The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (23 page)

             
“Any luck?” Reece asked.

             
Nivy nodded grimly and brushed a strand of sweaty hair behind her ear, staring without blinking at the bunks. Po and Scarlet's bunk, to be exact. She pointed—once at Po, curled up on the top bed with her freckled face mashed into her pillow, and once out the window, down at Leto City.

             
Reece must have worked out an interpretation ahead of Hayden, because he asked, “What for?” while Hayden was still frowning thoughtfully out the window.

             
Hayden winced, sympathetic, as Nivy opened and closed her mouth soundlessly, looking frustrated. Another good thing about getting to The Ice Ring…it meant she'd finally be able to take off that horrible collar.

             
“Is it Petric?” Reece guessed. “Did you see something with Petric?”

             
Shooting him a grateful look, Nivy nodded and outlined a shape with her hands—a tall box with lines running away from it.

             
“You want Po to look at the turbine.”

             
“Now?” Hayden reached, pulled the scratchy wool blanket off his bed, and wrapped it around his shoulders. However humid it was above ground, down here, it was as chilly as a coolant pantry. “But it's bound to be under guard. If we were caught sneaking into The Plant in the middle of the night…” He trailed off distractedly as Nivy charaded writing something down. He might not have Reece's uncanny interpretation skills, but that one seemed fairly self-explanatory. Hurrying over to his rucksack, he rummaged about for a square of parchment and a pen and handed them to her.

             
She wrote for a long time—full minutes—before finally thrusting the parchment at Reece. He pulled it out of sight to read with a frown for at least as long as she'd been writing, his face carefully neutral. Hayden looked on curiously.

             
“What does it say?” he asked.

             
“It doesn't matter.” Reece handed the parchment back to Nivy with a significant look. “We can't leave without that turbine. We'd never make it out of the atmosphere, let alone into the Perseus Stream. I agree there's something off about Leto, but they could threaten to cook us up and serve us on a side of rice, and we still couldn't go until the turbine was secured. We're stuck. Great. And now I'm craving rice.”

             
Frowning, Nivy tore the parchment in two, wadded up the pieces, and angrily threw them at the window. They bounced off and rolled to a stop by her feet; she stared down at them, her eyebrows pushed together.

“
Look,” Reece said, pausing to glance searchingly at Hayden, his expression conflicted for some reason, “I'll have Po and Scarlet go down to the city with you first thing in the morning, but that’s the best I can do for now. Just…try to get some sleep.”

             
Nodding unhappily, Nivy dragged her feet over to the bunk next to Scarlet and Po's, crawled into it, and stiffly rolled over with her boots still on. With a sigh, Hayden sat down on his bed, hugging the blanket to his arms and watching Reece as he snatched the candle from the windowsill and walked it to his and Gideon's bunk. He looked the kind of tired that Father often looked: not simply ready for bed, but whittled down to the bones-and-skin strength that kept a person walking after the muscles had been worn away.

             
“Reece?”

             
Reece looked up from untying his boots, eyebrows raised.

             
Grimacing, Hayden clumsily changed what he had been going to say. “How…how long do you think we'll be gone?”

             
Looking amused as he gave his left boot a tug and then let it plop to the floor, Reece remarked, “Homesick already?”

             
“I guess.”

Hayden carefully folded his bifocals and tucked them under his bed before lying down. He stared blurrily up at the spirals of Mordecai's bedsprings. Sophie had probably put in a few hours at the postal office this morning. After that, she would have worked in her vegetable garden until dinner, brought in some fresh nimblegreens to put on the table…maybe played with her owl, Benjamin…

As long as Hayden could picture those things, he could stifle the sting of wanting them in person. “I wouldn't go back yet, if I could,” he said, “but I do miss it. Sophie's cooking. The smell of grass. Little things you don't notice until they're gone.”

