Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) (11 page)

“Have they been down here?”
he asked.

Jessie wondered if the
concern she heard in his voice was for the papers and whatever invention Hiram
had promised the Union, or whether his concern was more immediate and personal.

She ran her fingers along the
books lining the wall. “No, it doesn’t look like it. I haven’t been down here
except once right after Pop died—disappeared. I never could bring myself
to fix it up.”

Luke rifled through a
haphazard stack of papers on the desk. “How on Earth was he able to keep any of
this straight? I would have sworn they’d already been down here, the way
everything’s so…”

“Messy? No, it was always
like this. Pop had his own system. Even my mother couldn’t figure it out. Those
men upstairs can’t get down here.
This
is my safe room. It’s designed for times just like these.”

He laughed. “You mean, times
when you have to break into your own home while Confederate soldiers search
your house for the papers you’ve come to retrieve? I guess you’re prepared for
any eventuality.”

“Nice to see you’re catching
on, Bradshaw.”

“Well, I’ve always been a bit
slow on the uptake.” He leafed through some papers, while Jessie pulled down
the looking scope. “Tell me why we’re here.”

“I think… I think Hiram lied.”

“Tell me something I don’t
know.”

She sighed. “Look, I didn’t
have any reason to not trust him. Pop used to go into the mines all the
time—he even had a lab down there for a time. When it collapsed, I had no
reason to think Hiram was lying when he said Pop was down there. I had no
reason to suspect him when he went to identify the body and told me it was Pop.”

“You didn’t see the body? Not
even to say goodbye?”

“The undertaker said there
wasn’t a lot to see.” Jessie fought off the residual pain of that awful day. “Hiram
said he didn’t look like himself. They showed me the clothes Pop was wearing
when he left the house. They gave me his wedding ring, and Pop would never have
taken it off. So I believed them. But now… Thinking about it, there were clues.
I just didn’t know to look for them.”

She hated admitting it,
because she figured he’d point out what a fool she’d been, and she couldn’t
fight him on that front.

“It’s not your fault,” he
said. “Though I happen to be one who needs to see the body, and maybe shoot it
a couple of times, before I believe a man is dead.” The way the words were
spoken, she couldn’t tell if he was teasing or not. “What are we looking for?”

“I’m
looking for a specific set of papers I saw when I came down here
right after Pop’s accident. You’re going to watch our friends upstairs.” She
motioned to the scope she’d just pulled down. “Look through there. You should
see the front room and the kitchen. Just twist the scope to move it. Try not to
be too obvious about it. If the scope moves too much, it might get noticed.”

Luke folded his arms. “This
would go faster if you’d just let me look through the papers with you.”

She waved away his words and
began digging through the nearest stack. “You don’t know what you’re looking
for. When you search through these papers, you’re looking to find something
about what my father was working on. Trust me, you won’t have any idea what you’re
looking at anyway. There aren’t any schematics you can take back to your
scientists in Chicago. Or wherever it is you’re headquartered.”

He turned away and peered
through the scope. “It’s Chicago.” He moved the scope around and made a sound
that wasn’t quite a groan.

“What?”

“It’s nothing.” He paused. “Incidentally,
there’s no record of Hiram ever having lived there. But we did find at least
one townhouse in Washington.”

Not wanting to think about Hiram’s
lies, she closed her eyes only briefly before focusing on the task at hand. “Hiram’s
dead, Bradshaw. Today I’ve found out my father might be alive, a man I thought
of as my uncle has been stealing from me for years and was murdered while I
cowered in a washroom. I’ve been shot at and fallen off a roof, accused of
being a prostitute, found myself half-dressed in a brothel, and been pawed by
you. Confederate spies are searching my house. I’ve had a full day. If you’re
going to try to make me feel like more of a fool for believing Hiram, you can
just keep it to yourself.”

“I’m not trying to make you
feel like a fool. I’m trying to tell you the truth. I thought you might like to
know where Hiram’s actually been. He’s been living dangerously close to Confederate
territory for almost a year.”

She didn’t want to think
about what Hiram had been doing, so she ignored Luke’s comment. “You see
anything in those optics?”

“Yes.” He didn’t turn from
the scope.

“Don’t be mean.” She meant to
sound angry, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Have you seen Muha?”

“Yes.”

His tone made it clear he had
no plans to offer anything more. He didn’t need to. Poor Muha. Everyone
associated with her, with this place, had met their deaths. Her mother. Her
brother. Hiram. Up until today, her father.

Up until yesterday, she had
counted Luke among that number.

It was too much to take. She
felt awfully close to breaking, and damn it, she would not let Luke Bradshaw
bear witness to that.

Leafing through the papers,
she found what they’d come for. A large envelope, with the Pinkerton Agency’s
San Francisco address in the upper left hand corner. Opening it, she found a
list of numbers, the name of a bank in Deseret, and a map with an area in
Shoshone territory circled. Next to the circle was written the word
laboratory
.

She shoved the papers into
the pocket of her jacket and felt along the bottom of the desk for the latch
that would open the locked drawer. When she found it, and the drawer sprang
open, she had to suppress the urge to cry.

Her father’s notes were gone.
Not that he kept detailed notes anywhere but in his head, and the notes he did
keep were so cryptically written no one but those intimately familiar with him
would be able to make any sense of it.

But they were
gone.

She rocked back on her heels.
If her father hadn’t removed them, then the only person who would have had an
idea of where to look would be Hiram. And why would he keep bothering her about
her father’s papers if he already had them? Why did he need her?

Maybe they didn’t have the
notes. Or maybe no one else could decipher them.

