The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

“Well, I doubt you know this,” the duke began, crossing the suite, “but it's a beautiful day. It's been a while since I've seen your campus. I thought perhaps…” Hesitating, the duke glanced at Reece, then folded back the shutters. Reece blinked against the brightness. “I thought perhaps I ought to remedy that.”

  A while? It had been four years, at least.

  “I have class. Fencing.”

  The duke harrumphed. “I should like to see that. I used to be quite the fencer myself, before I became duke.”

  Reece bit off a sigh. It had been hard enough to keep the mission secret from the duke without him making suspiciously spontaneous house calls. Reece would be walking on glass all day, trying to keep him from sensing something with his newly-restored parental feelers. Abigail had never had those, but once upon a time, the duke had been quite adept at reading Reece's mind.

  “Perhaps we should visit the museum,” the duke suggested, and Reece froze with his hands clutching his last unpacked pair of trousers. “Visit The Aurelia. I haven't had those rock treats from Oceanus in years.”

  “I don't know,” Reece said, trying to sound nonchalant. “It’ll probably be swarming today, what with the holidays…”

  The duke waved a flippant hand. “What good is it being duke if I can't have some privileges? I know the museum's curator; I'll send him a log letting him know to expect us.”

  Barely able to keep the sour note out of his voice, Reece mustered some fake enthusiasm and smiled. “Great.”

  They started the day with breakfast in the galley before touring the campus, visiting tutors and classrooms, attracting the awed stares of students who had only ever seen the duke in the papers. Two barrel-chested bodyguards who looked more like bears than men followed a careful ten paces behind everywhere they went. There was humiliating, and then there was this.

  They ran into the Rices at the small performance stage that had been set up on the campus green, now covered with a foot of snow. A four-person band, bedecked in holiday colors, played carols on their flutes and fiddles until they caught sight of the duke watching. Their music broke off raggedly as they stood to salute him. Hayden patted Reece on the shoulder with a mittened hand as Reece tried in vain to turn invisible.

  “It's good he's here, though,” Hayden said quietly as the duke chatted amiably with the ever haggard-looking Mr. Rice, whose furry hat dwarfed his head. “Now you can say a proper goodbye.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that, seeing as he doesn't know I'm leaving?”

  “Well, maybe you should tell him.”

  “What?”

  “What's the worst that could happen?”

  “Prison!”

  Sophie looked up from sprinkling birdseed over the snow, her blond hair pinned back by a pair of woolen earmuffs. A few purple-winged songbirds hopped over to her offerings. “He doesn't have to know you're saying goodbye. You could just tell him what he means to you.”

  “What he means to me,” Reece repeated. He glanced up and found his father's eyes watching him. “Right.”

  They said goodbye to the Rices and headed for the museum, Reece feeling worse by the minute. True to his word, the duke had flexed his right to special treatment. When they arrived, the lobby was cleared of tourists, so it was just them, the two bearlike guards, and Aurelia. Reece felt like she was staring at him. He felt like everyone was staring at him.

  All in all, they saw five exhibits before the strain on his conscience broke him. It happened as he and the duke rode the rolling pedestrian walkway through a dark room full of green and blue florescent stones from Leto. The walkway bore them past black pedestals affixed with datascope screens describing the way the Letoians mined the stones, and Reece found himself clearing his throat and studying the screens very closely.

  “Look, there's something I need to tell you.”

  The duke looked up, seeming unsurprised.

  “Since the masquerade, I've noticed things…have been different.”

  Now the duke merely looked wary. Reece trudged on as if the words were being forcefully towed from his throat with a chain. They scraped against him, chafing.

  “And I wanted to say—that that's good. I mean, it's good. I'm glad we're…speaking.”

  “Yes.” The duke eyed him. “Yes, I suppose that is good. Is that all?”

  “Yes,” Reece said quickly. “Let's go to the food exhibit and eat some rocks.” He tried to step off the walkway, but the duke caught him by the shoulder and easily held him at bay, his grip firm.

