by CM Raymond
“Yer welcome, of course, but I’m not sure what we need more mindjackers for,” Karl said with a scowl. “I’m sure Adrien is teaching his men not to fall for yer tricks of make believe monsters. Unless all that brainpower lets you know how to use a weapon?”
Ezekiel raised his hand, quieting the rearick. “Enough, Karl. Julianne is already developing the plan for the mystics’ role in all of this. Believe me, their ability to communicate seamlessly over distance will make them invaluable in the heat of battle.”
Karl nodded and snorted. “Not bad. But what we really need is hard steel in the hands of my men in the place the sticks they been training with.”
Hannah listened to the rearick’s complaint, pausing for just a moment, before she said, “Let me talk to Amelia, Karl. I might have an idea for how to overpower those sticks of yours.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The wrench spun off the rounded nut, causing Gregory to scrape his knuckles off the hard iron of his current project. He hated working with these scavenged tools and missed the large set of tools he had at home. “Son of a bitch!” he yelled into his basement workroom.
“Does cursing at it help? Must be some sort of Arcadian magic I don’t know of,” Laurel said, watching him trying to shake the pain out of his hand. She reached out to him when it was clear that his magic wasn’t working. “Here, let me see.”
Gregory stopped the shaking and held his hand up to her. She took it in her own and scrunched her face, inspecting the gashes on his knuckles, blood seeping to the surface. She pulled a green handkerchief from her hip and applied pressure. Then her eyes flashed green, and Gregory felt a warmth spread from her hand to his.
“Thanks.” He was grateful for the healing, and the way her touch felt somehow more intimate than others.
“No prob. To be honest, I’m not that great of a healer—I was always better at hurting things than healing them—so be careful. The knuckles will be fine, but those dark circles under your eyes make you look like you haven’t slept in days… or you’ve been hitting the seiderdrek a little too hard.”
“I have no idea what that means. Another druid thing?”
Laurel giggled. “You’ve never heard of sleep? You Arcadians are some kind of badass.”
Gregory glared at her playfully.
“The seiderdrek is something a group from the north—the far north—drink. It makes them mad, like the remnant, I guess. Don’t know if it is real, but the storytellers have a few tales about the violent people up there. The stories say it makes them crazy and nearly indestructible.”
“Are they in the Frozen North?” Gregory asked.
Laurel shrugged. “Hell, I don’t even know if they really exist. Hard to tell reality from fiction these days. But, from what they say, they’re further north than the Frozen North.”
Gregory laughed. “I didn’t know there was such a thing. Come to think of it, I don’t know much about anything outside of the Valley… and now the Dark Forest.”
“Hey,” Laurel replied with a jab to his arm, “the Dark Forest is still part of the Valley, even if you douchers want to disown us.”
“We disown you? As far as our stories go, it was the druids who chose to leave the city… wandered into the woods, never to be seen again.”
Laurel shrugged. “With all the shit you’ve told me, can you blame us? I mean, things got pretty bad there.”
Gregory felt conflicted over her words. Immediately, he felt a sense of defensiveness toward the home that, with all its injustices that he now knew of, he still loved, and he was ready to die for. But it was hard to argue against her point.
“OK, but you are the one who ran away from it all!”
She batted her eyelashes in an overly dramatic way. “I took one look at you, fair Gregory, and I just couldn’t—”
They both jumped as a voice rang out behind them. “Am I interrupting something,” Hannah said with a smirk. “Hell, every time I see you two…”
“We’re working,” Gregory said with a grimace.
“That’s what you said earlier today.” She crossed the room and joined them at the desk. Eyes on Gregory, she said, “You look like bloody hell. Sleeping much?”
“I’m fine. I’ve gotta get this done.” He waved a hand over a table full of ropes, pulleys, and other things that Hannah couldn’t identify.
Laurel pulled the handkerchief off his hand, inspecting the healed knuckles. “I think I have something for the sleep issue, too.” She patted her leather bag, before pointing at Devin, her squirrel. “I’ll be right back. You, stay here and behave.”