             
“Sophie's cooking,” Reece repeated fondly. He disappeared from Hayden's sight as he flopped back onto his bed with a grunt. “Biscuits and chocolate tea.”

             
“The rain,” Po spoke up sleepily, “I miss the rain.”

             
“I miss the sleep,” someone else snapped, and Hayden belatedly realized Gideon's snores had dropped out some time ago. “The kind you can only get when no one's talkin'.”

             
With a laugh, Reece blew out the candle.

             
Hayden restlessly waited and listened for the sounds of the others dropping off to sleep again. Gideon's snores returned with a vengeance. Reece muttered unconsciously. He couldn't be sure about Po or Nivy, but they weren't the ones he was worried about—they weren't like Reece and Gideon, always holding back the worst from him.

             
Retrieving his datascope from under his pillow, he used its buzzing screen to light the floor, searching. His fingertips brushed one wadded-up half of Nivy's message; it crackled noisily in his fist, making his pulse race. With the note and datascope together in one hand, he wriggled under his covers and ducked his head to read. His breath caught. The note was just three words.

             
Leave. Now. Danger.

             
He never found its other half.

             
Between the Creeds' snores and his reoccurring nightmares about the Rippers cooking him up in a pot of rice, Hayden didn't get much sleep. It didn't help that morning in Leto City resembled the dead of night as much as night did. He wouldn't have known it to be morning at all if it weren't for the smell of strong tea tempting him awake, and the sound of Mordecai merrily whistling “Blue Skies in Buckets”. Candles and leeks, flickering orange and dirty white, had been lit throughout the boarding house.

             
“Oh, Hayden,” Scarlet said from the foot of her bunk as he staggered to his feet. Bafflingly, she was wearing one of the Letoian's raggedy hooded cloaks. And still looked pretty, at that. “You look awful. Did you sleep
at all
? Here.” She held out a perfectly round red pill and a clay mug filled with tea. “Mayor Petric and her council have requested—firmly—that we all take this.”

             
“What…what is it?” Hayden clumsily tried to pinch the pill between his still-sleeping fingers.

             
“Bacterial sterilizer. To kill any foreign contaminants we might've brought with us.” As Hayden obediently swallowed the pill, she pulled a muddy-colored cloak like hers down from Po's bed. “She also sent these criminal fashion blunders.”

             
Mordecai, sitting on the window trunk with a book open on his knee, said without looking up, “They ain't so bad. Airy. Roomy.” He gave his left sleeve a flap, demonstrating. “Just go ahead and try to guess how many near-deadly weapons I'm keeping in there. Go on. Remember.
Near-deadly
.”

             
“I'd rather not know, Mr. Creed.” Scarlet turned back to Hayden, who was busy trying to make his fingers cooperate. They didn't seem to want to work together to unfold his spectacles. “The others have all gone,” she continued matter-of-factly, taking the spectacles, opening them, and sliding them onto his face. “Po, Nivy, and I have already been to see the turbine.”

             
Hayden had attributed her closeness to his bad eyesight, but once his bifocals had settled on the bridge of his nose…she was still there. Attentive, smiling. “I-it is the turbine, then?”

             
Scarlet paused, then said firmly, “Yes. Po's certain. But she also thinks any turbine could be fixed to operate like the Letoian's generator, with the right tinkering. Reece sent her and Gideon to the scrap market to find enough parts to make a replacement he can offer in his negotiations with the Letoians. Which should be underway by now.”

             
Rooting around in his rucksack till he'd found a clean shirt, Hayden asked, “Do you think that will work?”

             
Scarlet stared at Mordecai…or rather
through
him, her eyes glazing. The old man appeared absorbed in the book on his knee, absently curling one of his mustaches around a finger. “Imagine someone wanted you to trade your datascope for a different one. Not a newer one, not a nicer one, just a different one, because they wanted yours. Would you trade?”

