The design of the city had integrated Landships almost seamlessly. Broad avenues of green fields crisscrossed the city, large enough for the giant ships to reach their berth. Each ship had its own in the city, and looking out over it, Currency was full of rippling, shuddering color from their patchwork sails. Orange and red, purple and yellow, blues, greens, they looked like huge pieces of art fluttering in the wind. It was easy to see how Currency earned the nickname “City of Sails.”
As beautiful as it was, Holt didn’t pause to admire it, he only wanted to get away.
When the gangplank of the Wind Maker lowered, he and Max were the first off, leaving the others behind. All he could think about right now was getting back to Mira. Who knew how many days they had left before they were forced apart? The sad part was, it was a separation of their own design.
Mira couldn’t attend the test firing, she’d been pulled away to deal with some new flare-up regarding the Assembly and the White Helix, which was becoming more and more normal. The Helix had been honed in the Strange Lands as weapons to fight the invaders, and they were starting to get restless, and restless White Helix were a bad combination.
The Assembly, for their part, didn’t seem to take it personally. In fact, they rarely seemed to notice the hostility at all. Regardless, because Mira was the only one who could communicate with them, she was always brought in when things went south. That was Zoey’s last gift, the granting of one of her abilities to Mira, and as much as Holt didn’t like what that power was slowly doing to her, he saw its necessity, saw why Zoey had done what she’d done. Still, it was a steep price to pay.
“Hey, killer,” said a feminine, yet decidedly not soft voice, and Holt’s reaction to it was the same as always: apprehension mixed with warmth. That was the effect Ravan always had, in varying degrees.
Ravan was beautiful in a hard-edged way, olive skin and obsidian-black hair that trailed down her back. She wore black pants, a T-shirt, and a single utility belt across her waist. On her left wrist was the tattoo of an eight-pointed star, with four of its points colored in, the symbol of the Menagerie. On her right was a black raven, her namesake. All Menagerie took two tattoos when they joined, the star and one of their own choosing. Holt had a near-identical tattoo on his right wrist, though it had never been completed.
She waited for him ahead, near the gate that led into the crowded streets, smiling. Like everything about her, the smile was a contradiction. Warm, inviting, yet predatory.
Holt smiled back nonetheless. “Hi yourself.”
Max’s tail began to wag. Ravan knelt down and scratched the dog on the head, and Max put up no resistance at all. Holt studied them, perplexed.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “He never warms up to anyone that fast.”
“Some dogs are like people,” Ravan said. “They don’t whore themselves out, they wanna know what’s in it for them. That’s where he and I have a lot in common.”
Ravan pulled something from her coat. A piece of jerky, and when she offered it, Max gobbled it up greedily.
Holt studied Ravan. The girl had a hardness and a self-sufficiency that was rare, even in the world as it was now. She’d been through a lot. Ravan had told him some of it, the rest he’d guessed. Holt still felt close to her. If not for Mira, he often wondered what might have been.
“This came while you were gone,” Ravan said, handing him an envelope. Max chewed blissfully on his jerky as Holt studied the envelope. It was red with a white eight-pointed star on the front, just like the one on Ravan’s wrist, and at the sight Holt felt his pulse quicken. He pulled out the letter inside.
Ravan,
I am pleased that you are alive and unsurprised that you have succeeded. I knew sending you was the right choice. We eagerly await your arrival, myself most of all. Circumstances at Faust have complicated in your absence, and the news of your return, with my daughter, will raise spirits immensely.
As for Hawkins, the least you have earned from me is my trust. I will hear him out. He will receive amnesty for his crimes against the Menagerie and against me personally, on the condition that he return to Faust immediately and that the deal we negotiate be deemed acceptable.
Hurry home, Commandant. Power and profit …
T.
“Looks like you got what you wanted,” Ravan said. “Could at least smile a little.”
“I’m not sure I’d say it’s what I wanted,” Holt replied darkly. In a way, of course, it was. They were going to need the Menagerie if they hoped to have a chance against the Assembly. It had been decided, between him and Mira, that Holt was in the best position to secure that alliance. He knew the Menagerie, knew Tiberius. After all, Holt had killed his son, Archer. It had been why he’d fled Faust and left everything behind, including Ravan, a long time ago. All the same, he wasn’t in any rush to get back. Tiberius’s words in the letter were without menace, but … the man had a long memory.
“Does that mean you’ve changed your mind?” Ravan asked back.
“No,” he said. “I’m coming. Like I promised.”
“Well, your promises haven’t always meant a whole lot, have they?”
Holt sighed. “Is it going to be like this the whole way back?”
“You mean my brutal honesty? Most likely.” Ravan studied him. “You know, even without everything you’ve got going on, coming back to Faust is still your best option. Getting Tiberius’s buy-in on helping rescue your little girl is the king of delusive ideas, but you can still settle things with him.”
“So long as the deal we negotiate is ‘acceptable,’” Holt repeated from the letter. “Wonder what that means.”
“Means play your cards right, and you can get him off your ass forever.”
“I killed his son, Ravan,” Holt reminded her. “That’s not the kind of thing you wipe away with a bargain.”
“You know Tiberius. Power is everything, and that’s what you’re offering. A lot of it. Plus, I told him you were instrumental in finding Avril, that you agreed to help out of your deep and heartfelt guilt over the death of his only begotten son.”
Holt frowned as he thought it through. What choice did he have? They needed the Menagerie, and Ravan was right. Tiberius valued power more than anything, and that gave Holt real leverage.
