Arachnodactyl (24 page)

I
nside the engine room
, Ikey slammed the door behind himself, then raced around the perimeter and pulled the shutters over the windows. Admiral Daughton’s weight cracked the stairs.

“Mr. Berliss!” he called out. “We can yet reach an agreement, you and me. Let’s finish this business up here, set fire to the
Kittiwake
, and blame it on Cross. I will then hire you to be in charge of my next project. How does that sound?”

As he closed the last window, darkness blossomed through the engine room. Ikey turned around and breathed a sigh of relief. How much easier everything looked when he couldn’t see a thing.

“Mr. Berliss?” Admiral Daughton called from the hall. “I believe you owe me a debt of gratitude. As I understand it, I’ve done you quite the favor by getting rid of Cross. You fancied his wife, did you not?”

Ikey froze. His breath tumbled out of him and left his lungs hanging limp and slack in his chest. This was what he wanted, was it not? Cross gone, out of the way. The added bonus of Rose’s debt to Cross being paid in full. With Cross out of the way, things got much easier.

“Mr. Berliss? I know you’re in there. You should come out now and we’ll chat about the situation.”

Ikey turned to the door. The floor creaked beneath the admiral as he took a step towards the engine room.

Rose herself had said there was no wrong and no right. Only people getting by. Surviving. Ikey was doing what he needed to do in order to survive.

He lifted his hands before him. They were invisible in the dark. They were not his dad’s hands.

His heart thundered in his chest, cracked in his ears. Loud and irrepressible despite the dark. And it was his dad’s heart. It was not his hands he had to worry about, but his heart that would throw away a life to get what he wanted.

He clenched his hands into fists.

“Mr. Berliss?”

“That’s my dad’s name,” Ikey spat. He spun around, took three great steps forward, and swept his arm out in an arc. His hand brushed the air. He took another step forward and repeated the arc. His fingers snagged the tubes. Taking one in each hand, he yanked. A small pop issued from the dark before him. Hand-over-hand, Ikey found the mouth of the tube and held his fingers over the opening of the hose.

Air from the cells backwashed past his hand.

Admiral Daughton knocked on the door. “I know you’re in there.”

Ikey grabbed a third hose and pulled it off the tank. A fourth.

“I’m opening the door, Mr. Berliss. I’ve put the gun away. I want to discuss this like reasonable gentlemen. Here I come.”

After he yanked a hose off the fifth tank, Ikey counted his steps over to the corner where the toolchest sat. He flipped the lid up and reached inside. His hand landed on a hammer.

The door cracked open. Very little light found its way in.

“Mr. Berliss? Ikey, I know you’re in here. There’s no reason to hide.”

Ikey picked up the hammer. The groove and shape of the handle told him which way the head faced, and which way the claw curled.

The floorboards cracked as Admiral Daughton stepped into the engine room.

“Don’t light a match,” Ikey hollered.

The footsteps stopped.

“Why is that?”

Ikey turned around, the hammer held before him. The weight of it seemed to be nothing.

The ship jostled, as if set down gently by a giant. It now rested completely on the ground under the deflating cells.

“I’m rigging the ship to explode,” Ikey said as he crossed back to the rack of tanks. “I’ll help you burn it down. Nice and hot. It will melt the lead in Cross’s body and no one will ever know he was shot.”

Admiral Daughton took a cautious step forward. “I’m glad to hear you’re thinking, my boy. I knew you were a brilliant man the moment I saw you.”

“I need your help,” Ikey said. His hand tightened on the hammer. “Come over to the rack. You have to help me pull this last hose out.”

Admiral Daughton paused. A slight hissing filled the room. The sensation of drifting in the dark didn’t befall Ikey this time. He knew exactly where he stood, where his body was.

“We can set a fire outside the ship,” Admiral Daughton said. “Come up on deck and we can ignite the envelope.”

“If you want it to look authentic, you have to help me rig these hoses. But I’ll burn it down. I’ll strike the match myself.”

Admiral Daughton took another step forward. “Where are you?”

“A few more steps this way.”

Ikey held his breath and listened. His head began to swim and his heart to flutter as the mounting hydrogen pushed back the oxygen.

Admiral Daughton kicked the iron frame of the converter. “Ow. What is this?”

“Use your hands to feel your way around to the left. Come on. We don’t have much time.”

Admiral Daughton sidestepped around the converter.

Once he heard the admiral’s boot heel strike near the back of the converter assembly, Ikey raced around the other side and bolted for the door.

