Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) (10 page)

Vivian threw her arms around
Luke’s neck, hugged him tight, and winked at Jessie over his shoulder. “Not a
thing. It’s good to have you back, Luke. Don’t be gone so long, you hear?”

“I won’t, if I can help it.”
He kissed the top of the madam’s head, and Jessie fought an unreasonable stab
of jealousy before she recalled she wasn’t even supposed to
like
him.

Tears briefly misted the
older woman’s eyes, and she put a hand on his chest to push him away. “Go on.
Second room on the right.”

As Luke ushered her to the
room, his voice lost all the warmth it had held while he spoke with Vivian. “You
need a proper dress. Something heavier and several petticoats, a decent pair of
stocking and some boots. You’ll freeze to death in that. The damn trains still
aren’t running, but I’ll get us into Fort Clark.”

In an instant, it all came
crashing back, and she remembered why she needed Luke. “Wait! I have to go home
first.”

He waved away her words. “Jess,
it’s not safe.”

“No, you don’t understand,”
she protested. “I need to go through my father’s papers.”

“Now is not the time. The
first priority has to be keeping you safe. I’ll come back for them once I get
you out of here.”

“Please,” she whispered.

“No.”

Her hands shook as she
clutched his shirt. “I’m not going anywhere with you unless we go to my house
first.”

Taking her hands in his, he
forced her to release his clothing. “Be reasonable, Jess. You’re not in charge
here, I am. If I have to throw you over my shoulder and carry you out of here,
I’ll do that. Nothing is so important that you need to risk your life to go
home, do you understand me? Why are you doing this?”

“Because I don’t think my
father died in that mine collapse. And I think I’ve had the key to finding him
all along.”

Dusk was descending when they
dismounted in the hills above Jessie’s house. Luke took a pair of segmented
mirror binocular telescopes from his saddlebag and crouched behind a cluster of
snow-covered rocks. They were nice ones, too, better made and newer than the
ones she had. Probably more powerful, too. She could use something like that.

She wondered how she could
get her hands on them, if only to discover how they were made.

Luke pointed at the walk up
to her house and the area behind her stables. “They’re already in.”

Finally sober, or at least
soberish, she cursed herself for the way she’d left that morning—hasty,
unthinking of the consequences. Then she’d behaved the very same way in the
brothel, when she’d kissed him.

No. He’d kissed her. In a
brothel. In front of a bunch of whores.

And she’d kissed him back
like it had meant something.

It didn’t matter now. She’d just
keep telling herself it was the whiskey, and maybe she’d start believing it.

She flushed all the same.

“I wish I’d been home,” she
said finally. “I could have kept them out.”

He shook his head. “If you’d
been home, they’d have you, and there’s not much you can do about it now. We
could try to fight them, but it’s a fool’s errand. We have no idea how many
there are. Let’s go. I’ll come back in a few days.”

Jessie shook her head. “What
about Muha? The horses?”

He frowned and raised his
binocular telescopes to his eyes. “Muha’s dead. No way to get around that.
Probably the horses, too, except for these two. Just in case you came back.”

“Is that what you’d do?”

His breath fogged the air as
he stared at her house and the desolate, snow-covered landscape. Though the
weather had cleared earlier in the day, a light snow had begun to fall, and
dark clouds hung heavy and thick where they clung to the barren mountain
ridges. The wind whistled from the peaks and gusted into Jessie’s narrow
valley, carrying with it the groaning of distant crawlers.

Luke scanned the surrounding
mountains for a long time. “You’re not being fair.”

“I need to know what I’m
dealing with.” She stroked Taba’s neck, and the horse pressed her face into
Jessie’s shoulder. “Is that what you’d do?”

He shook his head, but he
never took his eyes off what was in front of him. “Muha would protect the
house. She’d have to go, for safety’s sake. The horses are just a counter
measure to slow your escape should you somehow manage to make it home.”

“So, yes, you would.”

He didn’t look at her. “We’ll
find another way in.”

Jessie closed her eyes for a
moment, resisting the urge to take Luke’s hand. She told herself that she
wanted to take comfort in another human being for a few minutes. Then she
reminded herself that seeking comfort from Luke might lead to her seeking
something else. She didn’t need that.

“I don’t need access to the
house proper,” she said. She might want it, but she didn’t need it. There were
too many things like that, right now. “We can get in the back way.”

Luke’s brows drew together. “Back
way? Jess, they’re
inside
.”

With a shake of her head, she
gestured to the house. “I doubt they’re in Pop’s study. It’s locked.” When he
just stared at her, she realized he had no idea what lay beneath her property. “You
don’t know. I always thought for certain Gideon showed you the other exits, the
way you’d disappear like a ghost.” Even she was surprised that her voice held
no bitterness. She motioned to the mountainside behind her house. “My father
took precautions.”

“You’re telling me there’s
another way in? One where we won’t be seen?”

Jessie nodded. “We’ll go in
directly below Pop’s study.”

“And you won’t try to go for
anything else?”

The way he said the words
made her think it was a test. If she gave him an answer he didn’t like, he’d
turn her around and not bring her back. “You mean, like going after Muha?” Her
heart drummed against her ribcage. For almost nine years, that dog had been her
constant companion. Before Taba came along last year, her only one.

“Yeah. It’s you or the wolf.
I choose
you
.”

Jessie swallowed against the
lump in her throat, as a part of her wished for something that simply wasn’t
and could never be. “But she’s the one who loves you,” she whispered.

“This is no time to be
flippant. Promise me you won’t go after your dog. She’s dead or as good as
dead.” Luke’s tone made it clear he wouldn’t allow her near her house unless
she agreed to his terms.

