Arachnodactyl (17 page)

“No,” Ikey said. “No, not at all. Cross—”

“Cross has nothing to do with this!” Rose sat up in bed. “You needn’t concern yourself with what is between Cross and me. That is our own business, and if it so bothered you, then I failed to hear you bring it up last night or even a few minutes ago.”

Despite the dark, Ikey felt incredibly naked and exposed. His hand patted around for his nightshirt or a corner of quilt.

“I didn’t mean to bring up Cross. I wasn’t trying to suggest anything.”

The bed shifted. Rose’s skirts rustled as she stood.

“Then what were you trying to say?”

Expectation sat upon his chest. The right words needed to be assembled and slid into place. Ikey struggled with a deep breath as he reviewed their exchange of words, but the longer he remained silent, the heavier expectation became until it forced the air from his lungs and he could not say a single word.

How could he be so daft? A woman stood there in the dark. A woman he had been with, who had taken him inside her. A woman who had wanted to comfort him in exchange for his company over these last few, intimate evenings encased in her private world of touch and sound. And the realization of her nature deluged him with a cold, dread fear. What the hell did he know of women? Of what they wanted or how to treat them? From his dad, he saw nothing but how to scream at them, to beat and flail and throw things at them as they cried, faces flushed and tear-streaked, hands cracked and red and fending off blows like wisps of paper in an avalanche.

Ikey swallowed hard and trembled in the dark.

What the hell had he done?

“Well, then,” Rose said. “If nothing is all you have to say, I can bloody well hear that from any room in this house.”

She stormed out and slammed the door.

Ikey lay in the dark, wrapped in trembles. He grasped one edge of the quilt, yanked it over himself, and buried his head inside the dusty-smelling cotton. There, he cried, his teeth grinding into each other as his throat pulled and raged with tethered sobs. Hot tears flushed from his eyes.

How could he be so dumb?

C
ross exploded into the room
. “Get shakin’, bacon!”

Ikey bolted upright in bed. His eyes squinted at the lantern glow, and he pulled the quilt around himself.

Cross stepped back out of the room and slammed the door behind him. Darkness enveloped.

Ikey took a deep breath and waited for his heart to cease skittering and skipping. The stuffy air rubbed against his bare shoulders. His head throbbed above his right eye.

After feeling around the floor for his clothes, Ikey dressed in the dark and descended the stairs. Cross sat in his place at the table, his paper held open before him. With each of Ikey’s steps, the music boxes tinkled, but their songs sounded not as complex this morning.

As Ikey approached the table, Cross peered over the top of his paper. “That’s a hell of a shiner you got there. When we get to the hangar, you’ll have to find a mirror and take a moment to admire my handiwork.”

Ikey looked for marks on Cross’s chin, but the lantern glowed behind him, situated on the sideboard.

Ikey swallowed a gulp of tea. “You ever build an automaton?”

“What?” Cross asked.

“An automaton. Have you ever built a mechanical person?”

“No.” Cross returned the paper to its position before his face.

“Then what about the arm?”

“What about it?” Cross asked without lowering the paper.

“Why did you build it?”

Cross folded up the paper. The rattle of it filled the room to the point that Ikey expected the music boxes to chime in.

“In case you forgot,” Cross said, “we have a job to go to.”

Ikey’s cup clinked as he set it on the table. “You can’t talk and walk?”

Cross dropped the paper onto the table. “You want a matching black eye? Is that it?”

Ikey pulled back his shoulders. He had far less to lose this morning.

Cross stood and tugged at the hem of his waistcoat. “Let’s go, then, Mr. Ready.”

Ikey shadowed him down the stairs and through the front parlor. As Cross set the lantern on the table, Ikey steeled himself for the barrage of daylight. He would stand up to it, plunge himself through it. The darkness only hid things from him. Outside, he could see the shape of people, their faces, their thoughts. He could know their actions and what they were.

The door squealed as Cross pulled it back. A gray world of rain waited outside: a world of rivulets running through the street; men with hats pressed low and collars turned up; women with parasols and shawls. Cool damp slithered around Ikey.

“Bugger,” Cross hissed. He pulled his hat brim low and stepped into the rain.

Ikey followed and closed the door behind himself. He looked up and down the street at the glistening carriages, at the streaks of water running down the fronts of buildings. Everyone hurried on, drawn in, nearly hidden in plain sight. It wasn’t the world he expected. It felt as if the house had moved, had ended up in a location different than when he had last entered it.

Falling in behind Cross, Ikey thrust his hands into his pockets as the rain worked him over, pecked at him with cold. He expected his breath to billow out before him. Inside Cross’s house, everything always remained the same. No weather. No change.

He smirked and chuckled at himself. The hell things didn’t change. Things were very different now.

Ikey looked over his shoulder at the house. What would he do once he got back?

