Terra Nova

by Shane Arbuthnott

  The fug in the air here was thick. Molly could taste grease, soot, burned things. She felt grit between her tongue and the top of her mouth.

  Up above, the floating docks blocked out the moonlight, leaving the area below to be lit only by a few soot-encrusted igneous lamps. But more lights were soon brought in and placed around the small wooden stage they had constructed at the foot of the umbilical. One of them was turned on, and a beam of light swung across the rooftops as they positioned it. Molly ducked below the lip of the building where she sat, hoping her dark clothes blended with the shingles.

  The light finally settled on the center of the empty stage. Soon, Molly knew, Brighid would appear to begin her speech.

  You’ll know the right time to step in, Theresa had told her when they all left to take their places. Trust your instincts.

  But my instincts are telling me to run, Molly thought now. Not so helpful.

  “I always hate this part,” Ariel said softly beside Molly. “This moment on the cusp of greater things. The waiting is almost worse than being in the midst of it all.”

  Molly nodded. “Me too. It’s weird, because I know once it starts I’ll be in constant danger, and so will everyone else. But I still wish it would just start. Even if…”

  “Even if we fail, and Arkwright brings us all down?”

  Molly nodded. “I’m sorry. I know that’s selfish, just to want it done.”

  “There have been times, during the past century, when I have wished the same. That I could slip and let Arkwright finally do away with me, simply so the struggle might be over. I have been fighting a long, long time. And you are only fifteen, but you have spent a year and a half of your short life engaged in this revolution. It is selfish, true, but there is nothing wrong with selfish thoughts. Sometimes they provide good counsel. But those thoughts must be tempered with more generous ones, lest we follow the path of Arkwright and forget that the world is filled with beings of equal significance to ourselves.”

  Ariel fell silent, and Molly sat staring at the reflection of her light in the small black stones in the shingles.

  “I never said thank you,” Molly said.

  “For what?”

  “For believing in me. For showing me Haviland’s journal and thinking I might understand. For bringing me in to all of this. Letting me do something better. You’re the one who really started this, not me.”

  Ariel was quiet for a time, her face turned upward. Molly looked up too. The sky was mostly clear, but Molly knew that somewhere up there Legerdemain was waiting, up so high that he was indistinguishable from the stars, where the air was so thin it could barely sustain him. She could feel him, his nervousness increasing her own.

  “Identifying who began something like this is like picking out the stone that began an avalanche. It began somewhere, true enough—maybe with me, maybe with the first spirits Arkwright captured for his own use—but once it well and truly begins, we are all just stones moving together. One stone rolling down the mountain changes nothing unless others move with it.” Ariel moved in closer. “So I should thank you too, Molly. For being my second stone.”

  There was a noise from below: applause. A man Molly did not recognize, in a black suit and a bow tie, stepped onto the stage. A small crew had set up an amplifier in front of him to carry his voice across the square. The entire area at the base of the docks had filled with people. At the front of the crowd were dozens of reporters, some with notebooks in hand, others with the black boxes of cameras strapped to their chest. Most of the people looked like sailors and harvesters, the laborers who fed Terra Nova and all the other industries within it by trapping and selling spirits.

  “Are you ready?” Ariel whispered.

  “No,” Molly said. “I never am though. But here we go.”

  “People of Terra Nova!” the man shouted, and the amplifier in front of him sent his voice rippling through the air all around them. Molly guessed it would be audible even dozens of blocks away. “You have come tonight to hear firsthand of the terrible downfall of the Stout family. Over one hundred years ago, when the great explorer Haviland Stout discovered the scourge of spirits and taught us how to protect ourselves from it, he set the world on a path that has changed life as we know it. What he could not foresee was his own kin falling under the pernicious influence of the spirits.

  “But you are not here to listen to me tell you the tale, right?” There were murmurs of agreement from the crowd. “You are here because the one survivor of the disaster, the last unpoisoned descendant of the Stout line, is here to tell you, to warn you, of the way the spirits can find their way inside the minds of even the most noble families. Her story is heart wrenching, and I hope you listen well. Here she is, folks. Brighid Stout of Haviland Industries!”