She’d do anything he asked,
if it meant she’d get her father back.

“All right. I promise.”

“Well look who finally came
to her senses.”

Jessie gritted her teeth and
fought back the retort. This was for her father. Luke could say anything he
wanted, so long as he helped her out. She didn’t have to like him.

Tying up his horse, he took a
bag from the back of his saddle, slung it across his back, and motioned to the
mountain. He gave her a small bow, like some sort of European gentleman. Or the
way Jessie imagined they’d behave, if she ever met one.

Gentlemen of any sort were a
rare breed around here.

“Very well. Lead on, ma’am.”

Removing a lantern from Luke’s
saddlebag, she took the lead. She didn’t need to be reminded to stay low. For
the first time in her life, she was grateful her father had made her practice
escapes from the house, both under the cover of darkness and not. She’d thought
him a fool at the time.

Now she used that same
training and those same passageways to sneak back
into
her house.

Jessie smiled at the irony.

She led Luke into a small
cave, barely large enough for a person to crawl through, the roof low and icy.
It had been months since she’d been down this way, but for a moment, she got
lost in the familiarity of it. The darkness. The smell. The dampness of the
air, even here in the high desert.

She lit the lamp and pushed
through the barriers designed so the tunnel appeared to be a collapsed
mineshaft—carefully placed rocks and brittle wooden barricades, obstacles
to deter the curious and the greedy. Nearly everyone in town had lost someone
in the mines, and most people weren’t curious enough to risk their lives to
venture into what appeared to be a shaky, abandoned mineshaft. She thought Luke
would object, but he wordlessly followed.

His willingness to do so,
despite the obvious danger and his earlier reluctance to take her home,
surprised her. She wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. But then, she didn’t
know what to make of him
.

They crawled in silence for a
few minutes until the cavern opened up. The walls dripped with hot water from
nearby springs, which collected in a low spot and trickled in a small creek
that traveled down another corridor, then back under the house. She waited for
Luke to catch up and pulled the lever to close the trapdoor behind him. For a
moment, the darkness and the quiet enveloped them, the only sounds the
trickling of water and the faint hissing of thermite.

Behind her, Luke stiffened
and placed a hand on her arm, and then the cave lit up, awash with light as the
thermite ignited gas lanterns. The damp rock reflected the flickering light,
glittering like the stars that had once shone in the sky before the smelters
and the crawlers covered the night in pitch.

“Jesus.” Luke blinked several
times before standing up. “I had no idea.”

The pride she felt at her
father’s accomplishments made her smile. “No one did. Come on.”

At the far end of the cavern
was a large vault door, and once they reached it, Luke touched it. Knocked
twice. The heavy metal barely made a sound beneath his hands.

“This thing must have cost a
fortune. Most of the banks in town don’t have this kind of security on their
vaults.”

“This has been here for as
long as I can remember. Twenty-five years, I guess. My father built it for my
mother.”

The familiar blanket of
sadness wrapped around her heart at the thought, so she dropped it, and Luke
didn’t question her further. She turned the bright brass wheel to enter the
combination.

Metal groaned as she pushed
the door open. At the end of the narrow hallway was a ladder leading up to a
hatch with a complicated lock. Several doors led to other corridors, but
nothing was as well protected as that hatch.

Luke whistled. “How much is
down here, Jess?”

She walked down the hall. “I
don’t know. A lot. This is where I scavenge most of my materials. Pop had so
many little projects he was working on. Stuff not affiliated with the company
or the blue silver. Just stuff he was tinkering with. Especially after Gideon…
Well, he was down here all the time. This is where he came to escape.”

Luke put a hand on her
shoulder. “And what did you do while your father was down here?”

For years, she had pretended
it didn’t matter, but it had. It had mattered more than she cared to admit. “This
and that. Sometimes he’d let me help him, but most of the time, he was alone. I
tinkered with gears and improved the shutters. Built and installed the Gatling
gun on the roof. Made that shotgun you admired earlier.”

“The shotgun is a beautiful
piece of work. Must have taken a long time to build.”

“Time is the one thing I have
in spades.”

He studied her for a moment,
reached out, and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry, Jess.”

She blinked at his unexpected
tenderness and stepped away. “Don’t be.”

He cleared his throat. “All
this time, and I never knew.”

“You never needed to. And you
never asked.”

If he’d ever asked her, she
would have told him. She would have broken her promise to her father and
brought him here as Gideon never had.

There had once been a time
when she would have done anything for Luke.

Banishing the thought, she
climbed the ladder, entered the combination for the hatch, and climbed out into
a narrow closet.

Luke followed, closing the
hatch behind him, and for a moment, they were alone in a room too small for two
people, their bodies nearly as close as they had been in the brothel.

“Christ.” Luke’s voice was
rough.

For a moment, she thought he
might kiss her, so she leaned around him to open the door. In such a confined
space, she couldn’t help but brush against him.

Luke couldn’t have moved
faster if the closet were on fire. “Are we where I think we are?”

The surprise in his voice
amused her. Her father really was brilliant, with his vaults and his corridors,
and his secret passageways. It wasn’t a shock to learn that both sides wanted
him and his inventions.

“Pop’s study. Yes we are.”

The room was just as her
father had left it. Papers were stacked haphazardly on the large, beaten-up
desk, the two broken chairs leaning up against the wall, the books strewn
around the room in various corners, as if someone had tossed them there. Gears
in various sizes and inventions in several states of completion leaned against
the walls in what looked like a jumbled heap, but Jessie knew from experience
they were carefully organized according to size, function, and material.