The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2)

by Cassandra Duffy

Chapter 12:

  Wonders Never Cease.

  Days passed and Claudia still didn’t feel completely well. Her lungs burned with even minor exertion, requiring constant treatment with a nebulizer. She walked the halls of the White Tower, which was the new and proper name for the building, with her father or Olivia depending on who was able to get away from their duties the longest. More and more frequently, it was Olivia as her tasks as a part owner of a tavern were significantly lighter.

  “There is talk of a permanent split in the power structure,” Olivia explained on one of their strolls around the building.

  The interior of the building, which once served as office headquarters had long since transformed into a multilayer government building, hospital, scientific research station, and from what Claudia could tell, a military command center. She preferred inspecting the interior of the building to the exterior as what was going on outside was fairly disquieting.

  “You mean nobody offered to step into the role of supreme ruler since Hastings’ death,” Claudia said.

  “The only man who could is your father and he doesn’t want the job,” Olivia said.

  Claudia knew this wasn’t entirely true. Her father mentioned that there was still a significant contingent among the civilians and likely within the military that thought her father had killed Hastings to do exactly what Olivia said he didn’t want to; only she and her father knew they were partially right in their thinking. This concerned Claudia. She knew why her father had done what he’d done, but she couldn’t be sure if he wasn’t taking Hastings’ spot because he didn’t want the job or because he didn’t want to be perceived to want the job. She had a lousy head for politics, indeed interpersonal back biting nonsense in general as she saw it. That was Veronica’s thing, never Claudia’s.

  “I would assume it is to be a split between your father and mine,” Claudia said.

  “My father claims it would be between the military council and the entire Oligarchy of the Keepers, but yes, in essence it would be them.” Olivia seemed antsy, her leg clicking and ticking as they walked appeared a little tightly wound, like she would rather be running.

  Claudia reached over and took her hand to calm her. “Do you not think this is a good idea?”

  Olivia calmed some, but there was still an edge to her posture and words. “Why would I?” she said sourly. “My father is no leader. It should be your father entirely as it was with Hastings.”

  They stopped at the corner windows of the floor they were on to look out over what had become of San Francisco. To the west, rolling hills, newly green with crops marked out what had once been a bustling city that was there no longer. The setting sun struggled to press through the cloud cover above the sea, giving enough golden light at the end of the day to illuminate the meandering appearance of giant metal monstrosities walking out of a great cavern in the ground amid the fields. Claudia let go of Olivia’s hand and walked to the window for a better look.

  The robots, for lack of a better word, stood thirty or forty meters tall a piece. Half a dozen of them walked from their earthen realm in surprisingly fluid motions. They looked slightly different, although all were more or less humanoid in shape. Some had multiple limbs, longer limbs, differently jointed legs and arms, various metals for plating, but all were exceedingly beautiful as though Leonardo Da Vinci decided to build robots out of old Aston Martins. The impression Claudia got from the robots, not only because the Irradiated field workers didn’t seem to mind their sudden entrance, was that they were calm and definitely not dangerous despite their size.

  “What are they?” Claudia asked in reverently hushed tones.

  “They’re the Transcended,” Olivia explained. “The Keepers say it is what they become when they choose to move on, whatever that means.”

  Claudia glanced over her shoulder to Olivia and cocked her head to one side as if to say the explanation was lacking in sense and content. “What are they, though?”

  Olivia walked over to the window as well. “Exactly what they look like: giant freaking robots. I’ve been around them for so many years, I guess they don’t seem that interesting to me anymore. They build and invent, recycling whatever they find into something more useful. They took apart the entire city over the course of a couple years, built a wall spanning the entire width of the peninsula, and now they simply build things they think will be useful to us out of the scrap they pull from the ruins of what was San Francisco.”

  “Are they dangerous?” Claudia asked, although she seriously doubted it.

