The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (5 page)

             
Reece had that part under control. A few good things had come from growing up on the edge of wealth and politics. First, money wasn't, and never had been, hard to come by for him…mostly because he never remembered to spend it, and it had a habit of gathering interest when he let it sit in his accounts. Secondly, the upper class provided friends like Scarlet, who could negotiate the color out of a crayon. If anyone could get her hands on the confidential records listing the owners of Aurelia's auctioned-off parts, it was her.

             
“How long until she's ready? Ten days?” Reece asked.

             
Po stared at him. “I…didn't you say we had a couple'a weeks still?”

             
“Will it take that long?”

             
“Workin' only four hours a night? Probably.”

             
“What about working on her during the day? I'm going to have Mordecai forge some maintenance requests. The museum itself could hire you. They'd essentially be paying you to fix Aurelia for us.”

             
Po twiddled her fingers as she counted in an undertone, her eyes shut tight in concentration. “Well, if we can get in nine hours'a work a day…which'll be tough, because Tilden and Gus need to keep up their shop, too…maybe five days? Seven, tops.”

             
Nodding, Reece leaned over and carefully unwound the tapered wick inside the lantern. The flame flared violently, and he squinted.

             
“There's something else, Po. But listen…you can say no.”

             
Po scooted closer to him, looking up into his face with an earnest, puppy-like expression that made him smile.

             
“Aurelia needs a mechanic, and you're the best there is. But I don't want anyone coming along who doesn't want to. I need a crew who is ready to take my orders, and if someone feels talked into coming, they might not be too keen on that. This job is going to be dangerous…
very
dangerous. Everyone who comes is accepting the risk involved.”

             
Reece paused, eyeing Po worriedly. She seemed to have gone into shock. Her brown eyes, liquid in the lantern light, refused to blink. He exchanged a look with Nivy, who shrugged bewilderedly.

             
“You're…askin' me to come?” Po asked in a whisper.

             
“You don't have to,” Reece said again, “but I'd like you to.”

             
Squealing, Po threw her arms around his neck and hugged him till he coughed. “I gotta tell Tilden and Gus!” she laughed, standing and running towards the stairs with a whoop.

             
Reece almost called for her to wait until he had Gideon on hand. That way he'd be ready when her brothers came to call, asking why he'd invited their sweet little sister to join him on a dangerous trek across the galaxy.

             
Nivy gave him a dig in the ribs, her eyebrows raised. He read her face for a minute, analyzing her expression.

             
“I know,” he finally said. “But I told her it'd be dangerous.”

             
Nivy's semi-exasperated but mostly amused expression said she doubted Po had registered that part of his invitation. They could hear the echoes of her delighted voice announcing to everyone down below that “the cap'n” had brought her on as official mechanic.

             
Spreading his hands over the lantern, cupping its faint warmth, Reece frowned thoughtfully. “I've been thinking, Nivy. About The Heron.”

             
With a hesitant nod, Nivy bid him continue.

             
“From what you've told us, The Kreft have been here for hundreds of years already. Orchestrating politics from the shadows, quietly beating down any rebellions The Heron could raise.”

             
Looking confused—they'd been over this a dozen times already—Nivy nodded again.

             
“Why haven't The Heron sought help from other planets? If a unified galaxy were to fight The Kreft, the war might've ended a long time ago. Why haven't The Heron ever asked for help?”

             
Her brow furrowed, Nivy leaned back and stared into the darkness beyond Reece. She rubbed her fingertips together, almost as if planning how to make them make words.

             
“If I had to guess,” Reece continued more quietly, “I'd say it was because of their weapon. The weapon The Kreft thought had been destroyed at the beginning of the war. Am I close?”

             
Nivy paused, then looked at him and tilted her hand back and forth.
Sort of
. She seemed troubled, thoughtful.

             
But then, if anything was worth being troubled about, it was this. Reece, with the help the duke had generously given in the spirit of father-son bonding, had managed to piece together the broken history of Honora—weeding out the bits fed to them by Eldritch and The Kreft—and most of the broader, vaguer past of the Epimetheus galaxy. Honoran history books would still need correcting, but that was a job better left to someone who liked history and books. Or anyone besides Reece.

             
The Kreft were a race of marauders and conquerors. More than five hundred years ago, they'd set their sights on the Epimetheus, following rumors of a great weapon kept by The Heron, a people who lived in the secluded cluster of arctic planets known as The Ice Ring. The Kreft and The Heron fought for nigh on fifty years before The Heron began to lose their footing. Their final stroke against The Kreft had been to destroy their weapon and send two ships of refugees across the galaxy and to safety.

             
The refugees had landed on what was then a rural, insignificant planet…Honora. The refugee Heron were assimilated seamlessly into the population, and their airships became a symbol of unity between the people, the capstone of the new civilization. A hundred years later, no one knew who had Heron blood and who didn't, and when The Kreft sent spies to take root on Honora, they believed as the people did…that this was the way it had always been.

Thanks to Nivy, Reece had been able to mostly fill the gaps in his father's research. He knew The Heron's weapon had been on a planet named Icarus, and that Icarus was now the largest Kreft outpost in the Epimetheus. Three-fourths of The Heron people lived in slavery in The Ice Ring, while the other twenty-five percent remained hidden on scattered moons and in tiny, unsuspicious towns. Nivy was one of the Underground's most beloved children. She had been sent to retrieve
The Aurelia
.

