Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (24 page)

Mordecai was waiting for them outside the shop, smoking a cigar. His bright Pantedan eyes twinkled as the bims’ engines roared and then sputtered to a stop on the pedestrian walkway before him.

“Lookie there! Not a bullet hole to be seen in one’a you!”

“Only because they weren’t using bullets,” Reece told him dryly, stretching. “They preferred some kind of…I don’t know. Appendage-frying electricity.”

“Eh. Lightning caps. They would.” Mordecai paused, chewing on his cigar and watching them lift their sorry selves off the bims. “Hayden’s already left for The Iron Horse. He’ll be sad he missed ya…don’t think he slept more than two winks. Left you all breakfast, though.”

Gideon paused, glanced around with a frown, and asked suspiciously, “Who’s watchin’ the Vee?”

“No one. Fella’s been out cold for about two hours now. Hayden managed to get some water in him, but he ain’t doin’ so good. Likely will be needin’ that serum before another day goes by, elsewise we’ll have a dead body to account for. You got some you can give him?”

Cringing, Reece heavily sat back down on his bim so that it bounced on its wheels. Bed and breakfast were going to have to wait. He needed to fetch Hayden and put him to work on the serum before the Vee keeled over…though, truth be told, he didn’t feel so far from keeling over himself.

“Here,” he grumbled, shoving handfuls of bottles at Nivy and Mordecai as he pulled them out of his pockets. “Get down there and try to get the Vee lucid. But don’t let him get his hands on any of these. And don’t leave him alone anymore. Stay put till I get back.”

Mordecai and Gideon both opened their mouths as Nivy raised her hand to be heard, but Reece was already kick starting his bim and switching into second gear. He peeled off the walkway, spraying pebbles in his wake.

In the distance, The Iron Horse’s kettle-like whistle sounded, and he grouchily stomped on the clutch to shift up again. He could see the locomotive chugging into the distance, a mile or two ahead of him, too far gone to be stopped now. It looked like he had a half hour drive back to The Owl to stay awake for, and nothing but a splitting headache to keep him company on his way.

Steering with one hand, he reached into the leather satchel slung behind his seat to retrieve his wireless earpiece. As he let it cuff the rim of his ear, he caught the crackling sounds of the morning public wireless wave, and settled back to listen, hoping the brisk morning wind would be enough to keep him conscious.

Guy Clark was heading the broadcast this morning, in a smooth, chipper voice that made Reece mash his molars together irritably.

“Day two-hundred and eleven of the Epimetheus’s solar cycle promises to be lovely. The Honoran Airway Sentries ask for your caution flying in Caldonia today, as it is the biannual equestrian march, and access to ground roads will be limited. In addition to our daily log, today we will be hosting an exclusive interview with Hester Knight, event planner for the Grand Duke’s upcoming masquerade. This interview is sponsored by Mister Mortimer’s Old Thyme Carriages, and…”

Reece made it back to The Owl in record time, though not entirely on purpose. His foot had been heavy without his help, heavy like the rest of him, particularly his eyes.

The Owl’s oak trees and picket fences were swathed in mist; students hurried along under shared parasols, teeth chattering. Guy Clark’s weather predictions apparently didn’t cover Honora’s moons.

Aware that he was entertaining stares from all directions, Reece looked down at himself, and in spite of how bone weary he was, snorted. He was still in his heist clothes, dark and filthy and stinking of garbage. And he could feel that his crop of brown hair was standing on end, sticky with sweat and slicked with rain. Oh well. If he had a reputation to look after, he
might
care, but as it was…

He beat The Iron Horse to its station just east of the Airship Command Center, parked his bim, and sat sideways on it to await Hayden’s arrival. The rain didn’t bother him. By this time, he was so tired that someone could have turned a bucket of water over his head, and he would have thanked them for their contribution.

