Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  “Gideon won’t be happy.”

  “Lucky we’re used to working without Gideon’s stamp of approval. Nivy,” she looked up from the empty beaker she was turning over mindlessly with her fingertips, “go get Mordecai. We’re going to need a little extra supervision.”

  The Vee had to be roughly shaken out of the comatose sleep he’d been in all day. The expression, if that’s what you could call it, that flashed across his face upon realizing he was still alive was, Reece thought, the equivalent of human disappointment. Every time the Vee spoke in his withered-snakeskin voice, he had to pause and gulp as if his throat were unbearably dry.

  “You should kill us now,” he panted as Gideon, who’d gone to new heights of sourness at hearing Reece’s plan, pulled him to his feet. “It would be a mercy.”

  “Right, because you’ve got a whole lot’a that comin’ to ya,” Gideon muttered.

  Mordecai raised his gun as Reece stepped forward to cautiously wrap one of the Vee’s arms over his shoulders.

  “Walk with me,” Reece ordered, recoiling at the Vee’s rattling breath, so close to his ear.

  The Vee took an unsteady step forward before his knees bowed inward. Slouching heavily against Reece, he chuckled hoarsely. “We feel death’s nearness. Shall it take any of you with us, we wonder?”

  “Gideon,” Reece choked, and Gideon, grumbling, came and took the Vee’s other arm and draped it across his back.

  “Rather cuddle with a spider,” he complained under his breath.

  As Gideon and Reece carried him down the corridor, the Vee’s pained groans faded into murmurs. Reece tried to ignore them, tried to think of daylight and laughter and bubbly little Po and anything but the Vee’s chilling whispers, which burrowed deeply, twisting the pit of his stomach…

  “Spiders. An interesting tool, to those with the fear of them. Anything can be a tool, of course. Fire…heights…darkness…we wonder, Reece Sheppard, what your tool might be. What could be used to bring you to the brink? You become a different man, at the brink. We have seen it. It is…a wonder.”

  Mordecai beat Gideon to cutting the Vee short. Rarely had Reece heard his accent with the gruff edges that Gid’s had, or seen his whiskered face look so menacing. “You’ll do best to keep walkin’ and save your strength, stranger. Young Mister Sheppard here is tryin’ to save yer sorry life.”

  The Vee let out a breath from between his teeth. “To bring us to the brink.”

  Gideon grunted. “What’s he goin’ on about now?”

  Reece could guess. These last few days, he’d wondered about The Veritas, about their reason for existing. They were still human, in a sense; surely they had some sense of what life was. The serum didn’t change the fact that they were sentient beings. They had to have goals, ideals (twisted ideals, granted), memories. Limits.

  “Caving into questioning. Betraying the Veritas. That’s his brink.”

  Blinking, Gideon eyed the Vee, who was staring numbly ahead, and barked a pleased laugh. “It’s scared?”

  The Vee looked at him sharply, and again, Reece saw not emotion on his face, but the impression of emotion. Like it was there inside, but he didn’t know how to shape his face to match. “Fear is our greatest ally. We admire those with the skill to use it.”

  If ever Reece wondered if he was making the right decision, it was then.

  As soon as they reached the kitchen, the Vee had to be allowed to rest; he was too weak to even keep his head erect so that Hayden could check his dilated pupils with a photon wand. All they could do was wait for him to recharge.

  “Let us begin,” the Vee finally said. His eyes scanned the kitchen without blinking, passing with interest over Nivy, who was propped on the empty end of the counter behind Reece. “Bring us what you have.”

  “Remember, nothin’ funny,” Gideon warned cheerfully, hefting his revolver. He and Mordecai were standing on either side of Hayden, managing to look like grandfather and grandson, for once.

  “Your understanding of fear is trite, Gideon Creed.” The Vee’s white fingers danced over the mouths of Hayden’s beaker collection. “There is no art in your method. Hayden Rice—” Reece saw Hayden stiffen. “—we will begin with the polythermatine. Next, the…”

  Afternoon dragged into evening in the longest and most confusing chemistry demonstration Reece had ever endured. Hayden started out fumbling and nervous, paling whenever he was forced to hand off a beaker to the Vee, but by an hour into the serum’s preparation, he had come into his prime. Reece would venture that he might actually be enjoying himself if it weren’t for the Vee’s routine comments about death and pain and fear and so on and so on.

