The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (19 page)

             
Scarlet just looked at him, but the look was packed full of words Reece would have been startled to hear coming from her dignified mouth.

             
“Gid and Owon are both coming. Don't get excited,” Reece added when Owon's eyes flickered to him. “Unless the prospect of spending the rest of your life rotting in a Letoian prison cell appeals to you. Then by all means, jump around.”

             
“We're dumpin' him?” Gideon exclaimed, and elbowed Hayden excitedly.

             
With a slow grace that might very well have been brought on by the presence of Gideon's revolver at his back, Owon stood. “We did not come this far to be cast aside,” he said coolly, his lip curling. It didn't do much for his misshapen nose. “If you leave us now, we will hunt you. We will—”

             
“You heard my terms, Owon. Be dumped or be—” Trailing off, Reece floundered a hand in Gideon's direction. When Owon's face darkened, confirming that he'd gotten the hint, he went on, “You can all come, but don't bring more than a bag each. I want to get that turbine and be out of Leto in…what is it, Po?”

             
Dropping her wagging hand, Po said, “I'm gonna need a full afternoon with the turbine, at least.”

             
“A day, then.”

             
A day to get rid of the Vee, replace the thermal turbine, restock on necessaries, and be on their way again. Twenty-four hours should be plenty of time to accomplish all that and maybe get some shuteye on the side. So long as The Kreft didn't show their ugly white faces.

             
The rear hatch opened up into blackness as thick as fabric. Reece half expected to reach out and come away with a handful of it. He'd known to expect the constant dark, but the heat came as a surprise; the air was humid enough to make his skin feel sticky. His winter coat lay in a pile with all the others' against the cargo bay wall, and the rucksack strapped over his shoulders was already making his back break out in sweat.

             
“I'm surprised they haven't sent any sort of welcome delegation,” Scarlet said as she twisted her hair into a golden bun on top of her head. “Surely they saw us break atmosphere.”

             
“I don't know,” Reece admitted, rolling up his shirt sleeves. “They didn't send a log, if they did.”

             
Gideon, who had his shoulder pressed against the frame of the hatch, glared out into the night, tapping the barrel of his revolver against the side of his leg. “It's as quiet as a graveyard out there.”

             
“That's just the planet's natural environment,” Scarlet told him. “The clouds are responsible for the darkness, but they account for the heat and the silence as well. It's like all of Leto has been shut in a giant warming cupboard.”

             
Reece twisted at the sound of footsteps, looking back at Po, Hayden, and Nivy, who he'd sent to fetch photon wands for the lot of them. He accepted his wand and clicked it on to test its charge, then flashed it over Mordecai and Owon, standing in the corner. Owon maintained a flat expression, but there was most definitely a new degree of coldness in his eyes. Reece would've been lying if he'd said he was looking forward to poking around in the dark with Owon a mere crazed pounce away.

             
“Lead the way, Gid,” Reece ordered, hesitantly turning away from Owon and his cold-burning eyes.

             
Without further ado, Gideon hoisted up his gun and his photon wand, one crossed over the other, and started out the hatch. The beam of his wand stood out like a bold white line drawn across dark parchment.

             
Reece ducked outside. One step his boots were on firm metal, the next, on soft, warm sand. His photon wand worked for finding his footing, but beyond that, it was mostly just a comfort, something to hold onto in the darkness that seemed to go on forever. He could dimly make out where the flat horizon stopped and the cloudy sky began, but only because the eastern skies were tinged slightly green.

             
Gideon caught him by the shoulder and turned him around, pointing with his photon wand at a place in the sky that seemed somehow blacker than the rest. After a second, there came a series of quick, colorful flashes—blue, yellow, red, purple—that backlit the rolling shapes of the clouds and made Reece's eyes water over. He made a noise of puzzlement. In the half-seconds when the lightning lit the landscape, all that could be seen in every direction was desert. Empty, rolling dessert. No roads, no trees—only some scrappy bushes, and staggered every half-mile or so, tall metallic towers, probably for drawing down lightning.

             
“I don't like this place,” Po whispered as she bumped into Reece. He could barely make out the lightness of her hair.

             
Scarlet's voice said from the other side of Gideon, “I'm sure this is perfectly…normal.”

             
“Last I heard,” Reece said dryly, “Leto was
inhabited
.”

             
He did a quick headcount and looked back at
The Aurelia
, just a big, hulking shadow now that her rear hatch had been closed. The Letoians better know how to find her again. If the Letoians themselves could be found at all.

             
“Pair up,” he ordered. The words were barely out of his mouth before Po wound her arm through his, nearly cutting off his circulation.

             
They walked in a slow cluster. Heading north, Reece thought, though it was hard to judge without the stars. The crew was quiet except for when the colored lightning made someone gasp or mutter. He kept expecting to feel raindrops, between the clouds and the lightning and the heaviness in the air.
Hoping
to feel raindrops, actually. In less than a mile, he had worked up the sweat of a good hard run.

             
“What's that?” Hayden's voice asked. He and Gideon were walking on Reece and Po's heels; Reece had been listening to the agitated
click-clicks
of Gideon toying with his revolver for well over two miles, now. “That reflection in the sand…see it? No, don't shine your beams at it. It's easier to see without. Look.”

             
Everyone hesitantly aimed their wands at the ground and stared ahead. Sure enough, something was weakly glittering in the green half-light, something smooth and flat.

