by Lucy Saxon
‘You don’t get it! You’d have to have seen it from my point of view to understand, but I promise you, it wasn’t that simple. I’ll probably sell all this when everything is over. Keep a few things for sentimental value, maybe, but … most of it is crap.’ Fox stared at her incredulously, and she shrugged, looking away in embarrassment. ‘Let’s just get the kids settled so I can guide Matt and Ben’s group through. Come on.’
Mentally running through a list of rooms in her house, she decided that the upstairs living room was probably the best place to house so many people. Not bothering to kick her boots off – what did she care now if she got mud on the carpets? – she led the way upstairs, smiling to herself at the awestruck whispers of the kids as they followed.
‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ she told them, pushing open the living-room door. ‘You’re safe here.’
‘But it’s government,’ one of the older boys retorted warily.
‘It’s safe,’ Cat repeated. ‘No one who works in government will be coming in here, I promise.’ She turned to Fox, running a hand through her hair. ‘I need to go back and meet the other group. Are you all right to get this lot settled?’
‘Of course. Stay safe, OK?’ Cat grinned at his concerned frown, stretching up on her toes to kiss him and lingering longer than she’d intended.
‘I’ll be fine. You saw how empty it is out there. I won’t be long.’ Pulling away from him reluctantly, she slipped out of the room and down the stairs, heading out through the back door. She locked it behind her, pocketing the key.
It didn’t take her long to get back to the tram tunnel, and she leaned against the wall, listening for footsteps. She wished she’d taken Fox’s pocket watch; she had no idea how long it had been since they’d left the ship. How long were Matt and Ben giving her?
A breath of relief escaped her lips as she spotted Ben’s curly hair approaching from the alley opposite, and she stepped out of her hiding spot far enough for him to see her. He grinned, ushering his group of children towards her. Matt was bringing up the rear with a little girl on his back. Cat recognised her as the one with the twisted ankle.
‘Blimey, I thought they’d filled all these in,’ he remarked, eyeing the crumbling brick tunnel.
‘No, they just fenced them over. Bricking in was too expensive,’ Cat replied, hurrying the children through the gap. ‘Come on, it’s not far.’
The path back to her house was just as empty as it had been the first time, and Cat kept her fingers crossed it would stay that way.
‘Take the kids up to the others,’ Ben told her. ‘I’ll go back and direct the rest. Matt can stay with the kids – you and Fox need to start snooping. The sooner you can find something, the sooner we can get moving.’
‘Are you sure?’ Cat checked, lips pursed. She knew the route better than Ben; she didn’t want him getting caught.
‘I’ll be fine, trust me.’ Matt reached out to clasp his friend’s shoulder, ruining his serious expression by ruffling his hair.
‘Hurry back, and be safe.’ Ben disappeared through the back door, and Cat led Matt and the children up to the living room. Pausing in the doorway, her eyebrows rose.
‘I see Sam found you, then,’ she remarked drily, unable to hold in a snigger at seeing Fox pinned to the wall by one mechanical hand, a blade protruding from Samuel’s other hand which was positioned at Fox’s throat. ‘Samuel, let him go, he’s safe.’ Samuel immediately released Fox, blade retreating into his wrist.
‘My apologies, Mistress Catherine. He claimed to be a friend of yours, but I do not take chances.’ Sam’s voice was even grittier than it had been the last time, and it made her wince. Poor thing needed some serious maintenance.
‘Don’t apologise. You did exactly what you’re programmed to.’
‘I didn’t know mecha servants doubled as security guards,’ Fox remarked, rubbing his throat. ‘You named it?’
‘Of course I did,’ Cat retorted. ‘I couldn’t just call him “mecha”. Come on, Ben’s bringing the other group through, Matt’s going to look after this lot. We need to go to my father’s office.’ Matt was already getting the children settled with the others, ignoring the mecha in the room completely. He’d probably seen them before when he’d worked at Tinker’s.