  As he swept his hand back, Brighid climbed the steps to the stage and emerged into the light. She waved to the crowd. The man who had announced her disappeared into the shadows as she took his place.

  Molly’s breath caught in her throat. Her sister looked like another person. Her skin was pale but smooth and clean, every scar and pockmark smoothed away under a layer of makeup. Her hair hung in ringlets around her face, not tied back the way Molly had always seen it. She looked like someone pulled from the stages in London, someone dreamy and glamorous. Not a real person at all.

  “Hello,” she said, the amplifier carrying her voice. The simple familiarity of her voice warred with the strangeness of her appearance.

  “Thank you for coming here tonight,” she went on. “My story is important, now more than ever. Six nights ago my sister Molly, and with her my father and brothers, struck another factory, freeing the spirits and killing dozens, some of them children.” Molly’s legs tensed, but she felt Ariel’s cool arm around her shoulders.

  “Not yet,” the spirit whispered. “Bear it a little while longer.”

  Molly forced herself to relax.

  “We do not know when they will strike again, but we know they will. We must always be alert. At this point they do not care about the human lives they ruin. The spirits have turned them too far for that, as I can attest. The last time I saw my sister was aboard the Gloria Mundi, where she released the spirits to slaughter the crew and left me to die.”

  It felt like something was crawling up Molly’s throat—a bundle of words she couldn’t say, knotted together, blocking her breath. It rose until she could feel it sitting heavy on her tongue.

  Her sister went on, outlining Molly’s flaws and mistakes as Molly had heard her do on the projections and the radio. She mixed truth and fiction expertly, spinning a story that made more sense than the truth.

  Molly tried not to listen to the words as her sister went on, playing their family’s pain like a fiddle for the audience. “Not yet,” she whispered to herself. “Not yet.”

  “I did everything I could to keep Molly away from the spirits,” Brighid said, and Molly nearly shouted in rage. “When she was young, I sang her to sleep. When she grew older, I taught her her knots and read books to her. But she was always drawn away to the engine, until my father made the biggest mistake of his life and promoted her to be our engineer, against my warnings.”

  Molly exhaled long and hard, until there wasn’t a scrap of air left in her lungs. You liar, she thought. How can you say all of that? You, who were hardly a part of the family, even years before you left. Taught me my knots? The ones no one would teach me, so I had to learn them myself by watching the deckhands? Read me books? How could you have through that damn door you always kept closed?

  “Anger alone will not persuade anyone,” Ariel whispered. “Remember, they need to see you, see you are not who they say you are.”

  Molly breathed in and out through her nose and nodded.

  “Despite everything, I loved her,” Brighid continued. “How could I not, when I remembered holding her in my arms, changing her diapers, feeding her milk?” Here she paused again. “I loved her, and it blinded me to how bad things were. But now, s
he’s…” She sobbed and turned away from the stage. Molly couldn’t tell how genuine the show of grief was. She wasn’t sure she cared.

  “Now, Ariel,” she whispered and began to hum.

  Ariel bent the wind around her, sending it in twisting patterns across Molly’s mouth to carry the sound of her voice across the area just as the amplifier did for Brighid’s. Molly’s hum grew louder, and people began looking around for the source. As Molly stepped forward to the lip of the roof, some in the crowd caught sight of her. Some screamed. “It’s Molly! Molly Stout is here!” Others simply stared. Molly glanced down and saw the cameras turning toward her. She kept humming, the tune ragged and faltering in her throat. As it continued, Brighid finally looked up, eyes wide, staring directly at Molly.

  “That’s the song you used to sing me,” Molly said. “Or the best I can do. I’m not much of a singer, I know, and I don’t know the words. But I remember you singing it to me, on the deck, sitting against the mast.”