“Ikey!” Admiral Daughton shouted.

Ikey skidded to a stop where the open door should be. He reached out, grabbed the edge of the door, then slipped around it. He closed it until less than an inch of space separated the door from the jamb.

As Admiral Daughton fumbled in the dark, feeling his way back around the converter, Ikey lifted the hammer and raked it claw-side down over where the steel latch should be. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes against the pending explosion.

The blade of the claws landed between the wood and the iron and yanked the latch from the door. It clattered to the floor.

“Mr. Berliss, what are you doing?”

“
Piss
!” Ikey spat.

As Admiral Daughton lumbered across the room, Ikey grabbed the door by its edge and snapped it back, slipping his hand out right before the door slammed shut. It shook in its frame as Admiral Daughton collided with it.

“Ikey!” Admiral Daughton yelled. His voice pierced the air, limned with panic.

Ikey dropped to his knees and felt along the door until his fingers lighted upon the lower hinge plates.

He lifted the hammer.

The door shook as Admiral Daughton pawed at it, searching for what remained of the latch. The shaking stopped as he found it.

Admiral Daughton stepped back.

The hinges squealed.

Ikey dealt the blow.

The tingle of steel on iron shot up his arm as three tiny sparks spat out from the claw.

The light of the sparks pierced Ikey’s eye. Their arcs traced a path. The light slit the veil between this world and Hell. And once rent, all of Hell spilled through.

Light fell on Ikey like the weight of the ship. A dirty orange light that grew in intensity and pressure until one second later, sight was ripped from his eyes. A wall of heat knocked him sideways.

He rolled onto his shoulder, his side, and flipped over onto his back. Flame rolled down the hall’s ceiling like a river seen from above. The rushing of it roared and bellowed and pitched up into a man’s scream. Ikey kinked his neck back. Inside the engine room, flames crawled up the walls. Admiral Daughton stood before the converter. His hands swatted at flames rolling across the mass of him. He screamed and swatted. Bits of fire fell from him and dropped to the floor. Then a bang like several gunshots all at once. A puff of fire erupted from his breast, and Admiral Daughton collapsed to the floor as tendrils of fire danced above him where gas hoses had been.

Ikey sat up. Heat hammered his eyes and wrested the breath from his nose. He pushed himself up to a crouch and hurried along the hall. Pain pushed down on his head. A burning pain. And the light faded quickly as if it too was being consumed.

Ikey shut his eyes and ran along the hall. He bounded up the stairs and out onto the deck. His lungs ripped breath from the air and his feet paused. His hands flew to his hair and became entangled in a mess of hot, foul-smelling knots. His scalp screamed at his touch. Yanking his hands out of the mess, Ikey glanced up at the envelope. A deep, flickering glow lit the oiled canvas like slow lightning in a storm cloud.

He whirled around. Bits of flaming canvas dropped to the deck of the aft castle. A blossoming, flaming hole in the envelope grew outward.

Ikey turned back.

Cross lay on the deck, on his back, his head turned away.

Ikey raced over to Cross. The growing light made it easy to see the pool of blood fanning out across the deck from his shoulder.

“Cross!” Ikey yelled, and his voice was swamped in a roar of growling air. “Cross!” Ikey grabbed him by the feet and began to drag him across the deck.

After a few feet, Cross tossed his head back and forth. His eyes fluttered open and he convulsed out of Ikey’s grip as he yelled for holy shit.

Ikey stumbled and fell on his ass. Cross flipped over and screamed, clutching at his shoulder with his good hand.

The ring of fire passed overhead. Bits of flaming canvas and goldbeater’s skin rained down on them.

“Come on!” Ikey yelled as he staggered to his feet. “Let’s go!”

Cross pushed himself up to his knees with one hand. Ikey ran up, threw Cross’s good arm over his shoulder, and helped the man to his feet.

A piece of canvas landed on Ikey’s head. He screamed and beat at his face. Cross joined in, swatting at Ikey’s head with what felt like his hat.

Together, they staggered to the deck rail. Ikey could no longer see out of his left eye, and his right one offered a dim, blurred view that was quickly closing. Another piece of canvas landed on his shoulder and filled his nose with the scent of burning flesh.

Cross brushed it away.

“Jump!” Cross yelled once they reached the rail.

The voice sounded so far away. Down a distant hall. A dark hall with a light at the far end.

Ikey closed his eyes.

Hands appeared on his shoulder. Long hands. Thin hands.

Ikey opened his mouth to ask if it was Rose.

The hands shoved.

