by Andrew Post
Maybe Moira, when she was playing Nula, had spoken something true. Maybe he did deserve better out of life.
Right here, watching over this, seemed like the ideal challenge. And he couldn’t really beat a job with no dress code.
CHAPTER 30
Separation, Reunion
Adeshka came into view. The entire flight in, Nevele’s heart ached. She didn’t want to be back there. Not because she detested the city but because she had to tell Clyde something before reaching it. She’d put it off the entire flight, unable to find the words.
The starship began descending in gentle dips. The ship swung over Déashune River and up into a repurposed cavern, finding a docking divot.
Clyde undid his harness, stood.
“Clyde, I have to say something.”
She was interrupted as the depressurization process began, making her ears pop.
He paused at the hatch. “Something wrong?”
“No, but . . . when I told you what I did, in Nessapolis . . .”
“It’s all right.” He smiled, always the optimist.
“It’s not, though.” She made herself look him in the eyes, hold his hand. “I never told you about the things I’d done, during that period of my life. And I consider that the same as lying. Maybe I am more like my brother than I care to admit. If I could just bury those wretched things, I thought I could just ignore the fact I’d done them. But because I did do them and never told you, the person you think is me isn’t really real. I wanted to be her, and for a while I thought I really was, but it was like a costume. And now that you know what’s underneath, I—”
“Nevele, I don’t care about any of that. I know you, the you now. That’s all that matters.”
“I hurt people. I thought since those people had abused their weaver children that they deserved the same, but . . . that’s not how healing is done, and you’ve taught me that, but . . .” Uncurling one finger at a time, she let his hand go. “It shouldn’t have taken you being in such a dire situation for me to tell you those things. I should’ve been honest from the start, maybe told you before . . .”
“I still want to marry you. I asked you to because I . . .” He faltered, always coming just that close to actually saying it.
“Say it,” she said. “Tell me you love me.”
“I won’t. You know what’ll happen.”
“Say it.”
The moment he left her sight, the next time he saw her, if he ever did, she’d be a total stranger. She wondered if he’d recoil at the sight of such a woman: stitches and cuts that would never heal, never mend, never close.
“I do . . . do that”—he took her hand—“with all my heart, but . . . I won’t say it. I will say that I accept you, everything, good and bad.”
Depressurization finished, the hatch finally slid open. The din of the city, even from this distance in the docks far below, plunged in, accompanied by the oppressive, humid heat—and that god-awful stink.
Nevele took her hand from Clyde, even as he reached for it, and stepped away. Pausing at the open hatch, she bit her lip to keep it from trembling. “I’ll be in the city,” she managed. “Do you still have your radio? Good. Keep it on. Give my condolences to Aksel’s sister, if you would.”
“Nevele. Wait, please.”
She dropped out of the ship, and as soon as her boot heels struck the catwalk connecting the various suspended docks, she took off at a run, sobs choking her.
Up outside, through the front doors, people openly gawked at this strange, stitched-up woman crying as she ran.
She couldn’t even summon a sneer right then for a one of them.
She heard Clyde calling her name but kept on. She pushed into what she once hated—the crowds and their staring eyes—but was thankful now for their camouflage. She brought up her hood and walked on, Clyde’s calls fading behind her. Across one street, then another, not looking back. Forcing herself not to.
The ring in her pocket, she carried with her, ran a fingertip around its rim as she walked but didn’t dare let it slide on. She was engaged. I am not.
Margaret Mallencroix reached into her bag, put on her mask so she could once again breathe easily, and then put on her respirator.
The city, without even going a few strides into it, seemed to engulf him. So many people, of every species, size, shape. He scanned every figure for anyone resembling Nevele. It was as though she’d disappeared, just as easily leaving his life as she had come into it.
“You still have me, Mr. Clyde,” Rohm said in his pocket, barely audible over the honking autos and trams screeching along their tracks. He patted the pocket to let Rohm know he’d heard him since he knew he wouldn’t be able to answer, having a hitch in his voice.