The little creature ran down her arm then jumped on a table adjacent to Gregory’s work bench. He eyed Hannah and Gregory as its master turned and left the room.
Hannah wrinkled her nose. “I kind of hate that thing,” she said nodding at the squirrel. “Gives me the creeps.”
Gregory gave her an amused look. “Says the girl with the dragon.”
“Point taken.” Hannah looked down at the bench, taking inventory of the strange devices. “So, what’s your play here anyway?”
He leaned against the table and watched Laurel push through the door on the other side of the room and into the stairwell. Gregory exhaled. “I am so glad you asked. I’m clueless, really. I might need your help.”
“My help?” Hannah said, fully aware of her ignorance concerning all things mechanical.
“Yeah. I mean, I think the right thing to do is to take it slow. You know, not scare her away. But she’s just so damned forward with me. I think she actually wants me to—”
Hannah jabbed him in the ribs. “Dipshit. I’m talking about your work,” she nodded at the table. “You know, taking down an unstoppable death machine. I don’t really have time to dedicate to your love life right now. But… If you bring it up at the next team meeting about how we are going to orchestrate an attack on Arcadia with a bunch of old women and kids, while also saving all of Irth, I’m sure Zeke would be willing to devote some time to it.”
Gregory blushed. “Oh. Shit. Right, this—”
Laughing, she waved her hand at him. “I’m screwing with you, G. Listen, we’re not a bunch of overgrown kids at the Academy, angling to get the attention of some cute magician. Just be yourself.”
“People don’t tend to like myself.”
“Bullshit. We all love you here—well, maybe not Karl, but he doesn’t really love anyone. Really, if you keep playing this over in your head, you won’t be able to contribute. Be yourself. Hang out with her, and if something happens, run with it.”
Gregory nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“I’m always right. Not to mention, odds are at least one of you will be dead before this is all over, then all this concern will be for nothing.”
He laughed. “I hate you.”
“Join the large and diverse club.” She jabbed at his ribcage again. “Now, tell me about your project.”
Before speaking, Gregory rearranged the contents of his workbench, taking an inventory. Finally, he pulled a piece of parchment and a writing tool from the back of the table and started to draw.
“That almost looks like a magitech rifle,” Hannah said, squinting at the page.
Looking up, Gregory smiled. “Indeed, something like that. Only here is the difference…”
Biting his lower lip in concentration, he put the pencil to paper and drew a set of legs holding the device in place and a picture of a man standing next to the device. The thing was nearly as long as the character was tall.
“Shit,” Hannah spat, “haven’t seen any magitech that size.”
“I know, right.”
“So, it will send a massive blast to take down the airship?”
Gregory shook his head. “To create a blast that powerful, we would need half the amphoralds in the Heights, or at least as much as the airship needs to fuel it. According to Karl, they’d been providing crystals for months. All we have are these.” He nodded to a pile of small, green s
tones. There were hundreds of them, but they were tiny.
He continued. “I took apart the magitech cuffs—the ones that the men who had escaped from the factory were still wearing when they got here—and extracted the bits of amphoralds embedded in them. Karl wanted the bracelets for some reason, which was fine by me. I got what I was looking for.”
Hannah looked puzzled, none of it was making sense. “So, you have a device the size of a cannon with the power of a pea shooter. Guess we’re finished.”
He held up a hand to slow her down. “Just listen. We aren’t blasting power at the ship; we’re using the power of the gems in a different way, a more powerful way. Remember when you broke into my father’s safe?”
“Yeah,” Hannah said, “I heated the crystals until the thing exploded.”
“Exactly. The crystals contain power until that power can be released in a controlled fashion. But if the crystals are broken, that power is released all at once. This was always seen as a disadvantage of the amphoralds.” Gregory paused, his throat tightened as he thought of his father. “My father built a regulator that would stop the flow of power into the amphorald as they were being fueled, so as to ensure that these accidents wouldn’t happen anymore… at least fewer of them.”