  “They don’t seem to have any notice of anything living at all,” Olivia said. “They won’t fight the Slark, they won’t help with growing of crops, and they don’t even seem to see the Irradiated surface workers although they would never step on any of them. They simply exist in a world beyond what we can know or understand, building whatever they feel like for as long as it takes to be built, and then returning to the underground for rest, I suppose.”

  Claudia watched them for a time, sorting through piles of already sorted scrap, plucking pieces out as they saw fit, and then beginning some construction project using the tools that were part of their bodies.

  “I guess your saying applies to humanity as a whole: whatever doesn’t kill us simply makes us stranger.”

  “Close enough, although from what you’ve told me of your Lazy Ravens, I think it also gave us an opportunity to set things right.”

  Claudia shrugged to this. She didn’t really know another way. She had a childish, vague understanding of the world that came before the power structures that ruled it. She was a fairly sheltered 14 year old girl from an idyllic town in one of the most peaceful countries in existence when the Slark invaded. What she knew of the world was simplistic at best before the Ravens and what she knew of them…she was beginning to understand better.

  “I believe I made a mistake of the ‘grass is greener’ variety when it comes to the Ravens,” Claudia said. “It’s easy to become complacent and spoiled in a society built for you.”

  “Yes, but I envy that you have that concept,” Olivia said. “Most women go their whole lives without knowing what it feels like.”

  Claudia smiled to her and leaned lightly against her shoulder. “You would be highly prized among the Ravens for your courageous heart, willingness to fight, and military training.”

  Claudia found out earlier that week that Olivia was thirty and well on her way to thirty-one years old. She’d taken her university training and military service all before the Slark were even known to exist. She’d lived her entire life within the construct of men. Claudia was barely twenty years old, but she wondered if maybe she and Olivia weren’t coming to the same point of world weariness—more macabre thinking born out of the ruinous streak from her mother, Claudia surmised, but she couldn’t shake the feeling.

  “You’re a morose little thing,” Olivia said, giving Claudia’s side a playful tickle.

  “Oui,” Claudia replied, “and to think, I have not yet known the heartbreak of a lost love. How insufferable I will be when this finally happens.”

  “I’m going to talk to Dr. Gatling about letting you get some time out of the tower,” Olivia said. “I fear you’re in danger of becoming a Bronte sister without the writing talent.”

  “Merci.” Claudia smiled as if she knew what that meant.

  Claudia was exceedingly worn out by the walking and talking of the afternoon. Olivia walked with her back to the room, gave her a cordial kiss on the cheek, and took her leave. As Claudia passed into sleep, she wondered after how truculent Olivia had become since their kiss; she wondered if Olivia was afraid of offending Claudia’s father in some way. Such a strangely honorable woman to find in truly bizarre world.

  †

  Later that week, after a day of thundering boredom, Claudia demanded clothing and permission to leave the tower. Dr. Gatling, who had come in to run a few tests on her eye, didn’t seem to care what she did once his tests were done. He had clothes f
etched for her and told her to come back before the end of the week so he could compile some more data.

  She dressed in the offered charcoal gray cotton peasant dress, strapped knee high boots, and a heavy, wool belted jacket. The air outside was cold and damp when she walked from the tower. She couldn’t even truly get her bearings in the fog of the stripped ruins of the city. Chilly air heavy with the scent of salt water blew in from the ocean, unhindered by the farming hills in the way it had been by the buildings when last she set foot in San Francisco more than six years ago.

  She briefly considered wandering the fields although she wasn’t sure she trusted the Transcended yet. To the south, the fog blew slowly across a more jagged landscape. On brief occasion, Claudia caught a glimpse of something colossal near the horizon only ever in snippets when the fog cleared a little. She wanted to go see what on earth could be so big as to be seen from such a distance, but she also didn’t think she would have the energy to get close enough to make a determination and certainly wouldn’t have enough to get back.