  As for the Vee…he was fading. Every hour, the paleness grew paler and the shaking grew shakier while sweat soaked his filthy jumpsuit. Reece thought he was willing himself to stay alive only because he knew the serum was on its way.

  “We have come to the final element.” The Vee’s voice would’ve been carried away by a slight breeze, it was so thin. Doubled over in his seat, his eyes level with the meniscus of the brew in the beaker, he nodded once, then let his forehead rest on the edge of the table.

  “Hurry, Hayden,” Reece felt the need to add.

  Hayden didn’t need the reminder. He already had the hydrogen ready, and added it with steady hands to the serum, which settled into a creamy purple color.

  “I-I don’t know how much you need…”

  The Vee was so quiet and so still, for a moment, Reece wondered if he’d already passed.

  “All of it,” he finally gasped out, and Hayden quickly transferred the serum from a beaker to a syringe, felt his way to the thick vein in the fold of the Vee’s pallid arm, and nudged the needle in.

  It was a long time before he gently pulled the empty syringe away. The Vee didn’t raise his head, just kept opening and closing the fist of his injected arm, allowing the serum to pump through his bloodstream. Reece felt like the room was holding its collective breath.

  “Well,” Gideon started impatiently when the silence stretched, “did it—”

  The Vee was a blur of movement, standing, grabbing Hayden by the throat, hurling him across the room and into Gideon and Mordecai. Mordecai shouted something, but the words rushed past Reece as he hurtled after the fleeing Vee. The Vee couldn’t reach the surface. Everything they’d worked for, everything they’d learned, it would all come to nothing if he escaped now.

  It didn’t occur to Reece until he had reached the stretch of tunnel between Mordecai’s living area and the toolshed behind the shop that he didn’t even have a gun. Huh. Maybe that’s what Mordecai had been shouting about.

  He faltered slightly as he stepped into the dark tunnel, and something invisible crashed into him and drove his back into the wall. It felt like a bleeding battering ram.

  “Did you really think,” the Vee jeered, his beakish nose inches from Reece’s face, “that we would be so easily controlled? That our secrets could be bought?”

  Again, the Vee became a blur. One second he was latching onto Reece’s arms, and the next, Reece was airborne. The hard stone floor flew up to meet him as he landed in a rolling sprawl, his bones seeming to shiver with the impact. His left wrist was definitely out of commission, he knew that right away.

  Everything went out of focus when he tried to sit up. Concussion. Again. He couldn’t make sense of what he was doing or why; his body was following old orders while his scrambled brain tried to make new ones. As the Vee started to pass by, Reece lunged and wrapped his arms around his legs. Pain that was realer to Reece than anything happening in the tunnel raced like fire through his wrist, and he put his chin down to his chest and screamed and held on.

  XVI

  1,201 Confessions

  “Cap’n! Reece!”

  Reece peeked between his eyelids and up at Gideon. The big Pan’s eyes were pinched at their corners, worried.

  “What happ—arrrggghhh!” Reece curled his body around the wrist that he’d tried to move.r />
  “Busted?” Gideon said with interest.

  “I think it’s just a sprain. A…really bad sprain.”

  “How’s your head?”

  Reece tried to gather his scattered thoughts and remember why his head would be anything but fine. His brief flight down the tunnel swam slowly into his memory. He touched the back of his skull with his good hand and found a patch of wetness.

  “I would’ve come sooner,” Gideon said, somber, “but Hayden hit the counter pretty hard. There was lotsa blood.”

  “What?” Holding his wrist against his stomach to keep it steady, Reece leaned up and looked around, feeling weirdly sluggish. He and Gideon were alone in the dark tunnel, but there were voices, presumably Hayden’s and Mordecai’s, coming from the kitchen. “He’s alright, then?”

  “He says so. Apparently head wounds bleed a lot, or somethin’. Mordecai insisted on gettin’ him stitched back together before he saw to you. Still, I think you’re gonna want to have a straightener on that bone sooner rather than later. Think you can stand?”

  Reece considered. Bracing his back against the tunnel wall, he pushed himself to his feet and was pleased to find that his body still worked like it should, even after the whack to his brainpan.

