Breath of Earth (10 page)

“Hang on!” snapped Mr. Jennings. The little car buzzed as it zoomed down the street.

“Hanging!” The scant window frame didn't give her much to cling to.

Ingrid looked out the back window. The Durendal was close enough for her to discern the individual soldiers that lined the walled running boards on either side of the armored ambulatory. Who knew how many were inside?

Releasing her death grip on her door, she stuffed the hat and its contents behind her cloth belt. The hard corner of the planner gouged at her belly. The car took another sharp turn, and Ingrid squealed as she slid across the seat and right into Mr. Jennings.

“Some warning?” she snapped.

“I said to hold on!”

“To what?”

“Me, if nothing else!”

No time for that as he took another fast turn and sent her sliding the other way. She felt his leg kick out and brush her hip as he shifted as well.

He glanced at her. “Look at it this way—could be worse. Could be an Ambassador back there.”

“How do you know there's not?”

“Ambassadors don't ride with common soldiers. They're too good for that. With the exception of Roosevelt, maybe.” True, that. She'd personally seen Theodore Roosevelt talk horses with several black hostlers at a livery stable downtown, treating them with perfect decency. “I'd rather face that full Durendal, running hot, than any Ambassador.”

She grunted agreement; she wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of Mr. Roosevelt either, and she knew him. Ambassadors oversaw the Japanese and American governments and their joint military operations. The sheer amount of power they wielded made Captain Sutcliff seem about as mighty as an ant biting a giant's big toe.

Grappling on to the leather seat, she pulled herself up to check the tank's progress. Mr. Jennings was zigzagging up Russian Hill, and this time the slope was to their advantage. The car's engine roared with exertion, but it easily outmatched the heavy Durendal that pursued them from a block away.

“Durendals have endurance but they can't take tight corners well.” Mr. Jennings turned again, looping to drive down Hyde, but this time Ingrid gripped the seat with both arms. Her hip jutted to the side and bumped him. This was not the body contact she had imagined earlier.

“You've almost gone in a circle!” Her heart had revved like the car engine, but the lingering burble of power beneath her skin was a comfort.

“Yes, almost, but not quite. Standard procedure has it Durendals never travel alone to a location, so they may very well have left unfriendly folk back at your house, miss.”

He sounded surprisingly cool considering how that evening she had threatened to shoot him, brought him home to endure a gunfight, embroiled him in a conspiracy with seditious Chinese, and then fled from a tank that carried enough firepower to level an entire city block. He'd even had the foresight to grab her shoes.

She liked the man more by the minute.

“Just so you know, Miss Ingrid, I'm not keen on attracting the military's attention. I'd like to know why a Durendal happened down your street.”

Another swerve, followed by a chorus of honks from other drivers and the abrupt neigh of a horse. In the dimming light, electric signs had already flicked on, advertising booze, dancing halls, and French-style restaurants—all the sinful glories of the Barbary Coast neighborhood. She tried to avoid these blocks, particularly as night fell.

“A fellow by the name of Captain Sutcliff thinks that Mr. Sakaguchi and I are somehow involved in the explosion of the auxiliary this morning.”

“Explosion?”

“It looks like we gave them the slip. Give me a moment to catch my breath.”

Ingrid let her hips collapse onto the seat again as she faced
forward. Ahead lay the naval dock with its masts and massive shipping containers; beyond that, the dark sheet of the bay. The canvas top of the car didn't filter out the briny air and the tang of a thousand things shipped from around the world.

Her heart began to climb back down from where it lodged in her throat. “The auxiliary blew up earlier, right after you left. I was with Mr. Sakaguchi when . . . we were the only survivors.” She forced her dry throat to swallow. Had that really happened just this morning? “Captain Sutcliff showed up right afterward, saying he was on a mission . . .” She let her voice trail off. This stranger didn't need to know about a missing hunk of impossibly large kermanite. “He insinuated Mr. Sakaguchi or other wardens were involved.”

“Hmm. You think this might've been handy for me to know a little earlier?” The lightness in his tone conveyed a slight edge.

