Liberty (Flash Gold, #5) (11 page)

“I don’t know. She
was
righteous.”

“Cudgel was about as
righteous as cow chips.”

The flying contraption
bobbed its way between the deck and the envelope of the largest of
the three airships, the skis coming down to allow it to land. Kali
wished she could see the faces of the people on the deck, so she
would know for sure who they were dealing with, but it was
impossible from so far below. She wouldn’t necessarily recognize
some gangster anyway. What she
really
wished was that she
could see
Amelia’s
face. Even though she had no doubt that
she was the pilot, Kali wanted to look her in the eyes, to glare at
her for the attacks the woman had launched at her. Unfair attacks.
Kali had never done anything to her except in self-defense.

“Cedar,” Kali said
quietly. “I want to get onto that ship. I want to know who she’s
meeting with and what they’re discussing.” Her heart gave a little
lurch as a new thought occurred to her. “What if Cudgel made a deal
with her, the powder for the flash gold? What if she’s there right
now to pick it up?” Her words tumbled out quickly, as this vision
filled her mind, flooding her with a feeling of urgency. What if
she and Cedar were already too late to do anything? What if Amelia
picked up the flash gold, flew off to some mountaintop, and blew it
up?

“I know it’s important to
you, Kali,” Cedar said slowly, “but don’t you think it would be
safer to leave her and the flash gold be and to hightail out of
town before those Mounties catch up with us? You can start over,
build another airship, one that runs on mundane coal, the same as
those ones. Wouldn’t that be acceptable?”

Kali scowled. It was a
perfectly reasonable argument—and she admitted that trying to gain
access to the airships of a bunch of armed gangsters wouldn’t be
wise, especially when those gangsters were loitering within a mile
of Mountie Headquarters—but she didn’t want to be reasonable. She
wanted to punish Amelia for taking so much from her, and she wanted
the last of the flash gold. Finding the journal had been a boon,
and maybe one day, she could seek out someone to help her craft
more flash gold, using the notes as a guide. But she didn’t know if
that was possible yet. What if her father had been the one who’d
held the true secret, and what if he had died with it in his head,
never revealing it fully to anyone, Amelia included?

Cedar was watching her.
His expression wasn’t stubborn, and she sensed that he wasn’t
committed to changing her path, just that he was offering
alternatives, alternatives that would help them to escape Dawson
and live out the week.

She groped for a
reasonable argument with which to respond. “If the law’s going to
follow us all over the world, having an airship powered by flash
gold would help us stay out of their reach.”

“And you don’t think you
can make some more using those notes?” He waved toward the pocket
where she had stuck the journal.

“I think someone with a
witch’s talent will be needed, at the least. Not to mention that
you actually need a massive chunk of regular gold to start with,
and I don’t think either of us has the deed to the mother lode
claim in our back pockets.”

Cedar leaned around her
and looked at her backside. “Looks like you’ve got a screwdriver in
yours.”

“Yes, and I’ll poke you
with it if you don’t help me figure out a way onto that
airship.”

His eyebrows rose. So
much for reasonable arguments.

Kali took a deep breath.
“No, you don’t have to help me. I’ll find my own way on. Maybe if I
let myself get captured, they would—”

“No.” This time, Cedar
gripped
her
arm. “That’s not acceptable. Listen, if her
flying contraption is still on the deck up there this evening, we
can try to sneak aboard in the dark. I reckon I can wrangle up some
rope and a grappling hook.”

“I could get both from my
workshop if it wasn’t under a mountain,” Kali grumbled.

“We’ve got a couple of
hours until dark. Why don’t we see if those scavengers have
scavenged up anything?”

“What about the
Mounties?”

Cedar looked toward the
airships. “That group with the hound might still be tracking us,
but I’ve a hunch that the Mounties close to Dawson were called back
to deal with this new threat. We’re small potatoes compared to
well-armed airships looming over the city. Might be the trackers
just didn’t know about this trouble yet.”

“You’re calling yourself
a small potato? Cedar, you’re taller than a tree.”

“A potato tree.” He waved
in the direction of the landslide. “We’ll stay under cover, but
let’s go take a look.”