  “You're more like your mother than you know.” The duke chuckled at Reece's expression. “It's your own fault you never see her good side, boy. Yes, you two are much alike. Neither of you have ever been very good at masking your emotions. Least of all from me.”

  The walkway scrolled into a new room, this one bright, golden, and springy, loud with the chattering of birds. The ceiling pulled up some thirty feet and ended in a roof of bowed glass. Reece and the duke rolled quietly through the tunnel of netting keeping the fluttering birds from escaping. They flashed like bits of falling marble in all the colors of the world, reds, blues, greens, and yellows.

  “When are you leaving?” the duke abruptly asked, sighing.

  Reece paused and then echoed his sigh. He should have known. “Tomorrow.”

  “And you had no mind to say goodbye to your mother or me?”

  “I thought you might try to stop me.”

  “I might. I haven't decided.” The duke suddenly planted his hands on the walkway railing and hung his head. “I wish you'd spoken with me.”

  Wincing, Reece raised his hand, and then deliberately dropped it. “How did you find out?”

  The duke straightened and faced Reece, his mouth set in a grim, forbidding line. “The fact you were tapping into your accounts for the first time in five years seemed a pretty good indicator something was amiss. And then I had some help. You should know better than to trust the Pans. Flash a little silver under their noses, and—”

  Reece bristled. “They didn't double-cross me.” He wouldn't believe it. Raft, Varque, the others—Gideon trusted them, and Gid's trust came at a high price. Unless…

  Kayl. Reece would bet his collectible Dryad rotary spike it had been Kayl. He wondered if he should mention it to Gid, briefly entertained by a daydream of his friend hunting down Kayl and folding him up till he could fit in a shoebox.

  “So what now?” Reece asked.

  “Now you tell me what plumb-headed ideas you have in that brain of yours, and I tell you whether or not you can expect to eat your next meal through a set of bars.”

  Reece's relief at having his guilt laid out in the open fizzled and evaporated. Thaddeus Sheppard was two people: the duke, and Father. Right now, staring sternly down his long nose at Reece, he was the duke, and the duke would always do what he thought was his duty; he'd proved that by nearly letting himself be assassinated by The Kreft.

  The floor suddenly grumbled, trembling, and the pedestrian walkway groaned to an uneasy stop. Reece caught his balance on the rail and looked around uncertainly.

  “What was that?” He had to speak loudly; the birds had begun cawing and screeching, flapping in a panicked maelstrom of color and wings. He looked up at them, confused. They were acting as though they'd seen a predator.

  The building shook again, harder this time; somewhere far off, someone began shouting.

  “Come,” the duke barked, and Reece nodded and followed him back the way they had come, walking briskly.

  As they reached the aviary entrance, the third and most powerful boom yet rumbled under Reece's feet and knocked his teeth together. The museum lights hesitantly flickered, and the bloody red auxiliary lighting buzzed on over the emergency exits as a recording of a calm woman's voice began echoing over and over throughout the museum.

  “What the blazes?” the duke exclaimed. His body guards hustled into the room and took posts on either side of him and Reece, as if their presence would do much good against an ear
thquake.

  A slow darkness rolled across the white sun; its shadow slithered over the aviary floor, from one side of the room to the other. Reece and the other looked up. One of the bodyguards cursed.

  It was a ship unlike any Reece had ever seen. He could tell it was huge—it probably hadn't even broken the troposphere, and yet against the sun it was the size of a bat. It was as black as night, long and pointed at both ends.

  Feeling a deep shock in the pit of his stomach, Reece walked forward, ignoring his father as he tried to hold him back. He stopped beneath the very peak of the dome and turned in a slow circle to watch the ship as it drifted by. The sun broke around the edges of the shadowy vessel, pouring into Reece's eyes until they stung, but he couldn't look away until he was sure, though part of him knew there had never been any doubt…

  Two quicksilver flashes dropped from the ship, falling, falling…Reece tried to follow them, but they were too fast, too small…

  A moment later, a violent boom like thunder rattled the glass ceiling in its panes. And he knew.

  The Kreft had finally come.