Ikey fell.

M
usic boxes jingled
and murmured and tingled around Ikey and he could find no rhythm or pattern to them, and he began to suspect a stampede of some sort when the noises resolved into a dozen or more voices.

Ikey tried to open his eyes, but couldn’t. Something covered his face. His breath came tough and rubbery, as if a band of leather encased his chest and squeezed. Pain ran along his bones with sharp, dry claws. He gritted his teeth and raised his hands to his face.

His right hand landed in a soft mess of gauze around his eyes.

His left hand hadn’t responded at all. He felt nothing but searing, grinding pain along the entire length of his left arm. Ikey shuddered and the world twirled underneath him. He grabbed for whatever he lay upon and found a bed beneath his grip.

“Hello?” Ikey called out. His voice hit his ears rough and raspy, baked and shriveled.

“I’ll be damned,” someone said nearby.

“Cross?”

“I didn’t think you’d make it, man. Wow.”

“What happened? Where are you? Where are we?”

“Mr. Berliss?” another voice asked. “I’m Dr. Gretten. You are in the infirmary. How do you feel?”

Ikey tried to suck in a deep breath, but pain bound his chest. “I hurt. I really, really hurt. Am I blind?”

“You’ve suffered major burns across your body,” Dr. Gretten said. “Including your eyes. Once the flesh around your eyes heals, I hope you will regain some of your vision.”

Ikey collapsed against the bed.

“Your burns are severe. Particularly the ones to your left arm. I am afraid we had to remove it. There was too much injury. It developed gangrene.”

“But I can feel it,” Ikey whispered. He lifted his right arm and patted at the space to his left. “It hurts like hell. It’s—” His voice broke. “… It’s there.”

“Nurse,” Dr. Gretten called. “Sit with this patient. I will check on him after a while.” The clop of shoes echoed as he crossed a large room.

Tears coursed through Ikey, but he had no idea how to cry. Could he? With his eyes bandaged and damaged, he couldn’t figure it out.

A hand appeared on his shin.

Ikey choked back a sob.

“There, there,” a woman said, her voice fluffed and soft. “It’ll be all right.”

“She’s lying to you,” Cross said.

“Shush!” the nurse spat.

“You should have let me die, you bloody, crispy fool.”

The sobs came harder and Ikey choked. His chest hitched and fresh pain exploded over his ribs.

“That’s enough!” the nurse declared.

“You saw me out cold on the deck, and then what? You took pity on me, and it cost you an arm, your eyes, and Lord knows your face will probably peel off with that bandage. If it wasn’t for pity, you’d be able-bodied and have me out of your bloody way.”

“If you aren’t quiet this instant, I will have you restrained!” The nurse’s hand left Ikey’s body, and he was adrift in the dark, rushed away on a great current.

“No,” Ikey wheezed. “Not pity.”

“No? Then for what?” Cross asked.

“Abigail!” the nurse called.

“Rose,” Ikey said.

A woman’s shoes clipped across the floor.

“Rose?” Cross said, her name broken into a couple syllables across his chuckle. The chuckle bounded into a laugh.

“Mr. Cross!” another woman scolded. “I will not have any further disruptions in this ward, or I will toss you out onto the street, broken leg and all!”

Cross’s laugh simmered down. “Rose? You saved me because of her? You thick sod. She’d have been thrilled to learn you let me roast in a fire.”

“That’s it. Get him out of here,” Abigail said.

“No!” Ikey said. “I’m talking to him. He saved my life. I want to talk to him.”

“I thought,” the nurse said, “you saved him.”

“I was on fire. He put me out. He pushed me out of the fire.”

“Aye. And you’d have been better off if I hadn’t.”

“You don’t have to put up with his insolent tongue, Mr. Berliss. This man has been nothing but a noisome nuisance since he got here.”

“If you brought me a drink, I’d settle down,” Cross said. “Or maybe even a decent meal.”

“He stays,” Ikey said. “For now. Please.”

Abigail sighed a long-suffering sigh. “For now. But only because he asked. But be forewarned that my temper is already blistering short. I will not withstand any more disruption to my ward. Is that clear?”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

A touch appeared on Ikey’s shin again. He realized it was the one part of his body not throbbing with pain. He concentrated on that touch.

“Is there anything else I can get you, Mr. Berliss?” the nurse asked.

“A few moments alone, please.”

The touch disappeared. “If you wish. I’ll check on you in a few moments.”

Slow steps drifted away.