“OK, so how does this help us take down their ship?”
“What I intend to do is turn the disadvantage of the amphorald technology into our advantage.”
Hannah was grinning like a fool as she watched her friend coming into his own.
“We will make a giant spear and insert it here,” Gregory placed the tip of his pen at the end of the barrel. “At the other end will be attached a very long rope.”
“And the amphoralds?” Hannah asked. “What the hell do they do?”
Gregory pursed his lips and nodded. “That’s the tricky—and dangerous—part. At the end of the barrel, we’ll have a compartment. We amp up the amphoralds beyond what they ought to hold.”
“Yikes!”
“No shit,” he grinned. “What I’m working on right now is a mechanism to basically ignite the amphoralds.” He mimicked the appearance of an explosion with his hands and made a sound to match. “All of that force stored up in the amphoralds will have nowhere else to go but into the barrel.”
Hannah jabbed a finger at the end of the barrel. “And it will push the spear out of the end of this massive tube.”
“Exactly!”
Hannah laughed. “If only we could fight Adrien directly with the power of your oversized brain, we could take back Arcadia in an instant.”
He flushed and shook his head. “If only the indirect use of my brain works…”
“What could possibly go wrong?” Hannah grinned.
“Don’t say that! There are countless problems.”
Hannah looked over the drawing again. She picked up Gregory’s pen and drew in a shape that looked more like a goose egg than an airship and added the spear with a rope trailing behind to the drawing.
“OK. Say we are able to get your rope somehow attached to the ship, then what?”
Gregory scowled. “Still working on that. But I think we might be able to—”
A scream interrupted their conversation along with the sound of a hundred boots marching above them.
“Laurel!” Gregory cried as he dashed for the stairwell.
****
Hannah and Gregory made it to the great hall just as a thunderous sound of footsteps faded down the long corridor in the opposite direction. Laurel lay on the floor, sprawled out in the space between the dining area and the kitchen.
Running to her side, Gregory knelt, his brow knit with concern. “You alright?” He said, helping her to her feet.
“What happened?” Hannah asked, inspecting a dozen or so overturned tables and chairs.
Laurel gave a sly smile. “Your dragon! That’s what happened.”
“No, really,” Hannah laughed, “all that lazy ass ever does is lay around, eat, and sleep.”
“Not today,” Laurel said. She pointed at an overturned bowl at the base of a table in the kitchen. A thick brown liquid had spilled out. “Gregory was so tired, I thought I would make him some kaffe. I turned around, and there was Sal, lapping from the bowl. Pretty sure he likes it.”
Hannah furrowed her brow, eyes moving from the mess on the floor to the druid and back. “Kaffe?” she asked, the word feeling completely foreign on her tongue.
Laurel giggled. “Don’t tell me you don’t have kaffe.” She watched Hannah and Gregory shake their heads in tandem. “Damn, this place. No wonder why you all are so cranky all the time. It’s a drink… a hot drink, made from a ground bean. I’ve been told that the bean only grows far south of here, but the druids have been using magic to grow it in the Dark Forest for years. Some say it was the Chieftain’s idea.”
“So, what,” Gregory asked, “it makes you drunk?”
Laurel could hardly control her laughter. “No. Not drunk. I guess I would say, it makes you feel more alive or something—more energetic. Apparently, it was all the rage in the old world. I thought I would whip you up a batch to help you keep working, but that… that thing drank it all.”
“That thing has a name,” Hannah quipped with her hands on her hips.
Just as Laurel opened her mouth to speak, a loud thump interrupted them. Before any of them could react, Sal, his little beady eyes flashing in every direction, crashed into the room. He slid to a stop in front of Hannah and started turning in circles, chasing his own tail.
Hannah turned to Laurel. “Will he always be like this? I think I like the lazy-ass Sal better.”
“Oh, no… it wears off. But he drank a ton!”
