Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (17 page)

“
Drawing
!” Reece shouted, startling Hayden as he grabbed his shoulders. He turned about and barked, “Nivy, come here!” Catching Hayden’s disapproving look, he exasperatedly added, “Please!”

Taking her good old time, Nivy moseyed over, handing Hayden his datascope so he could check her work. The glance she cast Reece had the look of a challenge; it made Gideon return to working feverishly on his bim, and Hayden focus on the datascope with undue amounts of concentration.

“Don’t give me that look. You brought this on yourself. Just as soon as you can tell me what I want to know, you’re free to go wherever you want.”

Nivy stopped him with a short flick of her fingers, then started signing, one gesture at a time, until he figured out what she was trying to say. She wanted to strike a bargain. Her answers, for—

“A ship?” Reece repeated incredulously. “You’re kidding, right? A ship? Can you even fly?”

She pointed at him, pretended to steer a yoke.

“Me, fly you? If that’s your asking price, you’d better have
a lot
of answers for me. First I’d have to find a ship, and then I’m not even licensed to fly in the Streams, so…” Rummaging around in his satchel, he produced a piece of carbon paper and a quill. Nivy gazed at them suspiciously. “It doesn’t have to be anything fancy.”

With a sigh that picked up and then dropped her shoulders, Nivy took the quill, flattened the paper out on her palm, and gave him a look. 

“Okay,” Reece began, scratching his head. “Uh, tell me where you came from.”

She stared at him, flatly disbelieving, then put her pen to the paper, drew a circle with some blotches on it, and shoved it back at him. A planet.

Reece made a face as behind him, Gideon snorted. “Very informative, thanks. What Stream is it near?”

Nivy scrawled a big X on the paper.

“None?”

Reece was a little skeptical about that. The Streams went everywhere in Epimetheus. There were several that were popular—the one that lanced around Honora, the one en route to Oceanus, Castor, and Apollon, and the handful that looped around the sun—but there were hundreds more that weren’t as well traversed, Streams that could be dangerous, Streams that pulled unwary travelers into the Voice of Space and left them stranded. Planets that weren’t near Streams typically weren’t inhabited.

“How’s that work?” Gideon wondered aloud from under his bim.

“Well, Atlas’s coordinates could have been preprogrammed into her capsule by its operating ship. Then there wouldn’t necessarily have been a need for a Stream to carry it in the right direction,” Hayden explained, glancing at Nivy for confirmation. She nodded.

“Did your capsule somehow come from the Aurelia?” Reece butted in. The emblem on the capsule, the book, the cufflinks—that was the thread that ran through all the puzzle pieces, the one thing that connected Nivy to Liem to Eldritch.

After a pause, Nivy shook her head, but stopped him with a sharply-aimed finger when he tried to go on. She put on a very pointed expression, willing him to continue on the path he’d started down.

“Did it come…” Reece squinted, concentrating. “…from Aurel
ius
?”

The expression grew more pointed, and she stared into his face in her intense way, as if trying to burn her thoughts into him.

“Not from either of them, but from a ship like them?
Exactly
like them?” More yes’s. That shouldn’t be possible.
The Aurelia
and
The Aurelius
were the original airships, the only two of their kind, more mother and father than brother and sister. There couldn’t be another. “Where, Nivy? Where is the other ship?”

Knowing this was a climactic moment for Reece, Nivy dramatically pointed at the drawing of her planet.

“But if your ship is just like Aurelia…and it came from
your
planet…”

Nivy set to drawing again, connecting quick, sketchy lines, sweeping the quill in a loop. She thrust her hand out and presented her finished piece to Reece.

After he had looked at it, he turned to sit on the house’s back stoop, dropping his head into his hands. Aurelia was Honora’s. She and Aurelius were cornerstones in Honoran history, the blueprints for every Honoran airship. But Nivy’s drawing of Aurelia’s famous emblem had been connected to her planet by a thick, resolute line.