  Instead, she followed a handful of people who were making their way from the surface down into the lower levels where the true city was supposedly held. Immediately down the staircase that might have been borrowed from a BART station, the quiet solemnity of the surface was completely shattered. An enormous market place stretched out before her with shoppers packed shoulder to shoulder at stalls while barkers called people to their shops in a language that sounded equal parts Spanish and Chinese.

  The mélange of scents, roasting meat, spices, smoke from cooking fires, and sweat all mixed together to create an overpowering aroma that Claudia could only describe as ancient—she assumed it was the same scent that hung over bazaars going all the way back to the beginning of civilization. She walked through the gaps between the people as best she could until a specific scent caught her attention. It was an impossible smell and one she was quite certain she would never smell again. It lingered just under the surface, threatening to be overpowered at any moment by chilies and fish. Still, she tried her best to follow the thin, attractive ribbon of the familiar smell to its source until she found herself outside a happy little shop tucked away in a corner near an elevator to the lower levels. The bedrock came out on both sides of the white and yellow slat building that looked like a cottage transplanted into a subterranean world. The hand painted sign above the door, with flourishing pink letters and flowers on a white washed board confirmed what Claudia had thought impossible: donuts.

  Claudia pushed open the shop’s windowed door to find the smell of cooking donuts wasn’t the only familiar scent rediscovered that she thought long gone. Coffee was being brewed as well. The sudden rush of sense memory was almost enough to knock Claudia from her feet; if someone in the shop happened to light up a hand-rolled cigarette, Claudia knew she would burst into tears. When she was little more than a girl, her maternal grandfather took her to a donut shop in Montreal. He would buy her whatever donut she wanted, get her a glass of ice-cold whole milk, and tell her stories in French while he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and drank black coffee turned nearly to syrup by the amount of sugar he put in it. Grand-père Dupuis knew English, but refused to speak it, especially to his only granddaughter.

  “Can I help you with something?” a sweet voice asked from behind the counter.

  Claudia realized she must have been standing idly, adrift in the world of her memory. She glanced around the shop to catch her bearings. Strings of lights crisscrossed the ceiling, providing a soft white light, almost like daylight in their effect. A handful of petite chairs and tables, painted white and yellow like everything else about the shop, stood empty on the restaurant floor. Claudia walked further in, drawn by the glass display cases and counter where actual donuts awaited her.

  “Are you okay?” the voice asked again, and for the first time, Claudia realized the person speaking must be speaking to her.

  “Yes,” Claudia said, “I’m just a little lost in thought.” She looked up from her inspection of the donuts to find the woman speaking to her was actually a little hard to find. She was short, possibly even a little shorter than Claudia, wandering amid the crowded service area behind the display counter. The woman was petite with thick, black hair held back in a long braid. Her large doe eyes were dark brown on the border of black, yet lively and warm.

  “Can I get you something?” the woman asked.

  “Maybe,” Claudia said. “I’m just a little overwhelmed in learning that donuts are not actually extinct.”

  “Yes, my grandmother and I resurrected them the first chance we got,” the woman said with a little grin. “Esmeralda’s Donuts has served the City of Broken Bridges for three years now. Before that, it served San Francisco for thirty years.”

  “Esmeralda is your grandmother? Is she here?” Claudia really hoped the woman’s grandmother was around. A little old Hispanic woman amid the entirely feminine donut shop would perfectly complete the picture.

  “In a sense,” the woman said. She lifted a pendant from the front of her white apron and dangled it out until the light caught on the gold. “She is always with me now although she has been dead a few years. I am the Esmeralda of the shop now, but people just call me Esme.”

  “I am Claudia.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Claudia,” Esme said. “Are you hungry?”

  “I wasn’t until I smelled your shop, but I certainly am now.” Claudia’s eyes traveled down from Esme’s face, back to the row upon row of donuts within the display case.

  “If you have your labor punch card we can fix that right up.”

  “My…what?”