             
Aurelia wasn't like her brother Aurelius; she hadn't been just a passenger ship. Nivy wasn't sure how, and Reece didn't have a clue, but somehow, Aurelia was the key to finding the weapon The Heron had never truly destroyed, and maybe even tipping the scales in the Epimetheus's favor.

             
Struggling to put gestures to her thoughts, Nivy pointed to herself.
The Heron
. She mimicked shooting guns, fighting, explosions.
War
. The Heron's war.

             
“Do you believe that?”

             
Nivy was one of the strongest people he'd ever met—she'd even let herself be collared with that band that kept her from speaking in case she was ever taken captive—but she wasn't hard, at least not like he'd first thought. She did what she had to, but he didn't believe for a second she would refuse her people help out of pride.

             
Nivy studied him for a moment, her face unreadable. Then she shook her head and pointed directly down at the ground, a gestured he'd weeded the meaning out of before.
Now
. Not now. Not anymore.

             
An alarmed shout echoed up from below; something banged, and glass crunched. His hand jolting to the hob tucked inside his jacket, Reece leaned out from the lantern and glared into the dark. The lights below had gone out.

             
“Nivy,” he hissed.

             
She nodded and blew out their lantern.

             
After a few moments of scuffling and grunting, someone struck a flint and relit one of the lanterns on the crates.

             
“It's alright,” Mordecai called, picking up the lantern and holding it at a level with his mustached face. “You can come on down. Just a little scuffle, is all.”

             
“What happened?” Reece asked as he and Nivy rattled down the winding stairs, following the light as Mordecai sparked more lanterns back to life. Two had tipped and lay in puddles of dark oil on their sides. Agnes had her arm around Po's shoulders—they were sitting together on the crate behind Mordecai—and Tilden, Gus, and Gideon were clustered around a kneeling Hayden and a spread-eagle, unconscious Owon.

             
“Just what I said would,” Gideon growled over his shoulder, hands on his double-barreled revolver. “He made a move. Almost got out the hatch.”

             
Reece kept his hand on his hob as he approached and knelt beside Hayden, who looked frustrated.

             
“I don't blame him,” Hayden said quietly. “He's never left alone. He hasn't seen daylight in a month. And you have a tendency to treat him like a rabid nightcat.”

             
“I don't recall you feelin' quite so sentimental when he tried to kill you.” Gideon paused. “
Either
time he tried to kill you.” He crouched, joining Reece and Hayden, his nostril curling as he glowered at the Vee. “Honestly, Cap'n, I don't get why we don't just kill him.”

             
Hayden made a noise that sounded surprisingly close to a hiss, and Reece held up a hand to cut him short. Lately, if he let them, his friends seemed able to make an argument out of what color the sky was. Gideon had always been skilled at picking fights out of thin air, but it was odd for Hayden to succumb to the temptation. It showed how on edge the lot of them were, that the best of them was worn to the point of petty squabbling.

             
“Because it'd be killing for killing's sake, now,” Reece explained. “We can't let him go until we leave Honora…he knows too much. But I can't condone killing him because we've let him hear too much. We'll knock him out and drop him in Praxis and be on our way. Whatever harm he might be able to do now will count for nothing once we're gone.”

             
Gideon shook his head unhappily. “It don't make sense, Cap'n. You can give the Vee a name and try to reason with him, but if you ever turned your back on him, he'd stake you in a second.”

             
“I never said I was turning my back on him.”

             
“As good as.”

             
The two of them stood, eyeing each other. Gideon was the taller of the two by a hand (and Mordecai still called him the runt of the litter; Pantedans were from big-boned stock), but he never used his size to bully his friends. Usually.

“
What if the Vee goes lookin' for Aitch, once we're gone?” Gideon demanded. He pulled off his cap, revealing short black hair in sweat-matted waves, and balled it up in his fist. “Or Sophie? Hugh, the Trimbles, your da…they'll all be left behind. Why shouldn't it go after them? They had a roundabout hand in all this, same as us.”

             
“Don't try to force my hand here,” Reece said, taking a step forward. “I refuse to do what The Kreft would and kill someone just to cover up my tracks.”

             
“It's a bleedin' Vee!” Gideon threw up his hands and turned his back on Reece, fuming. “I know what this is about. It's about Liem.”

             
The cargo bay, the very night, seemed to draw a sharp breath. Reece felt a twinge in his chest and barely stopped himself from rubbing at the invisible wound that would always be a scar. Even now, he wasn't sure what he felt more: hate, because Liem had betrayed him, or hurt, because Liem had betrayed him. What he felt didn't change why he felt it. Liem had turned on him, left him for dead. He'd been in on the plot to assassinate the duke, his own father. There was no reason Reece shouldn't feel hate more than anything.

             
But it was hard to hate the dead.

             
“Gideon…” Hayden warned, concerned.

             
“No,” Reece snapped. “Let him say it. What's this got to do with Liem? Enlighten me.”

             
Gideon tipped his head back and let out a breath that feathered in the cold night air. He turned stiffly. “You keep hopin' someone who went as bad as Liem did can find some kind'a redemption. You're givin' the Vee the second chance you never got to give Liem. But the reason you’re doin’ it don't change the fact that some people only get one chance.”

             
Reece didn't shout; he didn't even raise his voice. Because those words, wrong though they were, were like the eerie echo of his conscience telling him the same thing. “Take a walk, Gid,” he said firmly.