The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (8 page)

             
“It's the same this time. Much as you put up a fight, you don't want to miss out.”

             
Indignant, Hayden squared his shoulders and glowered at Reece. “Maybe that's not what I meant. Maybe I meant I'm always worried you and Gideon will go too far and get yourselves into trouble, or hurt, or worse without some voice of reason to hold you back. Maybe I'm wondering if that's a good enough reason for me to follow you across the Epimetheus now.”

             
Reece chewed on that for a minute, peering up at the ceiling, his face troubled.

             
Hayden reflexively felt guilty for snapping, though a small, unpleasant voice in the back of his head told him he shouldn't. He mentally shooed it away like a fly and began, “I'm sorry, that—”

             
“You worry too much, Hayden. No,” Reece added when he saw Hayden opening his mouth, “you do. You've just admitted it. You say you always worry what will happen to me and Gid if you aren't there when we lose our heads. But when have we
ever
done that?
Really
done that?”

             
“I know, I shouldn't have—”

             
“You've been studying to be doctor for nine years. Well, I've been studying to be a captain. Here's what I have to show for it. Think of the captain as a kind of umbrella,” Reece mimed an umbrella by cupping his hands, “that all the responsibility rains on. The umbrella protects a base, keeps it safe. But sometimes that responsibility rains from the captain down onto someone else—a doctor, a mechanic, a navigator—and that's when they have to pick themselves up and do their part. That's all I'm asking of you. It doesn't mean you don't have a large part to play…it just means you're going to have to trust me. I don't think it's arrogant to admit I know what I'm good at and what I'm not. If I didn't think I could captain this mission, I wouldn't do it.” Leveling Hayden with a firm look, Reece asked, “Can you trust me on that?”

             
Swallowing, Hayden nodded. It had never been a question of trust; he trusted Reece with his life. But it'd be dishonest of him not to admit that Reece was a creature of instinct and impulse, of feeling. Hayden liked structure, he liked facts, he liked having foresight. But then, he wasn't captain.

             
“Good.” Reece suddenly grinned, drumming out a small beat on the edge of the table. He returned to sifting through his notes. “Then I see no reason you shouldn't be a part of the crew. I mean, if you can admit you want to be.”

             
Hayden looked inward, considering. “I do,” he finally admitted, feeling guilty again. This time no inward voice came to his defense…maybe because he
should
feel guilty.

             
“Another thing, Hayden. You've
got
to stop thinking something horrible is going to happen to us out there. It's bad for crew morale.”

             
Hayden nodded again.

             
All-too-familiar shouts abruptly cut into the pleasant silence, and a second later, Po and Nivy scampered into the room, looking shocked.

             
“Ariel?” Reece guessed as someone shrieked like a banshee in the near distance. He nodded as if answering himself, circled the table, and slid the door shut decisively.

IV

What the Birds Knew First

Tomorrow. They were leaving tomorrow.

Reece tucked his hands behind his head and watched dust motes stream through the streak of sunlight slipping between his cracked wooden shutters. Everything had come together seamlessly. Po said Aurelia was as ready to fly as she'd ever be without her missing pieces, Raft was paid, the ship was packed, and Hayden was coming along. If he wasn't the luckiest captain this side of the Epimetheus, he'd kiss Tutor Agnes square on the mouth.

Hayden was already up and gone, visiting with his family. Sophie and Hugh had taken the news of his decision well; Reece had the feeling they, like him, saw Hayden as invaluable to this mission, whether or not he'd ever see it for himself.

Yawning pleasantly, Reece rolled out of bed and landed in a pose in front of his mirror. Captain Reece Sheppard of
The Aurelia
. He looked like a lanky, messy-haired ginghoo not likely to be taken seriously by anybody. The only thing lending him any credence was the scar along his side, given to him the night of the masquerade. He touched the puckered skin with a frown, remembering the feeling of thinking he might die…regretting…

             
Someone knocked at the door, and Reece confusedly looked over his shoulder. It wasn't much past dawn.

             
“Who is it?” he croaked in his early-morning voice, picking up yesterday's shirt from the floor and forcing it over his head.

             
The door opened in answer; the duke entered, looking amused. Today he wore an olive suit with a banded collar and carried a pair of black leather gloves that he tucked behind his belt as he said, “Sleeping in?”

             
Reece gawked. “What are you doing here?” An awkward pause preceded his question. He never knew whether to call the duke Father or Sir, anymore.

             
“Well, I doubt you know this,” the duke began, crossing the suite, “but it's a beautiful day. It's been a while since I've seen your campus. I thought perhaps…” Hesitating, the duke glanced at Reece, then folded back the shutters. Reece blinked against the brightness. “I thought perhaps I ought to remedy that.”

             
A while? It had been four years, at least.

             
“I have class. Fencing.”

             
The duke harrumphed. “I should like to see that. I used to be quite the fencer myself, before I became duke.”

