The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  Hayden came out of his gloomy trance with a start at the sudden change of topic and looked around as if just realizing they were alone. “He was here when I woke up, but he left before I could say much. Do you think he’s…?”

  “I’ll let you know,” Reece promised him, and slipped out of the infirmary, letting out a long breath.

  No, he didn’t think Gid was alright. Mordecai was dead; his laughter and his cigar smoke would never warm the cargo bay again. And there was something different about this death. They had all lost someone before—parents, siblings, friends, mentors, even as recently as Tutor Agnes—but for every loss for every one of them, there had been someone else to reassure them the hurt would get better in time. There was no one like that left. Mordecai had died and left every last one of them with a stinging sense of loss and no one on the outside to promise them they’d be happy again. Reece knew he’d be happy again. He just couldn’t imagine it.

  He heard Gid long before he saw him. A sharp clank rumbled in Reece’s sternum like the footsteps of a giant metal creature as he slipped onto the grated bridge where he had stood for more than a dozen moots and looked out over the cargo bay with his hands rolled in his pockets. Below, Gideon worked in the corner where the bims were parked, loading a crate methodically, the back of his shirt soaked with sweat. Sensing Reece or maybe hearing him, he stopped and squinted over his shoulder. As Reece started down the stairs, he went back to work with a frown, packing the crate a little more forcefully now.

  Reece drew even with him and peered into the crate. As he’d suspected, Gideon was packing away Mordecai’s personal belongings, namely his guns. His long leather duster carpeted the bottom of the crate and padded the shockguns, ALPS, and hobs Gid had already loaded, along with a flat tin of cigars, the physics book Mordecai had drawn on Sterling Eve, and two small canvas paintings, one of Panteda with its red grasslands and teal-blue skies, and one of his family, of which Gideon was the last survivor. Mordecai’s wife Esther, his sons and daughters and other grandchildren…they were all gone, and if Reece had never really known what to say about it before, he definitely didn’t have the right words to apologize for it now. Gideon went on packing the crate.

  A few minutes later, he stopped and snatched up the tin of cigars, popped it open, and offered it to Reece. Reece frowned but plucked out a cigar when he gave the tin an insistent rattle.

  “He’d hate it if we let them go to waste,” Gideon muttered before taking one for himself. Reece supplied a spark-starter from his pocket and clicked up a flame that they shared in silence till their cigars had taken and smoke curled about them in a homey fog.

  The silence stretched and pulled at the open wound.

  Leaning his elbows against the edge of the crate to stare into it, Reece took a gamble and remarked, “You know the first time Mordecai got me to try one of these, I was a Fourteen?”

  After a moment, Gideon smirked and blew an expert smoke ring up at the ceiling. It drifted like a ghost before fading into the dark. “I was six. Thought my ma was going to skin him and hang him out to dry, I was so sick.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Hid his cigars so she couldn’t incinerate ‘em. Acted extra polite for a few days, took his shoes off at the door, that sorta thing.”

  “You know, it’s funny.” Reece ticked his cigar on the side of the crate to dust off the embers. “I never really thought of what it meant that Mordecai was your grandfather. I mean, I knew he was, but I never imagined him bouncing you on his knee as a kid, or bringing you treats at holiday.”

  Shrugging his big shoulders, Gideon admitted, “Yeah, he wasn’t really the type.” After taking another long pull on his cigar, he went on, his words washed in smoke. “Even after the war, when he was supposed to take care’a me, he couldn’t really figure out how to treat me like a kid.”

  “Some people would call that a boon. Abigail still seems to think I’ll never brush my hair unless she does it for me.”

  Gideon shot a sideways glance at his unsightly crop of hair and snorted, and Reece grinned, relieved that so far, things were going smoother by far than they had with Hayden. But then, he hadn’t really gotten to the hard part. Gid could still conceivably decide to turn the crate into a coffin.

  He decided just to wing it and prepare to dodge.

  “Gid—”

  “Aw, burn it Reece,” Gideon sighed. “We really gotta do this? It’s bad enough, everyone lookin’ at me like I’m liable to explode at any second.”

