“Well,” Piper said sheepishly, “I was just going to point out that their minds are a lot different from a human’s, but what you said is better. Anyway, the traders sometimes take things they’ve bought from the scrap towns, the things that come from other worlds, and show them to Raenoll. They say she can touch an object and tell things about it, like who the owner was, what the world looked like where the object came from, things like that. I guess there are some invisible fingerprints left on the object that only she can see. Some of what she says doesn’t make any sense, but having a story to put with an object helps drive up the price when the traders sell it. The better the story, the higher the price.” Like having a name for the song Micah’s music box played. Piper swallowed a lump in her throat when she thought of that late-night visit. She hoped Micah was doing all right. “Anyway, it’s possible Raenoll might be able to tell us something about you,” Piper said.
“But I’m not an object,” Anna pointed out.
“Well, no, but the idea is the same,” Piper said. “You’re a mystery, the same way the objects that fall from the sky are mysteries.”
“Yes.” Anna nodded thoughtfully. “But I’m not an object.”
“Right, but we don’t know very much about you, the same way we don’t know about the things that come from other worlds, so we have to figure it out on our own. I’ve heard people say Raenoll can sometimes translate bits of language that stump even the archivists, and they spend all their lives studying this stuff. Maybe she can unlock a memory that’ll let you remember the rest on your own,” Piper said. “But I’m not an—”
“An object—yes, I know that!” Piper put her hands on Anna’s shoulders and took several deep breaths to keep from shaking the girl. “Repetitive, annoying, and strange, but definitely not an object. Look, this is the only thing I can think of to try. I don’t even know if we’ll be able to afford her, but we have to do something. I don’t want to just sit around and wait for the wolf to catch up to us. Do you understand?”
Anna was quiet for a minute as she thought it over, but finally she nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “If it’ll help, I’ll do it.”
“Are you sure?” Piper said. “You won’t be scared?”
“I trust you.”
Piper’s stomach clenched when she heard those words. She hadn’t lied, not exactly—she did believe their best chance at helping Anna lay in reaching the capital. Since she was marked with the dragonfly tattoo, Anna was important enough that someone at the royal embassy was bound to know who she was. Someone there would be able to help her piece together her memory, maybe find her family if she had any left—Piper didn’t believe the man from the caravan was Anna’s father. But she hadn’t told Anna her whole motivation—about the reward she still hoped she would get. Anna trusted her, but would she feel differently if she knew Piper was acting as much for herself as for Anna? She felt the stab of guilt but forced those feelings aside. It didn’t matter why she was doing this—she was here, wasn’t she? Right now, that was the most important thing.
After breakfast, Piper spent a few minutes in the washroom trying to make herself and her clothes look presentable before she left Anna and went out to explore the train. Now that she wasn’t worried about running for her life, she was able to get a decent look at the interior of the passenger section. Gaslight fixtures lined the walls, some a bit tarnished with age, and the cushiony, velvet-covered seats on either side of the car were a bit worn, but to Piper that made them look more comfortable and inviting, not stuffy and formal like she’d expected.
Humans and a few sarnuns sat near the windows. The humans mostly ignored her, but one of the sarnuns turned as she went past. Blue-skinned, he had chalk-white eyes, three slits for a nose, and a tiny mouth cavity. The skin around his nose slits fluttered up and down when he breathed, but otherwise his smooth face was still, expressionless.
The first time Piper had ever seen a sarnun, that blank, cold expression had frightened her. She’d heard Arno Weir say never to trust a coldskin in any negotiation because you couldn’t make them sweat. But Piper had learned to understand why they looked that way. Sarnuns communicated mind to mind, and their emotions came through by the movement of their feelers. This one’s stirred and angled toward Piper as she edged past, but not so much that he was being impolite. Pointing feelers too directly was the sarnun equivalent of staring.