Hannah pointed toward the doors leading outside. “Sal, I love you, pal, but you gotta go.” Sal stopped his circles. He looked up at Hannah, his head bouncing up and down. “Really, buddy. Go outside and run yourself ragged.”
Gregory jogged over to the door and opened it, allowing the creature to dash out into the cold, afternoon air. He watched him take four steps to the edge of the stairs and leap into the air, his wings beating in double time.
“I don’t know whether or not I should be glad that I didn’t drink any,” Gregory said as he watched the creature sail away. As he moved to close the door, something peculiar caught his eyes in the distance. A girl, her hands bound in front of her was walking toward the tower, followed by two men on Karl’s team, sticks in hand.
“Is that... Violet?”
Crossing the room, Hannah and Laurel joined him in the doorway, watching the soldiers march their captive toward the building. Violet was the girl that Hannah despised most during her time at the Academy. Not only was she the most stuck up of the noble people, but she also made it her mission in life to make Hannah’s life a living hell.
For a moment, seeing her in the custody of their troops made her heart leap, and then she was left to wonder what the hell she was doing there. Nothing about the girl impressed Hannah, except, perhaps, her ability to be a complete and utter douche. She certainly wouldn’t have been sent by Adrien to spy on their community, not unless part of his master plan was getting the young woman caught. Which Hannah guessed wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility.
As they got near, Violet squinted, staring in the direction of Hannah and Gregory. “That’s them. They’re the ones I need to see. Let me go, you scumbags.”
Hannah smiled as they half-carried her up the steps.
“What’s going on here?” she finally asked Karl’s men.
Philip, a boy she had grown up with in the Boulevard, pushed Violet toward them. “We found her in the woods on the south side. Said she needed to see the nerd and Deborah—just kept repeating it over and over. She sounded a little out of her mind. Billy here thought she might be a remnant.”
“I’m not a bloody remnant, you dipshit. My father—”
Hannah held up a hand to make her stop, and thankfully, Violet complied. “I know her. Unfasten her hands. Gregory and I will tak
e it from here—see if we can’t find Deborah or the nerd she’s talking about.”
Cutting the rope tying her wrists together, Philip nodded to Hannah and turned to leave; Billy was right on his heels.
“Hey, boys,” Hannah called from behind them. They glanced over their shoulders. “Nice work out there.”
Giving a grin and a little wave, the men left, heading back to do their rounds on the edge of the woods.
Violet’s eyes, which were always adorned with the finest cosmetics that a noble’s bag of coin could buy, were now bare. Dark circles stretched toward her cheekbones. “Deborah, thank the Matriarch. I’m so glad to see you.” She glanced over at Gregory. “And you, too…”
“Cut the shit, Violet. What the hell are you doing here? And can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t hang your body from the top of this tower and let it sway in the wind while the birds pick it to pieces?”
The young woman’s eyes grew wide, and her bottom lip trembled. She just stared mutely at the girl she only knew as Deborah the noble. Whether it was the threat of force or the stories of Hannah’s display of power in the fight against the Arcadian forces or the fact that she was now a prisoner of the enemy, Hannah couldn’t be certain.
Finally, the girl spoke. “I am here to learn the truth. What happened to my brother?” She croaked out her last word and broke into tears.
Gregory and Hannah shared a look before he finally nodded. Hannah took the cue and wrapped her arm around Violet as she shook with emotion. “Come on, let’s get you warmed up.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The great hall was busy with people preparing to fight or working to keep the tower fed. They were occupied enough not to notice the three late teens sitting in chairs, drawn in close to the fire. With one hand, Violet pulled the blanket up to her chin. It quivered in tandem with her shaking body. In the other, she gripped a mug of an herbal tea that Eloise made without complaint.
“First of all, my real name is Hannah.”
Violet looked up over her mug with a vacant stare.
“Deborah was a ploy. The hair, the family, being a student. It was all a lie, a part of our plan to overthrow Adrien and take back the city, to guide it toward the way it was supposed to be.”