‘Right. Let’s see if we can find anything about this skyship.’ Still regarding Samuel with distrust, Fox left the room at Cat’s side, as she turned to head up another flight of stairs. ‘This house is ridiculous. There were just the three of you living here?’
‘Yes. We could have fitted in another twenty, I know. But you get used to it, sort of.’
Cat led Fox through the winding corridors, right to the other side, where her father’s office was, several doors away from her mother’s bedroom. She faltered outside the bedroom door, wishing she could stick her head inside and see her mother resting there, see the smile on her face and sit and talk with her one last time. Pushing the memories away, she carried on, stopping outside the door to her father’s office. As she’d expected, it was locked, but she easily hacked the lock, pushing the door wide open.
Fox let out a low whistle, his eyes instantly drawn to the monstrously large desk in the centre of the room. She hated the decor in her father’s office; it was disgustingly extravagant, to the point of garish.
Ignoring the bulging filing cabinets along one wall, knowing they were full of useless business meeting transcriptions and bills and receipts, she went straight for the locked desk drawers, taking the spare key clipped to the underside of the desk beneath a secret panel. Unlocking all six drawers, she beckoned Fox to join her, pointing to the drawers on the other side of the desk from her.
‘Help me look,’ she instructed, already rifling through the top drawer. Now that she didn’t have to worry about her father coming back, she could be as messy as she liked in her search.
Most of what they found was information they knew already; blueprints of every level of the government compound, schematics for the mecha-human soldiers, and transcripts of conversations about Collecting the children and arranging for newscast crews to be sent out to film in the Greaves. However, there were also enough names written in the documents to condemn almost the entire upper level of government.
‘Nathaniel was clearly prepared for some pretty serious blackmail, then,’ Fox remarked, flicking through a journal full of scrawled writing. ‘He could get himself out of just about any accusation they could throw at him with all this evidence.’
‘And we can get an awful lot of people into some very serious accusations with it,’ Cat declared, piling the journals back into their drawers and locking them securely. They would need those later. ‘Still, there’s nothing in here that has anything about a location for the skyship.’ She growled in frustration, about to turn for the door and suggest looking elsewhere, when a memory came to the forefront of her mind. One of the few nights her father had left the door ajar, she’d peeked in to see him standing on a stool, pushing the portrait on the wall behind his desk back into place over something metallic. She’d never been tall enough to find out what it was. Of course!
‘Fox! Help me move the chair!’
The redhead gave her a confused look, but obliged, helping her shift the chair back from the desk, right up against the wall.
Cat pointed up at the portrait. ‘There’s something important behind that painting. I can’t reach it, but you can!’ she insisted, ushering him to stand on the chair. With his extra inches, he was able to shift the portrait aside. To his surprise, it swung right up, revealing a dark grey square of metal set into the wall, its face inset with enough mechanisms to lock the entire house down.
‘Wow. That’s one brute of a safe,’ Fox remarked, staring at it in awe.
Cat looked at him with raised eyebrows.
‘Can you crack it?’ she questioned, and he snorted.
‘Of course I can! Just give me a little while. This is some pretty sophisticated gear-work. And not the most comfortable
position to do it in either,’ he grumbled, leaning his knees against the back of the chair to brace himself. He pulled his tool kit from his pocket, eyeing the safe.
Cat hopped up to sit on the desk, her legs swinging absently. It was very odd being in her father’s office and not having to worry about him coming in at any moment and punishing her for intruding. Even more bizarre was having Fox in her father’s office; she didn’t think the room had ever seen someone so scruffy in its life.
‘Nathaniel didn’t skimp on the cash when he had this installed,’ Fox muttered, a thin gear wire clamped precariously between his teeth.
‘Nathaniel didn’t skimp on the cash with anything,’ Cat pointed out. ‘But with this level of security, it’s bound to contain something good. Fingers crossed, the information we need.’
