Suicide Run (Engines of Liberty Book 2)

by Graham Bradley

  “Love,” Calvin breathed, as he drank in her thoughts.

  Karahkwa joined in, his memories adding clarity to the big picture: after he’d dropped Calvin, he’d continued west until he reached Ehnita and told her that her stolen blood was destroyed. Yet Ehnita, seeing in Karahkwa’s mind the whole story, insisted upon helping Calvin, who’d been instrumental in their reunion. Karahkwa had gleefully agreed. He’d do anything at her side.

  Since Calvin had touched minds with him before, Karahkwa was able to find Calvin again, though it had taken some time. There was a hint of apology from the giant bird when he expressed this sentiment.

  Calvin barked out a laugh. He wasn’t sure what the sangromancer had wanted with him, only that he’d felt his life slipping away like wool pulled between his fingers. Their timing could not have been better.

  Ehnita asked Calvin about his mate. He cocked an eyebrow, unsure what she meant, until she showed him the dream of Amelia that she’d seen in Karahkwa’s memory. Just the sight of her in his mind made Calvin’s knees go weak. He was about to answer Ehnita’s question, but John Penn interrupted their reverie, clearing his throat more loudly than was necessary.

  “We’ve got our gear.” He spun the cylinder in his revolver and

  dropped it into his holster. Behind him, Griff and Daniel strapped their weapons on.

  “That’s nice,” Calvin replied. He didn’t move.

  John tossed him a hat. “Here, this’ll keep the sun off your head.”

  Calvin caught the hat but set it down without a word. John sighed.

  “Do I have to paint a picture? We need to get to the . . .”

  “Oh, I’m done with you, Penn. Thought you might have gathered that,” Calvin said.

  John growled and seized Calvin’s arm. “You’re still a TechMan, and you’ve got a desertion to answer for! Be that as it is, you’ll—”

  He was cut off when Ehnita sprang into the air and dropped her considerable weight onto John’s chest, pinning him to the ground. Griff and Daniel grabbed their pistols, but hesitated to draw when Karahkwa reared up to his full height, his chest swelling with compressed wind.

  “Y’all get the message?” Calvin asked. “Hands off the guns.”

  Griff and Daniel obeyed. Karahkwa exhaled slowly and tucked his wings back to his sides. His eyes never left the technomancers.

  At Ehnita’s beckoning, Calvin came closer and stood over John, who was much more agreeable with a three-hundred-pound bird on his ribs.

  “I’d like to kick you in the head right now,” Calvin said.

  John was unable to form a response.

  “These birds are decent creatures, though. And it seems they

  reward decency with decency. I’d rather ally with them than ever work for you and yours again, so accept my generosity and get out of here while you can. Any questions, Mr. Penn?”

  John shook his head. Ehnita backed off and he scrambled away, fighting for breath as he rejoined his comrades.

  “Where will you go?” Griff asked.

  “Wherever I damn well please. You fight your war, I’ll fight mine. That’s the last I mean to say to you about it.” Calvin folded his arms.

  John’s considered the thunderbirds flanking Calvin; he seemed like he wanted to say something else, but he only scowled and walked off. Griff and Daniel followed him into the woods, disappearing like shadows in the night.

  An air of contentment filled the space around Calvin; the sensation was so strong that he laughed aloud, causing the device to make his chest hurt again. Ehnita leaned closer so Calvin could rest against her shoulder.

  “I need help,” Calvin said, all bravado gone. “I need to go to Virginia. Do you know where that is?” He tried to think of Mount Vernon, tried to remember the smells and the stars, anything that would help them fix the location in their minds.

  They responded with severe hesitance. Many of their kind had

  died that close to the ocean. They would be seen, shot, cursed out of the sky . . .

  Calvin frowned. “Why the ocean?”

  It wasn’t the ocean; it was the shore. There was something in

  that general area, maybe fifty miles across—near the House of Commons?—and the thunderbirds were of the opinion that the people on the ground in that area didn’t want it seen from the sky.

  He filed that knowledge away, curious at its meaning. “I’m not headed to that place. There’s a river, it’s called the Potomac. Can you take me there by night?”

