring
his mustache, and walked out of the room.

Other arguments floated
into Cedar’s thoughts, but he kept his mouth shut. Steele had made
up his mind, and Cedar wasn’t going to beg.

As more thumps sounded,
followed by the cordial voices of fellow lawmen greeting each other
in the front office, Cedar leaned his forehead against the cool
bars. He wouldn’t give up. He didn’t know how long an airship took
to travel from the Yukon to San Francisco, but he had that much
time to figure out how to escape. He just wished Kali would be at
his side to help with that figuring. The worst part about all of
this was that he wasn’t going to get a chance to say goodbye. She
would simply come in to visit the next day and find out that he was
gone, taken in the night, never to see her again.

“Damn it,” he
whispered.

For the first time, he
allowed himself a pang of regret, to feel that all the years he had
spent chasing Cudgel might not have been worth it.

As dusk fell, darkening the streets, Kali leaned
against the wall of a bank half a block from Mountie Headquarters
and considered the airship floating above the building. To say it
was unexpected was an understatement. Seeing it filled her with a
mixture of longing and frustration. Longing because her dream of
flying her own airship was further away than ever, and frustration
because…
Tarnation
, how was she supposed to break Cedar
out of jail when what was probably some kind of law enforcement
aircraft hovered right over the headquarters building?

In the dark, she couldn’t
see the name on the side of the ship, but she couldn’t imagine that
a pirate craft would have anchored so brazenly close to the
Mounties. The hull was painted a dark blue, and big artillery guns
were visible at different points. Lanterns burned on the deck, and
a man carrying a rifle and wearing a blue uniform jacket and a blue
hat with a pointy spike on top came into view.

“Definitely not pirates,”
Kali muttered.

Having never traveled
outside of the Yukon, she had no idea what the military uniforms of
the world looked like, but she guessed those were U.S. soldiers.
Though she hoped they were here for something unrelated to Cedar,
she feared that another Pinkerton detective had been sent to
retrieve him, this time with backup. And Cedar would be easy to
retrieve from a jail cell.

She thumped her fist
against her thigh and growled in frustration. A man walking down
the boardwalk with a hired girl on his arm gave her a curious
look.

Kali nodded at them, then
started walking in the opposite direction. It wouldn’t be good to
have passersby remember that she had been lurking about, studying
the Mounties’ building. The streets were still busy, people flush
with gold ambling into hotels, bit houses, and dancing halls.

While Kali walked, she
mulled over how to get Cedar out. She had nothing but the tools on
her person. Even if she could cut a hole in the wall with them, it
would take a lot of time. Under normal circumstances, she might
have found that time in the middle of the night if the town lay
quiet, but the area around the building was well-lit, even the
muddy alley out back, and the soldiers on that airship might remain
on patrol around the clock. What if Cedar had already been taken up
there, and the soldiers planned to leave in the morning?

She fished into her
pocket, wrapping her hand around the now cooled lump of flash gold.
It might be used to power a tool, if she could find a place to work
and some scrap parts so she could make such a tool. Her heart grew
heavy at the idea of using the last piece of the energy source that
she had, but she couldn’t imagine freeing Cedar without some extra
help. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had an airship she needed to
save the substance to power anymore.

Kali turned down the
street that led to the boarding house on the outskirts of town
where Cedar had a room. Where he’d
had
a room. If word had
gotten out that he had been arrested, the mistress who ran the
place might have already sold his goods and given the room to
someone else. Kali hoped that hadn’t happened and that she could
retrieve his belongings while she considered how to distract those
soldiers. Unfortunately, everything that came to mind involved
destroying things—publicly, loudly, and perhaps with flames. Cedar
hadn’t wanted her to become a criminal to help him, but did she
have any other choice? If only her completed airship was anchored
outside of town, the envelope full of gas, the craft ready to take
off. Without it, the best scenario she could envision was being on
the run with Cedar, fleeing into the Canadian wilderness with
winter on the way.

“One problem at a time,”
she murmured, slipping through the back door of the boarding
house.

The owner or one of her
helpers would be up front, and Kali wanted to avoid being seen.
Even though she had been here numerous times, she did not want to
explain if the lady asked about Cedar being in jail. Already, she
felt like a criminal skulking around as she stepped quietly on the
wooden boards of the stairs.