  Molly’s heart was pounding in her chest, but her hands were still at her sides. She was vaguely aware of the huge crowd below her, but all she could see was her sister’s face, the light of the lamps reflected in her eyes. Her face was different, and her hair, but the eyes were the same as ever—dark and deep, like a pool run through with moss.

  “I missed that song, when you stopped singing it to me.”

  “I didn’t know you remembered,” Brighid said, her soft voice carried by the amplifier. There were people swarming between Brighid and Molly now, some kind of security guards, but they didn’t have a way to the roof, and Brighid didn’t move from the stage. “You were so little then.”

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t remember. But I do.”

  “I didn’t know how much you could remember, once the spirits got into your head,” Brighid said, speaking louder. “Once they turned you into—”

  “That’s not how it works, Bridge. I’m me. I’m Molly.” She could hear her own name echoing off the walls of distant buildings, but she focused through the sound, the bright light of Ariel’s winds, refusing to shift her attention. “The spirits got into my head right enough, but just in the same way you got into my head when you sang that song. I’m still me.”

  “The little girl I knew would never have released a powerful spirit on the—”

  “You never knew me!” Molly roared, the anger in her chest blazing up. “When you knew me, I was a baby! Barely a person at all! And once I grew up, you closed the door on me!”

  “Because I—” Brighid began, but Molly wouldn’t be stopped.

  “And when the door wasn’t enough, you left the bloody ship! Abandoned your family, your father, me!”

  “Because it wasn’t safe!” Brighid shouted back. “Because I needed to save myself from you! If I hadn’t left the ship—”

  “You left us a long time before you left the ship, Bridge.”

  Molly’s eyes flickered to the side, and for a moment she felt dizzy. There were so many faces, so many eyes. Molly had expected people to flee when she appeared, afraid of the dreaded Molly Stout. But no, they were all just standing there, watching her, waiting for what would happen next. If she focused on the crowd, she would freeze up. She pulled her eyes away. She was here for Brighid. Brighid, who was still staring up at her, looking lost and afraid in a way Molly recognized all too well. Molly’s anger suddenly drained out of her, leaving only sadness in its place.

  “I mean, I know our family was hard. I was born, and Ma died, and Da spent fourteen years sinking deeper into his bottles. And we weren’t…we weren’t right. It hurt a lot of the time. But still…

  “You know Da hasn’t had a drink in over a year? It got uglier for a while. When you left, when we lost the ship. But then Da stopped, and you weren’t there for that. And our brothers. Kier is hurt right now, but he got hurt saving people, working on something we all believe in. Rory, too, who used to skive off while the rest of us kept the ship running. He’s so brave, Bridge, you wouldn’t even believe it. He’s kept me sane better than anyone. You missed all of that.”

  “Kier?” Brighid said. “Is he…” Then her eyes flicked to the crowd, and Molly saw her jaw set in a way that was so familiar it ached. “So you’re getting our family killed now too. I knew you would eventually.”

  Molly took a deep, shuddering breath. “I never forced him. He wanted to, and now he’s hurt. I don’t want that. I want to bloody stop all this so no one else gets hurt. But the people you work for now, that’s how they power their machines. On pain, on lives stolen from—”

  The winds in front of her shivered and broke apart, and Molly’s voice was suddenly normal again and too small to reach her sister. She turned to Ariel, who was grasping at the winds as they dissolved. Molly looked up and saw a dark patch in the wider streams of wind above, growing steadily, a silver sword just visible around the curve of a black hull.

  She looked around and saw dark vans moving in at the edges of the crowd, Disposal agents spilling out and heading straight for Molly.

  “Okay, it’s happening,” Molly said. “Ariel—”

  But Ariel was already rising into the air, her light growing until Molly couldn’t look anymore. Her cool blue glow illuminated the entire area around the umbilical, and the eyes of the crowd turned away. The light only lasted a moment, but everyone had seen Ariel’s signal. Dozens of red glimmers danced out into the crowd, heading toward the stage. These were the spirits of the lamps in Molly’s sanatorium, who had come flocking back at Ariel’s call. And behind them came more spirits, and men and women pushing their way into the crowd. Molly tried to find her father, but she couldn’t see him. She looked down in time to catch Rory, though, jumping out the open window of the building below Molly’s feet and racing for the crowd of reporters at the front of the stage. The myriad threads of their plan were unspooling in front of her, and she couldn’t track them all.