Kali nodded and walked
beside him. “Thank you for helping me again.”

“Reckon I owe you quite a
bit of helping after that jailbreak.”

“But you’d help me,
anyway, right? I’m fairly certain helping the woman is a part of
the courting process.”

“Is it? I thought I just
had to sit on a porch with you and bring lemonade to sip.”

“Naw, sneaking onto enemy
airships and avoiding the authorities is definitely included.”

“Huh.” He wrapped his arm
around her waist as they walked across a flat stretch of land.
“I’ll have to find a book on manners and such and learn up on this
a bit.”

“You do that. Look up
potatoes while you’re at it, because you should know they don’t
grow on trees.”

• • • • •

Kali noticed two things
when the landslide area came into view, the big crater partially
filled with debris from the diggers. First, the men who had been
crawling all over the area with their shovels were gone. Second,
part of her cave entrance was visible.

She almost broke into a
sprint, but Cedar stopped her with a hand.

“What do you see?” she
asked—almost demanded—as she struggled to stomach a delay. Even
though everything in the cave had probably been crushed, she
couldn’t help but feel a surge of hope at seeing the mouth of it
yawning open. With luck, that meant at least part of the inside had
survived the explosion.

“Nothing,” Cedar said,
his gaze raking the long shadows that stretched across the hillside
of boulders, dirt, and logs. He sniffed like a hound, as if the
answer might lie in the wind. All Kali smelled were the scents of
recently upturned earth and broken trees. “I wasn’t expecting
nothing, were you?”

“No, but I’m amenable to
it. Why don’t you watch my back while I mosey over to the
cave?”

Cedar tapped the hilt of
his revolver. “I don’t have a lot of weaponry to defend your back
with if Mounties leap out of the trees.”

“If my workshop is
intact, I’ll
make
you some weaponry.”

He snorted. “Come this
way. We’ll take the circuitous route.”

Though Kali itched to
race across the landslide in the more direct route, she admitted
that the area lay suspiciously quiet, strangely so given the
activity of the morning. She followed Cedar through the trees
without argument. Still, she craned her neck for glimpses into the
cave, and she practically bounced as she walked, her weariness from
a day full of tramping through the hills forgotten.

Cedar stopped, and she
almost ran into him.

“Someone’s ahead,” he
whispered so quietly that she almost missed it. “Stay here.”

He shot her a warning
look over his shoulder, as if he didn’t expect her to obey. Kali
lifted her hands and pasted an innocent expression onto her face.
She had no interest in following him and finding out who was
lurking in the woods. As Cedar disappeared into the shadows ahead,
she cast a longing look toward the cave. On the other hand, she had
a great deal of interest in finding out if any of her belongings
lurked inside there. Preferably in an uncrushed state.

Admitting that someone
might have laid a trap, she leaned against a tree and told herself
to wait for Cedar to return. It would be wise to be patient. It
wasn’t as if the cave would go anywhere tonight, right?

Those reasonable
arguments swayed her for almost an entire thirty seconds. Then she
found herself crouching low and leaving the cover of the trees. She
didn’t sprint straight for the cave—she wasn’t
that
reckless. She picked her way through the rocks, using the bumps and
boulders of the destroyed landscape for cover, determined that if
someone was lying in wait, that someone wouldn’t spot her.

The twilight shadows made
it difficult to see into the cave, and boulders still covered a
large portion of the entrance. Though she paused and craned her
neck several times along the way, she couldn’t see much until she
was right in front of the opening. Even then, dark shadows in the
back made it hard to tell how much of the cave remained standing.
Many boulders filled the space, some piled all the way to the
arched ceiling, but was that… She scooted closer, thinking she
could pick out the bow of her airship, not as crushed as she had
imagined.

As she crept over the
cave threshold, a throat cleared behind her.

Kali jumped and spun
about, reaching for her empty smoke-nut pocket before she realized
that had been Cedar’s voice. He loomed in the shadows by the crater
with two smaller figures beside him.

“When I said, ‘Stay
here,’ I was sure I pointed to the ground over
there
,” he
said.