  As he started walking, Gideon at his elbow like a loyal wolfdog, his memories filled out.

  “The Vee?”

  “We’ve got him.” Hesitating, Gideon admitted, “Nivy clubbed him from behind while you were wrestlin’ with him. Didn’t think you’d want me to shoot him after she knocked him unconscious.”

  “Wouldn’t have been very sporting,” Reece agreed dryly. Not that hurling your opponent through the air was exactly fair play. “Where is he now?”

  “Tied up in the kitchen. Still under.”

  “And Nivy?”

  Gideon grumbled, “Except for bein’ all cocky about gettin’ the Vee, yeah, she’s fine.”

  Stepping into the kitchen, squinting because the light made his head buzz, Reece looked around and flinched. There was a lot of blood. On the counter, on the floor, in a handprint against the wall. Even though Gid had said Hayden was alright, Reece’s eyes jumped to find him.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table, staring sideways into a handheld mirror to watch Nivy’s hands work a needle through his tangled hair. In the corner of the room behind them, the Vee was trussed to a kitchen chair that faced the wall, like they had tried to put him out of sight, out of mind. Except a rare unsmiling Mordecai was in the corner too, and his revolver said he wouldn’t be forgetting any time soon.

  Hayden glanced up from the mirror, saw Reece’s slightly nauseated expression, and mistook it for worried. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Just a surface scratch.”

  “Right.”

  “Is your wrist—?”

  “Just sprained, I think, but I’m not sure.”

  “Your head is bleeding, too.”

  Nivy tapped Hayden on the shoulder and presented him with her needle, finished. Her fingers, stained red, pushed a strand of sweaty hair out of her eyes. Maybe she hadn’t been as collected as she looked.

  “What happened?” Hayden asked, in full doctor mode as he held out his hands and let Reece sit his ruined wrist on them.

  “He lied to us. He was never going to tell us anything.”

  Pursing his lips, Hayden mumbled, “There was always the danger of that, I suppose.”

  There was. And Reece had still dragged the lot of them into this mess, despite that danger. It had been a head-graze and a sprained wrist this time…what would it be the next time he put so much at stake for his precious answers?

  He didn’t think there was going to be a next time. He’d forgotten about the cufflinks, about why he had carried them, was carrying them.

  “We’re done,” he announced grimly, and they all looked up at him, Hayden, Nivy, Gideon, and Mordecai. “We’re in too deep. It’s time to pull back.”

  It came down to this: sacrificing the safety of his crew wasn’t going to save Liem, it wasn’t going to change Parliament, and it wasn’t going to keep him from being sent off to war. It wasn’t going to reverse time and start things over the day before Reece, Hayden, and Gideon had sneaked into the Atlasian Wilds and seen Eldritch combing over Nivy’s crash site.

  It wasn’t going to get him his captain’s wings. Funny, that that was buried deep in the core of all of this, the seed that everything else had sprouted from.

  All it was going to do was cost him the things he knew that selfishly, he couldn’t give up.

  Suddenly, Hayden tsked. “It looks like this has a slight fracture, Reece. I’m think I’m going to put a straightener on it, just for a day or so—”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Reece snapped, exasperated. He tried pulling his hand away, but Hayden grabbed his arm with the gentle firmness of a doctor and held it in place.

  “I heard you. It doesn’t change the fact that your hand is broken and needs to be treated.”

  “How long is that gonna take?” Gideon complained from the doorway. “I’m hungry enough to eat a Freherian boar. Heck, I’d eat Nivy.”

  As Nivy made a face at the chuckling Gideon, Mordecai thoughtfully scratched his beard and bent over a cracked cupboard. “Think I’ve got some bird-on-a-stick stashed somewhere in here—burn it, never mind, the foam got it.”

  With his good hand, Reece slapped the table and growled, “Don’t any of you automata have an opinion? I said it’s over. It’s time to pull back.”

  There was nothing uncertain about the pause, this time. Hayden kept working diligently on his wrist, but his eyebrows crinkled together as his look of concentration deepened, and Nivy went so far as to shake her head at Reece like she refused to believe him.

