The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (22 page)

             
“
The Aurelia
,” Henry said nastily, and Ingrid gasped.

             
Spinning, her face now a shade darker than Henry's, she demanded, “Is this true?”

             
If there ever was a time to play the Palatine First card, it was now.

             
“Listen,” Reece tried to make his voice soothing. Maybe he should’ve brought Scarlet along after all. “You should know I have the Grand Duke's permission to captain Aurelia. In fact.” Try though he might, he couldn't help but cringe as he extended his hand to Henry. “Reece Sheppard, Palatine First of Honora, heir to the dukeship, and rightful captain of the airship Aurelia as granted by her original owners.”

             
Nivy glanced at him sideways, eyebrows raised. She couldn't exactly speak for all The Heron, but she’d have to do, for now. Then again, maybe that look had simply been impressed. It was an awfully long title.

             
And it drew both Ingrid and Henry up short. Henry, his small, watery eyes flickering between Reece's face and waiting hand, was the first to recover.

             
“You mean to tell me,” he said, still flustered, “that you're simply here by coincidence, and
not
for the generator?”

             
“The generator,” Reece repeated flatly, and dropped his hand.

             
“Yes, the generator,” Henry echoed, mocking. “Ring a bell, does it, Palatine First? Well, you're about to find out how much those titles mean around—” He broke off hoarsely as Ingrid shot him a glare to rival one of Abigail's, expecting obedience and promising consequences at the same time. “
Ingrid
,” he complained. “They're outsiders! They can't be trusted! And their ship, Ingrid—”

             
“No. For too long we've refused to trust our allies. Our culture is
dying
, Henry. It is time for a change.”

             
Quivering with rage, Henry cast one last loathing look at Reece, gave the lapels of his jacket a yank, and marched away, muttering.

             
“I’m sorry,” Ingrid apologized, shaking her head. “He is a good man, but a traditionalist to the core.” Pausing, she looked at Reece, measuring him anew with a glint in her eyes that made him want to take a step back. “
Are
you after the generator?”

             
Reece truthfully answered, “We’re looking for a missing ship part, one that was auctioned off a few centuries ago. But we call it a thermal turbine.”

             
For a long moment, Ingrid stared at him, her mouth in a tight, hard line. She glanced at Nivy, uncertain, and then abruptly turned on her heel and started marching up the alley, beckoning, “Come. I will show you something.”

             
Reece waited till she'd gone a full ten steps before he slowly started following. “What do you think?” he asked Nivy under his breath as she walked beside him, staring after Ingrid with eyes little less calculating than the woman's had been.

             
Nivy signed out their designated gesture for the word
trust
, then firmly shook her head. Don't trust anyone. A good rule of thumb…if they wanted to end up like the Letoians. Friendless, and dead in the water.

             
They passed through a ramshackle market square where the grubby-faced peddlers were selling browning fruit and secondhand clothes, some with holes worn right through them. Where the market dissolved into artisan apartments—a blacksmith’s, a seamstress’s, a cobbler’s—the space overhead was crisscrossed with clotheslines dripping disconsolately between second story homes. All the while the houses clinging to the North and South Sheets flickered with movement and light and slow life.

             
“This way,” Ingrid said sharply when she caught Reece staring in interest at a wing of the overgrown factory—which she called The Plant—that was marked on its double steel doors with a poisonous red X. She led them past the forbidden doors and to a wing squeezed between the baker’s brick shop and a boarded-up warehouse that looked like it had once been a hospital.

“
This is not the quickest way to the heart of The Plant,” she admitted as she pulled out a fat ring and started sifting through its collection of keys. “But it will help us avoid any more Henrys.”

             
Once she’d found the right key, she unlocked a narrow, windowless door painted to blend in with its walls and waved Reece and Nivy on through. In blink-worthy contrast to the subdued greys and browns of outside, the inside of the wing was all white, from its low ceiling to its painted floors.

             
“What is this place?” Reece asked curiously, trying to imagine what a long empty hallway might be good for besides running up and down and screaming. He was tempted.

             
“One of our emergency evacuation centers. We have not had to use it in some months, thank goodness.” Closing the door behind her, Ingrid started down the corridor, the heels of her boots ticking like a loud clock. “The generator, you see, creates a safe box around the city, a shielding mechanism that keeps out the Rippers. The Rippers have broken the boundaries before, when our truce has failed, and these wings are a last holding point. They would risk destruction, coming so close to the generator. It works at a specific frequency only the Rippers can hear.”

             
“Like a dog whistle.”

             
“Hardly,” Ingrid said dryly as she paused before a pair of padlocked doors. “I've never known a whistle to burn out a dog's nerve endings. Look there.” She jabbed her chin at the doors' twin rectangular windows and stepped back to make room for him. “I can take you no further, but the generator is rather impossible to miss.”

             
It only took Reece one look through the window to decide he was in trouble. He didn't know turbines or generators, but he
did
know Aurelia's design, her gold and wooden look. The tubular hunk of metal sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the white domed room had that look. Men and women in more olive uniforms like Mayor Petric's bustled around the room with scrolls beneath their arms, never coming within ten feet of what Reece was sure was his turbine.