She watched Fox work silently for several minutes, until finally she heard several quiet clicks in quick succession. Fox prodded the centre of one of the bottom gears with his wire, turning it gently, and to Cat’s delight, the rest of the gears moved with it, slowly shifting the four lock bars to the side. With one last groan of gears, the door popped forward a fraction, and Fox dug his fingers into the groove at the edge to pull it the rest of the way open. Cat was impressed at the sheer thickness of the safe’s door. The entire country could sink to the bottom of the ocean, and that safe would probably still survive.
‘What have we got, then?’ Fox murmured under his breath, sticking his head into the safe. He pulled out several leather-bound journals that bulged with paper, passing them down to Cat. ‘Just those five, the rest of the safe is empty,’ he told her, dropping down unceremoniously into the chair.
‘Really?’ She’d thought there would have been something else in there; keys, a weapon, some ridiculously expensive jewel or heirloom.
She passed two of the five journals to Fox, keeping the other three and picking up one from the top of the pile. Scan reading, she ignored most of it; these were her father’s personal journals, and mainly consisted of his insane ramblings about what he would do when the country was finally his. Thomas Gale’s name turned up several times in passing, which didn’t surprise her.
‘Here we go!’ Fox cried, jumping out of the chair to shove an open journal under her nose. He pointed to a paragraph of cramped writing that took Cat a little while to decipher. ‘Read there,’ he prompted urgently, and her eyes darted across the page, growing wider as she read her father’s writing.
‘The skyship is by Hebris! Are they mad? That’s right next to the Stormlands! They could be sucked into a hurricane any moment!’ she exclaimed incredulously. The Stormlands were known to be impenetrable, running all the way along the world in a continuous storm. No one had ever crossed them, and it was dangerous to even fly near them; the few people who had dared never came back, whether they approached from either the Anglyan side or the Dalivian side.
Fox hummed, his lips tightening.
‘Obviously they’ve got a very skilled pilot to keep them hovering around the edges. And you have to admit, it’s a smart idea. No one would be stupid enough to go that far out to the Stormlands, so they’d never be found. Unfortunately for them, no matter how good their pilot is, ours is better,’ he said. ‘Ben’s been out there before. And their ship is bound to be bigger than ours, so they’ll have a much harder time trying to get away if they spot us. With luck, the cloud cover should be enough for us to sneak up on them, if we’re careful,’ he explained.
‘We should take these to Harry,’ Cat suggested, gesturing at the journals. ‘Nathaniel has written about all the weak spots in government, people to bribe, people who would let anything pass by them if it was suggested by the right person. It’s practically a guide to bringing the country to its knees.’
Fox nodded in agreement.
‘We’ll take them back to the ship with us. Are we done here, then?’
‘One moment,’ she said, rushing back to the desk and pulling open the desk drawers. Taking out all of the material her father had gathered, she passed it up to Fox to transfer to the safe. When everything was securely inside, he shut the door, seeing the mechanisms automatically wind back into place and lock themselves.
‘There,’ she declared in satisfaction. ‘Now we know it’s all safe, just in case.’ She doubted anyone would come by the house and manage to get past the swarm of children, but should the worst happen, it was good to be prepared.
Fox held out a hand to her. ‘Let’s go,’ he murmured, tugging her towards the door.
Chapter 25
The living room was full to bursting when Cat and Fox returned, and Cat smiled with relief at seeing everyone had made it across safely. Mary looked more comfortable than Cat had seen her before; of course, she probably knew the house almost as well as Cat herself did.
‘What did you find?’ Harry asked, standing as soon as he saw them.
‘The skyship is over Hebris, just on the edge of the Stormlands. Reckless, but clever,’ Fox told him, glancing at Matt and Ben listening in intently.
‘Doable,’ Ben assured them confidently. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve been out that far, but if we have the right weather conditions, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.’ He grinned. ‘Either way, I like a challenge. Did you find anything else?’
‘A lot of blackmail material. Nathaniel was well prepared. If he was going down, he was taking everyone else with him,’ Cat said with a frown. ‘I’ve locked most of it in his safe – we can get it after we’ve found the skyship and hand it over to the foreign authorities. That way they can hold a trial by proxy for most of the government, especially if we’ve got Mary to oversee things.’
