The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  Nivy and Scarlet were the only ones he’d seen since they’d merged into the Stream, narrowly avoiding an impatient blast from The Kreft that would have split Aurelia in half at the wings. Nivy kept him awake and for all intents and purposes, sane while he steered the helm and watched the green graph radar. Scarlet brought him food and news of the others. Hayden was in bad shape but stable. Po had moved in with her for the time being. Gideon was…Gideon.

  “He wasn’t exactly loquacious even before…” That’s when Scarlet would trail off, and Reece would nod to let her know he understood. Not mentioning what had happened didn’t make it easier, but neither of them had figured out how to talk about it. In part because Reece was worried talking about it might make it feel more real, and selfishly, he didn’t know if he was ready for that yet.

  The truth was, Mordecai was dead. Neserus was in ruins, The Aurelia was barely outrunning The Kreft, and according to Scarlet, Hayden was worried he might never use his broken foot again. To add insult to injury, the ship’s exterior processors had been damaged in her close call merging into the Rhea, so he was having difficulty pinpointing where exactly they were in the Stream. What was there to talk about?

  In the chair next to him, Nivy shifted, settling down for a nap. With good old fashioned latitude and longitude maps (and Reece meant old—they’d be lucky if the maps didn’t suddenly decide to crumble), she had estimated they were a few days out from The Ice Ring, where they should be able to lose The Kreft if they were clever enough. The Ice Ring was Kreft territory anyways; it had been their first stopover in the Epimetheus, the first cluster of planets and moons to fall under their rule. The Heron there were either slaves or rebels, but other ships frequently came and went, mostly by Kreft direction. Nivy was confident they would be able to lose The Kreft on their trail if they forked out into The Voice someplace busy and close enough to their ultimate destination, the moon Ismara.

  Suddenly, she kicked him.

  “Ow,” Reece complained without expression. “What?”

  With her creepily dexterous toes, she reached and switched the autopilot on. He rolled his eyes as the helm and leveler bar locked up, and spun his chair to face her. She gave him one of her famous looks.

  “I’m fine, Nivy,” he sighed, and as she tried to kick him again, caught her bare foot in hand, wrangling it away from his face. “Flying is therapeutic for me.”

  Uh-huh, her looked said flatly, but at least she dropped her foot. For a moment, as Reece slouched in his seat, yawned, and rubbed his eyes, she stared out the window, thoughtfully toying with the band at her throat. He could sense her indecision about something, but he didn’t press her on it. For three days she had sat there beside him and weathered his glumness without making him feel like he had to explain himself. For that, he owed her her privacy, and a whole lot more.

  The green beeped at his elbow. Curious, he bent over the radar, tapped it, and then smacked it irritably when it still wouldn’t respond.

  “The processors,” he explained when Nivy tipped her head quizzically. “We need to get them back online before we get any closer to The Ice Ring.”

  Nivy nodded her agreement, but at the same time made the sign for Po and raised an eyebrow. Strangely enough, Po—or more specifically, Po’s feelings for him and their consequential awkwardness—had very quickly lost rank in his long list of problems. Not that he wasn’t worried about her. Ever since Neserus, she’d been neglecting the Afterquin and avoiding everyone but Scarlet, and it just wasn’t like her. All he meant was…compared to everything else, apologizing to Po and confessing he’d been wrong to get her hopes up seemed actually manageable. If she would just answer the com.

  “Yeah,” Reece finally sighed. “I know.” He winced as Nivy unexpectedly punched him in the arm. “Ow! Hey!”

  Holding up a finger to forestall his complaints, Nivy gave him one of her long and hard looks, and he knew without her lifting another hand or so much as blinking what she was trying to tell him. It used to always be that way with them, but somewhere between Leto and Oceanus, they’d misplaced the ability. It seemed they’d found it again.