He’d asked a few people for directions to the Chrome Cricket, but either he was entirely ignored or they’d just sigh, “Tourists.” After hours of wandering, Rohm’s natural sense of direction all but useless in this glass-and-steel labyrinth, they finally arrived at the tall narrow brick building on Delmark Avenue.
The sign above the door was also of holo; scan lines ran down the image of a robotic cricket bearing a fiddle and a corncob pipe and sitting on an overturned washbasin. Before stepping in, Clyde was nearly bowled over by a mob of people in long red robes rushing into the street. None spoke, but they were clearly trying to get somewhere—or away from something. Adeshka was a weird place, Clyde decided. A different world from Geyser. His heart sank. He might have to get used to the city. He had nowhere else now.
Entering, Clyde found himself in a cool, dimly lit corridor. Ahead was the check-in kiosk. Electric candelabras were set to either side of the heavily varnished counter where a lectern and sign-in book waited. Seated behind was a blonde woman, whom Clyde didn’t need to be told was Aksel’s sister.
She gave a somber hello once Clyde had stepped into the candelabras’ undulating glow. “A room? A drink? Pub’ll be open in a minute, just got a fresh cask of potato wine in if it’s been that kind of morning,” she offered with genuineness, warmth, and welcome, but clearly she had something else on her mind. Had she heard the news report? That Aksel was a wanted man? Had they announced it when he’d been executed?
Her forced smile eased away slightly “Aren’t you . . . ?”
“Clyde Pyne.”
“My gods, I just heard it on the news.” She indicated an old radio on her side of the desk. She paused, turned her face, brow clouding. She turned back, slow, as if afraid to look him full-on. “They said a while ago that they got one of the men they think did that to that frigate. They didn’t say which, though. I feel wretched asking since your city just . . . but do you happen to know if it was the one man or . . . ?” Her hand met reddening lips, balled into a fist in time with her eyes clenching.
Clyde didn’t know how to say what he came here to say. He took out the key to room six and laid it on the counter—the heavy brass thing clinking on the varnished wood.
Vee Browne drew in a sudden, powerful breath, a choked gasp. Her gaze locked on the key as if it were her brother’s bullet-riddled body. She collapsed back into the chair, out of the reach of the candelabra’s electric light. Tears shined in the dark, and she shook and shook her head. “No. No. It must’ve been a mistake. He wouldn’t’ve done something like that. Aksel was a good man. Don’t tell me he’s—”
“I’m sorry.”
She sniffed, face hardening. “Was it them? Did they . . . frame him, set him up for that?”
“Who?”
She stared at the key on the counter between them. “Those three upstairs.” Her hand moved under the ledger, fishing around for something. “They had something over him. I just thought it was, you know, having him rough people up, loan shark stuff, I didn’t think they were bleeding terrorists.”
Clyde recalled what Aksel last said to him. Go get ’em. He hadn’t meant just the Odium when handing over the room key and the base’s coordinates. Clyde asked Vee, “Did they look like I do? Are they still h
ere?”
“I don’t know. Never saw them.” Vee freed what she’d been digging around for—a small revolver. She snapped it open, then closed, and came around the counter. Her eyes, framed with runny black eyeliner, were trained on the stairs ahead. “But I damn sure intend to go up and introduce myself.”
“No,” Clyde said, blocking her way. “I’ll take care of it.”
Up the creaky stairs into more dimly lit brick hallways, Clyde kept as quiet as he could. He approached the door at the end of the hall, silently unsheathed Commencement.
He leaned near the door.
“Mr. Clyde, I think I hear someone,” Rohm whispered.
Clyde didn’t hear anything but trusted the frisk mouse’s ears over his own.
But then, a raspy cough. A man, older. Steady footfalls and the hiss of a faucet running.
“What should we do?” Rohm said timidly.
Not answering, Clyde wrapped his hand around the doorknob and, with his heart in his throat, turned it and pushed it aside.
The room had one bed, a figure asleep on one side, not stirring. He continued pushing the door, allowing him to scan the room as it swept wider, wider.