  It seemed that was safer, but they still didn’t know the exact location of Mount Vernon. Karahkwa shared a memory of a place west of Alexandria, where the sky smelled like Calvin and the technomancers. Calvin reviewed the memory and agreed that it had to be an outpost. By his best estimate, it was eighty miles west of Mount Vernon.

  And they would probably have mimics.

  “Let’s go!”

  They flew all night. An hour before dawn, Karahkwa and Ehnita dived down into the center of an expanse of farmland, one mile north of the outpost. It was as far as they were willing to go, and Calvin fell over himself to thank them profusely for what they’d done. As a way of bidding farewell, both of them in turn touched their foreheads to Calvin’s, a gesture that felt like a hug he might have gotten from his parents. Then they took to the skies, and he watched them until they disappeared. His training at Mount Vernon had prepared him for many things, but meeting those two birds was by far the most surreal encounter of his life.

  With their help, he’d done the impossible. He was only hours

  away from Amelia; looking down at his chest, he read the half-smudged numbers on the dial and saw that he had a little less than three days to spare. He was going to make it.

  After tightening his boot laces, Calvin worked his way to the edge of the farm, found a road, and followed it to a small town. On the outskirts was a cluster of buildings that shone in the moonlight, which had to be the technomancer base. He took a moment to button his shirt all the way up to the collar; thankfully during his escapades he had only bled on the tunic underneath it, so nobody would inquire after his odd chest wound. Maybe Hamilton’s devices weren’t all that well-known, but it was better not to draw attention.

  Two guards sprang on him from the bushes, rifles trained, demanding to know his identity. Calvin threw up his hands, having expected this, and gave them a prepared story about being a news runner for Camp Liberty, that he had intelligence he could only share with their commanding officer. Given the state of his clothes and the general aura of hopelessness that had hung on him since Hamilton first dropped him off the back of a mimic, it wasn’t hard to sell the story. They blindfolded him and flew him on one of their own mimics (presumably so he wouldn’t count his steps) to the front entrance of their encampment.

  Like Liberty, this base—called Camp Winchester—was underground, though not as big. When the blindfold came off, Calvin faced a man who was older than Tyler but perhaps younger than McCracken. Streaks of gray colored his hair and scars decorated his face, neck, and arms. His clothing was neat and clean, and a mechanical appendage replaced one of his legs. He was a copper-skinned man, one of the native Merykan tribal members. There was something terribly familiar about the man’s face, and then it hit him: he was the deckhand aboard the Boston merchant vessel all those years ago, the one who’d thrown a tomahawk with pinpoint precision at a pallet full of cargo, condemning it to a salty doom in lieu of surrendering it to the Crown.

  Whoa, Calvin thought.

  “I’m Major Yahola. Explain yourself,” he said.

  “Like I told your men, I’m out of Camp Liberty. Major Tyler sent me here from Pittsburgh as a news runner—our radio network was compromised.” So far that was all true.

  Yahola pursed his lips, his eyes unmoving. “What’s your name?”

  Calvin had thought of this. “Edsel Winford.” It was a long shot, but he dared not give his own name.

  Yahola looked over his shoulder at a subordinate, who had
a sheaf of documents in hand. He flipped a few over, traced a finger down a page, and nodded at the Major. This seemed to mollify him.

  “Last we heard from Liberty, they had to abandon the Ohio

  country. What happened?”

  “Their cover was compromised. An army of mages moved in but we repelled them. Major Tyler led the survivors to Camp Monroe, and they’ve probably gone east since then. I’ve been out many days now.” Also true, which helped him sell the story. He needed a favor from them, and he needed them to be on his side by the time he asked for it. “We had to tip our hand with respect to the Saint George, sir.”

  Yahola swore. Some of his cohorts murmured as well.

  “It was nearly operational, too,” Yahola moaned.

  “Oh, they got it up and running, Major. Gave the mages quite a fright—sent them packing, even. I mean, the noise alone, to say nothing of the firepower . . .” Calvin trailed off as he remembered the sights and sounds of that horrible night.

