by Elise Kova
Arianna was quiet, prompting Florence’s attention. The woman had that same faraway look.
“Ari, what happened up there? The Dragon King knew you by name.” She tried to be gentle, but it was a topic as sharp as a scalpel. “Why?”
Still, Ari was silent.
“How did you crash-land with a glider in Dortam?” Florence pushed a little harder.
Nothing.
“Arianna, please, I need to know.” Why? Why did she need to know so badly? Why did it keep her up at night and draw her patience thin to think Arianna was keeping yet another secret?
“Yveun captured me. I escaped on a glider. I crashed.”
It was the most unsatisfying explanation ever. “Yveun, the Dragon King, captured you?”
Arianna picked up her gearbox again. Florence was on her feet, reaching across the table to put her hand between Arianna’s tool and the box. The woman brought her violet eyes to Florence’s.
“Why didn’t you fight?”
“You don’t think I did?” Arianna scowled. “You don’t think that, succession be damned, I wouldn’t have killed him if given the chance?”
“What did he do to you?” she whispered.
“He made me weak.” Arianna cursed, throwing down her tool. It was a fit of passion Florence had never seen from the usually reserved woman. “He made me feel weak, and vulnerable, and helpless. Again. Again, I could not stand against him or his agents to defend what and who I love.” Arianna looked back to Florence; for the first time ever, her eyes beseeched her student for answers. Answers that no one had. “I am loyal to Loom and our fight with every breath I have. I am loyal to you, Flor. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot kill him. If I face him again, I will fall. I fear I will take Loom down with me.”
Florence felt a dull ache of sympathy for the woman who clearly harbored so much pain and self-loathing. Slowly, as though she was trying not to startle a wounded animal, Florence stood. She rounded the table and reached to clasp one of Arianna’s tall shoulders. Under her fingers, she knew there was a tattoo, a mark signifying the day they’d met, and a bond that would exist no matter what paths they traveled.
“You do not have to strike him down, Arianna. Go to Ter.3. Go home and realize that your strength has not left you. And when you see the truth of that, as I do, give me the greatest canister this world has ever known. Give me the Perfect Chimera, and I will hone it as a weapon to deal the final blow.”
Arianna’s hand clasped Florence’s opposite shoulder.
“And give me House Xin to see that this chain of succession the Dragons so value puts someone we want on their throne,” Florence continued. How could Arianna think she needed to have the strength to vanquish their foe when she was already the lynchpin holding the entire fate of Loom in place? The woman who wanted nothing more than to sit locked away in a workshop had saved them time and again. “Load the gun, Arianna, and then rest. I’ll pull the trigger.”
Florence saw hesitation in the woman’s eyes, or maybe it was nostalgia. But it hardened like molten steel into a resolve that would hopefully last long enough for them to abolish the scourge of Dragons that plagued Loom once and for all.
“I will, Flor. I will do this one final act of rebellion, for you.”
Florence knew the most important thing was that Arianna had agreed to do what they needed. Which made it all the more confusing that her heart clenched at the notion she was doing it all for her alone.
ARIANNA
Arianna leaned back against the upper deck windows on Louie’s airship. Checking the magic discharge was unnecessary now, but it gave her an excuse to be away from everyone. Up here, there was nothing more than a gray sky, the wind, and the earth slowly changing below.
The last time Arianna had traveled this route, it had been by train. She had sat next to Master Oliver, pressed up against the window of the train car, watching Loom unfold before her in a way it never had before. She had pressed forward, hungry for the vast unknown the world seemed to offer.
But this time was different. This time she watched the spiraling trails of magic fade away into the dusky morning over the back of the airship. The world wasn’t unfolding before her but collapsing in her wake; it slipped away like a ribbon running wild, and the spool was nearly out.
She knew her body had changed from becoming a Perfect Chimera at such a young age. It was obvious before any others had pointed it out. She could run faster, endure more injuries; her bones were thicker and her height dwarfed most Fenthri. After being on Nova, she knew she was built more like a Dragon than one of her own gray-skinned race.
Arianna looked at the line that ran around her wrist where the soft blue skin of her hands met her natural, steel-colored flesh. These hands had tried to dismantle her world. She would use those same hands to be that man’s downfall—to annihilate all who sought to oppress Loom.
The door to the deck opened.
“Am I taking your spot?” Will asked, from where he hovered on the threshold.
“Yes.” Arianna turned her eyes forward, pointedly ignoring the child.
“Sorry about that.” He clearly wasn’t sorry, and sat down next to her. Will drew his heavy coat tighter around him, pulling up the collar to shield his face from the wind that whipped around them. “How are you not freezing to death out here?”
“If it’s too cold for you, perhaps you should return indoors?”
“I just may.”
Victory, Arianna thought.
“I’ll wait just long enough to lose him.” Will peered over the window ledge and looking into the upper deckhouse before ducking down again.
“Okay, I’ll bite.” Wasn’t as if she had anything else to do. “Lose who?”
“Vicar Willard. The old man just won’t shut up about how to make the engine run more efficiently.”