There weren’t many people on the platform—mostly just girls who were painfully obvious about waiting for some boy or another to return from a night spent in Praxis. They milled about restlessly in their prim black uniforms…Reece’s eyes started to close as he listened to the soft
chhh
of the rain…there was one girl in brown, one out of a dozen in black, walking towards him…

“Reece!”

The buoyant voice startled him. He rocketed up off his bim, slightly frantic, swallowing hard, and looked around. Someone giggled.

“Well, that’s what you get for sleepin’ on the platform,” Po gently admonished.

Reece sat down again. “It wasn’t my first choice, believe me,” he told her as he shook out his rain-dappled hair.

“I do.” Po tipped her head to the side. She leaned across his handlebars to look him in the face. “Everythin’ alright? I was kinda worried, you just up and disappeared yesterday.”

Reece navigated carefully. “I had some business in Praxis. What are you doing here?”

“Oh. Me and Gus are shoppin’ for undulator parts.” She waved a dirty hand at a man in a jumpsuit with a mop of bleached hair and a small, clever face, sitting on one of the platform’s black benches. Too young to be her father. He had to be one of her brothers. “What are you—”

“Waiting for a friend.”

Teeth catching her bottom lip, Po considered him. “Don’t know what it is,” she said after a moment of thought, “but you’ve just got a look about you today. Somethin’ that wasn’t there yesterday. You’re all…feverish.”

Pushing up the cuffed sleeve of her jumpsuit, she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead, like Abigail would have done ten years ago. New though Po was to Reece, this didn’t feel odd or unfamiliar in the least. He wondered if Po ever made anyone feel out of place, or if she was like one of her beloved engine parts that could be jimmyrigged to fit wherever it needed to fit to make the engine run smoothly.

“I haven’t slept,” Reece admitted, because there was no harm in saying that much, and because lying to Po felt twice as wrong as lying to anyone else.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be drivin’ a bim around The Owl then, Cap’n.” Po smiled bashfully; it might’ve been a trick of the dull morning light, but Reece thought she had gone rather red behind her freckles.

Right on time, The Iron Horse noisily slid in on its tracks, breaks shrieking, chimney coughing. Shapes milled behind the milky glass of the carriages, ready to spill out onto the platform. Hayden was probably one of the smallish shapes getting crowded further and further back in line.

“That’s me, then,” Po said as she stood and dusted at dirt on her filthy jumpsuit that Reece got the feeling was there to stay. “I’m off to see a man about an AX734 crude undulator refinement cap. Don’t be a stranger, alright, Reece?”

Reece watched her skip away and almost trip on one of her straggling boot laces as she joined Gus in the boarding queue. She said something to Gus, turned, and waved enthusiastically at Reece one more time while Gus glared over her head broodingly. So, probably not a member of the Palatine Second fan club, then.

“Who was that?” Hayden asked as he joined Reece by the bim, a little breathless.

Reece started to answer before he noticed Hayden’s face—tight, discolored, and tired. His stomach clenched in guilt. If there was a way he could do this on his own, he would do it. In a second, he would do it. The hard fact was, he couldn’t. A captain wasn’t much of a captain without a crew.

“Hayden…don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look so good.”

Hayden smiled and said, “It could be worse. I could smell like I spent the night in a garbage disposer.”

“That
would
be worse.”

“Did you get what you needed? Are Nivy and Gideon alright?”

“Er…in a manner.” Hayden’s face spasmed in alarm, and Reece hurriedly amended, “I mean, we got what we needed in a manner. Crazy and The Grouch are fine. It couldn’t have been easier.”

Hayden eyed Reece doubtfully as he hefted his leather bookscrip from one shoulder to the other with a grunt. Reece tried to keep his face cool, but even his cheek muscles were too tired to cooperate. His attempted smile felt like a lopsided grimace.

“Something’s wrong,” Hayden guessed with a sigh. Distantly, The MA Building’s bell began tolling, counting off the seventh hour as Reece scrubbed his bleary eyes.

“Our sample of the original serum was destroyed. We need you to recreate it from the ingredients we got you. From scratch.”

