by Sparks,Cat
Star stood on her toes, hoping for a better glimpse of the ship, but all she could see was the now-familiar scattering of wrecks and obstacles, many of them wreathed in an eerie glowing mist that had not been there when the tankers were still in view.
She went for Allegra’s glass. Lucius stopped her. “Not now. Cover your face.”
She did as he said as the mist thickened into a sickly, stinking luminescent fog, rolling up and over the ship’s sides.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.
“I have. Once,” Lucius said grimly. “Long time back. A thing I hoped I’d never see again.”
Lucius nodded at Bimini, who had taken up her favoured position on the foredeck, long hair loose and streaming in the wind, sniffing the tainted air. Her head was cocked at an angle, with a bitter expression on her face. “Reckon she might have seen it too.”
“Dangerous?”
“Hell yes.”
Ahead of the Dogwatch, the Black appeared more sleek and sheer, with fewer obstructions. It would have been easier to steer a passage through if the sickly miasma had not been seeping upwards from the ground.
Star aimed the glass at a thickening patch of the stuff as the ship slowed out of caution. Any moment, she expected some fog-breathing demon to leap upon the deck, or for the hull to slam headlong into a jagged entanglement of ancient steel. Something Goja had missed, despite those reliquary goggles strapped to his head day and night.
Star dropped the glass and hung on to the side as the Dogwatch came about a little too quickly, causing the mighty portside wheels to lift. Not far—just enough to set them all on edge.
As the fog continued to drift and thin in patches, Quarrel relinquished the helm once more, then moved to stand beside Bimini. They talked in low voices so nobody else could hear.
“I don’t know if I trust her,” said Star.
“Good,” said Lucius. “Shouldn’t be trusting any of us.”
“Not even you?”
“I’ll have your back, girl, as long as I’m standing on this deck. It’s after that you need to worry about.”
She nodded uneasily.
He nudged her arm. “Nene said something to you, didn’t she? Just before you were brought on board. Something that’s had you rattled ever since.”
Star paused for a long while to consider her answer carefully. “She told me she’s not my sister.”
“Not your sister? What she mean by that?”
“We aren’t related. We do not share blood. I’ve been living a lie seven summers past—actually, who even knows how old I am?” she said bitterly. “To think, I would have done anything for her.”
Lucius stared at her, his lined, tattooed face etched with an expression of deep concern.
“Girl, let me tell you what I know. Without that woman, you wouldn’t even be alive. Oughta show more gratitude. More respect.”
“Respect?” Star turned to face him, pushed him with her hand. “You’ve known it all along, haven’t you? All these years. You knew!”
“Calm down, girl. Don’t do to go showing emotion like that in front of this lot. Makes you vulnerable. Oughta know better than that by now.”
Star fumed. “But you had no right to keep a secret like that from me.”
“A secret like what—that you ain’t blood kin? What does blood tell you about who you think you might or might not be?”
He made a ponderous show of shaking his head. “Tell you one thing, girl. Nene took you on when she didn’t have to. Put her own life on the line. Crossed the open Red on foot with a clueless child in tow. Couldn’t have been more than ten years old—bet you whined even more than you’re whining now.”
Star’s face reddened. “You don’t understand.”
“Probably not—but neither do you. Nene loves you. Sisterhood ain’t just about the blood. Actions speak louder than birthright. No one gets a say in what they born to. Only what we make of what we got.”
Too angry to argue, she looked away, towards the Black and its mysterious green-tinged landscapes beyond the confines of the Dogwatch and its rickety railings. Trying desperately not to think about her arm and what it meant. What would happen if the others were to find out what she was.
Shouting eventually distracted her. Quarrel and Bimini getting into a fight. He grabbed her wrist. She tugged it free, pointing urgently at the sky. Star looked up and saw that it was changing colour once again, and there was something swelling and blooming right above them, roiling and churning and spitting blasts of light.
= Thirty-six =
Quarrel’s mesh stopped itching once they’d passed the last of the broken Sentinel towers. Telemetry from Nisn had been growing weaker by the mile, and the incessant ping and scratch, like the pestering of bugs and rats, was fading. No mind or matter. The mesh hadn’t told him anything he could not figure for himself from the surrounding landscape. The ordnance he carried was built into his bones. The bits he’d let his crew folk see had barely been the half of it. No matter what they didn’t see and didn’t have to know. So long as they kept the old crate rolling towards their destination.
Those priests of Nisn didn’t own him anymore. Old Quarrel was on a mission of his own, to prove he wasn’t anybody’s soldier.
Out this far, the Black was rent and buckled. Poison pooled beneath the surface, hot rocks and lava bubbling deep within the cracks and crevices. Belching toxic fumes and sour gasses. Enough to kill the lot of them if the crew didn’t steer around the worst of it.
But they were good, this ragged gang of coin-greedy misfits. Quarrel crossed himself and spat for luck, praying to no god in particular that the Dogwatch might manage to hold together across the final leg. That the broken blister weeping in the sky was no more than it seemed. That the Lotus Blue was no more crazy that any uploaded five-star general consciousness was likely to be so long after the wars. With a stroke of luck, its memory might be turn out to be fragmented, its weapons powered down and locked on standby. The Lotus Blue, rendered impotent and harmless—and Quarrel rendered obsolete by default.