“What’d you find?” Luke
turned to her.

Someone knocked on the vault
door that led to the main house, the sound thundering in her father’s study.

He froze, his hand on his
bag, the tension clearly visible in his face.

“Nothing. We can go now.” She
shut the drawer. “Don’t worry, they can’t get in here. Can’t hear us either. It’s
fine.”

Luke’s eyes narrowed as he
watched the vault door. “There’s always a way in. Just depends on how much
damage you’re willing to accept.”

She shoved past him and looked
into the optics. Three men milled around her sitting room, were joined by a
fourth, and then filed out the front door.

“Hey, it looks like they’re
leaving, Bradshaw.” Turning, she discovered Luke closing one of the drawers of
her father’s desk. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

Liar.
She almost told him so.

“Wait. They’re leaving?”

“Yeah, it looked like it.”

He moved her aside and took
the optics, watching them for a moment. “Shit. Get down, Jess!”

“What? Why?”

He grabbed her around the
waist and flung her to the floor behind her father’s massive desk, and she
shrieked in angry protest. He threw himself down on top of her, and she
screamed in pain at the pressure on already bruised ribs. Luke shoved her
underneath the desk and covered the exposed parts of her body with his, his
elbows on either side of her face. His cheek against hers, he covered her free
ear with his hand.

His hand on her face, his
body on hers. A long buried memory flashed behind her eyelids of what he’d done
all those years ago when the city had been shelled. How he’d protected her that
day. How he’d stayed and grieved with her—with them—during the
horrible time that had come after.

Heat zinged through her and
sizzled all the way down to her core, just as it had when she had been a girl
of sixteen.

Luke
.

It was her last thought
before the room exploded in a brutal flash of noise and fire.

Jessie didn’t know how long
they lay like that, as he covered her body with his and debris rained down
around them. Confused and disoriented from light blindness and the ringing in
her ears, she hadn’t recovered before Luke dragged her to her feet.

She heard mumbling from far
away, and Luke turned her so she faced him fully. He gave her a little shake,
shoved his six-shooter into her hands and said something she couldn’t hear and
didn’t comprehend. Her fingers curled around the grip, and she tried to focus
on his face, the only thing she could really see, his presence the one thing
she understood.

For the first time in a long
time, she had no plan, and no idea what to do.

She could only hope Luke
had one.

Beneath her feet, the floor
pitched and rolled.

Dark smoke billowed from a
gaping hole where the vault door had once stood. It had been blown off its
hinges with such force it had crashed into the opposite wall. Flames engulfed
an entire wall, and more smoke poured into the study from another fire in the
hallway.

No,
no, no.

The hatch couldn’t be opened
unless the vault door was closed and locked. It was an adjustment her father
had made after Gideon or Jessie had left the vault door open once too often.

No chance of closing it now.
The only way out was through the fire and into the main house, where at least
four armed men lay in wait.

“We’ve got to go
that
way!” she yelled to Luke.

He mumbled something back.

“That way!” She motioned up
the stairs. “The hatch won’t work!”

His expression bland, he
turned her toward him, and she saw, rather than heard, him say, “Shut the fuck up.”

Shocked, she did just that.

Luke shoved in front of her
and took a large, black clockwork carbine out of the satchel he had slung
across his back. With two tubes on the top and the barrel underneath, the
weapon looked like an oddly shaped triple-barreled rifle. He wound a lever on
the side of the gun, brought it to the ready position—in close to his
body, his eyes looking over the sights—and pushed a numbered dial on the
weapon forward with his thumb.

Something about the switch
brought to mind Jessie’s own protections. She turned to her father’s desk,
crawled underneath, and pulled the lever to fire the gun on her roof. She
twisted the lever from left to right, up and down, maneuvering the weapon as
she fired blindly into the dark.

Maybe it would discourage the
men outside from coming back in.

Luke grabbed her arm and
yanked her after him. Toward the stairs. Toward their attackers and their only
way out.

With a combination of relief
and terror, Jessie realized he
had
heard her. Relief that he had a plan. Terror to realize his plan meant they’d
be running a gauntlet of Confederate soldiers.

He motioned for her to follow
him, his expression set and hard. Serious. A man who had one singular intent,
would take no prisoners and brook no dissent. He mounted the weapon to his
shoulder and crept up the stairs into the main room.

For some reason, Luke’s
apparent lack of fear in the face of such danger scared her more than exploding
doors, more than the Confederate soldiers lurking in the darkness.

She stuck to his back as he
slowly opened the door into the hallway upstairs.

Without removing his hand
from the gun, he gestured to the stairs with two fingers, his movements clipped
and economical. He silently told Jessie she was not to move until he came back
for her. His eyes were so intense she didn’t argue.

She had been with some
dangerous men in her time—her grandfather and his warriors the first
among them—but she had the distinct impression Luke was the most
dangerous man she had ever met.

His disappearance around the
corner was quickly followed by two short bursts of the rapid
rat-a-tat-tat
she associated with her
Gatling gun.

Smoke began filling the small
stairwell, thick and black as fire consumed the far wall, and with the back of
her hand, she wiped sweat from her brow. The pistol Luke had given her hung
loosely from her fingers. Her hands were shaking so badly that, even if she had
wanted to, she wouldn’t be able to use it.

Thick smoke burned her lungs,
and desperate fear built in her chest until she couldn’t bear it anymore. As
she peered around the corner, she found Luke dragging the bodies of two men
back into her house. In the opposite corner, a dark stain seeped out from
underneath a brightly-colored blanket. Muha.