“I met you in Mr. Thornton's house, which had quite clearly been ransacked, and you expect me to tell you personal details from the day? Almost everyone I know
died
.” Tears threatened and she blinked them away.

“My apologies.” His voice softened.

The autocar slowed as evening port traffic squeezed in on them. Surrounding cars glistened beneath the high electric lights along the dock. The grand spire of the ferry terminal loomed ahead, and past that trailed short and tall rows of airship masts. Each resembled a steel lighthouse with exposed staircases and girders. Elevators lifted pallets of goods.

Airships bobbed in a variety of colors and sizes, taut ropes tethering them to the top cones of many of the masts. Rigid
Behemoth-class freightliners were the largest today, their gasbags swollen with hydrogen and decks receded within their hulls.

Commercial passenger vessels were a bit smaller, identified by the presence of windows along the deck. These were nicknamed Portermans after the man who created the first east–west American airship network in the years soon after the California Gold Rush.

A smattering of small vessels moored at the lower masts: Sprite-class personal vessels that seated anywhere from four to twelve, as well as a number of Pegasus gunships. She wondered which one had brought Sutcliff to the city.

Flags of all nations emblazoned the rounded hulls—the majority being Japanese, American, or the split flag of the Unified Pacific—but British, Mexican, and Russian dirigibles freckled the rows. Ingrid knew that if she leaned out the window, she would hear dozens of languages in a brilliant cacophony, all of them belonging to men who were laughing and trading and ready for a night on the town. Women in furs with hats the size of Spartan shields ambled past Russian sailors in heavy furs of a different sort. Machinery clanked and propellers whirred from crafts too directly above to be visible.

“Beautiful airships, aren't they?” Mr. Jennings's voice was quiet, reverent. “My father used to say that an airship at sundown was colored silver and gold, and worth far more.”

Ingrid looked down at her hands. Mr. Sakaguchi's blood had dried in the crevices of her palms and itched beneath her nails. Emotion caught in her throat. On any other night, she would have delighted in speaking with a kindred soul, someone
who saw the beauty beyond the everyday bustle of the port.

She tugged the wadded hat from her obi. Mr. Sakaguchi's slipper plopped out onto her lap. Her pointer finger traced the gold embroidery along the top. Mama's work.

“I'm sorry, miss. He's like a father to you, isn't he? The fellow shot?”

“Yes.”

A horn honked somewhere ahead. Pedestrian traffic shuffled along faster than they did.

“Hey, hey!” a very loud man spoke just outside. “Word's a Durendal's driving about downtown! Let's go have a look!”

“Holy hell, I'd like to see one a' dem!” A whole mob of sailors crossed in front of the autocar, headed into town.

Mr. Jennings said nothing for a few minutes. Their wheels rattled across the cable car tracks at Howard Street. “It is peculiar for a Durendal to be mobilized in an American city.”

“It seems like overkill. They could have driven over in a caravan of trucks.” Her voice sounded thick to her own ears.

“Durendals hold three set purposes. They're to kill, awe, and intimidate, and if you can do all three at once, all the better.”

That sounded like Captain Sutcliff, all right. He probably had his shoes shined before interrogating her and Mr. Sakaguchi. He'd have driven a tank across the peninsula from the Presidio and parked it at their curb, too, if it showed who was in control.

“You seem to know a lot about Durendals.”

“To my regret, yes.”

She studied him in the intermittent gas-lamp light. He had
to be a few years older than her, probably not past thirty. Certainly old enough to have fulfilled his conscription time in the Philippines or China or some other Southeast Asian isle that earned brief mention in newsreels.

He turned them away from the docks and into the older blocks known as South of the Slot, as they were below the main cable car lines along Market Street. Leaning power lines and older factories flanked the quiet avenue. Haphazard metal sheeting and planks reinforced holey brick walls. A building up the street churned out plumes of steam so thick she imagined cupping a hand and scooping it from the sky like whipped cream.

He guided the car up a short gravel drive and behind a slatted fence. “Here we are.” Mr. Jennings shut off the car and hopped out to close the gate behind them.

She was slow to move. Even with the fresh tingle of power in her veins, a terrible sense of exhaustion weighed on her. She should be with Mr. Sakaguchi, not here.