Ikey reached over and felt along his left shoulder. It didn’t connect in his head. Nothing sat where his arm should have rested, and so his brain kept insisting that his hand was in the wrong place. His arm was there. It had to be. How could his arm hurt so much if it wasn’t there?

Ikey thought of Smith and chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” Cross asked.

Ikey crunched the chuckle in his teeth and gripped the bedsheets again.

“Hey,” Cross said, his voice hardly above a whisper. “That Ellsworth fellow and a few other officials stopped by to ask questions. I told them about the accident. How the three of us were investigating a leak, and Admiral Daughton took his pistol out of his pocket to find something else. He dropped it. I got shot, and the discharge ignited the gas.”

Ikey concentrated on slow, regular breaths.

“They aren’t looking to buy that story,” Cross continued, “but if they come back around and you tell them you weren’t looking at Admiral Daughton, and you don’t remember what happened, it’ll be the only story they get, and I’ve got a feeling that they’re working hard to quietly brush these events aside.”

“How did you know?” Ikey asked. “About Rose and me?”

Cross’s mattress shifted nearby.

“I didn’t. Not at first. I was only trying to get under your skin. But after I saw your reaction, I knew.”

“And you saved my life?”

“I was a bit disoriented. You were a crutch for me. And there’s not much use in a flaming crutch.”

“Disoriented? You were half drunk.”

“The hell I was. I was half shot!”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“I am. I broke my leg. I got singed around the edges, but nothing like what you took. When we’re out of earshot from these nebby nurses, I’d like to hear things from your point of view.”

Ikey gripped the sheets again. The knot of cotton felt hot and sweaty under his grip.

“Thank you,” Ikey said.

“Don’t thank me. Don’t thank Smith, either. He’s the one who pulled you away from the ship. He heard the racket from the carriage and came to investigate. But make no mistake, neither of us did you any favors. You got what you deserve for daft heroics. You should have left me behind. I’ve known Rose a lot longer than you have, and I dare say she’d delight at the idea of being rid of me and having you in one piece, as opposed to the situation we have here.”

“That’s not true.”

“Poppycock.”

“My dad wouldn’t have saved you.” As the words passed his lips, he collapsed into the bed as if that statement had served as a pin holding together an entire machine. The weight of himself felt too great of a burden to bear.

“Bully for him,” Cross said. “Sounds like he’s smarter than you after all.”

“Maybe. But I’m not him. He wouldn’t have done it. I did.”

Exhaustion weighed on him, sudden as a freak summer storm. His face itched to smile, to grin broadly at the realization, but his facial muscles sat against his skull limp and wretched. The sobs came again, and Ikey laid in the bed and did his best to cry silently in his darkness. He willed himself to feel tears or wetness against his eyes—any sign that they were still there, that they worked, but he found nothing more than darkness and a low, throbbing pain. His breathing grew ragged and hoarse and he strained against the panic of not being able to expand his lungs fully.

After what seemed like hours, and possibly some sleep, Ikey called out for Cross.

“What.”

A soft moan drifted across the ward.

“I love her.”

“God help you. Now go back to sleep.”

“I saved you to prove that I could love her. That I’m not my dad. I don’t have to be like him.”

“It’s late. Shut the hell up and go to sleep.”

The moan rose in pitch. Springs groaned as someone rolled over in bed.

“If I can’t be with her, I’ll accept that. But I did it for her.”

“I’m about to snuff you with your own pillow for the sake of the ward if you don’t fucking go back to sleep.”

The moan crescendoed into a retch. Ikey gritted his teeth. His stomach twisted and gurgled. How long had it been since he ate? How long had he been out?

The sobs grew like tumors in the back of his throat. Ikey concentrated on slow, regular breaths in order to keep from crying, to keep from feeling like he was suffocating.

“Ikey?” Cross asked.

Each inhalation was a hand passed over a hand along a rope. His breath was a line that kept him moored to the world. If he spoke, the line would snap.

The retching man gasped and gurgled. Someone called for a nurse.

Ikey inhaled. Ikey exhaled. A sea of darkness passed under him. A sea filled with dark things ready to grasp him with cold and sightless tentacles.

“I’ve been over here thinking,” Cross said, “about a prosthetic arm. I could modify the one in the workshop. Shorten it up a bit so you don’t appear so damned lopsided. We’ll fix you up. Rose and I will.”

A bed creaked. Something cracked against the floor, and Cross cursed under his breath. A warm hand slid into Ikey’s and gripped him tight. Ikey clutched back.

“We’ll make a home for you,” Cross said.