             
“Water!” Po exclaimed loudly, then slapped a hand over her mouth, looking around. “Sorry. But water means people, don't it?”

             
Gently unwinding her fingers from the crook of his elbow—he expected when she wanted to take it again, the grooves she'd made would still be there—Reece eyed the pool uneasily. He guessed it wasn't that much stranger than the rest of this place, but he'd never seen water that looked so still, not on the calmest spring day. It almost looked like a mirror. And everyone knew that mirrors were nothing if not creepy in the dark.

             
“Gid, Nivy?” Sand swished against his pants as they shuffled to join him. “The rest of you, stay here. And keep your wands on, pointed up, so we can see them clearly. Got Owon, Mordecai?”

             
“Well sure, he's right…oh, dirt.”

             
“That ain't funny, old man,” Gideon said, but not before he snorted.

             
“We think it is.”

             
“No one cares what you think,” Reece told Owon curtly. He wished he could shake the feeling Owon was seeing him clear as day with his serum-enhanced eyes; it made his skin prickle. “Hayden, watch for the all-clear signal.”

Hayden clicked his photon wand off and then on three times.
“That one?” His voice took on a different tone; Reece could just imagine him looking at Scarlet with that loopy smile on his face, aiming to impress. “We used to sneak out of Dormitory Taurus all the time. Out the window. We would climb right down the trellis.”

             
Reece wished he could've gotten a good look at Gid's face; he wanted to know if it was as astonished as his. There had been a time when Hayden would
never
have admitted to sneaking out after hours.

             
“You got the signal wrong,” Gideon told Hayden, a grin in his voice. “Three clicks is what?”

             
Reece answered sagely, “It's safe to come out, no one's around to see you've been swimming naked in the lake.”

             
He could practically hear Hayden swelling up indignantly. “You
stole
my clothes, Reece! After you tricked me into the lake!”

             
“You never did find that injured gursa, did you? I could've sworn we told him it was right there in the shallows,” Reece said to Gideon with a shake of his head.

             
“Blind as Freherian swampghost without his glasses. Ow!” Gideon growled. Just as Reece opened his mouth to ask him what was wrong, someone flicked his ear, and he jumped. When he turned his beam on Nivy, she was shaking her head at him disparagingly.

             
“Alright, alright,” he grumbled, sourly rubbing his ear. “Just watch for the signal, Hayden. Two clicks.”

             
He, Nivy, and Gideon started for the distant pool of water. The pool was really more of a pond, almost perfectly round and nestled in a bowl of sloping sand. It looked like black glass, bouncing off the colors of the lightning in strange ripples of light. His hand sweating on his photon wand, Reece went to the water's edge, and with a careful toe, prodded the surface of the water. It rippled slowly, more like oil, or syrup. They wouldn't be drinking from it any time soon.

             
“I'm starting to think we should go back to Aurelia,” he said quietly, more to himself than the others. He looked at Nivy as she hoisted her rucksack, crouched by the pool's edge, and tapped her finger against the water. She rolled the wet fingertip against her thumb, smelling it, then touched it tentatively to her tongue. Spitting, she shuddered and leaped to her feet, holding her hand out to Reece. He aimed his wand at it, confused until he realized the sheen of moisture on her finger was
red
. Oh, bogrosh. That'd better not be—

             
Gideon's hand coming down on his shoulder about made him jump out of his boots.

             
“Something's out there,” Gid said, tensing. “On the next rise. Watchin' us.”

             
Reece twitched his eyes in the direction of the rise. His lungs went cold.
More
than one something was out there. The three horse-sized shadows were dark against the green clouds, and they gave a feeling of watching. One was seated on its hind legs, like a dog. They could have been statues for how little they moved…only they hadn't been there a minute ago.

             
“Move,” Reece whispered to the others, though he could've just as easily meant it for himself. His legs were trying to lock in place. “Slowly. Move.”

             
Together, he, Nivy, and Gideon backed up the opposite bank, waiting for the things to move, to leap, to make any sign of being alive. Nothing. But the feeling of watching grew more pronounced, as though Reece could feel the eyes he couldn't see taking measure of his every step.

             
“The others,” Gideon suddenly said. “The others are runnin'.”

             
Reece craned his neck a fraction to one side.
The beams of light from the others' photon wands were jumping and sweeping as if they were being carried in swinging arms. And they were getting closer. A gunshot sounded.

             
“Owon,” Reece guessed through gritted teeth. He wet his lips. The things remained as they were. “Wait till we're down to where they can't see us. Then run.”

             
It seemed the longest ten seconds in the world, those ten seconds they crept backward till the creatures on the rise were slowly halved, then cut entirely out of sight by the crest of the hill. As soon as the last silhouetted head slid behind the hilltop, Reece spun and fell into a dead sprint back towards the others, not a step behind Gideon or ahead of Nivy.

             
For a second, the adrenaline in his ears garbled the others' distant shouts, and he took them for warnings that Owon was on the loose. He wanted to shout back, to ask which way he'd gone, but the thought of those shapes in the darkness stopped his voice up in his throat.

             
Then two words suddenly leaped loud and clear out of the echoes. He cursed, grabbing Gid by the back of his shirt to stop him from barreling onward. The others were materializing into bouncing shadows on the near horizon, heading straight for them.

             
“Let go!” Gideon snarled. “If that bleedin' Vee even—”