  “I’m not feeling sorry for myself,” he informed her. “I’m just…” Nivy’s black eyebrow crept further and further up her forehead as he gestured wordlessly. She pointed at him and shook her head sternly, making him grimace. “It is my fault, Nivy,” he sighed. “No, it is. You can’t—” He broke off as she irritably grabbed his chin, holding his gaze. Then, slowly, she forced his head to shake in time with hers until he couldn’t help but sadly laugh. For a wonder, it actually made him feel a degree better, at least until he heard footsteps coming up the walkway and recognized the sharp clip of Scarlet’s heeled boots.

  “Reece,” she called the second before she stuck her head onto the bridge. Even Scarlet with all her socialite manners and pretty dresses had looked decidedly careworn since their flight from Oceanus, and it had little to do with the yellowing bruise on her jaw and the stitches Nivy had helpfully hidden in her hair. “Hayden would like to talk to you.”

  Reece stood, uneasy but resigned. “How is he?”

  “He’s coping,” she answered cautiously. “But I think it’s time the two of you…”

  “Had it out?”

  “He’s not angry with you, Reece. None of us are. Well—”

  “Gideon.”

  “Yes, there is Gideon. But even Gideon doesn’t blame you.”

  With a longsuffering sigh, Reece started for the door. “And he told you that himself, did he?”

  Scarlet edged out of his way. “Reece—”

  “No, you’re right. I’ve been putting this off and it hasn’t helped anything. I just…don’t know what I can say other than I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe…”

  He glanced back at her as she hesitated. Between her concerned frown and Nivy’s appraising glances, he felt like he ought to be the one on a sick bed, being fretted over with a tongue depressor in his mouth. But he was fine. This wasn’t the first time he’d lost someone and felt responsible for it.

  “Maybe you just need to realize that’s enough,” Scarlet finally finished as she looked him over. Whatever she saw made her start wringing her hands; she took a half step his direction with a cringe. “Reece—”

  “Keep Nivy company,” he said curtly. “Don’t let her push too many buttons.”

  Eager to get away from their worried looks, he slipped off the bridge and started for the infirmary. The ship around him felt strangely cold and dark, and more still and lonely than it had even after being parked on the floor of a museum for two hundred years. Maybe he was just more aware now of the negative space, and how few six people were to fill the drafty corridors and unexplored corners.

  Either way, he was fine.

  For a cowardly moment, Reece dithered in the corridor and stared in the infirmary door at his friend, who looked older than ever and simultaneously small, lost, and for all the exhausted lines on his face, very much like the little sick boy from Bus-ship Ten. Reece’s jaw burned, but he swallowed back the ache and scowled, blinking hard. That was cowardice too.

  Pale and brittle, Hayden glanced up from the book spread limply in his lap and looked right at him without a trace of surprise. His bad ankle was draped in a sling and splinted yet still crooked at an awkward angle that seemed to point accusingly right at Reece. The crack in Hayden’s left lens was the sorriest touch.

  Slowly, Reece walked into the infirmary and sat on the stool by Hayden’s cot with his elbows on his knees. He dragged his hands through his hair. This must be why the duke was nearly bald and not much past fifty. “You called?”

  “I thought one of us should.” When he saw Reece’s grimace, Hayden added, “You’ve been busy. It’s alright.”

  “I still should have come.”

  “I’ve been asleep most of the time. The pain agents, you know.”

  It took Reece a long time to find his voice after that; Hayden waited patiently, returning his attenti
on to his book to give Reece a much-needed moment.

  “Hayden,” he finally managed, “I messed up. I made a mistake, and I can’t ask you to forgive me for it because I can’t even forgive me for it. This should have never happened to you, and it’s my fault it did.”

  Hayden simply nodded, seeming neither as angry as he should be or as forgiving as he normally would have been, and reached up, took off his spectacles, and set them on the wooden nightstand as if marking the passing of an era. Reece stared at the folded spectacles hollowly before reaching out and taking them, bouncing them lightly in his palm.

  “How bad is it?” he asked, nodding towards the foot.

  Grimacing as he carefully shifted his weight, Hayden admitted, “It needs surgery. Soon, if I want to use it again. It was dislocated at one-hundred and eighty degrees.”

  “Not broken?”

  “And broken. Twice.”