A woman stood before a dresser in the far corner, her back to him. Long, raven hair hung past her shoulders. She was dressed in a long-sleeved black tunic and leather trousers, heavy boots. She was sweeping her hair back in one drag of her gloved hand after another, gathering it for a ponytail—until her hands fell away.
Clyde’s gaze switched to the mirror before her and realized she was staring right back at him—with a face not so unlike his own.
Remaining where he was, hunched in the doorway, sword ready, Clyde said nothing either but listened for others in the room with her. The faucet shut off, dropping the room into silence.
An older man emerged, flinched when he noticed Moira holding the gun and then again when seeing Clyde standing in the doorway. Facing him now, Clyde glimpsed toward him and recognized the man as Geyser’s resident blacksmith, Grigori Gonn.
Clyde was about to ask what he, of all people, was doing here, when Moira spoke. A soft, efficient voice.
“What are you doing here?” She posed the question plainly, no fright in her voice whatsoever. Coolly, evenly, as if she’d been expecting him but merely asked the question as a formality.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Clyde said.
The man in bed sat up. His face mirrored Clyde’s own—except his eyes were covered in thick gauze, tied in a loose bandanna about his head. “Is that . . . Clyde?”
Stepping over to the man Clyde could only assume was Tym, Moira said, “We’re packing up, preparing to leave.”
Clyde let his gaze drift for a split second to survey the room some more. At the foot of the unmade double bed, a load of bulging luggage was neatly arranged. In a smaller, second room past Moira, what apparently could be used as a sort of office for the temporary residents, a third person—large, dark caramel skin, shirtless—sat before a set of holoscreens, eyes wide, hands raised. He looked like a younger Grigori.
“Karl,” Moira explained, reading Clyde’s confusion.
“My son,” Grigori put in. He stepped near his own belongings, what looked like a hastily grabbed supply of toolboxes and portable gas-powered kilns.
“You were working for Raziel against your will, yes?” Clyde asked them, all of them. “That’s what Flam said.” He hoped he was right.
Upon hearing Flam’s name, Moira visibly tensed. “Yes. Raziel wanted you dead. How . . . is Flam, by the way? Is he okay? We heard it on the radio, what happened to Geyser. And your fiancée?”
“They’re fine,” Clyde said, wanting off that subject. “We could’ve used your help.”
Tym shifted in the bed, his bandaged eyes looking away from Clyde’s general direction to Moira. Grigori, Karl, and Moira averted their gazes from Clyde. They were ashamed. Appropriately so, in Clyde’s opinion. Still, he muttered an apology. What was done was done. There was no changing that. He’d failed as much as they had. Maybe more so.
“The Odium are through,” Clyde went on. “Now we’re looking for Nimbelle Winter. She, we’ve learned, is planning something.”
Tym sat up. “Nimbelle Winter? Moira, isn’t that . . . ?”
Moira frowned, stepped nearer. “There must be some mistake. She was a teacher at the academy. She’d never . . .” Her coal-black eyes looked away. Maybe she was remembering something—small tells she’d seen in Nimbelle Winter that, now, revealed her as a possible leader of a cult.
“Either way, she, whoever she is or was, has aligned with Gorett,” Clyde said.
“Where are they?” Karl said, returning to his small room packed with computers, dropping into a chair, big hands hovering over holo-keyboards, poised.
“I don’t know.” Clyde recalled the rolled-up eyes and blackness-bleeding mouths of the afflicted pirates. Incubating inside each—if Dreck was to be believed—weren’t just parasites, but wyrms. What if more of that were to happen elsewhere? In a densely populated place, like here, the affliction could spread quickly. His pulse raced as he remembered the promise—that he and his friends would not be spared.
Moira approached. Her hand landed on his arm, softly. For a flash, Clyde felt accompanied in his thoughts—something else was in his mind, tapping in carefully, not at all intrusive.
“If you’ll have us, we can help.”
Tym got up, navigating by touch. “As a family.”