Arianna laughed. “Oh, to be young and stupid—”
“Hey!”
“—and not capitalize on the opportunity to learn from a vicar.” Arianna adjusted her goggles. Granted, she had some mixed feelings about Vicar Willard, but she was allowed—they had history.
“At first I did.” Will was instantly defensive. “But he corrected everything.”
“That’s because everything in this rig is wrong.”
“No, it’s not. It runs just fine, thank you,” the boy insisted.
“It could be better and you know it.” He made it too easy for her to push right on his soft spots. “You’ve been away from the Ravens’ Guild proper for a while. Getting sloppy, Will.”
“Sloppy? You’re one to talk.” Will breathed on his hands, looking out at the magic discharge. “Thought you were supposed to be some great White Wraith, master thief, super sneaky.”
Arianna arched her eyebrows, not even dignifying him with a response.
“I overheard you and Florence. I know what you gave her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Arianna looked him in the eye, challenging him to call her on her bluff.
To her frustration, he did. “Sure. Well, then I heard some other Arianna through a crack in a wall talking to some other Florence about some other copy of a ledger she made of something she stole in Ter.3 before leaving the five-tiered hall.”
“You were sent to spy on me?” Arianna mentally cursed herself for not inspecting more carefully the rooms surrounding her laboratory.
“Louie likes to know what’s going on.”
“That he does,” she agreed, training her expression to be void of emotion. “Too bad any reports he gets would be from a bored Raven with an overactive imagination.”
“Be careful, Ari. I wasn’t the first and won’t be the last.”
“The irony of you telling me that.” She’d been in dangerous situations longer than he’d been alive.
“Fine, ignore me.” Will shrugged. “Just saying that if it had been anyone else in Louie’s crew, you would’ve been outed.”
“Anyone else? Including Helen?” Arianna wonder
ed if she was hearing between his words correctly.
“Helen has her eyes on inheriting all of Louie’s operations. She’ll do anything to suck up to him.” Will had the tone of a friend who’d been chapped by some rather cold treatment.
“Why are you telling me this?” Helen and Will were a matched set. In no world could she imagine Will doing anything that would separate them.
“Because when she does inherit Louie’s kingdom, we’ll need a champion. I hear he has a pretty good one he’s been working with. Don’t want to see Helen burn any bridges we may need to drive over.”
Arianna snorted with laughter at the idea of taking orders from either of the children. But still, fair was fair. The warning he gave her was valuable, almost adult-like, and she appreciated it. “Play your cards right, and maybe you’ll be so lucky. If you can pay.”
“The business is pretty lucrative.” Will glanced through the window into the deck cabin.
“Have you heard anything else?” Arianna asked when they both confirmed no one was observing their clandestine meeting.
“Anything else?”
She didn’t know if he was being coy, or just stupid. “Why did Louie want the ledger in the first place?”
Will’s mouth turned into a frown. “I don’t really know. But I know he speaks to someone on Nova with the red-eared one, Adam.”
Red ears. Arianna’s instincts went off again as they had the first time, apprehensive at anything that resembled Rok.
“Do you know who?”
“That’s all I know . . . for now.”
“For now?”
“Like I said, I want to work with you.” Will shrugged again. Arianna didn’t know what she’d done to endear herself to the boy, but she wasn’t going to challenge it. The fact that he hadn’t gone to Louie—or at least claimed he hadn’t—was good faith enough. “Except, can we please do this in the future where it’s not freezing? I think I’ll brave the vicar and his corrections over losing my fingers.”
“It’s not that cold.”
“Ari, my fingers are turning blue.”
Before she could even comment on where, when, why, or how he thought it was acceptable to refer to her as “Ari,” Will had pulled open the heavy door to the top-deck cabin and disappeared within. She looked back down at her own hands and realized she wouldn’t be able to tell if her fingers turned blue.
Even out of his element, Louie could still be a problem . . . She needed to tread carefully and learn what game he was really playing.
It was, in total, a two-day ride from Ter.0 to Ter.3, thanks to Arianna’s contributions with magic, Will and Willard working together on improving the engine, and Helen’s keen insights on charting their course.
Thick palm fronds branched out overtop each other. Stronger trees that preferred dryer climates quickly disappeared as the land became more marshy and wet. The bogs in the forests to the south of Garre held dark waters, caged by tree roots.
Garre itself was known as the clockwork city.
Tethered by her cabling and winch box to the heavy door behind her, Arianna crouched atop the cabin roof for the best vantage the airship could offer. She dug her knees and fingers into the metal grooves for stability, but the wind threatened to rip her away. The city of her childhood grew from a speck in the distance to the towering mechanical marvel that rivaled any in the world.
The capital of the Rivets was entirely the guild hall. There were no other elements to the city itself; there were no visitors without specific business for the Rivets.
Even late in the year, humidity crept beneath her coat and made her hair cling to her neck. It was an omnipresent citizen of Garre, rising up from the marshes under the city’s stilts. A mechanical haven built atop water, destined to fight an endless war against rust and corrosion. It was the worst place possible for the Rivets to have attempted to build, and it was all the more perfect for the fact.