  Reece abruptly stood to begin pacing around the infirmary, hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets. Idiot that he was, he’d never considered the eventuality of Hayden getting hurt and having no one to fix him up. No one else on board was qualified to treat more than a splinter, though Mordecai might have known how to tie a tourniquet. Not that that helped them now. Reece’s chest ached dully around the hole that marked that particular missing piece of him.

  “We’ll be to The Ice Ring soon,” he promised, staring blindly at the corner where Mordecai used to sit when it was his turn to watch Owon, his clunky work boots propped on the corner of Hayden’s desk, a halo fog of cigar smoke floating about his head. The corner looked long-abandoned, but Reece could almost smell the smoke, that oily but sweet smell that used to cling to their clothes for days after a visit to the workshop in Praxis. “The Heron will have the facilities to take care of you.”

  For a long time, Hayden was silent, and Reece wondered if he had gone back to reading, or if he was too angry for Reece’s apologies, let alone his reassurances that this would be alright. It wouldn’t. Hayden’s leg could set and heal cleanly, but they both knew there were things deeper than skin and bone that would never be the same inside of them.

  Finally, Hayden cleared his throat and spoke up. “It isn’t your fault, Reece.”

  Reece tiredly turned to face him with a flat look, though he doubted Hayden could see as much without his spectacles.

  Nevertheless, Hayden insisted, “It isn’t. Not what happened to me.”

  “But what happened to Mordecai?” Reece ventured a little testily. He scowled when Hayden merely shrugged, tilting his head back to glare up at the ceiling and draw a breath through his teeth. “Nah, it is. Everyone knows it is, even if they want to pretend differently. If I had gotten us out of Neserus—”

  “You couldn’t have,” Hayden said without feeling. “Pryor had forbidden us to leave.”

  “That shouldn’t have stopped me. I let it stop me.”

  “Maybe you did. But it’s done now, and you still have to get us to The Ice Ring. You can’t just stop being captain because you made a mistake.”

  “It was more than a mistake, Hayden! It was…I don’t even know it was. Mordecai is dead because of me. What do you call that?”

  “Out of your hands.” Hearing Reece’s disgusted noise, Hayden pushed himself up against his pillows with a frown and a wince for the way his ankle rocked in its sling. “Reece, Po is down in the engine room thinking the same thing right now. You guys can fight over the responsibility if you want, but if The Kreft had attacked and Mordecai had been somewhere else entirely…I don’t know, maybe he wouldn’t have died. Are you going to take the blame for where he was when it happened? Where everyone was? That had nothing to do with you.”

  Reece kicked the desk chair, sending it rolling on its legs, and threw up his hands only to drop them on his head, limp and empty. How could he expect Hayden to understand? So what if girls and heights and loud noises made him uneasy—death and gore were things he’d been trained to deal with calmly and efficiently when they were laid out on a hospital bed. But Reece had been trained to do good enough at his job to keep Hayden bored at his; he was supposed to be ensuring those hospital beds stayed empty. He was supposed to be protecting his crew, and yet it felt like since setting out on this voyage, he was the only one who hadn’t taken a hit, like the helm had somehow protected him. He hated it. And he hated even more that there was nothing he could do about it except blame himself because that kept him from feeling idle and helpless. It was easier to be angry.

  “I get it, Reece.” He glanced over his arm at Hayden, who smiled faintly. “You’re the umbrella.”

  After a moment, Reece snorted and echoed in agreement, “I’m the umbrella.” He sat down heavily. All his tension was bleeding into a tight, neat knot in his chest, the pressure nigh unbearable and at the same time a strange relief, because at least it was focused, and not just a messy buckshot of feelings.

  He was actually starting to feel a little bit better—again—when Hayden had to go and break the spell by saying, “This…this is my fault.”

  Reece stared. “Wait…what?”

  Hayden gestured at his foot in distaste. “This. What happened in the cargo bay. I never even stood a chance against Hannick.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Everything!” Hayden burst out. Glaring at his glasses where Reece had left them on the nightstand, he shook his head with his jaw tight and set, and Reece didn’t know whether he was about to cry or rage, or which one would startle him more. “You had to talk me into coming along in the first place because I was too scared to leave.”