  Reece sprinted through the museum, followed closely by his father and the two bodyguards, soon joined by a puffing little man with his white hair parted down the middle—the museum curator—and a handful of sentries and tour guides.

  “What's going on?”

  “Is that a ship?”

  “Son of a toffer, they're firing!”

  “Remain orderly, all of you,” the duke's smooth voice rumbled, hushing the shrill voices in one fell stroke. “The calmer you stay, the safer you will be. Open the doors to the below ground exhibits and form lines to the stairwells. I want a hundred people to a level, their backs to the walls. Don't just stand there—move!”

  Reece muted the voices and compounded them in the back of his head. He knew what he had to do, but suddenly, doing it seemed like the most complicated thing in the Epimetheus. Just this morning he had marveled over his crew's preparation…now he cursed his lack of foresight. They should have been ready to go at a moment's notice!

  People milled outside the museum, huddled together against the brisk wind, not yet aware what was happening. They looked to the ship and pointed and gasped, but panic hadn't broken over them, like Reece knew it would soon enough.

  Panting, he leaped onto the back of a snow-slicked bench and looked over the heads of the crowds. Students were streaming out of brick halls, their voices one low murmur of excitement.

  The duke grabbed Reece by his jacket and yanked him down, catching him before he fell into the snow. Their eyes locked; a silent conversation passed between them. As he had twice before, Thaddeus Sheppard reached and cupped the back of Reece's neck with an affectionate hand.

  “You have to go,” he said simply.

  Reece nodded. His legs suddenly felt as solid as this morning's porridge. “They might not have come for Aurelia, but either way, we can't let them have her. Maybe I can lead them away.”

  “Do what you must. Then come home.”

  Nodding again, his head feeling waterlogged with everything he needed to say but couldn't, Reece said, “Try to get everyone underground, but if you can't, at least get them clear of the dome.” With one last studious look at his father's face, he ripped himself away and started running.

  Halfway down the block, the real screams started, and the milling turned into frightened jostling, the jostling into pushing and shoving. Snow sprayed up around Reece's boots as he ran headlong into the tumult. The running crowds parted around him like a river around a stone, and he searched their faces wildly, calling till he was hoarse, “Hayden! HAYDEN!”

  “Reece!” a familiar voice finally cried back. Hayden toppled out from between two weeping girls, his glasses crooked on his white face. “It's them! The Kreft! They—”

  “Sophie and your dad?” Reece interrupted, planting his feet to keep from getting sucked into the pressing tide of people.

  “They're with Tutor White! He took us into his basement laboratory just after it started—I left them there!” He looked devastated. “Reece, the others are here! I saw them out the basement window, but they were gone by the time I got out…Gideon and Mordecai and Nivy!”

  “What? Why would they—” Another boom tilted the ground, and Reece and Hayden ducked together as a hot rush of hair—foreign feeling, in this cold—blew over their heads.

  “I know, but they're here!”

  “Then they'll be headed for the museum! This way, come on!”

  With a hand twisted in the fabric of Hayden's coat, Reece turned and plunged into the madness. The crowds were thinning—people were catching on to the idea of getting underground—but those who remained on the surface ran around like a bunch of spinning tops, without order or direction. It felt wrong, leaving them behind when his conscience screamed at him to find some way to help. There was nothing for it but to grit his teeth and plow on, dragging Hayden.

  At the museum, the boys stumbled to a stop and stared. The glass doors were too congested to pass a piece of parchment through; there was no way to get in, short of walking on the crowds' heads.

  Reece was about to roll up his sleeves and wrestle his way into line when he spotted Gideon standing with his back to them a short distance away, scanning the crowd with one hand in his jacket, no doubt on his revolver.

  “Gid!” Reece screamed.

  Gideon spun. He looked like he'd taken a mud bath. The only bit of color left to him was in his sharp blue eyes, pinched tight at their corners to show he was worried. Nothing else gave him away.

  “Back door, Cap'n. There ain't no way we're gettin' in up here,” he said when he joined them.

  “What happened?” Reece asked as he jogged, hauling an out-of-breath Hayden.