He moved to stand by the portside bow, gripping a handful of rigging to hold him steady. The ship was rolling, slow but steady, its castors taking them around the worst of the cracked obsidian and its bleeding toxic fog.
He had gotten used to the sulphurous stink. No matter if it scalded his lungs, they only had to last a couple more weeks.
Quarrel closed his eyes and felt the acid sting of chem-laced breeze against his cheeks. Not long now and then he would sleep forever, dreaming of the world and all it had lost. Dreaming of a girl called Manthy, his girl, his love, his one and only. The things he’d had to do to set her free.
He felt a sharp stab behind his eyes and he opened them wide, shocked fully into consciousness. The pain was a pattern, repetitious, running through his mind, a sensation like steely fingers poking around in his head, prodding with surgical precision and intent.
It wasn’t Nisn this time. Something else. The thing he’d been afraid of. Something best not mentioned to the others.
He slammed down his internal defences and flushed the intruder from his parietal cortex. It worked, but the pathway had now been gouged. Such an attack would come much easier the next time, and the time after that.
Quarrel looked over his shoulder, in search of the skinny girl with the growing mesh. Found her beside the man who had named himself as her protector, who had dared stand up to a Templar to try to save her. Grandfather and daughter was what they looked like, although that girl was nobody’s child. She’d been vat raised, same as the rest of them. Where and how were the only mysteries—Quarrel had been so certain he was the last of his kind, that the vats had been discontinued, shut down after the Lotus Wars, when the name of Templar had become a dirty word. So ho
w was there such a recent hatching, and how had she survived this long, found her way to Fallow Heel without being put out of her misery? There was nothing more useless than a Templar soldier without a war to fight.
No matter. None of it mattered when a raised-from-the-dead uploaded General was trying to claw its way inside his skull. The mesh would keep the Lotus Blue out in the short term, but the defenses wouldn’t hold for long. Quarrel was being hacked, like rats chewing through his head, clawing at his synaptic junctions, scrambling his neurones, trying to tell him what to think and do. Sooner or later the enemy would have his way with him. Enemies as strong as this one always did.
= Thirty-seven =
Aboard the Dogwatch, nobody had eyes for anything other than the sick blue-green blister bubbling in the sky. Good, thought Star—nobody had time to spare a glance for a girl with metal growing all over her skin. An arm that ached continuously, a dull pain radiating from the inside out, like her bones were hardening and thickening. Like her muscles were clenching and repositioning. Metal the colour of tarnished gold was pressing and burning against her yielding flesh.
There was no doubt left about what she was becoming. Star had never even wondered how a Templar was created, had presumed they had been made the way the were: full grown and fully formed. She’d never asked Nene—deep down, her sister probably already knew, or at least suspected, which was why she’d been checking the arm of the the Templar strung up at Broken Arch. Because she’d known what was going to happen to Star eventually.
Star remembered how Nene had insisted upon calling it a man and not a thing. She also remembered the way their fellow Van travellers had hissed and spat as the wagons passed. They’d have hacked it to pieces with knives and axes had it been hung a little closer to the ground. Such was the fear of the Templar soldiers. Those things had two arms, two legs, and a face but they were not our kind.
Our kind.
And now Star was one of them. A monster. A creature. A thing. And Nene had known. She had known the whole way through.
If the Dogwatch crew learned the truth, they would likely kill her and tip her body over the side. The bulk of them seemed to have made their peace with Quarrel—all but Bimini—but that was because they now felt like they needed him to survive. Every one of them had families back on shore. People to love and homes to lose.
Star ran to Lucius and grabbed his arm, her fingers curved like claws. “You’ve got to help me,” she pleaded in his ear.
He studied her face as though it was the first time he’d seen it properly. “Girl, you sick? You don’t look so good. Looks like your blood might have gotten some poison in it.”
“It’s not my blood,” she said, dragging him off the deck to a more private spot where they leant over the rail. The soupy mist below was thickening.
“You’re sweating like a feverish dog,” Lucius said. “You gotta tell me what’s the matter, else there’s nothing I can do to make things right.”
She nodded, bent to pull one of the blades from her boot. She handed it to him, pommel first. Her hands were shaking, and she kept her voice low. “I’m going to show you something and you have to promise to cut it out of me.”
Lucius said nothing, but snuck a quick glance over his shoulder, then up at the crow’s nest. He took the knife, eyes on her bandaged arm as she unwrapped the fabric, loop by loop. She uttered a gasp when she unwrapped the last of the cloth and saw how much the metal had expanded, crisscrossing her skin and jabbing into her flesh.
Lucius stared.
“Cut it out of me,” she begged quietly through clenched teeth. “Quickly, before it goes any deeper.”
Lucius sighed deeply. His face clouded over, lips pressed tightly together.
“Do it,” she said, “and hurry!”