  Yahola closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, supporting himself on his desk with his other hand. “Keep going,” he whispered.

  “Sir?”

  “The Saint George. Was she magnificent?”

  “Beyond all comparison, and rightly so,” Calvin said, his honesty surprising even himself. “Like a storm on legs, a real force of nature. Major Tyler said that if we act now, we can still gather together and protect it until we launch the prime offensive.”

  Yahola barked orders to the men behind Calvin. “Get every dragonling pilot up. I want a fleet of news runners in Pittsburgh an hour ago. They’ll need our coordination. You, you’re coming with me,” he said to Calvin.

  “All due respect, sir, I can’t. I have orders from Major Tyler to personally warn Commodore McCracken about the situation. I meant to get to him first but I ran into a bit of trouble with some mages in Morgantown, and they dogged me all the way to Cumberland. I lost my mimic. Been stealing horses ever since, and I still have eighty miles to go,” Calvin said, making it up as he went.

  “We can radio Mount Vernon,” Yahola said.

  “No!” He hoped the severity in his tone would help sell his story. “No more radio! It’s too risky, Major, sir. I think . . . I’m pretty sure that’s how they found Camp Liberty.”

  Major Yahola stroked his chin. “I suppose that’s possible. And if they know Saint George is out there, they’ll want to track her movements any way they can.”

  “Yeah, and they can’t know you’ve been warned. That’s what Major Tyler said.” He wished he’d thought up a more detailed lie beforehand, but Yahola’s instincts had played to his favor. A small voice in Calvin’s heart thanked whatever supreme force had decided to wake up and guide him these last few hours. Maybe he wasn’t entirely without luck.

  “Very well. Mount Vernon is only a few hours away by mimic. I will see if we can spare a gryphon pilot to take you there,” Yahola said.

  “I’ll save you the pilot if you can spare me a dragonling,” Calvin said.

  Yahola was good for it. He ordered one of his lieutenants, a man called McDiarmid, to pull the oldest dragonling out of the motor pool and fuel it up for Calvin.

  “I appreciate your adherence to Major Tyler’s orders. The army is built upon the kind of determination and fortitude you’ve displayed, TechMan Winford,” Yahola said as Calvin accepted a pair of goggles from a passing technician.

  The captain’s words stung, given what Calvin had just fed him. He tried to remind himself that his deception was a necessary evil.

  “Just doing my duty, sir.”

  Yahola slapped a hand on the dragonling’s fuel tank. “Try not to lose this one. Camp Liberty was our biggest factory, and now we’ll have to take care of what few machines we currently possess.”

  “Absolutely, sir. I will see you again at Pittsburgh,” Calvin said.

  “Until then, Edsel.”

  Calvin emerged through a hidden exit gate and surfaced in a wheat field. Reading the compass on the handlebars by its illuminated markings, he steered south by southeast on a course for Mount Vernon.

  All of the pain and anguish had been worth it now that he had a throttle in his hands and the wind in his hair. Amelia was close.

  CHAPTER 16

  Heavy feet scraped over hard-packed ground. At least, it felt hard. Was it paved? He couldn’t tell. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Every step sent white-hot pain up his bones, and even through the fog engulfing his mind, it occurred to him that he was in bad shape.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  The staccato pain morphed into a constant ache. Why didn’t he stop? That wasn’t so hard, was it? But his legs just kept moving, broken only by the occasional prick of static on his skin, and a jarring sensation as though he were skipping across great distances in a single bound. Then he would land again, and the pain augmented. When it reached a certain point he opened his eyes, yet

  still trundled onward, bound for a murky bayou in the distance.

  His vision blurred in and out of focus. His chest hurt. Was he breathing? Maybe. He wanted to throw up, but his guts didn’t work. By all means he shouldn’t even be upright. He had walked a great distance, yes, but he’d also hopped through teleportals along the way.

  Teleportals. Something familiar about that.

  He blinked. Whether by magical or mundane means, the distance shrank, and he was in the bayou. A shack stood before him.

  It’s not in the shack.

  Right, that would have been too obvious. Where had he put it?