Reece expected a lecture about safety first and taking risks, but Hayden just stared at him like things couldn’t get any worse, and sighed again.

“As soon as possible, I’m assuming?”

“You’re the doctor. You think our friend the Vee can afford a few hours?”

Making a face, Hayden looked back at The Iron Horse. “I’ll need to swing by the dormitory…collect some of my supplies.”

“I’ll meet you back at Mordecai’s.”

“You’re skipping class again?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Reece said as he sagged onto his bim. “Given my options, I’d rather sleep on a cot than a desk.”

Reece slept for a whole twenty minutes on Mordecai’s patchy couch before Hayden gently shook him awake, his apologetic eyes made huge and comical by the magnifying lab specs he wore.

“I’m sorry, Reece. I’m going to need your help.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Reece mumbled as he unwillingly came to, leaning up on his elbows. His hair hadn’t even had time to dry from his stand in the water closet not half an hour ago.

Nivy came into the room through the kitchen’s swinging doors, artfully balancing a triangle of mugs in her hands. After handing one to both Hayden and Reece, she sat her chin on the rim of the leftover, letting the steam of the chocolate tea (Reece could recognize that smell anywhere) soak her face. Of the three of them, Reece had to say she looked the best. She had her natural wildness to help cover up her sleeplessness, but she still seemed genuinely, bafflingly, somehow alert.

Reece felt worn thin, as if he could stand in front of a light and be translucent.

They did what they could with what they had. The shop upstairs was better lit, but rather less discreet, so they had to make do turning Mordecai’s kitchen into Hayden’s makeshift laboratory. That meant boxing up Mordecai’s junk and sanitizing the whole room to Hayden’s very fastidious satisfaction.

Hayden was spreading a drop cloth over Mordecai’s counter as Nivy and Reece scrubbed at the gritty floor with the sponges bound to their hands. Standing on a chair in the middle of the room, Mordecai worked to fasten new photon globes to his hanging chandelier.

Mordecai coughed as he inhaled dust. “All this cleanin’…it ain’t gonna look like home in here anymore.”

“We’re almost done, now,” Hayden promised. “If you want to go keep wa—”

“Nah. I’d rather be in here, in case somethin’ goes wrong with the serum and it explodes or somethin’.”

Reece thought it would make more sense to want to be out of the room pending a chemical explosion; going by Nivy’s small smile, she would say the same, if she could. If she could. His grin faded.

“What happened to the serum, anyhow?” Mordecai asked. “Thought you were gonna at least try to bring back a copy of the original?”

Nivy’s scrubbing turned violent, and she cringed unhappily.

“We did,” Reece said on her behalf, “but it didn’t make it back.”

“It’s unfortunate,” Hayden sighed. He picked his black satchel up off the floor, clicked it open, and spread it out on the counter like he was unfolding a book with pages made of tapering metal tools. “Anything I make will be more or less a rough mock up. I would’ve liked to see the serum in its purest form.” He paused, appraised the room, and declared, “I’m ready to start. Let me grab the rest of my tools.”

Mordecai started whistling cheerfully to himself as Hayden disappeared into the living room. The sudden privacy Reece and Nivy had down on their hands and knees made Reece feel slightly self-conscious. It was the first chance he’d had to ask her alone—
almost
alone—about what Gideon had said in the tunnel last night.

“
Can
you talk, Nivy?” he asked in a whisper so low he almost didn’t hear it himself. Mordecai went on whistling, as chipper as a spring bird.

Nivy didn’t look up until her scrubbing brought her so close to him that their heads nearly touched. Then she raised her eyes, and with that odd power of hers, forced an answer on him in the silence.

Relief made his words come out as a sigh. “No, you can’t.”

But there was more to it, he could tell, because Nivy’s eyes narrowed slightly, and then her gaze intensified.

Reece shook his head helplessly. “I’m not asking the right question.”

“Or maybe yer just askin’ the wrong person.”