  “Molly!” a voice shouted from above her, and Molly turned upward. There were people in the air, people in black with dark helmets, gliding silently toward her. “Molly!” the voice repeated, and she realized it was Ariel, who dodged back as one of the airborne Disposal agents swung something metallic at her. “Go! Run!”

  Right. Molly looked back out at the crowd, at the agents already grappling with sanatorium patients, the free spirits creating ripples of panic as they surged through the crowd—igneous and aetheric spirits skipping above people’s heads, terric and aqueous spirits wending between their feet. There were so many, but there were more Disposal agents than Molly had ever seen, more than she knew existed. And above it all, two more airships pierced through the bright winds. They’ve got three of those ships? Molly felt panic rising—it was all too big, and happening too fast.

  Focus, Molly. This doesn’t change your part of the plan. You need to distract the airborne agents and draw them to the south. And if Arkwright is in an airship, like we suspect, then… She shook her head. No. One thing at a time. You just need to run and not get caught.

  One of the dark-clad agents alighted beside her and grabbed for her arm. She jumped away, running along the edge of the roof. She could see winds around her, but they were all cut to shreds, nothing she could use. She could hear more agents landing behind her. She sped up, planting her foot at the very edge of the roof and leaping across the alley.

  The next roof came at her fast, and she rolled and landed back on her feet. To her left, the first Disposal airship had descended so low she might have been able to jump and touch its hull, and the other two were following close behind. Spotlights flared on their prows, fixing on her. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the agents with their antigravity packs lifting off from the roof, giving chase. This wasn’t going to be easy without the wind to help her. Just run, Molly, she told herself. And she did.

  The agents were at her heels, and the spotlights never lost her. But Molly ran from roof to roof, never stopping, the shingles rolling beneath her heels in a blur. The agents were faster than her
, but they weren’t as nimble—once they kicked off, they tended to keep going in the same direction. So Molly constantly changed direction, moving up and down levels, traversing roofs and gutters, away from and toward the base of the docks, never letting them keep moving in a straight line.

  As she clambered up a gutter pipe and onto a wide, flat roof, a blaze of blue light broke through the clouds, and the thrill of flight surged inside her through her connection to Legerdemain. He’s coming down. That must mean the fighting is getting serious. She looked out over the square and saw that the Disposal agents on the ground had brought out weapons, wide-mouthed things that spewed clouds of iron filings into the air. A few got shots off, but as Legerdemain descended he brought a wide swath of wind that poured across the crowd, sending the iron filings flying back.

  Legerdemain stopped in the air, beating his wings to keep the wind flowing, to keep the weapons from cutting down the spirits who were even now converging on the journalists and, more important, their cameras. But she also saw people stretched out on the ground, people who were meant to be keeping Disposal away from Molly and the spirits. And yet, despite the fallen allies, there were more people fighting than Molly had known they had. Are those the Unionists? I didn’t think they wanted to be involved in this part. She knew Ariel was in charge of coordinating the efforts on the ground, and it wasn’t her job to worry about the others, but she couldn’t stop herself from watching.

  Molly felt fingers on her arm, and she ducked. An agent sailed past, landing a few feet away. She doubled back.

  Just as she leapt off the roof, she felt a hand on her heel. It knocked her sideways, and she fell short of the next roof, barely catching herself on the gutter. Someone landed just above her, and a dark helmet bent down.

  “Come now, you must be getting tired,” said Howarth. He was breathing hard but still eerily calm. Molly glanced down and then let go.

  She landed on the awning of a storefront and broke through to land on the cobblestones below. With a grunt she got to her feet. She looked up at the docks floating far above, trying to judge her position by the jagged shape of their outline. I’m on the south side now. I’m almost in position. If I can—