Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (30 page)

He found Gideon standing by the lake with his hands in his pockets, watching the indigenous blue swans of Atlas glide around on the slate-colored water. Not far from him, a group of well-dressed girls in bustles were setting up some sort of booth. The flag on the front of it read, “Masquerade Volunteer Committee”.

Shifting his feet, Gideon muttered, “Didn’t want to go to class anyway.”

“Me neither,” said Reece honestly. He dug up a small flat stone with the toe of his boot, dusted it off, and spun it into the lake, where it skipped and startled the swans into flight.

“You think Tutor Flint could be Kreft?”

“No,” Gideon said simply. He didn’t look at Reece. “She’s Honoran. You can tell.”

“Reece! Gideon!”

They looked over their shoulders at Hayden as he tripped off the front step of the Social Economy Building and came running to join them. Reece had to cover his laugh with a cough when the Masquerade Committee saw him as an excited student rushing to volunteer and bombarded him with posters and even a few artful invitations to send a log if he had any questions. When Hayden joined them, there wasn’t a bit of skin showing on him that hadn’t gone as red at the swans were blue.

“Stop laughing,” he pleaded, mortified, and shoved some of the duplicate posters at them. Gideon promptly started folding his into a hat. “I managed to get all our homework from Tutor Flint. I was going to stay, but that…that wasn’t very good of her, was it?”

Reece just shook his head and stared out over the lake again. Angry though their clash with Tutor Flint had briefly made him, he welcomed the normalness of it; it felt like stepping back into sync.

“What other classes do you have today? I want to take a look at as many tutors as possible.”

Hayden checked his schedule on his datascope. “Botany. But Tutor White is an old friend of my parents’…he was born down the road from my mum.”

“Ship Repelling. Tutor Rowe is a real numpty, so I guess he could fit the profile. I’ll check him out,” Gideon answered as he twirled his hat around his finger. Looking past Reece, he raised an eyebrow and quirked his head to the side. “You know her?”

Reece glanced at the slight blonde figure bouncing his way. Po walked right through the middle of the Masquerade Committee’s posters and bustles and insulted gasps and joined Reece and the others at the water’s edge with a freckly grin.

“Heya, Reece!” She blinked at Gid and Hayden. “Hi! Reece’s friends?”

Reece didn’t appreciate how they looked at each other for confirmation before nodding. He rolled his eyes ungratefully. “Po Trimble,” he gestured to Po, “Hayden Rice, Gideon Creed.”

“Hi!” Po repeated, and shook Hayden’s hand so hard that his bifocals fell off one ear. Her eyes
homed in on the paper hat in Gideon’s hands and twinkled. “Did you make that? Clever! You’d prolly be good with engines too, you know, because’a all the geometry that goes into it. Oh wow!” She moved as fast as a hummingbird, from Gideon’s hat, to Hayden’s auto-encrypting journal. She doubled over with her hands on her knees to look at the book in his hands. “I ain’t never seen one’a those before, not outta a store window, anyhow. You know that chip technology, that’s some’a the same stuff that’s used in the smallest engine there is, the Flutterbee—but you prolly already knew that.”

Straightening up, Po sighed happily and looked around at the three of them. “Well, I’d better go. I’m workin’ on the bus-ships today, all ten’a them. Don’t wanna get a late start!” Spinning to face Reece so quickly that her white braid swung over her shoulder, she told him earnestly, “Your friends are real nice, Reece.”

When she had gone, Hayden and Gideon turned to him with looks of complete bewilderment.

“She seems…nice,” Hayden said.

“She frightens me,” Gideon decided, staring at the hat hooked on his finger with a thoughtful frown.

They had an hour to kill now that they didn’t have Honoran History and the lovely Tutor Flint to enjoy, and they spent it walking around the lake, joking like this was two months ago and they didn’t have a hundred worries to go home to tonight. They didn’t talk about the Vee, Nivy, or Eldritch, about The Kreft or going to war or Liem, even though Reece’s fingers were secretly wrapped around the cufflinks in his trouser pocket. He could really only forget for so long.