Lee's Uncle Moon had to save Mr. Sakaguchi. He just had to.

Ingrid groped beneath the seat for her shoes, and after a moment joined Mr. Jennings outside.

Heaps of machinery walled off the back of the warehouse. Piles of parts mounded taller than her five and a half feet, and as she stepped around the autocar and looked closer, she noted everything was organized. Wheels, axles, and other parts she couldn't even name, all together in distinct stacks.

“Miss, follow me if you will. All this metal around, it's not safe for anyone in the dark.”

Mr. Jennings walked her to the back of the warehouse. A flickering light above caused the brim of his hat to shine like a halo. At the sound of that first gunshot, he must have grabbed his accessories from the hall. He was not as fastidiously attired as Captain Sutcliff, but he had his vanity, too—and a lot of common sense. She certainly couldn't have walked barefoot through a place like this, not without the risk of lockjaw.

“Thank you for thinking to grab my shoes,” she said.

He shrugged. “Sometimes old habits come in handy. If you have to skedaddle, know what you need to survive.”

Yes, he most definitely had been a soldier. She followed him inside. Scant lighting revealed a winding pathway through more machinery. Tables weren't set with dinner plates and napkins, but with dismantled engines, the chassis of an airship's stub wing, and the extended canopy of an autocar.

Mr. Jennings motioned around them. “My partner believes in the high art of disorderly organization. It makes sense to him.”

“You two keep busy.” No wonder they could afford a piece of kermanite large enough for a Sprite-class engine.

“We do try.” Pride warmed his voice. “Fenris! Where are you, Fenris?” Mr. Jennings's yell echoed against the high ceiling and bounced through gnarled metallic canyons.

“Working on the
Bug
! About time you showed up with my kermanite, damn it.” The high voice was muffled in its echo.

Chuckling, Mr. Jennings led the way through the labyrinth and to an airship. Well, parts of an airship. A pulley system hitched to the ceiling supported the massive copper-toned hunk of the orichalcum cockpit. Filled gasbags the color of
vellum hovered just above. Sporadic ropes and weights held it down.

She couldn't help but gape in fascination. Sprite classes always looked small in contrast to other dirigibles, but she'd never been up close to any craft. If a Sprite made her feel this way, beside a massive Tiamat-class airship, she'd be like krill before a whale's maw.

She stooped to pick up a piece of orichalcum. The golden metal was the length of her arm, and about as light as a bouquet of flowers. She set it down again, amazed at how metal so strong could weigh so little.

Two oil-smeared legs stretched out from beneath a big piece of something. An engine, judging by the empty kermanite chamber.

Mr. Jennings planted his fists on his hips. “Pop out of there for a bit, Fenris.”

“Bah. Okay. Give me a minute to connect this.” Something rattled within the metal block, followed by indecipherable muttering, and then the body rolled out into the light.

The figure was slender and slathered in oil and God-knew-what, and reminded Ingrid of fairy photographs sold by Victoria Rossi. The body was shaped like a lowercase
l,
with no hips, cropped hair, bug-eye goggles, and a scowl that suggested they interrupted him in the midst of something very important. A black-gloved hand pried up the goggles. Clean skin around his eyes created a reverse raccoon effect.

“That's a woman, not kermanite.” His voice was high and raspy; a smoker, she guessed.

“Congratulations,” said Mr. Jennings. “You are correct.”

“Cy. We already had a talk about you feeding half the stray cats in the neighborhood. Now you're bringing home women, too? Couldn't you fill a saucer of milk for her and leave it by the rubbish bin?”

Ingrid folded her arms across her chest, tucking her meager possessions near her heart. “If I'm not welcome here, I can go back home.”

“No. You can't.” Mr. Jennings's voice was gentle and warning all at once.

She rubbed at her face. She wanted home. She wanted her reading chair and a hot fire. She wanted to hear the whisper of Mr. Sakaguchi's slippers as he paced between his desk and shelves as he did his evening work. Instead, her household probably resembled a kicked-in anthill of soldiers in blue, and Mr. Sakaguchi—no, she wouldn't think of him, not right now.