  “The bombin' started in Praxis an hour ago. They started on the wrong side’a the moon and worked their way here. We made it out by the skin’a our teeth,” Gideon said grimly, leading the way to the back door that would serve them one last time. He unceremoniously kicked it in on its hinges and continued past it without slowing down. “Borrowed an automobile off'a one of Mordecai's friends and pulled in not five minutes ago.”

  “The Vee?”

  Gideon smiled savagely. “Gave him a knock on the head that should have him sleepin' a week and dumped him in an alley.”

  Crowded though the entrance and the stairwells were, the lobby was empty—probably by the duke's design. Reece couldn't help but look around for one last glance of his father as he ran for Aurelia's rear cargo hatch, which opened onto the lobby floor like a ramp. Nivy and Mordecai stood astern of the ship, every bit as filthy as Gideon.

  “What's the plan, Cap'n?” Mordecai asked, calm but stone-faced.

  “We leave. Now.” Reece marched past them as another explosion purred in his chest. He felt his way to a lever on Aurelia's wall and heaved it up, flooding the empty cargo bay with white auxiliary lights. “Have Po warm her up. We're out of Atlas in five minutes and in the Euclid Stream in ten.”

  “But…Po's not here,” Hayden said, looking around the cargo bay with an expression of dawning horror.

  Panic spiked in Reece, and he thrust it down with a growl. He turned on the ladder he had begun to climb and looked out over the bay as if hoping that little white head would pop out of a hatch somewhere.

  “She'll be at the docks with her brothers,” he realized. The docks were a good three miles from here. He couldn't expect her to have found her way here through all the chaos—and what if she'd been hurt? He couldn't leave without his mechanic! Bleeding—

  “How fast can you make it to the docks?” he asked Gideon, climbing until he reached the mesh metal bridge crossing to the sleeping quarters.

  Gid was already pulling a white drop sheet off one of the bims parked in the corner of the bay. “Fast enough.”

  “I think I can get the ship started up for ya,” Mordecai offered. “Seen Po fiddlin' around enough to have a mind for how the thing works.”

  Reece c
onsidered, then nodded and said flatly, “Ten minutes, Gid. We can't wait much longer and hope to make it out of this in one piece.”

  Rather than answering, Gideon kicked the bim to roaring wakefulness, then rolled back on the handlebar so greasy grey tendrils curled up from its exhaust funnel. Shifting up, he shot down the ramp, careened to the left so his back tire slid along the marble, and was gone.

  Ten minutes and counting.

  Jaw clenched, Reece charged the bridge, racing the auxiliary lights as they popped on down the wooden corridor. He heard footsteps and glanced back at Nivy as she joined him in his mad dash, her black ponytail lashing her face.

  They reached the bridge together, and it was a mark of Reece's determination that he took to the leather pilot's seat without stopping to look around at the bridge that was officially his. He had daydreamed about this moment, imagining taking the yoke calmly and switching toggles one at a time so Aurelia woke up with a deep, dramatic breath, and everyone applauded.

  His hands sped over the flightpanel, snapping buttons and turning knobs almost without thought. Nivy sat in the co-pilot’s chair, buckled herself into the crisscrossing harness, and lowered the brass headset down over her hair, tapping each earpiece. Reece followed her example and shoved his own headset into place.

  “Alright,” he sighed into the mouthpiece, “here's hoping we don't explode.”

  With a sweaty hand, he reached up, latched onto the horizontal leveler pump over his head, and eased it down with a hiss. Then he found the engine pedal—a long flat bar at his heels—wrapped his ankles over it, and drew it towards his seat. With a cough and a snarl, Aurelia began vibrating. Nivy's chair squeaked and rocked on rusty springs. Reece started to grin—

  —and then stopped as Aurelia powered down with a whine of complaint. Nivy's chair stopped bobbing. They looked at each other.

  “Not good,” Reece said needlessly. “That should have done it.” He repeated his steps, and again, Aurelia grumbled with promise and then abruptly, almost stubbornly, went quiet. “What the bleeding—”