Heat trickled into his cheeks as he berated himself for being so stupid, for being so hopeful that he had found someone or something so completely different, so unlike the people who thronged through the street. They hurried along, their eyes cast forward or down, and they were not the least bit mindful of anyone or anything around them. So wrapped up in their own little worlds, they might as well not have eyes at all.

When Ikey and his brothers had accompanied their dad into the village, they followed regardless of limps, of blackened eyes, of shirts stuck to the flesh of their backs as fresh wounds seeped, and none of the people they passed saw them. They looked away. Averted eyes. And Ikey, as a boy, watched them pass, continue on, quiet and unquestioning and not once looking back. Blind.

Rose saw more than these people.

Cross stopped in front of the costermonger and purchased two pies.

“A fantastic morning to you,” the costermonger said to Cross. His tone underscored his lack of sincerity.

Cross nodded and handed a pie to Ikey. They kept going.

As they continued down the road, Ikey glanced up. The seagulls weren’t as numerous today, and not half as aggressive. He held his pie close, then searched the faces of the children who strode at the sides of adults, and those who swarmed past and wove themselves in and out of the crowd, not content with the pace of adults. In their pale and rain-streaked faces, no signs of fear appeared. None of the anguish. None of the eyes that darted around in a ceaseless search for danger. He didn’t recognize tight lips, shallow breaths, or the posture of one who wished to not be there, to not be seen—a boy who wanted to be the air.

Ikey wiped rain-soaked hair from his forehead and shoved it back along his scalp. The water on his lips tasted of salt and sulfur. He swallowed and lifted the pie to his lips. Drops of rain peppered the top.

A young girl caught his attention. She was dragged half a step behind a woman. The girl held her left hand curled to her belly, fingers in a loose fist. No bruises showed on her pale cheeks or around the dark eyes set back in her skull. Damp, brown hair fell in tendrils around her face beneath a bonnet too large for her. She looked to the space before her feet. The girl’s neck bowed as if bent with constant stooping.

As they approached, Ikey held out his pie to her. “Here. I’m not hungry after all.”

The girl drew closer to the woman, seeking shelter in the curtain of her skirts.

The woman glared at Ikey, quickened her pace, and looked away. She yanked the girl along.

Water dripped from the pie in Ikey’s hand as he watched the two walk away. The woman glanced back over her shoulder with eyes hard as knobs of steel.

A flash of white crashed into Ikey’s hand. He leapt back as the pie tumbled from his hand and a seagull landed several feet before him in a flutter of white wings. Its dark eye played over him, looked him up and down. When Ikey didn’t move, it ventured a few steps forward and gulped down a bite of the pie on the street. Two more gulls landed nearby and squawked at the first. A bedraggled house sparrow landed beyond the seagulls and hopped along the perimeter.

Ikey watched the woman and girl as they disappeared in the crowd, absorbed until they were no different than anyone else in the throng; nothing more than the same.

Ikey turned around. Cross was nowhere in sight. As his stomach rumbled, Ikey stuffed his hands in his pockets and hurried along. He caught up to Cross as he stepped off the stairs and onto the bluff. Rain drove across the sea and gave it a rough look, like it needed sanding. From the whalebone arch, Ikey peered back to the ruins of the abbey on the bluff opposite of the River Eck.

Sharp had talked about the ruins’ age, their history, the ghost of an abbess who turned serpents to stone with the power of her anger.

Ikey shivered and hurried along, trotting behind Cross to warm himself. It seemed ridiculous that anger would make a stone of anything. Anger made ash. Dust. It wore things down. It laid people out in their graves. Ashes and dust.

But he had said nothing to Sharp as the man leaned on his shovel. He had kept up his own shoveling, tossing coal into the angry belly of the boiler, agitating it, stoking its fury hotter and higher in hopes that it might lift them off the ground as if they were anything other than daft stone.

When they arrived at the hangar, Cross wrung the water from his cap, settled it back on his head in a mangled lump, and then proceeded to the engine room where Wendy looked up from the rows of bubbling tanks.

“Everything is looking good,” Wendy said to Cross. “Much better than the two of you.”

Wendy nodded at Ikey and touched his own cheekbone. “Nice makeup job,” he said. “It’ll look fetching when you’re down shoveling coal today.”

“He’s in charge today,” Cross said.

Wendy chuckled. “Who? Sharp?”

“No.” Cross shook his head and hitched a thumb at Ikey. “Him. I have to go see a coppersmith about some tubing. Ikey is in charge while I’m gone. Got it?”

Ikey failed to find evidence of a joke in Cross’s face.

Wendy stood up straight and pushed back the brim of his bowler.

“What?” Wendy asked as planted his hands on his hips. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m serious, all right. Ikey is in charge. He’s running the show today. If you have any problems, be sure to let Admiral Daughton know.”

Ikey’s breath came in short, burning gulps. Bloody Cross was setting him up again.

A slow smile spread over Wendy’s face. He nodded. “Got it. Aye, Chief, Ikey is captain today.” Wendy turned his attention to Ikey. “Any orders, Captain Ikey?”