It was over lunch in the banquet hall that it all came crashing back into focus.

Reece was sitting down with his third plate of lunch, making up for all the meals he’d had to substitute bird-on-a-stick for real food, when his eyes landed on the masquerade poster that Gideon had been using for a placemat. There was a black and white drawing of Emathia on it, accurate except for the miniscule little figures in ball gowns and top hats depicted wandering around the grounds.

The picture disappeared as Gideon arrived and covered it with his fifth or sixth plate (Reece had lost count) of poached eggs, sausage sandwiches, and smoked apple pudding.

Hayden was stirring a mug of chocolate tea and saying exasperatedly, “—but you see, that’s the point of poached eggs, to—” He stopped and grimaced as Gideon began violently scrambling his eggs and pudding together.

But Reece’s mind wasn’t on lunch anymore.

“I think I’ve just realized something,” he said dazedly, falling back in his chair with a thud.

“What is it, Reece?” Hayden asked, still watching Gideon make mush out of his food, looking horrified.

“The masquerade. Scarlet said the most prestigious members of Parliament are going to be there, along with Eldritch. She said if he had something up his sleeve, he’d pull it out then, when it would make the biggest waves.”

Tearing his eyes away from the catastrophe on Gideon’s plate, Hayden frowned at Reece. “You can’t be thinking of going. You know your father wants you away from Eldritch and Parliament. If you show up at the masquerade, he’ll have you arrested and taken to your uncle’s before you can say—” He glanced sideways as Gideon began spooning his creation into his mouth. “
Disgusting
.”

“I know.”

“I mean, Emathia is the last place you should go right now.”

“I know. So does the duke. That was his plan.” Everything was falling neatly and disastrously into place. Reece pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I thought maybe he was protecting me from Eldritch, but that’s not it. He’s keeping me out of the way.”

Gideon and Hayden still didn’t understand, though they were both alert and listening; Gideon had even stopped tormenting Hayden and put his plate to the side.

“He told me his plan was to do nothing. He’s going to let himself…let himself…but why would he do that?”

“I’m sure you’re just misinterpreting,” Hayden said, trying without success to mask his worry. His fingers were gripping the table’s edge very tightly.

“I’m not.” Reece felt like someone had opened a trapdoor under his stomach. “My father is going to let himself be assassinated by The Kreft. And I know where it’s going to happen.”

When Reece, Gideon, and Hayden banged their way into Mordecai’s, arguing loudly, they were covered in dust and sweat and their hair was standing up, wind-slicked. They’d driven their bims into the ground to get here as fast as they had, but now that they were here, Reece was drawing a blank. He paced around the sitting room, madly clicking his fingers as Nivy and Mordecai stuck their heads in from the kitchen to see what all the noise was about.

“It takes three hours to fly from here to Emathia…I’ve got to get a ship, and not a garbage disposer, either. I need—what do people wear to masquerades? I’ll need one of those…my hob…maybe a backup ALP…”

“What the bleedin’ heckles is goin’ on?” Mordecai demanded loudly.

Reece was too busy talking to himself to answer, so Gideon covered for him from the corner of the room, where he was pouting and not bothering to hide it. “Reece thinks The Kreft’s gonna try to off the duke at that fancy masquerade tonight.”

Mordecai whistled through his front teeth and rubbed his hands together. “Now, that’s what I call a job! Guns, assassins, and free food, I’d wager!”

“That’s the thing,” Hayden unhappily explained, collapsing onto the sofa. “Reece has it in his mind that he’s going alone.”

Reece took a break from his monologue to snap over his shoulder, “None of you will make it past the front gate! You’re too recognizable!”

“And you aren’t?”

“I know every servant’s name at Emathia—I’ll have no problem talking myself in a side gate. Once I’m inside, I can blend in. None of you can.”

“What are you doin’ now?” Gideon mumbled as Reece threw open the cupboard concealing Mordecai’s outdated log interface.

