Heart of Veridon (30 page)

“Hey,” she whispered. “Good wine.”

“Nothing but the best.” I put the bottle down and brushed her hair from her eyes. “How are you feeling?”

She cleared her throat and nodded to the bottle. I went to the kitchen and got a shallow bowl. She drank carefully while I held the wine to her lips.

“Were you trying to drown me?” Her voice was dry, and she dropped half the words, but I understood. “I’m just asking, because I feel that may have been part of your plan.”

“You feel that way, huh?” I grinned.

“Purely an observation, Jacob.”

“Right. So you’re feeling better.”

“I feel like I was shot, held underwater and then dragged through sewage.”

“You forgot the wine,” I said, sloshing the bottle.

“Right. All that, plus wine. Amends made.”

“It is a very good wine.”

She struggled to sit up, but gave up and settled into the couch again. She licked her lips and closed her eyes.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Yeah. I don’t know how to explain it.” I looked over at her and drank a little wine. “What do you remember?”

“A girl, tied up and half gone. Like some kind of experiment.”

I nodded. She was breathing slowly, her heart rate slowing down. I thought she was almost asleep when she stirred.

“So what was it?”

“Some kind of legend,” I said. “Forget it. It was a dream. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Later. Okay.” Several long, slow breaths. “Where’s Wilson?”

“I haven’t gone for him, yet. I didn’t want to move you, or leave you here. I dressed the wound. We’ll get to him, when you’re well enough to move.” I put down the bottle and leaned closer. There was fresh blood on her shirt. “I think you’re bleeding again.”

“Okay,” she said.

I adjusted the bandage, carefully folding her shirt over her breasts. The wound was gummy, a little red seeping at the edges. The plug of metal had worked loose. I plucked at it, and saw cogwork churning underneath. I grimaced, then tightened the cloth, added more gauze, returned the shirt.

“That should hold. No polo for a few days, okay? Em?”

Her lips were parted, her breath deep and even. I crept back to the kitchen and cobbled together a meal of stale bread and traveler’s stock in a can. I set up at the writer’s desk in the drawing room, a muted candle by my side so I could see her as night fell outside.

Her face was a warm moon, floating in the night. I watched her while I ate, and listened to the city outside.

I
MET
E
MILY
before. Before everything, before the shit happened. I met Emily while I was still at the Academy. I just didn’t know her yet.

We were in the habit, the boys of Twelfth Cadre and I, of getting well-deep drunk on Friday nights after field exercises. It was our only free night. Technically, the sainted elect of the Pilot’s Cadres had every night off. We were the nobility, after all. But practically, between the daily drills, classwork and recovery from the layers of surgery, we didn’t have even minutes to commit to leisure most nights. An accident of scheduling gave us Fridays. Most of those nights were a drunken blur, time spent unwinding. I didn’t even remember most of them. I remember this night, though.

I was recovering from the final round of the Engine surgeries. They staggered our recovery times, so that most of us made all the classes. It was the responsibility of the healthy to help the invalid, so they didn’t lose class time. I spent the week in my barrack, trying to decipher Hammett’s notes. Scribbles. But I passed all the tests, the examinations. I was cleared to fly. Tomorrow. I remember. It was my last night as a Pilot.

We went to the Faulty Tooth, our usual place. I felt good. A week in bed on a diet of cereal and water meant I got drunk easy and hard. The night started well for me. Plenty of girls, and they all liked the uniform. Common girls, girls whose fathers I didn’t know. My kind of girls.

Emily was working. I didn’t know. I suppose it would have mattered to me, at the time. It would have bothered me in different ways than it does now.

She stood by the bar; we had a booth. Girls circulated, laughing, holding hands. Drinking things we bought them. She was gorgeous and stood apart. She talked to various men, and seemed familiar with the barkeep. I hadn’t seen her before.

When the time came, when I felt it was right, I went to the bar. Pretended to be impatient for the wench to make her rounds back to us. I stood beside her and placed my order, then stretched and, as casually as a butcher laying out the prize pig, struck the best pose I knew. She smiled, but not the way I intended.

“Nice pants,” she said.

“Thank… uh. They’re just part of the uniform.” I flicked the cuff clasps. “Pilot Cadre.”

“Mm.” She drank some wine. “Well, they’re kind to you. Big night?”

“Oh, you know.” I rolled my hand to the boys, who were staring at us while they pretended to ignore us. “Just getting out.”

“Living the big life, huh.” She wasn’t quite dismissive. I didn’t think. I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or just had a very peculiar way of showing interest. “They let you prizes go anywhere?”

“Hey, we go to the sky. The sky goes everywhere.”

She laughed and covered it with a drink of wine. I thought it was a good line. I looked back at the boys. Their attention was absolute.

“Look,” she said. “You’re a nice kid. And the Corps will be good to you. Stay with it.’

“It’s not a slag job, you know.” I gathered up the drinks I’d ordered. “Tough work. Keeping the skies safe for citizens like you.” I went back to the boys. They were unbearable.

I drank the rest of the night quickly. When she left I made some excuses and followed.

It almost felt staged. I was so fucking angry. There was a light mist, gray streamers drifting across the cobbles, the street rain slick and blurry behind the beer in my blood. She was well ahead of me when I came out. She went around a corner and I followed quickly, fists in my pocket. I wasn’t going to hurt her. I just wanted to talk, to make her see. She needed to see that I was someone worth paying attention to. She would see.

The night tightened into a narrow, drunken tunnel. Someone slipped out of an alley, near where she had just disappeared. He was closer to her, and faster. Seconds after he slipped around the corner there was a scream. I ran.

I wasn’t fast enough to save him. Which wasn’t what I was expecting.