  Reece knew the feeling. At Liem’s funeral, the uncertain glances and significant silences had made him want to explode. Still, he owed Gideon an apology and an explanation, even if it was a lousy one that got him punched in the face.

  “I was wrong, Gid.” As he rolled his cigar between his fingers, shaking his head, Gideon scowlingly turned away and busied himself with Mordecai’s luggage. “I thought you’d want to hear at least that much.”

  Gideon didn’t answer, just went on unceremoniously shoving faded clothes into the crate until Reece sighed and decided to come back later. His friends were making it impossible for him to be pathetic and contrite when it was the only time he’d ever asked to be allowed to be those things.

  “Where you goin’?” Gid demanded, straightening and frowning at him.

  Pausing at the door, Reece called back, “You don’t want to hear my apologies, and that’s all I have to deal in right now, so—”

  “Quit bein’ a ginghoo,” Gideon turned one of Mordecai’s bags upside-down and let socks, bullets, sheaves of papers and assorted trinkets fall out in a clump, “and get back here and give me a hand.” As Reece wandered back and scooped up a bag that still needed sorting, Gideon grumbled, “Just don’t understand why people feel the need to say stuff that’s common knowledge. I know you’re sorry. So why we gotta talk about it?”

  Reece should’ve picked a different bag. Who knew Mordecai had collected old ink canisters? Reece’s fingers were an oily black mess in a matter of seconds. “Because you deserve to hear it even if you already know it? And I worried you were blaming yourself for…I don’t know. Look, the point is, I went too far, thinking you’d stolen the anai.”

  “I told ya. If I had, I would’a never been so obvious about it,” Gid said with a simple shrug as he squinted down at a few pages he’d plucked from the sheaves—loose gun design sketches, from the looks of it. He set a few of the drawings to one side before tying the rest back together and tossing them into the crate. Mordecai’s revolver, Reece noticed, had been holstered at his opposite hip rather than packed away with the rest of the armory. Following Reece’s wondering stare, Gideon glanced at the gun and tentatively touched Mordecai’s pearly silver hand guard. His face had darkened again. “Usually when a Handler dies, his gun’s buried with him. But I figured, since there won’t be no burial…”

  “He’d want you to put it to good use,” Reece agreed, forcing himself to look away. He couldn’t shake the image of the revolver sitting in a puddle in the engine room, dripping quietly and still managing to be the loudest thing in the room. Water rushing, heart pounding, lungs burning, a door that wouldn’t open. The things he thought about when he saw the dripping revolver in his mind’s eye.

  He tucked the last ink canister away between two waistcoats. “Ready?”

  With a grunt of assent, Gid stepped to the lid where it leaned against the wall and took its other end in hand. Together, they hoisted it into place over the crate and eased it down till the magnets caught and it clicked closed. Then Reece watched as Gideon slowly, with much more care than he’d shown the possessions themselves, pulled out a clunky padlock, lined it up, and with a slow inhale, snapped it shut indefinitely. He patted the box twice and pulled back.

  “There ain’t ever been a dual-wieldin’ Handler before. Pretty sure he’d be pleased to know he made room for the first.” He looked at Reece until Reece realized this was as close to a funeral as his grandfather would be getting. He’d learned about captains
officiating ceremonies on their ships, but this…this was yet another thing his tutors hadn’t prepped him for. But then, he doubted even another ten years of schooling could really teach him how to say goodbye to a friend that had died on his watch.

  Shifting his weight with his hands on his hips, Reece cleared his throat and said, “If I knew him at all, Gid, I know there wasn’t a second he regretting doing what he did. He saved Po, and Po is one of the only things keeping this ship flying. So in a way…he saved all of us.”

  Speaking of Po. Reece caught himself with a hand on the crate as the ship rattled, groaned miserably, and went still again. Mordecai’s sacrifice would be for nothing if the mechanic he’d died to save let the ship fall right out from under the rest of the crew. Which brought Reece to the other subject he needed to broach with Gid.

  Gideon frowned at the door to the Afterquin as he dusted his hands on his pant legs. “What’s she doin’ in there?”