Reece flicked on the small screen, transmitter, and audio box, punching in a four digit code that started the interface up with a protesting hum. “Scarlet said I would need a date. She’s right. I’ll be too conspicuous on my own.”

Beet.

“This,” Scarlet said gravely, “had better be important.”

The black and white image of her kept fading in and out of focus, but it was plain to see that her hair was in a tower of strange rods that Reece couldn’t begin to imagine the purpose for outside a torture chamber, and her face was caked in something that looked like it had been dug up from the bottom of the lake.

For a second Reece was too stunned to speak. “Oh—uh—it is,” he said quickly, avoiding direct eye contact with the creature on the screen. “I need you to come to the masquerade with me.”

“The masquerade that is less than six hours away?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” Scarlet’s muddy face lurched closer to the screen (Reece unconsciously leaned backward), and she glared. “Did it occur to you, Reece Sheppard, that I might already have a date, seeing as it
is
six hours away?”

It really hadn’t. He’d actually been under the impression that she might be waiting for him to ask her to go.

Reece blurted out dumbly, “Who?”

“Lucius Tobin, if it’s any of your business.”

“
Him
?” It’d been six years since Abigail had forced him to one of her dreaded “most important families in Honora” tea parties, but the name Lucius Tobin brought to mind a picture of a porky boy with hair parted right down the middle under a straw boater. He had to shake his head firmly to dislodge the memory.

“Look, I really need—” In a warped reflection on the screen, Reece saw the answer to his troubles. One of them, anyways. “Never mind.”

His last glimpse of Scarlet before he ended his transmission was not a happy one. He turned around. Before he had even opened his mouth, Nivy started eagerly nodding her answer.

“
What
?” Gideon barked when he realized what the nodding meant. “You’re takin’
her
, but you can’t take us?”

As Reece began punching a new code into the log interface, he said dryly, “Don’t be jealous. If you could fit in a dress, you could come too.”

Beet.

He had called in to the bus-ship housing units at The Owl, and the face that greeted him, while not covered in mud, looked as menacing as Scarlet’s had. Tutor Agnes was wiping her oily hands on a rag and scowling as if Reece was an unexpected blip popping up on her radar.

“Yes, Mr. Sheppard?”

“Hello, Tutor Agnes, may I speak with Po Trimble?” A little extra manners couldn’t go amiss, afterall.

“She’s currently wedged between an Axil 11-Seven engine and a bypass funnel,” Agnes told him curtly, slinging the rag over her shoulder. She put her hands on her hips and scrutinized him through the lens of her interface. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“I…really just need to speak with Po, actually.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait, Mr. Sheppard, seeing as Ms. Trimble—”

“Mr. Sheppard?” Po’s voice squeaked off-screen before she pushed her way into view. Her grubby jumpsuit managed to make Agnes’s look clean. “Hey, Reece! Long time no see!”

Reece waited to speak until, grumbling mutinously, Tutor Agnes picked up a wrench and prowled out of sight. “Po, I need a favor. A really big favor.”

“Short of fixing a Bylink 12-Twelve to run smooth—because you
know
that’ll never happen—you got it!”

Uncomfortably aware that Hayden and Gideon were closing in on either side of him, Reece leaned closer still to the screen. “You see, there’s this masquerade tonight,” Po’s expression brightened, “and I need a ship to get there,” and then fell a little.

“Well, that’s not such a big favor. You can prolly take Tilden’s Nyad back planetside. Him and Gus and me have to ride the bus-ships down anyway, just to make sure they’re all in order.”

They made arrangements to meet on the landing dock where the Trimbles’ Nyad was stationed, and then Reece signed off the interface and turned to face Gideon and Hayden, who were standing identically, arms crossed, frowns deep, eyes dark. The only difference was that Hayden had to work at it while Gid was a natural.

“Seems like everybody’s gettin’ to help but us,” Gideon mused to Hayden.

“I have that feeling as well.”

“You can help me,” Reece said sharply as he impatiently pushed his way between them, “by letting me focus on what I’m trying to do.”