             
“Well?” Ingrid prompted.

             
Reece turned to Petric. “I'd like to send for my mechanic, if I could. I'm sorry to say I don't have much of an eye for engines.”

             
He hoped his confused face would stand up to Petric's scrutiny; she seemed to be trying to glare right through to the back of his head. “In the morning, perhaps,” she said finally, her voice a little too light. She gestured them back towards the exit. “It's late, and I promised you food and rest. No work can be done on your ship until the Rippers sleep, in any case. You can find your way back to the up-downs? I must see to Henry before he plants too many rumors…that man will be the end of my term, the Raiders take him. Ask the guards at the up-downs to escort you to the boarding house. They will show you the way. Goodnight, Captain Sheppard.”

             
She abruptly left them there, standing before the doors to the outside while she strode away at a march that seemed hurried but smooth at the same time. The whole thing was strange, and Reece didn't need one of Gideon's telltale bad feelings to warn him to be on his toes, with Ingrid as much as Henry or anyone else. Why would she leave them? And so close to The Plant.

             
“Nivy.”

             
Nivy looked at him as they stepped outside together.

             
“I need you to follow her.”

             
Unsurprised, she nodded and immediately began backing up, facing the wing and flexing her hands experimentally.

             
“Just see where she goes and what she says to Henry and then come find us. No sidecar adventures,” Reece firmly added when she smirked. This might be the sort of thing she used to do for The Heron all the time, but he wasn't The Heron. And these weren't The Kreft…they were something else.

             
With an “alright, alright!” expression, Nivy took a few running steps till it seemed she would collide with the side of the wing, then leaped, kicked off the wall, and grabbed the lip of the roof, her feet scrambling. Reece glanced over both his shoulders, on guard. By the time he'd looked back around, she had gotten her footing, dived to the next low rooftop, and come up from her landing roll to begin sprinting away.              

XI

Evacuation Now, a Guidebook

             
The blanket was itchy. Usually that wouldn't have bothered Hayden—and he wasn't really complaining; it was cold in the barracks, or
boarding house
as they were supposed to call it—but tonight, it was just one more thing keeping him from sleeping. He rolled over, exhausted but restless, and tried to muffle the sound of Mordecai's wheezy snores in his pillow. Gideon's provided a deeper, coarser harmony from a few bunks down.

             
“We should've thought to bring some local vibration dampeners,” someone whispered.

Hayden opened his eyes. Without his bifocals, Reece was a fuzzy shape silhouetted against the boarding house's window.

              “What are you doing up?” he asked, feeling around under his bed till his hand found his spectacles. He pushed them on and leaned upright, careful not to bump his head on the low springs of Mordecai's mattress above. The old man gave a snuffling snort.

             
Reece stared out into the valley with one leg folded up to his chest and the other dangling off the side of the large trunk serving as a window seat. “Nivy's not back yet.” He played his fingertips over the candlestick on the windowsill, making the flame wink in and out.

             
Hayden lowered his bare feet to the stone floor and rose to join him, worriedly peering out the window. Fewer than a dozen windows on the distant South Sheet still had candles burning in them, and the leeks, as Reece called them, had all gone out when a loud gong had sounded some two hours ago.

             
“I'm sure we would have heard something if she were in some sort of trouble.”

             
“I sent her to
spy
, Hayden. If she's in some sort of trouble, it's exactly the kind the Letoians won't tell us about.”

             
Slowly sitting down on the other end of the trunk, Hayden said, “You don't trust them, do you?”

             
Reece looked at him. “Should I?”

             
“They
are
our allies. Petric sounds alright. She took you to see the turbine.”

             
“She took me to see their generator. And I'm ninety-nine—no, ninety-eight—no,
ninety
-
nine
percent sure she was just testing me.” Making an agitated noise, Reece went on in a low mutter, “But why would it matter to her if their generator turned out to be a turbine? She knew before ever taking me to The Plant that it didn't matter if the two were one and the same…she'd never give up the generator, either way. She was looking for something. Looking for me to confirm it was a turbine. Why?”

             
“Maybe you should ask Scarlet.” When Reece snorted loudly—loudly enough to cause a brief break in Mordecai's snores—Hayden insisted, “She understands people, Reece. And she's good at puzzles.”

             
Reece leaned back against the wall and crossed his ankles, reclining. His smile-lines were deep grooves in the candlelight. “Is that what you two have been up to? Solving puzzles?”

             
His face burning, Hayden said, “It's not like that. Scarlet is…” He listened, carefully counting the sounds of deep breathing and making sure everyone was asleep. “She's really clever, and with the…you know,
the glamour
fading…she's becoming a good friend.”

             
“But you still want to impress her.”

             
“Oh, definitely.”

             
Laughing, Reece leaned upright, squinted out the window, and began undoing the bolts to open it. Hayden followed his glance and jumped. There was a face—Nivy's face, thank goodness—staring through the glass at him. She ducked out of sight, making room for Reece to swing the window out over her head, then scrambled in to sit with them on the trunk, breathing hard.