A trial by proxy was only performed when the country itself didn’t have enough of an established legal system to perform a trial themselves, and had to call in foreign judges and jurors to conduct the trial for them. She doubted there would be enough people left in government after the arrests to conduct a full trial.
Passing one of the journals to Harry, Fox flipped it open to the page telling the ship’s location, watching the older man frown.
‘We’re supposed to get rain for the next few days, so I can’t see the Stormlands being the most welcoming place in the world. Still, if we set course tonight, we can fly through the night and get there as the sun rises. If all goes well.’
‘Are we ready to leave tonight? What if the foreign authorities don’t arrive in time, or even at all? We’ll be awfully vulnerable without military help,’ Alice pointed out, concerned.
‘It needs to be done as soon as possible,’ Cat insisted. ‘The longer we leave it, the more likely the government is to discover we know what they’re up to. If they find another place to hide before we can bring their skyship down, all our efforts will be for nothing.’
‘The lass is right,’ Matt piped up. ‘We need to get going as soon as we can.’
‘We have to feed the sprogs first,’ Alice said, looking at the children. ‘Is there enough food in the house, Cat?’
‘There should be plenty.’ Cat bit her lip, a thought coming to her. ‘Mary, would you mind showing Alice to the pantry? I assume you remember where everything is?’ Mary nodded, getting gracefully to her feet. ‘I’m going to grab a few things from my room, if we have time.’
‘We’ve got time,’ said Fox. ‘I’ll come with you. I have to admit, I’m curious to see what your room is like.’
‘It’s this way,’ she directed, heading for the smaller, metal spiral staircase that led up to her bedroom. A grin was on her face as she opened the door, and she stopped. Fox came to a halt at her shoulder, peering over the top of her head.
‘Impressive,’ he murmured, and Cat stepped forward, entering the room.
It looked as if she’d just popped downstairs for a glass of milk before bed; her things were still arranged neatly on her shelf, and there was a pile of folded laundry on her chair waiting for her to put in her dresser.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Fox.
She cross
ed the room to sit on the padded bench at the bottom of the large window, staring out over the city. Everything looked just the same as it had when she’d last looked through the window, the evening before she’d run away. And yet, everything was so very different …
‘I thought Nathaniel would have had Samuel pack up my things. Or sold them off, even. I never thought he would keep them.’ She didn’t know why he’d kept them, and she didn’t want to know, but she was glad he had.
Fox moved to stand beside her, and she shifted so she could lean against him. ‘So how does it feel to have a common boy all alone in your fancy bedroom?’ he drawled playfully, making her giggle, her pulse picking up at his words.
‘How do you know this is the first time?’ she retorted, trying to match his teasing tone. He winked at her, pushing a lock of hair out of her eyes. Cat’s breath caught in her throat.
‘I’ll be ever so upset if it’s not,’ he said mock-solemnly, his voice low and eyes bright as they met hers. Cat’s lips curved in a smile, his fingers feeling hot where they rested on her neck.
‘I’d best spare your feelings, then, and stay quiet.’ He growled at her words, though he was smiling, and as he leaned in closer Cat’s eyes caught sight of the clock on her wall. They didn’t have time for this!
Fox clearly sensed her abrupt change in mood and followed her gaze, his smile faltering as he came to the same conclusion. He coughed awkwardly, stepping away.
‘So what did you want to bring with you? You’ll need a bag to pack it in,’ he reminded her, tugging her gently away from the window ledge.
She opened her wardrobe, dragging a large canvas duffle bag from a drawer in the bottom, leaving it open on the floor and looking at her racks of clothes. Most of them were disgusting: gaudy, hideous outfits that her father had insisted she wear to formal occasions or meetings, but there were a few outfits she actually liked that were too obviously government to pack last time she’d come.
‘Is that what the government classes as fashionable?’ Fox remarked with a raised eyebrow.