These people were strangers to him, but Clyde could sense they remembered him. Lots of years together had been expelled from his mind because he’d said three simple words to each, by their father’s order. Why, Clyde still wasn’t certain.
The same words Nevele had wanted him to say to her.
He wished he could take it back, remember his childhood with his siblings. The gap echoed in its vastness, a struck-over portion of his life he felt would never be known. He’d just have to make new memories with them, from this point forward. That’s all that could be done. The future was all they had.
“Karl and his father are quite skilled,” Moira said.
“That we are,” Grigori put in, with a grin and a tip of his ashy hat.
Moira smiled weakly. “Clyde, I’m sorry we—”
An ear-splitting alarm started up outside.
Rohm scampered onto Clyde’s head, leaning over his forehead and out, whiskers flicking.
The five of them crowded at the windows, Tym asking Moira, panicked, what was happening.
Outside, barriers were being raised at the intersections, blocking traffic with steel pillars lifting out of the asphalt. From the open window, the general din of a bustling metropolis shifted into a sharpness that illustrated fear spreading. On every holosign up and down the street, advertisements dropped away and were replaced: Quarantine Now in Effect.
Storming robotically past the Chrome Cricket below, guardsmen in full armor—adopting gas masks—formed a line straddling the street. Waving batons, they scraped foot traffic along, barking them off to their homes. A man leaped out from an alley, Clyde gasping. He had the papillae sprouting from his mouth, eyes rolled back, black slime draining from his nose.
It’s already here.
The guardsmen halted, raised arms. The afflicted man wheeled, screaming. A barrage of gunfire flung him to the ground. He lay still. The line of guardsmen moved on, parting around the corpse, on the search for more.
From their position above at their window, Clyde and Moira watched. Clyde’s hand was still on her shoulder—and now, his fear wasn’t isolated. She was letting him hear hers too. If it was meant to calm him, let him know he wasn’t alone, it wasn’t quite working.
“Moira, please, I can’t see. What’s going on?” Tym repeated.
“The coming blight,” Clyde answered, echoing Nimbelle Winter. But Clyde didn’t expect she meant so soon.
Tym moved back to the center of the bed, as if it were a shoddily crafted raft on tumultuous waters. Kneel
ing there, he turned his bandaged face from one corner of the mattress to the others, as if the arising awfulness were about to drag him down. “The blight? What blight? Moira? Clyde? Please, tell me what’s going on.”
Moira sat beside him, and Tym threw his arms around her, squeezing tight. She looked at Clyde—worry in her eyes.
Clyde turned to Grigori and his son, their faces lit by the yellow lights pulsing in through the room’s windows all around. “Mr. Gonn,” he said, having to say it twice to gain his attention, “do you have your tools with you?”
“Aye, right there.” Grigori steered Clyde’s gaze to the heaped stove, sooty billows, and the bundle of tongs held together with twine. “What do you need?” His voice was shaking, and he was clearly confused. Why would Clyde want something smithed right now?
With sirens wailing, Clyde had to speak up. He held Commencement for the old, perplexed smithy to take. “I apologize asking you to undo your work, but will you turn this back into a gun?”
EPILOGUE
Srebrna Academy stood on the cliff, a frozen wave of azure stones—leaning, cresting, but not crashing. Once a daunting fastness, as far as Ernest Höwerglaz could recall, the lookout had been bought after the Skirmish and put to a new use.
It certainly looked like a fastness now. On the arch of its front gates, bodies hung by their necks. Teachers with multilayered robes turned in the breeze alongside uniformed students. Birds pecked at them, taking them back to nature. Ernest passed under their dangling feet, entirely indifferent. Specks of sand, just like those of the beach below the cliff, where he’d parked the Magic Carpet.
Figures in red, seeing him approach, all sprang to their feet—throwing aside cups of tea and smoldering mold pipes—and drawing guns. Like the professors they’d killed when taking this place, they too were robed—in uniform red. Red as the hair of the lady who emerged from the front doors of the school, a small smile playing upon her lips as she stepped onto the bloodied grass courtyard.