“Aurelia and Aurelius came from Nivy’s planet.” Saying so aloud felt like a betrayal of everything he’d ever believed.

“You sure?” Gideon muttered, and Reece heard the insistent flapping of Nivy’s drawing as she shook it for him to see. “Yeah, but how can you
really
know that? Those ships are a couple hundred years old.”

His hope snagged by the question, Reece dragged his head up to see Nivy’s response. Glowering at Gideon, she pointed at herself, pointed at Aurelia’s emblem, and then made her hand soar like a ship till her finger came down and landed on the depiction of her planet.

Hayden made a fascinated noise even as he sat by Reece and put a consoling hand on his shoulder. “She came here to retrieve
The Aurelia
. To take it back where it belongs.” He peered up at Nivy, squinting as if he were examining her through a micro lens magnifier. “I assume that’s why you were on Aurelia two nights ago. You were seeing if she could still fly.”

“Just a bleeding second.” Reece’s heart did a strange upbeat number in his chest, undecided between nervousness and excitement. “You said you wanted me to fly you back to your planet. You didn’t mean…on
The Aurelia
?”

Hayden gasped. “Reece, you can’t!”

“How would he get back?” Gideon asked Nivy darkly, as if that was the biggest hitch in her plan. “That’s not the issue!” Hayden exclaimed, voice as tight as a piano string liable to snap at any moment. “She could send him back in an escape capsule, but Aurelia, the single greatest artifact of Honoran history, would be left there. Reece could be executed for a theft like that!”

“He’d have to get caught first. I wouldn’t let him get caught.”

“That doesn’t change anything. What we’re talking about…it’s practically treason!”

“Not if Aurelia wasn’t ever ours to begin with. Sounds like we might’a stole her first.”

“Oh,
now
you want to be all noble—”

“Shut up, both of you!” Reece shouted, making them jump. “Nivy?” She glanced at him, seeming a little frazzled by the intensity of Gid and Hayden’s argument. “Would you walk with me?” She nodded and squeezed between Gideon’s broad chest and Hayden’s red face, which were at a level.

There wasn’t enough yard to walk to find privacy, so Reece led her around the building and onto the pedestrian walkway, teeming with shoppers in their garish hats and bustles and men in their shirtsleeves and suspenders. They walked in silence for a time, Reece entertained by Nivy’s absorption in the bright things she saw in the storefronts, bells and baskets for push bikes, top hats in all colors, antique bound books, all sorts of automata...he was going to guess that wherever she was from, it wasn’t like this.

They stopped at a frozen dairy stand, and Reece ordered them scoops of vanilla and ginger melted over apple pie, his favorite. Nivy stared down into the tin bowl cupped between her hands with a look of pure rapture.

“Okay,” Reece began, waving with his spoon for her to join him on a bench tucked around the corner of the red and white striped stand. “Have I earned the right to start asking questions again, or do I need to get you some more ginger for that?”

With an almost-smile and a mouth full of white cream, Nivy nodded for him to go ahead.

“Look, just need to be clear…” Reece searched her face. “I don’t trust you, and I know you don’t trust me. You ran when I would have asked you to stay, and it’s made things difficult. Maybe that’s on me. I haven’t exactly been Captain Courteous these last two days; I know that. But I’m going to tell you everything now, Nivy, because I’m making the choice to believe you. You’re going to have to believe me too, alright? I need you to. I can’t help feeling like we’re running out of time. Both of us.”

Though Nivy seemed engrossed in cleaning the bottom of her bowl, she gave a jerk of a nod. So he told her. About everything from Bus-ship Ten to meeting Po Trimble. Laid out, the story sounded fragmented, holey, because he was still missing pieces. The question was,
which ones
? 

“…Hayden and I have been drafted to be cleanly disposed of at war. Eldritch has probably figured that no one will notice if Gideon gets killed the old-fashioned way, being a Pan and all.”

Thoughtful, Nivy tapped the back of her spoon against her bottle lip, staring over his head at nothing.