“Why are you doing this?” Ikey asked Cross.

Cross looked down at Ikey. “If you don’t like it, you’re free to leave.”

Ikey ground his teeth. Before he thought of a response, Cross slipped out of the engine room.

Wendy burst into a laugh and slapped his palm against his thigh. “And some have greatness thrust upon them, am I right?”

“Piss off.”

“Is that an order?”

Ikey ran his hands through his soaked hair. He wanted to rub at his chilled arms, but not in front of Wendy. Damn Cross.

“Is Admiral Daughton supposed to stop by today?” Ikey asked. A shiver threatened to rattle his jaw, chatter his teeth.

Wendy shrugged. “I’m not his secretary.”

Ikey turned to the hydrolysis converter. Bubbles formed along the submerged coils. They grew and slid upward, merging with other bubbles until they broke loose and rose to the surface of the brine. There, the gas passed into the hoses.

Ikey pointed to the tank. “Can we heat this?”

“Why?” Wendy asked. “You want tea?”

Ikey crouched beside the rack. Underneath the tanks, more than a foot of space separated the floor and the bottom of the racks. Wires from the turbines snaked into the space, split, and disappeared upward among the glass bottoms resting on iron bars.

Ikey waved his hand at the space. “Can we put lanterns in here?”

“Lanterns? Are you mad, man? No, we can’t put lanterns under there. These tanks are filled with oxygen and hydrogen. That’s the whole point. You’ll blow us all to kingdom come.”

Ikey glanced around the room. Wide, short windows cut high into the wall offered ventilation. “The hydrogen is going up into the cells. If we heat the brine, it’ll rise faster. And if we leave the windows and the door open, there should be enough air to circulate.”

“No.” Wendy shook his head and waved his hands. “Absolutely not. You do understand that hydrogen is flammable, right?”

Ikey stood. “Cross wants us to fail.”

Wendy crossed his arms over his chest. “At least he isn’t trying to kill me.”

Ikey took a step toward the door, then paused. If he left to find lanterns, Wendy would never let him back in. He turned around. “Go fetch some lanterns. As many as you can find.”

Wendy shook his head. “You.”

“I’m in charge.”

“I’ll not follow a dead man.”

“Cross will dismiss you for not following orders.”

“The hell he will, you moron.”

“Then what of Admiral Daughton? What if he stops by and asks why his ship is still on the ground?”

Wendy smirked. “But at least it’ll be in one piece.”

“Do you really think he’ll be happy with that?”

The two men stared at each other a few seconds more. Ikey forced his gaze to remain locked on Wendy’s. His gut trembled, but if he wavered now, he would never recover. Wendy wouldn’t do his bidding, and the ship would fail its test. To beat Cross at his own game, he had to raise the
Kittiwake
.

Wendy glanced at the rack, then back. Ikey maintained his stare. He hadn’t won yet.

“You’re mad,” Wendy said. “Mad and daft. You can’t bring fire in here. Cross wouldn’t allow it.”

“You can tell him all about it when he gets back. If you want me off the crew, then show them what a danger I am.”

Wendy glowered. “All right, you dumb-ass moron. Have it your way.” He brushed past Ikey and slammed the door behind him.

Ikey exhaled a pent-up sigh. He grabbed one of the iron rails and leaned against it, hung his head over his churning stomach and weak knees. His heart thudded in his chest. A slight, manic chuckle rolled off his chest as he thought of besting Wendy. The courage had sprung out of him from someplace hidden, uncorked by Cross’s attempt to show him up. Perhaps this was even Cross’s attempt to get him booted from the crew before he claimed Ikey’s idea as his own.

To hell with Cross. Ikey should have known the man wasn’t clever enough to build an automaton. Only a fool would have thought Rose could be Cross’s invention.

If Rose was human, then how did her hands become as they were? Ikey held his hand before himself and folded the fingers across his palm. The tips of them barely covered the center of his palm, let alone the top of his wrist. In addition to her hands, there were also her arms. Her height. The impossible thinness of her. Her blindness.

Ikey rubbed his fingertips over his thumb. What malady could do that to a person?

He shook his head. Concentrate on the ship. Wendy. The task at hand. He pushed off the rack and started to pace in circles around the hydrolysis converter.

Once the ship lifted, Ikey would prove his worth. It would then be difficult for Cross to bounce him. Admiral Daughton might reconsider his reluctance to allow Ikey onto the crew. He might even hire him on as a paid hand. Ikey could have a job, make some money. Get a flat of his own and bring Uncle Michael out to Whitby, far from his dad.

Or with the money, he could go home. Back to the farm and his workshop tucked in the corner of the barn. Back where he understood things. Where his dad was the only one he had to watch out for. He would construct an arm like Smith’s and put his dad into his place. He’d then create an automaton of his own. One that could corral his dad and look after Uncle Michael around the clock. An automaton that could be built to be his friend and companion when no one else was. And knit with him in the dark.