She stood in front of him, her dress ruffled, her hands around a long thin blade. He was against the wall. Some of him was on the pavement, leaking into the drain. She dropped him and looked over at me.

She was breathing heavily, her careful hair coming out of its tress. I looked down at the blood on her fingers. She tossed the blade onto the steaming body, then wiped her hands on his coat. She took a bag from his pocket and hid it in her dress.

“Were you… did he try to…” I stammered drunkenly.

“Either way, are you going to turn me in, Pilot?” She lowered her head, staring at me like a predator. I took a step back. “We don’t all need heroes, friend.”

I didn’t know what to say. She left me there, to explain the pilfered body to the Badge that was just about to come around the corner.

T
HERE MIGHT BE
a fever. I kept checking, but it was hard to tell. Her face was still very pale, but she breathed evenly. I prepared a small meal, best I could do in this weird house. She ate some and then fell asleep almost immediately. I tried to make her comfortable, but it was hard to tell if I was doing any good.

While she was out I changed the bandage. I was probably doing that too often, but I didn’t know what else to do. I folded her shirt carefully, kept it as decent as possible. The tiny hole in her chest was still bleeding, soaking into the gauze in a startlingly brilliant crimson. I didn’t know if that was normal, or if I should be concerned. I didn’t know what Camilla’s newborn machine was doing inside her, how it was remaking her. I couldn’t see any visible changes on the outside. There were usually changes.

I needed to go get Wilson. Medicine wasn’t something I did. Generally, I did the thing that necessitated medicine. The precursor. Wilson would know what to do, even if there was nothing to be done.

I soaked a rag in cold water and put it on her forehead. That didn’t look right, so I folded it and put it behind her neck. She squirmed and started coughing. The rag went back into the sink.

Wilson would know. I crouched by the front window and peered carefully out into the street. Not much traffic. Night was ending, the first hammered silver light crowding into the overcast. If I was going to do it, I needed to get at it, before morning brought the crowds back to the street. Just an hour, and not even that. I looked back at her. So pale. I checked for fever again. Coughs tore through her chest, upset her carefully draped shirt. I put it back, then got another bottle of wine from the pantry. Morning filled the room slowly, lining her face in pewter light.

Wilson would know. But Wilson would have to wait.

I
T WAS TWO
years. I had enough on my mind during that time to forget Emily. But when I saw her, standing across the bar and smiling… it came back.

Different bar, different district. Different friends. And the pistol I had strapped to my leg wasn’t part of some uniform, nothing ceremonial or exquisite about it. Things had changed for Jacob Burn. But she was still there, still brilliant. I stood up, to go talk to her.

“Wouldn’t,” Matthus said, his hand lightly on my elbow. He glanced at me, then at Emily. “Cacher’s girl, one of Valentine’s people. I wouldn’t.”

The rest of the table looked. One of them said. “Yeah, I know her. Whore. No harm in it, Jacob.”

“She’s not working tonight. Doesn’t pick up men in bars.” Matthus snorted into his beer. “Her clientele make appointments. Not the like of you, son.”

“Then what’s she doing here?” I asked. “Alone. If Cacher cares for her so much.”

“Girl can’t get a drink?”

“This isn’t a safe district, Math. Bad people about.” The table had a chuckle at that. Bad people. I had a sudden flash of her standing over her attacker, the memory rolling through me, the blood on that blade, the look in her eye.

“It’s your funeral, mate.” Matthus said, then wrote me off. Kind of friends I had.

I went to her, my table snickering and being generally bad people. Old noble Jacob, talking to the ladies. Forgotten who he was, or more accurately, who he was no longer. A good laugh, for the crew.

She seemed amused to see me coming. One look, then her eyes were on the bar in front of her, the slightest smile on her face.

“Buy a girl a drink?” I asked. She looked at me, no hint of that smile evident.

“Girls have money too, you know.”

I shrugged. She turned to the barkeep. “Castle Crest on the rocks, compliments of the gentleman in the dull gray coat.” I winced. Crest was expensive stuff. My dad drank Crest, after a good vote in the Council. We sat in silence while the ‘keep poured into his cleanest glass, the ice cracking under the slow amber liquid. She drank it quickly.

“Satisfied?” she asked.

I clattered my empty glass at the barkeep and he refilled it, with less care and flourish. More foam than brew. We stood there in silence again. She started to turn away.

“You could at least talk to me,” I hissed, so the crew couldn’t hear me. “That’s the least you could do for my coin. Don’t make the fool of me like that.”

She turned back. Her eyes were cold as stone.

“I hadn’t realized this was a transaction. Is that what your mates told you? That I have a slot,” she spat. “You can put coins in it?”

“I… godsdamn it. No, that’s not what I meant.” I flushed and busied myself drinking my warm beer. I spilled a little and had to wipe it on my sleeve. “It’s not at all what I meant.”

“Then what, exactly, did you mean?”

I stared off behind the bar. The bottles back there were dusty. A painting hung above, a copy of a copy of a masterpiece I had seen hanging in the artist’s studio when I was a child.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” I asked without looking at her. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her toying with her glass. She signaled the barkeep, waved off another pour of the Crest and pointed to something a little less elegant.

“I do, actually.” She looked at me, a brief flash of eyes, a smile. Her voice was quiet. “I wouldn’t, honestly, not if you hadn’t had such a spectacularly bad day the following.”

I grunted and drank. The people who remembered me usually remembered me for that day. Those who forgot me, too.

“I’ve often wondered, you know. What happened to that boy I met? The one who fell from the sky.”

I turned to her, remembering the ridiculous pose that I’d struck on the night. I looked down at myself, the drab clothes, the stained sleeve. The only thing about my appearance that was in order was the pistol, oiled and black.

“Looks like he kept falling,” she said.