  “Nothing. That’s the problem.” Reece hesitated as Gideon raised his eyebrows at the door. He knew what that look meant without seeing it head-on; there was a dare behind it, a challenge to go on and see if Gideon wouldn’t stop him if he didn’t like what he was saying. “I need you to talk to her.”

  “Po?” Gideon coughed out in surprise. “About what?”

  “The ship. The processors got banged up coming into the Rhea and I need her to get them back up and running again, or we don’t stand a change of navigating to Ismara on our own.”

  Incredulous, Gideon turned and stared at him. “So why can’t you do it?”

  He hesitated. “I doubt she wants to see me right now. Besides, you two have a…rapport.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “She listens to you, Gid.”

  Gideon eyed him suspiciously for a moment, then rolled his eyes and snorted. “She listens to you plenty. You just don’t ever listen back.” Shouldering past Reece, he headed towards the galley.

  “Wait. She…” Reece caught up to him and grabbed him by the arm, which he could tell was a mistake from the way Gideon ever so slowly turned his head to glare at him. Despite knowing from experience this was the part where he should back away from the bear coming out of its cave, he pressed, “What does that mean?”

  “Forget it,” Gid growled, shaking him off. “If you ain’t bleedin’ figured it out by now—”

  “For the love of…figured what out?” He had a sudden inspiration. “You mean her…the way she…” He gestured, trying to get Gideon to help him out, but Gid just crossed his arms and waited without expression. It had only recently come to his attention that everyone had known about the situation with Po prior to Neserus and had deigned not to tell their captain, and he half thought it was so he could feel the way he did now—like an idiot. Not that he didn’t deserve it, but their ingenuity on behalf of his idiocy was something else. “You’re talking about her…feelings for me.”

  Gideon made a disgusted face. “There ya go, genius.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? Po knows she and I aren’t going to happen. I told her it wasn’t going to happen—that’s why I’m in this bleeding mess! Now she won’t even let me—”

  “You told her that?” Gideon barked in disbelief. “Burn it! You bleedin’ numptified—” He slipped into a strand of no doubt colorful Pantedan, which Reece hadn’t heard him do in ages, and swung away to kick one of Mordecai’s empty bags clear across the cargo bay. When he jerked back around, it was to jab a gun-like finger in Reece’s astonished face. “See, this is what I’m bleedin’ talkin’ about! You makin’ her feel like you’re bleedin’ better than her when she’s the brightest, best thing on this ship. The rest’a you count on her to always be smilin’ and happy and she is, and then you don’t even notice that she never takes the last biscuit, and sings when she’s workin’ on the nastiest bit’a engine muck, and can’t even talk about raisin’ her hand to hurt someone else without lookin’ sick to her stomach. Then you go and just—”

  Reece was only paying half a mind to the details of Gideon’s outburst. Not because he didn’t get what he was saying, but because he suddenly understood what he wasn’t saying, and what he’d been neglecting to say for quite a while. At least in words; all the grousing and snapping and overreacting sure made a lot more sense now.

  “Ha! You’re in love with her!” Reece crowed loudly as Gid cut out with a croak. Honestly, he was just happy to have solved the mystery of Gid’s recent wishy-washiness, but something about his reaction must have been misinterpreted as offensive, because the next thing Reece knew, Gideon was tackling him with an expletive that would have made Hayden blush, and it was suddenly all he could do to keep his teeth in his mouth.

  “What are you doing?” Tangled together in a knot of arm bars and head locks, Reece and Gideon looked up as one at Scarlet where she stood on the cargo bay steps, imperious with her hands on her hips. “Let go. Now.”

  Whoever she meant the order for, they both obeyed. Reece stopped cranking Gideon’s wrist the wrong way a beat before Gid unfisted his hair and pushed him away with a scowl. It was a good thing Scarlet had shown up when she had; Reece had wrestled Gid plenty of times before, but never when Gideon had had so many reasons to hurt him. At least…good reasons.

  Sighing, Scarlet adjusted the beaded shawl around her shoulders. “Shame on you. How do you think Hayden would feel if he saw you two fighting like this? Or Po?”

