Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (16 page)

Rolling up the sleeves of his jacket, Reece merged into the stream of students on their way to lunch.

“There you are,” someone with a breathy voice said, startlingly close. “You are a very difficult young man to track down.” The hand on his shoulder felt strangely like a restraint.

Glancing up, Reece tried to keep his face from showing the panic suddenly streaming through him like waves of electricity. Headmaster Charles Eldritch, so lean he seemed almost skeletal, had a slight stoop in his back from putting his head level with Reece’s.

“Me, Headmaster?” Reece affronted an easy smile. “Sorry about that. With just getting back from holiday—”

“Was it a very eventful holiday, Reece?” Eldritch’s lips curved, patronizing. The portly Robert Gustley was shuffling along behind him, scrubbing the sweaty forehead showing beneath the rim of his bowler cap with a handkerchief.

With blood pounding in his head, Reece made himself shrug. “Well, I assume you heard about my brother, Liem.”

“Indeed I did.” Eldritch gave his shoulder a pat. “A most terrible thing, the kidnapping of the Palatine First. Honora is a sight to behold. Your brother’s face is the only thing on the evening wireless waves.”

“It
is
terrible,” Reece agreed carefully, evenly. With the headmaster hunching over one of his shoulders and Gustley panting like a racehorse behind the other, he was starting to feel a little crowded. “But whoever is responsible will get what’s coming to him. The duke will see to it.”

Eldritch chuckled as he straightened to his full height. “Alas, but I do not think the duke has much power there, my boy. Not anymore. Perhaps back in the day when we had kings, not dukes, but these last eleven generations, Parliament and its democracy have been Honora’s origin of power.”

They were coming up on the banquet hall and its tall white steps, where several dozen students were spread out with books or trays of food in their laps. Reece stopped walking to face his stalkers with a frown.

“Why were you looking for me?”

“I wanted to congratulate you on your induction into the Honoran military,” Eldritch crooned, extending a slim hand with a gaudy ring on one of its fingers. “I just heard this morning. You must be thrilled at your luck. It seems you’ll be piloting a ship after all.”

After a pause, Reece shook the hand. “Thank you, Headmaster.” He tried to release the handshake, but Eldritch clung to it, covering Reece’s hand with both of his.

“The final stretch of a student’s career at The Academy is pivotal, Mr. Sheppard. Often, he or she is tempted to let…distractions…hinder their focus. But distractions can be dangerous.” Eldritch’s eyes suddenly flashed, and he gave Reece’s hand a cold, unwelcome squeeze. “For your career, I mean. The last thing you want to do is disappoint your parents.”

“Well,” Reece freed his hand, “I’m wouldn’t say the
last
thing. I mean, it’s down there, but certainly not below becoming a traveling mime, or eating someone I know.”

Eldritch’s smile tightened impatiently. “Then your friends. The Rices, the Creeds. It is sadly true that the ones dearest to you are the ones hurt the worst by…bad choices.”

He was threatening. Threatening Reece’s friends. Stepping up toe-to-toe with Eldritch, Reece glared into his face, his sunken eyes and sunken cheeks, imagining how Hayden would bemoan this story when he heard it.

“I will protect them from the consequences of my choices.”

Gustley paled. Students did not speak to the headmaster in that hostile tone.

Eldritch’s eyes narrowed, looking strange paired with his amused smile. “You are a fascinating specimen, Reece Sheppard. I wish you the best. I will grieve the day when no one is there to protect
you
from the consequences of your choices.”

I bet you will
, Reece thought.

“Sorry,” interrupted a Westerner voice, sweet and soprano. “But did you just say Reece Sheppard?”

Gustley, spluttering his objections, was pushed aside by a wink of a girl with a face that tickled Reece’s distant memory, with freckles and white-blonde hair braided over her shoulder. Her cheek was smudged with the same black oil peppering her grey jumpsuit.

“Oh, there you are!” She beamed at Reece. “Almost didn’t recognize you. Agnes told me to introduce myself, said you’re really clever with engines. Well, Agnes don’t say that about nobody, so I thought that even though we’ve kinda already met, there wouldn’t be no harm in meetin’ again.”