             
Hayden's eyes wandered to his pillow, concealing his datascope. It'd been his thirteenth birthday present from Father and Sophie; it'd taken them months to save up enough to buy even an outdated model. All his class notes, all his work on translating The Heron's mysterious manuscript, even some kinetic stills of the Rice family from before Mother had died, were contained in that small box with his initials scratched on its back panel. Giving it up “just because” would feel like betraying an old friend.

             
“So what do we do?” he asked.

             
“Well, first,” Scarlet broke out of her thoughtful trance with a disarming smile, looking at him, “you should get dressed. Then I thought we could take the morning to explore the city.”

             
Hayden scrambled to catch the shirt he'd dropped in his shock. “I'm sorry?”

             
“It will take Po till lunch to suit up a replacement generator, and Reece
at
least
that long to make Mayor Petric at all open to a trade. After that, I'll neatly step in to take over negotiations and do what I can with what Reece has given me, but until then…are you alright?”

             
A whole morning. Alone. With Scarlet Ashdown. Hayden would honestly rather tackle quantum chromodynamics than have to suffer through constantly thinking of clever things to say, or straining to not humiliate himself at every turn. It was one thing when he and Scarlet naturally fell into conversation, but the thought of being put up to entertaining her for two or three hours made his palms break out in itchy sweat.

             
Trying not to sound frantic, Hayden croakily asked Mordecai, “Are you…I mean, did you…would you like to come?”

             
Mordecai’s eyes twinkled as they continued perusing his book. “Can’t. Got some business to see to for Reece.”

             
“You don't have to be frightened,” Scarlet said lightly, and patted his arm. She made turning for the door to the up-downs look like a ballet move. “I'm not the worst company in the Epimetheus. Once the glamour has faded, of course.”

             
Hayden was still staring long after she'd closed the door and left him standing with his glasses slowly inching down his nose, as if they wanted to run away as badly as he did. He hadn't felt this cornered since Conner Rogers had threatened to stuff him into a garbage digester if he didn't swap his N.H.A. Anatomy homework with him. The only difference was that then, he'd been able to call on Reece and Gideon for help, and now, he was completely on his own.

             
He hadn't thought about Conner Rogers for a long time. He wondered if he still jumped whenever someone mentioned Reece or Gideon in passing.

             
To be fair, it wasn't that bad after the first twenty or so minutes of stammering out answers to Scarlet's polite questions about his family and his studies. Riding the up-downs with a Letoian escort in uniform, Scarlet was relaxed, chatty, graceful. Hayden was just trying to contain his queasiness at the sight of open air between the haphazardly-spaced floorboards beneath his feet.

             
She'd already been out with Po that morning, so the state of what the Letoians denoted as their market square apparently came as no surprise to her, but Hayden was appalled. The food for sale looked shriveled and overripe. The clothes were raggedy disasters. There was only one book vendor that he could find, and her titles were all similar:
An Abridged History of Leto
,
Lights Out! How You Can Conserve Leto's Resources
, and
Evacuation Now, a Guidebook
, and more of the same. The apothecary booted him from her store and told him she hoped the Raiders and Rippers fought over his bones after he called her medicines primitive blunders. He really had had the best intentions.

             
“I don't understand,” Hayden huffed as he sat heavily on the low brick wall quartering off the varying shops and booths. He turned the yellow barbean fruit he'd purchased over and over in his hand. “Why hasn't Honora helped? We have the resources! All this potential…” Sighing, he took a halfhearted bite of the barbean fruit.

             
Scarlet carefully sat down beside him. “Hayden, Honora
has
tried. Years ago, it was one of parliament's biggest focuses, fulfilling our role as Leto's nearest ally. But Leto has turned us away over and over again. We can't force ourselves on them just because we think we could run their planet better than they can. That’s one of the first lessons of Intraplanetary Politics…and the hardest.” She eyed the spotted fruit in his hand. “How is your barbean?”

             
Hayden swallowed with effort. “Disgusting.”