  That depended on whether or not Po knew the reason for their fighting, Reece thought, and then she’d feel either good or terrible. Thinking back over the last few months, he didn’t know how he could have missed this. But then, this wasn’t the first instance of his astute observational skills failing him. As he dusted off his battered jacket, he glanced at Gideon, who was dragging a wrist over his split lip. Po and Gideon. Of course, one part of him said, while another part demanded, How? He’d known Gideon through a lot of girls, the main one being Ariel, but all of them were at least like Ariel—assertive, audacious, usually unpleasant. And then there was Po. Who, like Gideon said, never took the last biscuit.

  He trusted Gid with his life, but oddly enough, trusting him with their breakable little mechanic was different. Po was different.

  “Honestly,” Scarlet scolded as she shook her head. “There hasn’t been a fistfight in all of history that couldn’t have been prevented with a little diplomacy.”

  Reece feigned surprise. “I didn’t know you’d been there for all of them.”

  “How come you didn’t stop ‘em?” Gid added, mumbling around his fat lip.

  Giving the two of them an unimpressed look, Scarlet picked up her skirts and glided away, leaving them alone in the strained quiet of the cargo bay. After a minute of hovering uncomfortably, Gideon, obviously avoiding Reece’s eye, leaned his shoulder against the packed crate and with a grunt, shoved it till it was flush with the wall.

  “Don’t go sayin’ anythin’,” he finally muttered. “It ain’t worth mentionin’.”

  Joining him in slouching against the crate—and cracking his back twice in the process, thank you Gideon—Reece wondered, “Why not?”

  “Just ain’t. I’d be no good for her and besides, she’s had eyes for you since we were kids.” Gid shook himself and started scowling again as if just remembering he was angry. His eyes still wouldn’t venture higher than Reece’s collar.

  Anxious to keep the conversation away from Po’s unrequited feelings, Reece tilted back his head and made a preoccupied noise up at the ceiling. However leery he was about Po taking up with Gideon, he was a whole lot leerier about her taking up with him. He could only know Gideon so far, but there was no avoiding the inside of his own head. No one else should be subjected to that. “She could do a lot worse than you, you know,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Yeah,” a small smirk splintered Gid’s bleak stare, “she keeps tryin’.”

  Reece smiled darkly and let the jab lie. “So stop her trying. I mean it,” he added when Gide
on started ruefully shaking his head. “Just…be careful with her, alright? I know I’m not the best example, but Po is special. To all of us. Scarlet would probably—”

  “I get it. And I said it ain’t worth mentionin’. Po can’t see three feet in front’a her own nose when you’re around, and you don’t even care,” Gideon said curtly, shoving off the crate. “I’ll talk to her about the ship. Someone has to, seein’ as you’re too scared.”

  Reece let him go, watching him march away with his shoulders hunched and his twin revolvers rocking at either hip. Something ugly in him wanted to yell and demand he take back that last, mostly because he knew…Gid was right. He was scared, but not of Po or her feelings; there, he was just inept and apparently oblivious.

  He started walking, drifting in a daze in the general direction of the bridge, where Nivy would be waiting to hand over the helm. He didn’t want it. No, that wasn’t true…he did want it, more than anything. But what he was scared of—the fear Gideon had felt from him—it was the fear of letting himself have it, and what would happen if he did.

  At the top of the stairs, he paused, realizing he wasn’t alone. Scarlet stood in the shadows with her hands folded in her lap, chewing her bottom lip as she waited for him. The one person he could count on making him feel impossibly worse.

  Scarlet cautiously approached, frowning at him as he raised a single challenging eyebrow. “Bad day?” she asked quietly.

  Just as Reece was about to think up something especially witty to put her off his trail (“I’m fine” came to mind), his exhaustion hit its peak, and his guard dropped like a curtain. Not that it mattered. Subterfuge had never worked on Scarlet back when he’d had nothing to hide—why should it now? “I’ve had better,” he admitted dispiritedly.

  Without another word, Scarlet put her arms around him and hugged him. He let her.