Lucius tucked the knife into his belt, grabbed her wrist, and gently guided the arm into an available splash of light.
“Cut it out!”
He shook his head. “Too late for that,” he said. “Thing’s part of your arm now, dug in deep. Cutting’s only going to make you bleed and scream.”
She flinched when he placed his free hand upon her shoulder.
“The pain will stop soon,” he said gently. “Looks like it’s near finished what its doing.”
“How can you know that?”
She stared into his eyes and found them calm and full of reason—along something else she had not anticipated: knowledge. She whimpered and snatched her arm away, fumbling to hastily rebandage it. Her hands shook, making a mess of things.
Firmly but gently, Lucius took the bandage from her hands. “Hold your arm steady. Let me help.”
Tears squeezed out the corners of her eyes. “You want to help me—then cut it out! Please . . . I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
He paused awhile to let her cry, then rewrapped her arm until no metal was showing. A professional job, tied off but not too tight.
She stared at him through bitter tears. “You knew about this already, too, didn’t you?”
“Now is not the time,” he said gently.
“Then when is it ever going to be?”
The tone of her voice was near hysterical. He grabbed her tight and held her against his chest, firm, but gentle.
“You gotta stay strong and you gotta keep this hidden,” he whispered. “You tell the others you got slashed or burnt. You don’t show this to none of them—no matter what. Okay?”
She didn’t answer. She just kept on crying and he kept on holding her until the crying was all done.
= Thirty-eight =
The walls of the stateroom shuddered, glasses clinking against one another in the liquor cabinet as the ship made alterations to its course.
Mohandas’s loud protestations echoed down the passageway. A door slammed and the shouting abruptly ceased.
Kian returned his dagger to the sheath on his belt, then dismissed Tallis and Jakome. Neither man moved at first, until Kian bellowed, “Leave us!”
When they were gone, he motioned to the rectangular wooden table taking up half the stateroom. As Allegra chose a seat, he moved across to the well-stocked liquor cabinet, removed a crystal decanter and two glasses. He poured a generous measure into each, and downed his in a single swallow.
Allegra took the glass he offered and raised it delicately to her lips.
“You expect me to believe you had no idea of your own father’s true heritage?” said Kian.
She sipped then smiled, cradling the glass in her hands. It was heavy, its sides etched into thick diamond shaped ridges. “I have never before heard the name Raneesh Patel. My mother was from Makasa, from a wealthy fishing family. Six sailing ships, they had, and a hemp plantation. Her people thought she had married beneath her station.”
Kian waited for her to explain what had happened to her mother—or mention her name, perhaps, but she didn’t.
“You are curious now, aren’t you,” he said, “to learn what use tanker heart-and-brains are put to where I come from?”
“Operating systems was what you called them,” she said. “What a curious name.”
He nodded.
She paused, swilling the liquor around in her glass. “I’m certain your people make excellent use of relics.” She took another delicate sip. “I should very much like to visit Axa. To see which of the rumours turn out to be true.”
“What rumours are those?”
She laughed. “Surely you have heard what people say. That the men and women of Axa are sickly, pale as milk, with skin the texture of skink underbelly.”
The corners of Kian’s lips edged upwards into a smile. “Not so true, as you can see for yourself.” He angled his head, as if inviting her to examine the colour of his skin up close, which was lighter than her own by a small fr
action.
“As I can see,” she agreed, taking another tiny sip of her drink. Just wetting her lips, not consuming any more of the fiery substance than etiquette demanded.
“Axa is your city, too,” said Kian. “The Patels are an important family. I am certain they would welcome you back into the fold.”
She nodded. “But my father’s disgrace—”
“Is forgotten,” Kian answered. “We will say no more about it. All that lies in the past—or, at least, it can be that way if you are willing to cooperate.”
Allegra placed the glass down on the table.
Kian leaned forward. “So, do you know if he has those maps, or don’t you?”
Allegra coughed delicately to clear her throat. “I know where he keeps his gold,” she said, “I know which of the local houris are his favourites, how much protection money he skims from the vintners of Evenslough.” She smiled at Kian with kindly condescension. “Sure, I know where my old man keeps his secret maps.”
She picked up her glass and flicked her gaze to a particular painting hanging on the wall. Kian set down his own glass, stood up, walked around to the table’s far side, reached to remove the painting with both hands, expecting to find a safe built into the wooden wall behind. But there was nothing, just an expanse of shiny lacquered wood.
Frowning, he looked to back of the painting itself. Four nails held the backboard in place. He lay it face down on the table, pinched his fingers, and wiggled out two of them. Allegra watched his actions closely, toying with her drink but saying nothing.
Kian tugged the backboard free. Behind it nestled three slender rectangles of shiny old-world plastic. He picked one up, tentatively, as though expecting it to disintegrate in his hands. One side was covered in a dark blue geometric pattern. The other side was blank and colourless, aside from a symbol that looked like a small blue flower. When he saw it, Kian sucked in his breath.
“You need to speak special words to make them work,” Allegra said. “My father knows the words. Let me convince him—”