Nivy and Reece both jumped, startled, at Mordecai’s interruption. He didn’t look down at them, just kept screwing in the photon globes, touching them with only his callused fingertips.

“I know I don’t look it,” Mordecai drawled, “but I have been around the bend a few times. Seen a lot, you know. Been to nearly all the planets this side of the Epimetheus, one way or another. One planet in particular, I’ll never forget. Not one of Honora’s ally planets, nosiree. Big slave tradin’ planet, enforcin’ all kinda laws over the lower class. Ever heard’a Zenovia?”

Reece leaned up off his knees, flexing his pruned hands, and shook his head speechlessly. Nivy remained prostrate on the kitchen floor, bowed over her scrubbies with her blue eyes sharp on Mordecai. She looked wary.

“Figured you hadn’t,” Mordecai continued, still intent on his work with the chandelier. “Ugly planet. Ugly government. Cruel place to live, ‘specially if you get lotteried into the slave class. Zenovia’s slaves have less rights than a bucket’a fish bait. Speech is forbidden to them, you see. They couldn’t talk back if they wanted to, because as soon as they get lotteried, they’re collared.”

A bad taste had settled in Reece’s mouth. “Collared?”

“Mmhmm. The collar the slaves wear is some kinda impairment technology that shuts down their vocal chords so long as they’re worn. And here’s the kicker. The slaves can’t take them off, not even off’a each other. Only their master can remove them. Fair as dirt, if you ask me.”

A voice spoke up from the doorway, cutting through Reece’s speeding thoughts. “Her necklace…” Hayden suddenly joined Reece and Nivy on the floor, wearing a lab coat, his goggles, a pair of tight rubber gloves, and an expression that looked ill. “Nivy, is that…is that what happened to you? Are you a…slave?”

That image felt off, skewed. Nivy, a slave forced into silence by a lottery and a master and a piece of shiny new technology—Reece didn’t believe it, even before Nivy started shaking her head. She stuck up her chin proudly, and there, around her neck, Reece saw the black ribbon she never took off. It had never been particularly pretty, but it had never struck him as ugly, as it struck him now.

“You’re not a slave, but the collar works the same,” he said darkly. “It keeps you from speaking. It cuts off your voice.”

Abigail and Liem’s voices in his memory:
“Nivy doesn’t speak.”

“She’s a mute?”

“She doesn’t speak.”

Had Liem known?

Nivy hesitated, then nodded, running her thumb over the band above her collarbone without any particular fondness.

Hayden seemed stricken, staring at her throat. “Can we take it off you? Is there a way?”

“Seems to me,” Mordecai said dryly, “if she’d wanted you boys to try, she would’ve told you what that collar did from the start in her own way.”

“Why? I’m sorry, Nivy, but…who chooses not to be able to speak?”

“Someone with something to hide.” Nivy frowned at Reece’s tone of voice. “Your own people collared you in case you were captured by Eldritch. So you couldn’t speak about who you are or why you want Aurelia back.”

Reece had never dreamed that not being able to talk was
convenient
for her. What better way to guarantee her secrets’ safety than to wear one of those bleeding collars? What sort of person…he stopped that thought. He was overreacting because he’d started counting Nivy as a sort of tenuous friend, a surrogate crew member. A crew didn’t keep secrets of this magnitude from each other.

Even as Reece simmered at her, Nivy cautiously reached out a hand and touched the top of his head, then brought the hand back to her chest to cover her heart. The gesture didn’t make sense, but Reece knew what was at the heart of it. She was sorry.

Nivy repeated the gesture to Hayden, who was like putty in her hands. “I understand, Nivy,” he said with feeling. “Well…as much as I can, I suppose. We really have no idea who you are, do we?”

Nivy outright grinned at him as if to say, “No idea at all.”

The kitchen fell uncomfortably silent. Mordecai occupied himself with disposing of old photon globes while Hayden, seeming embarrassed, returned to arranging beakers, wash plates, and crucibles on the counter. Reece realized they were waiting for him to say something.