             
Reece bit off a sigh. It had been hard enough to keep the mission secret from the duke without him making suspiciously spontaneous house calls. Reece would be walking on glass all day, trying to keep him from sensing something with his newly-restored parental feelers. Abigail had never had those, but once upon a time, the duke had been quite adept at reading Reece's mind.

             
“Perhaps we should visit the museum,” the duke suggested, and Reece froze with his hands clutching his last unpacked pair of trousers. “Visit
The Aurelia
. I haven't had those rock treats from Oceanus in years.”

             
“I don't know,” Reece said, trying to sound nonchalant. “It’ll probably be swarming today, what with the holidays…”

             
The duke waved a flippant hand. “What good is it being duke if I can't have
some
privileges? I know the museum's curator; I'll send him a log letting him know to expect us.”

             
Barely able to keep the sour note out of his voice, Reece mustered some fake enthusiasm and smiled. “Great.”

             
They started the day with breakfast in the galley before touring the campus, visiting tutors and classrooms, attracting the awed stares of students who had only ever seen the duke in the papers. Two barrel-chested bodyguards who looked more like bears than men followed a careful ten paces behind everywhere they went. There was humiliating, and then there was
this
.

             
They ran into the Rices at the small performance stage that had been set up on the campus green, now covered with a foot of snow. A four-person band, bedecked in holiday colors, played carols on their flutes and fiddles until they caught sight of the duke watching. Their music broke off raggedly as they stood to salute him. Hayden patted Reece on the shoulder with a mittened hand as Reece tried in vain to turn invisible.

             
“It's good he's here, though,” Hayden said quietly as the duke chatted amiably with the ever haggard-looking Mr. Rice, whose furry hat dwarfed his head. “Now you can say a proper goodbye.”

             
“And how am I supposed to do that, seeing as he doesn't know I'm leaving?”

             
“Well, maybe you should tell him.”

             
“
What
?”

             
“What's the worst that could happen?”

             
“Prison!”

             
Sophie looked up from sprinkling birdseed over the snow, her blond hair pinned back by a pair of woolen earmuffs. A few purple-winged songbirds hopped over to her offerings. “He doesn't have to know you're saying goodbye. You could just tell him what he means to you.”

             
“What he means to me,” Reece repeated. He glanced up and found his father's eyes watching him. “Right.”

             
They said goodbye to the Rices and headed for the museum, Reece feeling worse by the minute. True to his word, the duke had flexed his right to special treatment. When they arrived, the lobby was cleared of tourists, so it was just them, the two bearlike guards, and Aurelia. Reece felt like she was staring at him. He felt like
everyone
was staring at him.

             
All in all, they saw five exhibits before the strain on his conscience broke him. It happened as he and the duke rode the rolling pedestrian walkway through a dark room full of green and blue florescent stones from Leto. The walkway bore them past black pedestals affixed with datascope screens describing the way the Letoians mined the stones, and Reece found himself clearing his throat and studying the screens very closely.

             
“Look, there's something I need to tell you.”

The duke looked up, seeming unsurprised.

              “Since the masquerade, I've noticed things…have been different.”

             
Now the duke merely looked wary. Reece trudged on as if the words were being forcefully towed from his throat with a chain. They scraped against him, chafing.

“
And I wanted to say—that that's good. I mean,
it's
good. I'm glad we're…speaking.”

             
“Yes.” The duke eyed him. “Yes, I suppose that is good. Is that all?”

             
“Yes,” Reece said quickly. “Let's go to the food exhibit and eat some rocks.” He tried to step off the walkway, but the duke caught him by the shoulder and easily held him at bay, his grip firm.

             
“You're more like your mother than you know.” The duke chuckled at Reece's expression. “It's your own fault you never see her good side, boy. Yes, you two are much alike. Neither of you have ever been very good at masking your emotions. Least of all from me.”

The walkway scrolled into a new room, this one bright, golden, and springy, loud with the chattering of birds. The ceiling pulled up some thirty feet and ended in a roof of bowed glass. Reece and the duke rolled quietly through the tunnel of netting keeping the fluttering birds from escaping. They flashed like bits of falling marble in all the colors of the world, reds, blues, greens, and yellows.

              “When are you leaving?” the duke abruptly asked, sighing.

             
Reece paused and then echoed his sigh. He should have known. “Tomorrow.”

             
“And you had no mind to say goodbye to your mother or me?”

             
“I thought you might try to stop me.”

             
“I might. I haven't decided.” The duke suddenly planted his hands on the walkway railing and hung his head. “I wish you'd spoken with me.”

             
Wincing, Reece raised his hand, and then deliberately dropped it. “How did you find out?”

             
The duke straightened and faced Reece, his mouth set in a grim, forbidding line. “The fact you were tapping into your accounts for the first time in five years seemed a pretty good indicator something was amiss. And then I had some help. You should know better than to trust the Pans. Flash a little silver under their noses, and—”

             
Reece bristled. “They didn't double-cross me.” He wouldn't believe it. Raft, Varque, the others—Gideon trusted them, and Gid's trust came at a high price. Unless…

             
Kayl. Reece would bet his collectible Dryad rotary spike it had been Kayl. He wondered if he should mention it to Gid, briefly entertained by a daydream of his friend hunting down Kayl and folding him up till he could fit in a shoebox.