Piper had never quite gotten used to seeing those thin bluish-white tentacles hanging past their shoulders in place of hair. Few sarnun traders came to the scrap towns. The meteor dust was particularly damaging to their lungs, and even minimal exposure hardened their feelers, prematurely aging them. Most of this one’s feelers were soft and glistening with moisture, but a few had calcified and hung stiff against his neck. Counting the stiff cords, Piper guessed the sarnun was about sixteen years old, which would make him an adult, as sarnuns normally only lived into their sixties.
Nodding as she walked by, Piper saw the sarnun’s tentacles lift briefly in greeting.
The next car had a green sign above the door that said OBSERVATION LOUNGE. Armchairs faced the big windows on either side of the car, their floral patterns sun-faded but still pretty. In the middle of the car was a horseshoe-shaped bar area with dozens of glass bottles and crystal decanters arranged in cabinets against the wall.
More passengers gathered here, the humans laughing and talking while nursing cups of coffee or kelpra juice. The burnt-leaf smell of japmel cigar smoke lingered in the air. A group of sarnuns sat in silence by the windows, their bodies pressed close together in an intimate circle as they spoke mind to mind. The other passengers could only guess what they were talking about—Piper supposed eavesdropping was never a problem for the sarnuns, at least not outside their own kind.
Piper opened the door at the other end of the car and almost bounced off Gee’s chest.
Quickly, they both stepped back, and for a moment, they just stared at each other. Gee didn’t look any happier to see her in the light of a new day, although Piper noticed his green eyes were much more vivid than they’d seemed last night in the darkness of the cargo section. She caught herself staring at them for a few seconds longer than was strictly polite.
Not that the pretty color made up for anything. He was still sooty, scarred, and barefoot. The bean-shaped soot mark on his face had migrated south to his chin sometime in the night and now more resembled a smooshed teakettle. Worst of all, he still glowered at Piper as if she were a piece of scrap he wanted to pitch out a window.
“Excuse me,” she said icily, pushing past him.
Gee put a hand on her arm, startling her. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Piper answered coldly.
“Why not?” he asked, sounding suspicious.
Piper glanced down at his hand on her arm, and he let her go. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have a shiny, special tattoo to protect me, so maybe I’m afraid I’ll end up ‘accidentally’ falling off the train at some point in the conversation.”
He scowled at her. “I told you I can’t do that.” He leaned around her and closed the door to the observation lounge, sealing them between cars. Piper tensed, but he didn’t touch her again. “You’re pretty jumpy,” Gee said, eyeing her carefully. “Is there something you’re afraid of?”
“Wait, now you’re concerned about me?” Piper sniffed disdainfully. She didn’t believe that for a minute, not when he’d been ready to toss them off the train as if they were so much trash the night before. “Don’t strain yourself with worry.”
Gee’s frown deepened. “I’m not worried for you, but if there’s a threat to this train, I need to know about it. So let’s pretend for a minute that I actually believe you and your friend are important people on some secret mission for King Aron. You can at least tell me what you’re running from.”
“I really can’t.” Technically, it was only half a lie—Piper had no idea who the man with
the caravan was or what he wanted with Anna. But even if she had known what he was after, she wasn’t about to share her troubles with Gee. It was crystal clear that Anna’s tattoo was the only thing keeping him civil. “Can I go?” she said. “I need to find a porter.”
But Gee didn’t seem inclined to move, and Piper wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of trying to squeeze around him in the narrow space, so they just stood, toe to toe, glaring at each other, until Gee said, “What do you need from the porter?”
Piper sighed and crossed her arms. “Are we going to stop at Tevshal?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Yes. Why?”
“Sightseeing,” Piper said, and ignored Gee’s eye roll. “When will we get there?”
He shuffled his feet and ran a hand through his already mussed hair. Muttering under his breath, he stared at her as if he was fighting some inner battle. Piper wondered what else she’d done to bother him. “We’ll be there in about two days,” Gee said finally, “but I can tell you that you won’t want to get off the train there.”
“Why not?” Piper asked, suspicious. “I thought you’d be jumping for joy to get rid of us for a while.”