“Er—” Reece glanced sideways at Eldritch, who was gazing down at the Westerner girl in clear contempt. “Hello?”

“Hi!” The girl stuck out a dirty hand. “I’m Po Trimble, remember?”

“Er—”

“Wanna grab some lunch? I hear they’re servin’ crab cakes today.”

“Sure?”

“Swell!” Po faced Eldritch for the first time, and her freckled face turned cool. “You have a nice day now, Headmaster.” Then she turned on the heel of her clunky black boot and started up the stairs of the banquet hall, as self-possessed as any lady would have been despite her appearance of having just crawled out of a gut engine bypass.

Watching Po give the Headmaster of The Aurelian Academy the cold shoulder left Reece feeling as speechless as Nivy, so he hadn’t quite gathered his scattered thoughts back together when Eldritch suddenly reached out and clasped his wrist.

“Good day to you, Mr. Sheppard,” his whisper rattled. He pressed something smooth and rectangular into Reece’s captured hand, snapped his fingers at Gustley, and left. Strolling between the students in his tall dark suit, he looked to Reece like a terrible bat trying to blend in among bright birds.

Reece gazed down at his old gun, feeling a jarring spike of alarm as he recognized it, and then shoved it under his jacket. Anger crowded into the space between his scattered thoughts. It had all been a game of wits between him and Eldritch, and he had just lost terribly.

X
II

It Only Gets Deeper From Here

Reece caught up to Po in the buffet line serving vegetables, and grabbed himself a plate even though his appetite had sunk to the pit of his stomach. Po saw him, and after spooning herself a glob of orange squash, went ahead and spooned him a helping as well.

“Trust me,” she said brightly, “just put a little sweet cream on top’a that, and you’ve got yourself the healthiest dessert this side of the Epimetheus.”

Blinking, Reece said, “Uh, thanks. Listen. What was that between you and Eldritch? You seemed—”

Po sighed and gestured with a serving fork with a carrot skewered on one of its tines. “A mite unfriendly, I know. But with Eldritch, you gotta…what’s it called?...establish dominance. You gotta do that straight away, or he’ll walk all over you.”

She took off again at a brisk, bouncing walk, veering
towards the bread line. Reece hopped to stay on her shadow and tried to remember where he’d heard that chirpy voice before.

“Have a lot of experience with him?”

“Not really. Just one really bad one, when I told him I was quittin’ The Owl.” In the bread line, Po picked out the butt of a greenish loaf of bread and settled it next to her squash, careful to keep the two foods from touching.

“Quitting The Owl?” They drifted
towards the pasta line. “You mean you’re not a student here?”

“Oh, heck no! Haven’t been since I was a Fourteen! I dropped out to help my brothers with their shop in Caldonia. Eldritch didn’t like me leavin’, to be honest. Agnes had told him I was a prodigy, and he wanted me to be The Owl’s prodigy, not nobody else’s. So we got in a bit of a spat when I told him I was goin’ and he couldn’t stop me.”

When Po seemed satisfied with the eclectic foods she’d gathered, she led Reece to one of the two-person tables under the hall’s tall, pointed windows looking out at The Owl’s busy sidewalks. A waitress came and poured them glasses of dark green limeade, and Po said thank you and told her to have a wonderful day. Being with Po, Reece felt as if he’d accidentally fallen onto some other planet. A planet of chirpy birds and meadows and rainbows.

The answer suddenly rang like a bell inside his head. Where he knew her from. He almost choked on his limeade as he realized, “You rode beside me on Bus-ship Ten, didn’t you? You were the little mechanic girl!”

Po looked down at her food bashfully, stirring her squash and noodles together. “Is that all you remember me from?” she asked. When Reece said nothing, stumped, she glanced up and blushed. “I sat behind you in class before I left The Owl.”

“Which class?”

“Um. Beginner Aerodynamics. Alien Anthropology. Literature and Composition.”

“Huh.”