“So that first capsule,” Reece continued after a lapse of awkward silence. “Was that from your planet too?”

Still staring blankly ahead, Nivy nodded.

“What do you think went wrong that first time? Do you think it was
The Aurelia
not being able to fly?”

Nivy glanced at him as though surprised he had to ask, held his gaze until he figured it out.

“Eldritch,” he guessed. “Why? And how would he even know what the capsule was? Why the cover up, unless he knew the truth and wanted to hide it? Nivy…” Reece turned sideways on the bench, forcing her to look at him. “Who is Charles Eldritch?”

Nivy seemed to be suffering from an internal battle of the wills, biting her lip, glancing at him, then shaking her head as if arguing with a voice only she could hear. Finally, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the piece of parchment already decorated with the sketch of her planet and Aurelia’s emblem. She turned to its clean side and stared at it.

“Nivy?” Reece leaned down to look up into her face.

Without meeting his eyes, she put a hand on his forehead and pushed him away. He waited.

Suddenly, she began scribbling furiously, her eyes screwed up in concentration. When she had drawn a new planet, she tapped it madly with her pen until Reece nodded in understanding, then started writing in an unpracticed, childlike scrawl, E—L—R—I—C—H. She was missing a few letters, but he wouldn’t dock her points for that.

“Okay, okay.” Reece rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Eldritch and a planet. Not Honora? Your planet? No? Okay. Uh. He…”

Impatient, Nivy kept tapping the nib of her pen against her drawing. She drew an arrow from Eldritch’s name to the planet and darkened it with a few fevered strokes.

“He is going to another planet? He’s a spy?”

Nivy paused on the second question and tipped her head uncertainly. Seeming to decide to leave that question be for now, she continued rapping her pen on the planet, waiting for him to try again.

“He’s…
from
another planet?”

Nivy pointed at his face and nodded enthusiastically. He’d struck gold.

“He’s an alien? Eldritch is an alien?” Reece repeated. He was sure Eldritch was registered as Honoran-born—otherwise he wouldn’t be allowed to be headmaster—but him being an alien wasn’t otherwise fishy. There were loads of non-natives living on Honora. “What planet is he from?”

Nivy began drawing slapdash circles around her first illustration, and after several guesses, Reece worked the word “galaxy” out of her frantic gestures.

“Nivy, you’re losing me,” he admitted, rubbing a hand through his hair.

Throwing down the parchment, Nivy put her chin in her hands. If Reece felt frustrated, he couldn’t imagine how she felt.

After a moment of sitting in restless silence, Nivy looked up at him, studying him intensely. And somehow he knew, without any certain proof, that she was trying to decide whether or not she really could trust him.

Nivy carefully picked up the parchment and angled it on her leg so he couldn’t see what she was drawing. After a moment, and another scrutinizing glance, she extended her work. Scratched in the margins of the cluttered page were two words.

The Kreft.

Reece opened his mouth to read them aloud, but Nivy put a finger to her lips and shook her head frantically.

“I don’t understand. What is it?”

She pointed to Eldritch’s misspelled name.

“Is it something he’s after?” She shook her head. “Is it his planet? His…his race?” Finally, she nodded, and visibly shivered.

So there it was. Eldritch was an alien, something called a kreft, or a kreftite, or what have you. How did that help Reece? What was in Nivy’s head that she couldn’t draw or spell? Why was she shivering?

Someone cleared their throat, and Reece jumped and looked up.

“Sorry,” Hayden uncomfortably said, scuffing the toe of his shoe against the road. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“What is it?” Despite Hayden’s apology, Reece couldn’t help but feel annoyed by the interruption. He’d finally been making headway.
The Kreft
. What were they?

“It’s just, Scarlet’s at the house, and—”

“Scarlet? At Mordecai’s?” Somehow, the picture of the upstanding young lady in petticoats and the one of Mordecai’s grungy workshop clashed in Reece’s head.