The airship banked and began its descent.
Closer up, the movements of the guild could be seen. Slowly rotating upper walkways ticked around cores like odd-faced clocks, counting down to something unknown. Steam billowed in jets, piped from the depths of the all-metal guild hall. Giant gears showed their teeth proudly on the outside of walls, perpetually churning against equally sized counterparts within.
Arianna had never seen her guild from the air before, and it was quite the sight. There was an undeniably breathtaking quality to its spectrum of metallic colors and carefully constructed pathways and structures that formed one tight, singular city. A city that changed before her own eyes on their descent, as walkways moved with the groaning of gears and various windows and doorways opened and closed.
It was also a vantage by which she could clearly see the remnants of the Dragons’ attack—wounds that could not be healed with the limited hands available. An entire wing seemed to have been hit hard, the metal jagged and oddly bent, pulled apart by blasts that Arianna could still imagine the echoes of.
The whole of Garre was spotted with such damages, but it persisted.
The airship looped three times before finally finding a landing that would fit their wingspan. As soon as they touched down, Arianna leapt from the roof, tumbling into the metal below with a clang. She sprinted for the doorway into the guild.
Locked.
This was not like the usual locks she faced. She was back in the Rivets’ Guild. Here, everything was designed as a challenge—a mental puzzle where success often hung opposite bodily harm. Right now, she suspected that harm took the form of a collapsing platform beneath their feet if she couldn’t open the door in time.
Arianna ran her fingers along the lock. There were a series of pictures and numerals on its spinners. She could either solve the puzzle, or break her way in. The Arianna of the past would have delighted in the former . . .
But she was too old for games.
Arianna unclipped and unrolled a bag of tools from her belt, quickly selecting a narrow, flat-headed screwdriver. Fortunately for her . . . the designer of this particular lock expected her to revel in solving the puzzle, not dismantling the thing entirely. Its seams were well exposed and screws easy to access. Arianna had the box apart in a mere minute, manually unlatching the heavy curved bolt that affixed the lock to the door.
The room within crackled with electricity. Arianna could hear it humming in the wires that draped from the ceiling like moss off swamp trees. She flipped a switch next to her, funneling that energy into a bulb in the center of the room. Arianna blinked at the light. The last time she had been at the guild, electricity was new and only in a few areas.
She looked around the room, finding a series of levers on one of the side walls, nestled between two bookcases.
“Lock, raise, release . . .” She read the labels scribbled on each of the handles. Arianna tugged on the one labeled lock. The release lever raised slightly in reply, a soft click engaging it in place.
“You’re much faster than I,” a weathered voice spoke from the doorway.
“I should be.” Arianna turned to face Willard, rolling up her tools. “You have a good fifteen years on me, old man.”
“You’re back in the hall; you’d think you’d show a little more respect to your vicar.”
“Just honoring what would’ve been the wishes of my Master.” Arianna couldn’t fight a small smile at the idea of being back in the Rivets’ Guild, but her face fell at the thought of Master Oliver. He had never been able to return.
“Your work alone honors him.”
Arianna didn’t have a chance to comment one way or another, for the door to the inside of the hall opened, revealing a man with a filled bolt and wrench tattoo on his cheek. The journeyman crossed his forearms in an X—a gesture of respect within the guild, for the vicar. Willard promptly settled them in what would become their new quarters.
“Should they require anything, see that they receive it, within reason,” Willard said after Louie and his crew had been closed away behind the doors
of their new rooms. Arianna appreciated the vicar’s foresight to add the final caveat. “And go tell Charles to meet me in my office in one hour.”
“Understood, Vicar.” The journeyman departed promptly.
“This way, Arianna.” Willard motioned for her to follow him.
She ran her fingertips along the metal walls that encased her. They pulsed with the omnipresent movement of the hall itself. Behind every wall there were gears churning, shifting, pushing something into a new design. Every panel could be removed and tinkered with, and every Rivet was encouraged to leave their mark by doing so.
“What is it?” Willard paused, noticing her palm flat against the wall.
“It’s unlike Holx,” she observed. “The Ravens’ Guild was so quiet from everyone being gone . . . How many people are still here?”
“I believe about fifty journeymen stayed behind, and I left one Master, Master Charles, to oversee them.”
And in case something happened to you, Arianna finished mentally. “Nearly empty, and the guild still moves, still lives.”
Vicar Willard outstretched his gnarled and age-spotted hand, placing it next to hers. “And it will continue to tick, long after we all are dead.”
That much was true.
As they continued, the paths became more and more familiar. It was like an old toolkit, where every wrench and screwdriver was remembered the moment it was seen once more. Ghosts were their only company in the empty halls.
“Wait, Willard, my room is that way.” Arianna pointed down a hall at one of the forks.
“Your room has long since been given away.” Willard progressed forward, and Arianna did the same, ignoring the stab of pain she felt at his words. She knew there hadn’t been a home for her to come back to for some time, but to hear it articulated so clearly wasn’t easy. “And even if it hadn’t been, you no longer belong in that wing.”