“Believe me, in any other town I would, but we’ve heard rumors from some of the passengers that there’s going to be a slave market at Tevshal sometime in the next few days,” Gee said. “We don’t know exactly where—someplace outside town—but that means Tevshal will be crawling with slavers. We’re telling all the passengers to stay on the train unless they live in town or it’s an emergency.”
Piper bit her lip, hesitating. She hadn’t expected this obstacle. Slavers were nothing to mess around with. But surely if she and Anna were careful, kept to the main streets where there were lots of people, they’d be safe enough. “This is an emergency,” she said at last.
“Really? So it’s emergency sightseeing?” Gee looked like he wanted to strangle her.
Piper threw up her hands, tired of lying and tired of how easily he saw through those lies. “Exactly. I have this crazy desire to see the perfumeries and the night eye flowers. I hear they’re beautiful this time of year.”
“Don’t be stupid!” Gee’s pupils flashed yellow. Startled by the change, Piper took an involuntary step back and bumped her elbow against the door. “Have you ever seen a slave market?” Gee snarled. He plowed on, not waiting for an answer. “More coin changes hands there than in the richest legal trade markets in the capital, and the government hasn’t been able to shut any of them down. Do you know why?”
“Probably because they don’t care enough to try,” Piper said, her anger rising to match his.
He barked a laugh. “And you say you work for the Dragonfly territories. You don’t know much about what goes on in the world, do you? It’s because the slavers know exactly what they’re doing. The locations of the markets change all the time. Slavers have their own secret cant to talk to each other, so they’re always a step ahead of the law, and whomever they can’t outsmart, they buy off. They make a fortune because they’ve turned kidnapping and bribery into an art.” Gee stared at her, his lips pressed into a thin line. “You were raised in the scrap towns—did you know they collect the green dust from the harvesting fields?”
“That’s impossible,” Piper said with a laugh. “No one would risk breathing that poison just to try to bottle it up.”
“The dust is worth a lot to a slaver,” Gee said. “They combine it with other chemicals to make a tranquilizer. They pack it tight in these little sacks and tie each end of a rope to them to make bolas. When they throw them at a moving target, it trips them up and sprays them with the dust at the same time, very neat and tidy.” His hands clenched into fists. “The dust doesn’t knock you out or anything, it just makes your head go all fuzzy, like you’re in a fog. You can’t run away; you can’t yell for help. You just stand there in a daze while they round you up, march you off to the market, and auction you off to the highest bidder. Slave markets are very quick and quiet, and not a place you ever want to be.”
“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s not going to work,” Piper lied. Inwardly, she had to admit it was working pretty well. As much as she hated it, maybe Gee was right. If they encountered slavers, they could end up in a situation far more dangerous even than running into the wolf. On the other hand, this might be her best chance to help Anna recover her memories. She just couldn’t pass that up. “We’ll take our chances,” she said. “We have to get off at Tevshal.”
Gee sighed and closed his eyes. When he opened them, Piper saw they were still yellow around the pupils. He managed to keep his voice level as he spoke. “You know, as a passenger on this train, you’re under my protection. I may not like it, but if you need help, if someone’s after you—”
“What?” Piper almost yelled it. “You’re going to protect us?” Anger burned in her chest, the same uncontrollable, consuming emotion she’d tasted when she saw Anna touching her father’s drawings. “Do you know what the ‘protection’ of the government—Merrow or Dragonfly—is worth to us scrappers? You know how often anyone in charge comes up to the mountains to see how we live, how we dig up bits and pieces of broken machines, trinkets covered in toxic dust, just to sell them to the capital folks for a few coins? The Merrow Kingdom doesn’t care that thousands of its people are starving. And what do you do down in the Dragonfly territories with all that iron you kept? You build more ugly factories—metal and smoke! Life’s hard and dirty, and there’s barely enough money to live on. Keep your protection, because we don’t need it.”