A boyish giggle drifted
up the slope.

“Tadzi?” Kali asked. It
had grown too dark to make out faces.

“Yes, and Kéitlyudee,”
Tadzi said. “We’ve been keeping the white men away.”

“Really? Did the fan
work? Did it make scary noises? And did you tell stories about
sacred grounds being haunted?”

“The fan sort of worked,”
Kéitlyudee said, “but I think the men were more spooked by the
Mounties showing up and by soldiers rappelling down from an airship
than by moaning sounds coming from the woods.”

“Ah.” Kali decided not to
be disappointed. As long as the scavengers had been scared away
before her cave had been looted… She looked over her shoulder,
itching to see if that was the case. “Did you already check the
cave? Did anything survive?”

“It’s a mess,” Tadzi
said.

That didn’t answer her
question.

“The men were excited to
unearth the cave,” Kéitlyudee said. “They hauled boulders out in a
hurry, and I think some of them might have pilfered small items
that they found, but nobody carried away anything sizable.”

“Most likely, those
scavengers were criminals or had questionable pasts themselves,”
Cedar said.

“I miss the days when I
could sniff disdainfully at criminals,” Kali said, crawling over
the boulders partially blocking the entrance. “Cedar, do you have a
lantern?” she called back after she cracked her knuckles against a
rock. Her own lanterns were surely flattened under the
boulders.

“Is providing light for
you something listed in the courting book?” Cedar asked.

“It better be.”

“Courting?” Tadzi
asked.

Kali left Cedar to
explain that as she patted her way to where she could make out the
bow of the airship hull. Her fingers brushed boards, still intact
boards. She felt her way along the hull. Not all of the boards were
still intact, and she wagered the half-completed decking had been
smashed to tarnation, but the overall frame seemed like it might be
salvageable. She paused when the letters she had painted on the
hull came into view, dinged and dusty, but still readable:
Liberty
. The name she had chosen for her ship.

The engine and boiler had
already been installed, so she had to clamber inside the framework
to check on them. She squirmed into the dark hold, squeezing past
broken boards and a boulder that had fallen through the deck. She
hadn’t built much in the way of cabins or separate spaces yet,
figuring that could all be completed once they were in the air, and
it was a good thing, or the inside might not have been navigable at
all.

“Got your light here,
Kali,” Cedar said from outside of the vessel.

“Thanks.” Kali couldn’t
see a thing from within the bowels of the craft, so she
investigated by touch. “The engine is still here. There’s a boulder
that smashed the smokestack, but I can hammer that out. I hadn’t
installed the fan blades yet, so if I can unbury them, they might
still be all right. The deck protected a lot of the interior.
Definitely need to move these rocks and broken boards, though.
Cedar?”

“You’re not going to tell
me that manual labor is on the courting list, are you?”

“Actually, I thought I’d
ask you to look for a rope. Should be in the back of the cave where
I had my workbench. Doubt the bench will have survived, but you
can’t crush rope, right? And I can make us a grappling hook in
quick order.”

“A grappling hook? You’re
still thinking to infiltrate that airship?”

“Of course I am. What
would have changed in the last hour?” More than ever, she wanted to
find Amelia and her flash gold. She ran her hands over the
machinery in the compact engine room, touching the spot she had
created just for the energy source.

“Well, you found your
airship,” Cedar said. “I thought you might want to spend the night
cuddling with it instead.”

Her hands
did
slide lovingly over everything, everything that she had been
certain she had lost. The smokestack wasn’t the only thing that
needed to be hammered into shape, but she didn’t mind hammering. It
was better than starting everything over from scratch.

Kali forced herself to
keep the inspection brief. Besides, it would be easier to inspect
once daylight returned to the cave. She wriggled out of the hatch
and hopped down onto a boulder. As requested, Cedar was poking in
the back with the lantern while Tadzi and Kéitlyudee helped. Warmth
flowed through her, not just because she had found her airship
mostly intact, but also because of their help. Especially Cedar’s.
She might tease him about the courting, but she was flattered he
wanted to spend time with her and that he was risking himself by
staying around for her.