  Put what? I didn’t put anything . . .

  Not you. Me.

  He walked behind the shack to a pile of firewood. In a stump on the ground there was an axe. Yes, that was the place. He grabbed the handle and tugged it sideways.

  Rather than pull free from the stump, the axe lifted the whole stump off the ground as if on a hinge, revealing a hidden shaft. He bent at the waist, groaning, and grabbed the edges of the hole to lower himself in. At the bottom he found a secret cave that extended under the house, lined with shelves along both walls and a workbench at the end.

  I need light.

  Fumbling with a set of matches, he lit a candle in the corner and set it by a mirror, which was pointed at more mirrors around the room. Soon the light filled the small place well enough for him to see his own reflection in the mirrors. His lungs didn’t allow him to gasp, but the intention was there.

  Godfrey’s skin had turned a horrid shade of grey, mottled with blue specks where his blood had congealed in his veins. He expected his heart to race, his skin to flush, but these reactions were dead inside him. It made sense, after all: his heart was not beating.

  Frowning, he lowered his eyes to a gaping knife wound in his chest, rimmed with bright red sores. When had he gotten that?

  Adler.

  That name . . .

  The wound stung something awful. Not just his body, but his magic was affected by it. Weakened. Debilitated. Perhaps beyond the point of saving.

  Oh, but you have much to learn about blood magic, I think, said the other voice. It sounded terribly familiar.

  Kalfu! But . . . you’re dead, Godfrey thought.

  So are you. Get to work.

  Godfrey’s aching feet shuffled forward again. With one hand, he pulled up a corner of the carpet and rolled it back to the center of the room, revealing a square hole in the ground that housed a wooden chest. He extracted the chest and carried it to the workbench where he opened it and removed its contents. What was he going to do with this?

  One does not live as long as I have without contingencies, Kalfu

  explained. Open that box you’re holding.

  The box held four large bottles inside, each one full of a thick, viscous substance that was dark in color. Some kind of sangromantic compound? A potion to preserve a blood sample? Labels indicated their content, the samples having been drawn from skilled magicians long ago. Pictomancy, sangromancy, psychomancy, necromancy.

  Godfrey tippe
d each bottle into a cauldron, careful to extract every drop of the blood potions using Kalfu’s fine tools. Then he selected other ingredients from the shelves, added them to the cauldron, and lit a fire under it. As he worked, Kalfu told him to utter various words from languages either long-forgotten or long-forbidden.

  Some hours later, the concoction was complete. He drained it into an unused skin and stopped it tight, then secured it in a burlap sack, which he strapped to his back. Within minutes he had concealed the shop once more, climbed out of the hole, and retraced his long, slow, agonizing steps to the nearest teleportal outlet.

  The fog retook his mind, releasing him only when he had returned to the place where he had died over twenty-four hours earlier. The wreckage of a wagon marked where the thunderbirds had freed the technomancers, a feat Godfrey couldn’t explain. How could they control the birds? A most unsettling notion.

  Six people had died here: one by strangulation, another by immolation, a third at the hands of some feral beast, a fourth had been positively shattered by a thunderclap, a fifth was riddled with bullets, and sixth was Godfrey. He walked over to Kalfu’s corpse and stared down at his ruined torso for a moment, then got to work.

  Again his vision left him, and while he felt his hands working on Kalfu’s body, and he sensed strange words leaving his lips, he couldn’t be sure what he was doing or saying. Kalfu’s ghost tugged on invisible puppet strings in Godfrey’s body, and whatever he was making Godfrey do, the self-pronounced voodoo god didn’t want Godfrey to remember the process.

  What an odd notion. Godfrey was dead. Did he have any plans for later?

  How much time had passed? He couldn’t tell. When his work was finished his vision clarified, and he was standing over Kalfu’s body. A veritable atlas of strange symbols surrounded the sangromancer, drawn in the dirt with a twig by Godfrey’s own hand. More glyphs and symbols adorned Kalfu’s body, painted with the mixture Godfrey had put together in the workshop. The symbols swam before his eyes, refusing to adhere to his memory. Was he still muttering incantations? It felt like it.