Heart pounding, Piper shoved past him and banged through the door to the other car. She glanced back once, but he wasn’t following her. Through the window in the doorway, she saw he was still standing between the cars, not moving. She had no idea what he might be thinking. For her part, Piper was shaking. She sat down in one of the empty passenger seats and let out a long breath. She tried to calm down, but it wasn’t easy.
She’d never realized how much anger she still had churning inside her. She thought she’d gotten over it in the months since her father’s death, or at least buried it so deep that it couldn’t touch her, but here it was, coiled snakelike in her chest. The intensity of it frightened her. Every nerve in her body had reacted to Gee’s words, lashing out. She knew she wasn’t really angry at him but at the Dragonfly territories, Aron, and the Merrow Kingdom—all the powerful people who didn’t seem to care if she starved, died in a factory, or was killed in a meteor storm, people who thought she was nothing but a worthless scrapper. The only thing she wanted to do was pour all that anger and rage onto someone else so it couldn’t poison her anymore.
The strange thing was that he’d let her. He’d stood there and let her rant at him without saying a word. When she’d regained some of her composure, Piper laughed weakly at her own stupidity. If Gee hadn’t wanted to toss her off the train before, he surely was dying to now.
She waited until Gee left the vestibule before she made her way back to the suite. She didn’t want to have to face him again. She couldn’t trust herself to be civil, though a part of her regretted taking so much of her anger out on him. He was doing his job, and naturally, he saw her as a threat, an invader.
Piper shook her head. No one knew better than she that she didn’t belong here. A scrapper staying in a private train car, eating fresh fruit and being served a breakfast fit for royalty—she wouldn’t have believed it if she’d heard the story from Arno Weir or one of the other scrappers.
When she got back to the suite, she was surprised to see the porter standing at the door talking to Anna. He was an elderly man with a shiny bald spot, dressed in a navy blue jacket and black pants. He listened with a polite, bland expression as Anna talked and gestured animatedly about something. Piper had to look down to hide her smile. Seeing Anna’s excited expression helped dissolve some of her anger. Piper didn’t know how she managed it, but when Anna wasn’t being annoying, she had an air about her that made Piper want to grin. K
ind of like a puppy.
“Piper!” Anna said when she saw her. “This is Mr. Jalin. I was just telling him what you said, that I couldn’t wear this bathrobe around the train, and he agreed with you.”
“Wholeheartedly, miss,” said Mr. Jalin, his lips twitching.
“So I asked him if there was anything else I could wear besides a bathrobe, and he told me there’s a clothing merchant traveling on the train—Ms. Varvol. She sells dresses, coats, petticoats, hats, trousers, shirts—”
Piper held up a hand to stop the flood. “That’s great, Anna.” She looked at Mr. Jalin. “Can you tell us where to find Ms. Varvol?”
“She spends most of her time in the dining car or the library,” he told her. When Piper thanked him, the porter turned to Anna. “Is there anything else I can do for you, miss?”
Anna shook her head. “Thank you very much.”
Mr. Jalin inclined his head to them both and moved off to the passenger cars. Piper followed Anna back inside their room and flopped down on the sofa. “Well, at least something’s gone right today. We’ll go see Ms. Varvol at lunch. I just hope she doesn’t charge much.”
“Oh!” Anna, who had just sat down next to Piper on the sofa, suddenly sprang up and reached into her robe pocket. “I almost forgot. I have to show you something.” She drew out a leather money belt. “I forgot I was wearing this. I saw it when I took off my dress. It weighed me down so much, I didn’t want to put it back on, but I thought I’d better keep it in case we needed it.”
She held the belt out to Piper. Threaded onto it was a row of rectangular gold coins. Piper’s heart stopped when she saw them. Ten, twenty, thirty—Piper lost count.
“Where … did you … get those?” Piper had never seen so much money in one place before. She reached out and caressed the gold coins, running her finger along their smooth surfaces. There was enough money on that belt to feed everyone in Scrap Town Sixteen for a year.
The Mark of the Dragonfly Page 9