  “Come on, Hayden. To leave your family. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Maybe that was part of it, but the rest was just an excuse. Because I knew if I stayed on Honora, I’d go on doing well with my studies and become a doctor and everything would be fine, but if I came with you on Aurelia, it’d only be a matter of time before I stopped belonging.”

  His words were stretched taut, pulled to a transparent thinness so Reece could finally see what this was really about. He’d always commended Hayden for being the uncomplicated “normal” one, the one who secretly held The Aurelia together. Not the metal paneling and bolts and springs, but the real Airship Aurelia—her people, her crew. He did plenty to contribute, but the wonder of Hayden was, he didn’t actually have to do anything to make the others feel better, warmer somehow. Reece saw that and called it goodness. It baffled him that Hayden called it uselessness.

  “Hayden,” Reece said in a low voice, “listen to me. You belong here. That—”

  Hayden interrupted him with an agitated flick of his wrist. “There’s a difference between belonging and fitting in. You belong with your family. But do you fit in with them?”

  “Who wants to fit in?” Reece exclaimed. “You bring a stability to the rest of us ginghoos. Don’t discount that.”

  “A stability,” Hayden murmured, thoughtful, and looked down at his hands. “I suppose one of us needs to be boring.”

  Now Reece was getting impatient. If not for the stranger on the bed’s bad ankle, he’d shake him till he started to resemble Hayden again. “Alright. So what do you want to be?”

  Hayden dropped his head back into his pillows and closed his eyes. “I…I don’t even know.” After a long pause, he admitted, “When I first decided I wanted to study medicine, it was because I wanted to help people. I still want to help people. But I was wrong when I thought being a doctor would give me any kind of power. I’ve never had real power over who gets draped with a sheet and who walks away with barely a scratch. That’s determined before they ever come to me.” His face was grim and stormy. His eyes opened with sudden sharpness, and Reece felt a little sorry for the ceiling, the recipient of that dark glare.

  “You’ve saved lives, Hayden, whether you want to believe it of yourself or not.”

  “Have I? I had a responsibility to protect Sophie, and I left her on Atlas. I tried to protect Po, and for my effort, I got t
his.” He gestured angrily at his foot with both hands, his voice raw with emotion. “And I promised Talfryn I would get her away from Neserus, but as far as I know, she could be dead there.”

  Reece had to swallow to push past that. Because no one knew better than he did right now how the guilt of failing people you cared about twisted the gut like a sickness. “Alright, but remember Nivy, on Leto? Or how about when Owon got the jump on me at Mordecai’s? You stitched us back together. You fixed us like no one else could have. I don’t understand what more you think it is you need to do.”

  “I need to stop people getting hurt in the first place,” Hayden said, fierce. “That’s the only way I can save them.” He transferred his glare to Reece, looking wild. After a long moment of Reece staring back at him, he deflated, shrinking, small and young and Hayden again. He took his glasses back up and put them on resignedly. “I’m sorry.”

  Frowning, Reece stood, shaking his head. He was at a loss. He’d come to the infirmary ready to deal with a Hayden who had every right to hate him for what had happened on Oceanus. He was ill-prepared to deal with a Hayden who thought his greatest strengths were actually to blame. “If anyone has nothing to be sorry about, it’s you.” Hayden snorted humorlessly. “Hey,” Reece snapped, “I’m serious! Let me be the bleeding umbrella, Hayden! I make the bad decisions for all of us—occupational hazard, remember? You deal with your foot and whatever’s going through your head right now, but you leave the blame with me. I can handle it.”

  “But I can’t?” Hayden wondered, impassive. Reece wished he could see himself, laying there despairingly like he’d been pushed in front of a bus-ship by his best friend. If this was him handling the blame, losing control of it would probably do him in.

  Reece patted him on the shoulder on his way to the door. “Get some rest, alright? I mean to push us hard to The Ice Ring and get you back on your feet. Have you seen Gid?”