  The smile vanished from Esme’s face as she took a closer look at Claudia. “You’re awfully clean for an Irradiated laborer. What exactly do you do?”

  “I’m a scout sniper,” Claudia said, falling back on the only job she’d ever had. She’d tried her hand as a showgirl in some of the Raven’s shows, singing ballads under a red lantern, but it was little more than a gimmick, and she doubted there were cabarets in the City of Broken Bridges to revive her dead act.

  “Try again. Irradiates aren’t allowed to use weapons.” Esme folded her arms over her chest giving Claudia a stern stare that no doubt emulated a look favored by the original Esmeralda.

  “Why do you think I’m an Irradiate?” Claudia asked. She vaguely knew the term from her talks with Olivia. Irradiates were surface dwellers. Individuals cured of a mild case of radiation poisoning by Dr. Gatling’s stasis chambers, but still slightly radioactive. Olivia hadn’t said as much, but Claudia gleaned from the way she talked that Irradiates were second class citizens, little better than true mutants.

  “Because of your eye,” Esme explained. “There’s always something at least slightly off about Irradiates.”

  Claudia had almost forgotten her right eye didn’t match her left. She was neck deep in an entirely new society with rules she hadn’t remotely started to learn. If she was going to pass as anything but a tainted field hand, she would need to start wearing colored goggles to cover her eyes.

  “Look, I’d love to be able to give you something without punching your labor card, but if word got out among the Irradiates that I was giving away food, I’d have an endless stream of open hands running me out of business and scaring away clean customers,” Esme said.

  “I understand,” Claudia said. “I’m new here and still getting used to things.”

  “Where did you come from?” Esme asked with a skeptical eyebrow raised, her arms still crossed over her chest.

  “Quebec originally, but more recently Las Vegas.”

  Esme’s eyes went wide, which was remarkable considering how large and round they already were. “You’re the commander’s daughter.”

  The bell on the door rang and heavy boots stepped onto the plank floor. “She is indeed,” Commander Marceau’s voice boomed through the tiny shop. “My little Claudia, how did I know you would find this place among all the shops in the Chinican market
?”

  “I am so sorry, commander,” Esme stammered. “I didn’t know.”

  Claudia rolled her eyes and leaned back against the shop counter to face her father. Of course Esme was just another attractive woman who was completely cowed by Claudia’s father. Claudia wondered how far outside the City of Broken Bridges she might have to go before she found a woman who would have that reaction to her rather than her father.

  “Papa, do you know Esme?” Claudia asked.

  “Everyone knows Esme,” her father said. “She might be the only living donut artist left on the planet. I got to know her well in the years I searched for you. I came here often as I believed it would be a place that would speak to you, and as you see, I was right.”

  Claudia had to admit that was true. The shop called to her on more than just the scent level. She enjoyed the décor, the exterior, and it did hearken back to the shop of her childhood. In truth, Claudia didn’t like the masculine intrusion of her father upon the feminine space of the shop. He was a strong, brutish, male figure, armed and armored in a shop meant for pleasantness. Her father strode deeper into the shop, wrapped his arm around Claudia’s shoulder, and rested a kiss atop her head. Her minor, inner objection to him being in the shop melted under the warm embrace. Sure, he had pistols on his hips, a shotgun slung over his back, and a metal chest plate on, but beneath all the warrior accoutrements, he was still her father.

  “What jewel among these riches would you like to end your long fast of donuts?” her father asked as he bent low to look within the glass-front display case. “As I recall, you liked sugar-dusted crullers.”

  “Yes,” Claudia said, getting a little choked up at his perfect memories of her, “those were my favorite.”

  Esme plucked one of the twisted knots of dough, glittering with sugar crystals, from the case with metal tongs. “Would you like one as well, commander?”

  “My stomach is too occupied with thoughts to eat anything,” Commander Marceau said. “If possible, could you wrap this treat to go? My daughter has an appointment to meet the Keepers that we should make our way to.”