  “I think you got it backward, Reece. See, once you’re in this deep, you don’t pull back. If you want out, you see it through. All that pullin’ back is gonna do is leave a messy trail and a lot’a unfinished business,” Mordecai said gently, all the while hitting upon a hidden stash of black plums under his kitchen sink and tossing them one at a time to Gideon.

  “The old man’s right,” Gideon added before Reece could get one syllable in. As he caught the plums, two, three, and then four, he juggled them in a complicated cycle he made look as easy as breathing. “Comon’, Reece, you know you ain’t givin’ up on this, not really. You’re just tryin’ to do what you think is right by your reckonin’ and put the rest’a us outta harm’s way.”

  “That’s not—”

  “It is.” Hayden smiled without looking up. “You’re very transparent.”

  “Alright, so what if that’s true? Anyone remember Gideon’s bim accident? Do you realize how many close shaves we’ve had recently? Eldritch is on to us. He’s controlling Parliament and The Veritas. How long do you think we’re going to last if we keep sticking our noses where they don’t belong?”

  Gideon finished out the juggle, catching the four plums in one hand. “S’not as though you ever cared about takin’ the safe way out before.”

  “And I don’t see how that will solve anything, anyways,” Hayden added in a milder voice. “Our sudden uninvolvement in this isn’t going to protect us from what Eldritch already knows about what we know. Nivy, could you hand me that cellophane tape and canvas bonding? Thank you.”

  “You’re unbelievable. All of you. Even you,” Reece accused Nivy. She smiled and passed Hayden his torture devices. “This isn’t going to end well.”

  With a chuckle, Mordecai twirled one of his mustaches around a finger and said, “Well, I suppose that’s true for somebody out there, but heck, someone’s gotta win. Might as well be us.”

  The discussion was far from over for Reece, but his chance to pursue it came to a dead halt when the Vee began to writhe in his chair in the corner, flexing against his bonds. As one, Gideon and Mordecai took up stations on either side of the chair and brought out their revolvers.

  “Easy now, stranger,” Mordecai warned. “My grandson and me, we’re not too i
mpressed with your shenanigans. Gideon here was trigger happy before you tossed around our friends, so just imagine how heavy his finger is on that trigger right about now.”

  “It’s real heavy,” Gideon clarified helpfully.

  The Vee was silent for a moment, listening, perhaps, to the sound of Reece crossing the room, holding his half-braced wrist at an odd angle away from his body.

  “So this is how it will be,” the Vee quietly speculated. “You will try to press us, but your endeavors will get you nowhere. You are eager for failure, Reece Sheppard.”

  As Reece circled the chair, he caught Gideon’s eye and nodded just slightly. He would have been lying if he had said his stomach didn’t clench when Gideon sheathed his revolver in favor of his long belt knife. This had always been the plan, hadn’t it? To put the questioner to the question?

  There wasn’t a trace of hesitation in Gideon’s movements as he bent over with his knife angled to carve.

  “Wait!” Hayden suddenly barked. “Gideon, wait!”

  “If this is gonna make you squeamish, Aitch—”

  Hayden broke through the circle that Reece, Mordecai, and Gideon made around the Vee, holding a small stopped tube that looked empty. “There’s another way. Please. Put away the knife.” When Gideon did no such thing, Hayden turned and appealed to Reece, his face drawn of color. “Reece, I saved a sample of the chemical we concocted earlier. The one that works like a compulsor. It’s at least worth a try, isn’t it?”

  The Vee laughed. “Indeed, proceed with the compulsor, if you wish to waste your time. But you will find that this body is immune to such primitive devices.”

  It came as a surprise to Reece when Hayden mustered the courage to look the Vee right in the eye and say evenly, “I said like a compulsor. But the standard sentry’s compulsor is liquid-based. This chemical is gaseous in form, unique in every way. It’s probably the first of its kind. I doubt your body, perfect though it may be, will have the defense capabilities to fight it yet.”

  As soon as Reece saw that flicker of almost-emotion in the Vee’s black eyes…almost-uneasiness…he said heatedly, “Do it.” And if his relief was written all over his face as he stepped back from the Vee and slumped against the wall beside Nivy, oh well. “The rest of you should all clear out. He’s not going anywhere, and the chemical’s affects are a little, uh—”