Standing on legs bruised from scraping over the hardwood floors, he studied Nivy’s earnest expression and sighed. “I guess you didn’t mean anything by it.”

Nivy rolled her eyes, and Reece read in her face, Of course I didn’t.

“I just thought we were going to start trusting each other.”

She started reaching for his head again, and he batted her hand away, trying not to smile, now. “I guess it’s a good thing you can’t be bought with apple pie alone,” he allowed grudgingly.

An acrid smell made Reece’s throat sting, and he looked over at Hayden, who at the counter, was transferring droplets of green liquid from one beaker to another filled partway with purple. As green curled into violet, the liquid sizzled angrily, and the smell grew more defined, almost rubbery.

“Should we leave you to concentrate?” Reece asked, hoping for a yes as he covered his mouth and nose.

It was a minute before Hayden replied, he was so focused on those tiny green droplets. “It doesn’t matter either way. I’ll be experimenting for quite some time to even figure out what half these chemicals are. I mean, doesn’t this look like hydroburotane to you?” He picked a yellow bottle up between his thumb and forefinger and showed it to him, his magnified eyes widening to disconcerting proportions.

Reece stared at it. He didn’t want to say what he thought it looked like. “Sure, yeah. Hydro…burrow…tang.”

Hayden turned back to the counter and started working again with feverish but precise speed. “Get some rest, Reece. I’ll wake you when I have something.”

It was three hours before Reece rolled off the couch, startled awake by the sounds of frantic shouting and Pantedan curses. He opened his eyes regretfully and stared up at the ominous purple cloud clinging to Mordecai’s low ceilings.

“Cap’n!” Gideon roared as he rushed through the room with a pail of dirty water in either hand. “You’d better come quick!”

Clumsy with half-asleepness, Reece tripped to the swinging kitchen door and hurled himself through it. It would have been better if he’d waited for his feet to come to their senses—there was an ankle-deep layer of yellow foam covering the kitchen floor. With a wordless scream, Reece slid through the foam, crashed into Gideon’s wall of a back, and fell.

“Get up, get up!” Hayden shouted from where he was trying to stop a strangely endless flow of foam from erupting out of an impossibly small beaker by cramming a dinner plate over it. “It will eat through your clothes!”

As Reece thrashed, Gideon doubled over and grabbed him by the front of his waistcoat, heaving him to his feet. Reece could smell the singed threads of his shirt. What was worse, his back was startling to prickle.

“Water!” he bellowed, trying to peel his shirt off before the foam ate through to his skin.

Skidding in the foam, Gideon grabbed a bucket of water and turned it upside-down over Reece’s head.

And that was just the first incident.

After the foam, there was the concoction of liquid that froze Hayden’s hands together. Next came the black goop that bubbled like tar. At one point the kitchen started smelling like an old shoe, and it turned out the smell was from an airborne chemical that had traits similar to a hyperactive compulsor’s.

“Open the vents and try to flush it out!” Hayden said shrilly upon realizing what the smell was. He fanned a glove before his face. “Where is Gideon? Probably off polishing his guns somewhere—no no, I didn’t mean that! Hurry up with the vents!”

Reece, standing on the counter and trying to open the airvents that had long since been rusted shut, snapped, “You
could
get up here and help instead of waiting uselessly on the sidelines like you always—ugh, I’m sorry, that’s not—”

“Uselessly! I’m tampering with dangerous chemicals for you while you sit back and get your forty winks! I didn’t sleep at all last night either, you know!” Hayden violently smacked his glove against the counter, stared at it, and then whispered, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

As Nivy leaped up onto the counter with a butter knife to help Reece with the vent, she looked at him, opened her mouth, and then closed it. He saw her throat constrict as if she’d had to swallow her words. He could have asked her anything,
anything
right now if the collar wasn’t doing its job to a T. In Gideon speak, it was fair as dirt.