“Arithmetic I and II. Honoran Economics. Zoology,” Po continued. She put down her fork and narrowed coffee-colored eyes at him as he cringed. “What kind’a person takes eight classes with someone and doesn’t bother rememberin’ their name?”

“
Eight
? We had
eight
classes together? What were the other two?”

“Piano and Paintin’.”

Vaguely, very vaguely, Reece recalled a tiny blonde girl playing a jaunty saloon tune in Amateur Piano and getting rapped across the knuckles by Tutor Clevenger. He’d been a Thirteen then, in the midst of turning his parents and Liem against him. He’d burned most of the memories from that period out of his mind.

He and Po proceeded to talk mechanics and aviation over first and second helpings and then dessert. Being an airship mechanic, Po had a natural affinity for ships, but she hadn’t flown on much but bus-ships, so begged Reece for story after story about Nyads, Dryads, Furies, Kraken, and even the mysterious Spectre ships of the Veritas. To Reece’s great envy, she and her brothers had been hired three times to run diagnostics on Aurelia, and had even done work on the Afterquin.

“I don’t care if she’s the oldest ship there is. Engines like Aurelia’s can’t be duplicated. The Afterquin’s just…” Po groped for words, gesturing. “Honestly, I don’t know how we ever made it to begin with.”

Gnawing on the end of his fork, his forehead gathered in concentration, Reece asked, “Po, how much to you suppose Aurelia’s been altered since she was decommissioned?”

“Altered? Wha’dya mean?”

Reece put a foot up on the windowsill and glared into the sunshine. “Don’t you think it’s strange she never had escape capsules? If she’s the elite, why didn’t she have a way to save her crew in an emergency?”

Po chewed on this for a moment, slowly dragging her fingertip over the whipped custard left on her plate and then sucking it clean. “Well,” she drawled, “here’s what I think. You know how Aurelia’s designed to look so pretty? She ain’t like them heliocrafts with all their unnecessary bells and whistles. She’s simple. Well, all the ships that came after her had capsules, but they were the exterior kind that fixed under the wings and hugged the sides of the ship like leeches or somethin’. Aurelia wouldn’t’a had that design, because it wouldn’t’a been keepin’ with her simplicity. But she could’a had pods inside’a her to be shot out the hydraulic hatch on her belly. We always assume that that hatch is for loadin’ cargo. But it could’a also been for
sendin’
cargo, primarily escape pods, out in a hurry. Hey, where are you goin’?”

As Reece pushed in his chair and started pulling on his jacket, he said, “It was really good meeting you again, Po, but I’ve got to go.”

“Where?” She checked the unwieldy watch on her wrist that looked like it had been crafted out of scrap metal. “We’ve got class in ten minutes! Reece? Reece!”

But Reece was already jogging out the door, leaving her alone with a frown, two trays, and a pile of dirty dishes.

Reece had been right in assuming Gid, Hayden, and Nivy would return to Praxis—he’d figured Hayden wouldn’t keep Nivy at the dormitory for a second longer than he had to. He found the three of them in Mordecai’s small backyard, surrounded on all sides by a fence of unkempt hedges. Gideon was kneeling with a piqued face beside his bim, trying to fix a new rear tire to it, while Hayden and Nivy were sitting in a hazy patch of sunlight, sharing Hayden’s datascope.

Reece stopped before Gideon and his bim and frowned. “Is she salvageable?”

Gideon grunted as he jimmied the rear rotational pin with a clock wrench. “She’ll run. But those bleedin’ sisquicks did her a number.”

“They did you a number, too.”

“Yeah,” Gideon smirked, “but
I
heal.”

Hayden joined them, running his hands through his hair tiredly. Reece peered over his shoulder at Nivy, who was manning the datascope on her own, tapping its screen and every once and a while shaking her head with a silent sigh.

“So. Can she spell ‘troll’ yet?”

Folding his arms over his chest, Hayden mustered up a stern look, pointedly ignoring Gideon’s chuckle. “Probably. She’s doing well, considering your unreasonable expectations. I mean, we have no idea where she comes from, let alone what the typical means of communication is there. For all we know, her people may be accustomed to…to drawing on cave walls or—”