             
“So what now?” Reece asked.

             
“Now you tell me what plumb-headed ideas you have in that brain of yours, and I tell you whether or not you can expect to eat your next meal through a set of bars.”

             
Reece's relief at having his guilt laid out in the open fizzled and evaporated. Thaddeus Sheppard was two people: the duke, and Father. Right now, staring sternly down his long nose at Reece, he was the duke, and the duke would always do what he thought was his duty; he'd proved that by nearly letting himself be assassinated by The Kreft.

             
The floor suddenly grumbled, trembling, and the pedestrian walkway groaned to an uneasy stop. Reece caught his balance on the rail and looked around uncertainly.

“
What was that?” He had to speak loudly; the birds had begun cawing and screeching, flapping in a panicked maelstrom of color and wings. He looked up at them, confused. They were acting as though they'd seen a predator.

             
The building shook again, harder this time; somewhere far off, someone began shouting.

             
“Come,” the duke barked, and Reece nodded and followed him back the way they had come, walking briskly.

             
As they reached the aviary entrance, the third and most powerful
boom
yet rumbled under Reece's feet and knocked his teeth together. The museum lights hesitantly flickered, and the bloody red auxiliary lighting buzzed on over the emergency exits as a recording of a calm woman's voice began echoing over and over throughout the museum.

             
“What the blazes?” the duke exclaimed. His body guards hustled into the room and took posts on either side of him and Reece, as if their presence would do much good against an earthquake.

             
A slow darkness rolled across the white sun; its shadow slithered over the aviary floor, from one side of the room to the other. Reece and the other looked up. One of the bodyguards cursed.

             
It was a ship unlike any Reece had ever seen. He could tell it was huge—it probably hadn't even broken the troposphere, and yet against the sun it was the size of a bat. It was as black as night, long and pointed at both ends.

             
Feeling a deep shock in the pit of his stomach, Reece walked forward, ignoring his father as he tried to hold him back. He stopped beneath the very peak of the dome and turned in a slow circle to watch the ship as it drifted by. The sun broke around the edges of the shadowy vessel, pouring into Reece's eyes until they stung, but he couldn't look away until he was sure, though part of him knew there had never been any doubt…

Two quicksilver flashes dropped from the ship, falling, falling…Reece tried to follow them, but they were too fast, too small…

A moment later, a violent boom like thunder rattled the glass ceiling in its panes. And he knew.

The Kreft had finally come.

Reece sprinted through the museum, followed closely by his father and the two bodyguards, soon joined by a puffing little man with his white hair parted down the middle—the museum curator—and a handful of sentries and tour guides.

             
“What's going on?”

             
“Is that a ship?”

             
“Son of a toffer, they're firing!”

             
“Remain orderly, all of you,” the duke's smooth voice rumbled, hushing the shrill voices in one fell stroke. “The calmer you stay, the safer you will be. Open the doors to the below ground exhibits and form lines to the stairwells. I want a hundred people to a level, their backs to the walls. Don't just stand there—
move
!”

             
Reece muted the voices and compounded them in the back of his head. He knew what he had to do, but suddenly, doing it seemed like the most complicated thing in the Epimetheus. Just this morning he had marveled over his crew's preparation…now he cursed his lack of foresight. They should have been ready to go at a moment's notice!

             
People milled outside the museum, huddled together against the brisk wind, not yet aware what was happening. They looked to the ship and pointed and gasped, but panic hadn't broken over them, like Reece knew it would soon enough.

             
Panting, he leaped onto the back of a snow-slicked bench and looked over the heads of the crowds. Students were streaming out of brick halls, their voices one low murmur of excitement.

             
The duke grabbed Reece by his jacket and yanked him down, catching him before he fell into the snow. Their eyes locked; a silent conversation passed between them. As he had twice before, Thaddeus Sheppard reached and cupped the back of Reece's neck with an affectionate hand.

             
“You have to go,” he said simply.

             
Reece nodded. His legs suddenly felt as solid as this morning's porridge. “They might not have come for Aurelia, but either way, we can't let them have her. Maybe I can lead them away.”

             
“Do what you must. Then come home.”

             
Nodding again, his head feeling waterlogged with everything he needed to say but couldn't, Reece said, “Try to get everyone underground, but if you can't, at least get them clear of the dome.” With one last studious look at his father's face, he ripped himself away and started running.

             
Halfway down the block, the real screams started, and the milling turned into frightened jostling, the jostling into pushing and shoving. Snow sprayed up around Reece's boots as he ran headlong into the tumult. The running crowds parted around him like a river around a stone, and he searched their faces wildly, calling till he was hoarse, “Hayden!
HAYDEN
!”

             
“Reece!” a familiar voice finally cried back. Hayden toppled out from between two weeping girls, his glasses crooked on his white face. “It's them! The Kreft! They—”