“Reece,” Hayden suddenly cried, throwing himself into a kitchen chair, “I
do
get airsick, I’m sorry I never told you! I’m a liar! A terrible liar!”

Reece held out his hand for Nivy’s butter knife and started wrenching the creaking vent out of the ceiling before Hayden could altogether lose his head. Relief washed over him as the vent split and fresh oxygen replaced the old in his lungs.

“That’s not all!” Hayden bemoaned, dramatically dropping his head into his hands. “Do you remember when we were Thirteens, and you and Gideon were going to skip our Honoran History class but Tutor James caught you? I ratted on you! I’m sorry! I didn’t want you to go to the Mead Moon Festival and leave me behind!”

“We weren’t going to go to the festival without you.”

Hayden raised his head. “Really?”

“No, that was a lie. I was testing to see if the chemical’s gone. I think it’s clearing out.” Reece hopped down from the counter and wiped his rust-stained hands down the front of his shirt with a sigh. “Look—”

“I know.” Hayden started straightening his goggles and pulling his gloves back on, avoiding meeting Reece’s eye. Reece thought he was just embarrassed over what had been dredged to the surface (he didn’t bother confessing that he and Gideon had always known about the airsickness and the ratting) until Hayden looked up with a deeply troubled frown. “I don’t know if this is going to work. The formulas I’ve tried so far have had fairly harmless results—”

“I almost died in acid foam.”

“Well, there’s that.” Hayden pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes. “Reece…I can’t make that serum. Someone’s going to get hurt if I keep trying.”

“What if you had some help?”

“From who?”

Reece’s eyes wandered in the direction of the back tunnel, and Hayden made a thoughtful if uneasy sound.

“The Vee?”

“If anyone knows something about the serum, he does. And I think he’ll be eager to save his own neck, if we gave him the chance to try.”

“Gideon won’t be happy.”

“Lucky we’re used to working without Gideon’s stamp of approval. Nivy,” she looked up from the empty beaker she was turning over mindlessly with her fingertips, “go get Mordecai. We’re going to need a little extra supervision.”

The Vee had to be roughly shaken out of the comatose sleep he’d been in all day. The expression, if that’s what you could call it, that flashed across his face upon realizing he was still alive was, Reece thought, the equivalent of human disappointment. Every time the Vee spoke in his withered-snakeskin voice, he had to pause and gulp as if his throat were unbearably dry.

“You should kill us now,” he panted as Gideon, who’d gone to new heights of sourness at hearing Reece’s plan, pulled him to his feet. “It would be a mercy.”

“Right, because you’ve got a whole lot’a that comin’ to ya,” Gideon muttered.

Mordecai raised his gun as Reece stepped forward to cautiously wrap one of the Vee’s arms over his shoulders.

“Walk with me,” Reece ordered, recoiling at the Vee’s rattling breath, so close to his ear.

The Vee took an unsteady step forward before his knees bowed inward. Slouching heavily against Reece, he chuckled hoarsely. “We feel death’s nearness. Shall it take any of you with us, we wonder?”

“Gideon,” Reece choked, and Gideon, grumbling, came and took the Vee’s other arm and draped it across his back.

“Rather cuddle with a spider,” he complained under his breath.

As Gideon and Reece carried him down the corridor, the Vee’s pained groans faded into murmurs. Reece tried to ignore them, tried to think of daylight and laughter and bubbly little Po and anything but the Vee’s chilling whispers, which burrowed deeply, twisting the pit of his stomach…

“Spiders. An interesting tool, to those with the fear of them. Anything can be a tool, of course. Fire…heights…darkness…we wonder, Reece Sheppard, what your tool might be. What could be used to bring you to the brink? You become a different man, at the brink. We have seen it. It is…a wonder.”

Mordecai beat Gideon to cutting the Vee short. Rarely had Reece heard his accent with the gruff edges that Gid’s had, or seen his whiskered face look so menacing. “You’ll do best to keep walkin’ and save your strength, stranger. Young Mister Sheppard here is tryin’ to save yer sorry life.”