“Cheer up.” Ravan punched him hard on the shoulder. Holt winced. “You get me for company the whole way, and I’m almost fifty percent sure I’m not going to put you in leg irons.”
Holt studied her skeptically.
2. ALLIES
EVEN OVER THE DISTANCE that separated them, Mira Toombs could still hear their voices. Though, “hearing” wasn’t really the right word. The projections were more like feelings or emotions, stripped to their barest essence and shoved into her mind, overpowering whatever else she may have been thinking or feeling right then. The farther away she was, the worse the projections were. Anxiety. Loneliness. They were like cries that only she could hear, and she told no one, not even Holt, how bad it could be.
Mira exhaled in relief as the Wind Rift rumbled up and over the crest of a hill, and the feelings began to lose their potency. She could see the Shipyards, at the bottom of the hill, and the closer she got, the better she felt.
“They’re in your head again,” said a small, yet strong, voice behind her.
A tiny girl, barely over five feet tall, her hair laced with strands of pink, stood at the helm of the ship. The wheel was bigger than she was. Her name was Olive, a close friend, one of the few Mira had in the Wind Traders, and their history went back years. In fact, Olive had been the one to help her escape Midnight City, what seemed like ages ago.
“How could you tell?” Mira asked. She didn’t like talking about her connection with the Assembly, it made most people nervous.
“Your knuckles are white.”
Mira looked down and saw her fingers wrapped tight around the wooden railing that circled the deck and instantly let go. She had to control things like that, no one could kno
w how bad it really got.
“It gets better, doesn’t it?” Olive asked. “When you’re closer to them?”
For all the connection Mira now shared with the Assembly, she still knew very little about them. One thing she did know, was that Ambassador and his followers had made a very difficult decision. The aliens were a race that, for eons, lived within a joint consciousness, where each one’s emotions and thoughts were instantly accessible to all the others at any time. When they rebelled and joined the quest to rescue Zoey, those connections were severed. Permanently. The staggering silence and blackness which came was, to them, terrifying.
But the aliens soon discovered they had one thing they could latch onto to restore a semblance of their original existence: Mira herself.
The ability to communicate with them, given to her right before Zoey was taken, had unwittingly made her a conduit of sorts for them to sense one another. It was a dim likeness to how it had once been, but it was something, and the closer Mira was to them, the more they could sense each other, and the more their anxiety and sadness lessened.
More and more Assembly rebels appeared every week, leaving their established clans and joining Ambassador’s group, and the sensations grew stronger as they added their emotions to the rest. Mira shuddered thinking about it. What would it be like in a week or a month, if the numbers kept growing? How could she stay sane, with all those emotions washing out her own?
These were the kinds of things she told no one, and so she did what she usually did when questions like Olive’s came up. She lied. “I’m not sure.”
Olive frowned. “You don’t have to tell me, but I hope you’re telling Holt. It’s not good carrying weight like that all by yourself.”
Mira forced herself to smile, then attempted a subject change. “Why aren’t you at the test firing?”
Olive knew when she was being deflected, but she answered all the same. “Nothing there I wanna see.”
Mira could hear the distaste in her voice. “You don’t approve of the Grand Bargain?”
“Not when it means I have to put my crew and my ship in harm’s way.”
“You do that every day.”
“Not by requirement, and not when there’s no profit in it. Fighting wars isn’t what Wind Traders are supposed to do.”
Mira looked at Olive evenly. “How do you know?”
Olive’s eyes thinned. “I’m sure your little friend is very important to you, and I don’t pretend to understand all you’ve been through, but did you really stop to think about the ramifications of dragging other people into this? Where they might be killed? By the hundreds? Have you thought about how that’s gonna feel when all’s said and done?”
“No,” Mira replied instantly. She and Holt had intentionally not thought about those things. If they had, they might have hesitated, they might have done nothing.
“I didn’t think so.” Olive looked back ahead, and Mira didn’t say anything else. Olive was implying the selfishness of Mira’s actions and maybe she was right, but Zoey had come to mean everything to her, and whatever it took to get her back she would do.
Mira sighed. All she really wanted was to be alone with Holt. Their deal with the Wind Traders was almost finished. Tomorrow or the next day they would leave and go their separate directions for who knew how long, and there was no real guarantee they would ever see each other again. What time they had was precious now, and there was far too little of it left.
The Shipyards were just ahead, close enough to make out detail: a honeycombed collection of platforms and scaffolding that surrounded what was left of an old power station, its dual brick smokestacks stretching into the air. Smoke vented from them, but these days it was from the forges and welding stations inside for fabricating and repairing the many Landships which passed through it every year.
She could feel the projections from the Assembly there, out of sight on the other side of the building.
Guardian, they projected. There is disagreement.
Now that was an understatement, Mira thought.
* * *
THE ARGUMENT WAS LOUD and volatile, but Mira’s attention was held by the Reflection Box. It lay near the entrance to the Forge, the machine shop inside the old power plant, a large, black box with two heavy doors, side by side, that served as its lid. It was painted in worn-out colors of red and green and gold leaf that twisted around its edges, a faded white rabbit on one end, holding a wand that shot sparks in an arc of old silver paint. Large, flamboyant letters spelled out a flowing script of words:
The Mysterious, Magnificent, MOLOTOV—Prepare for Amazement!
In the World Before it had been part of a magician’s repertoire, a magic case that did who knows what. Now, it was one of the most powerful major artifacts ever produced by the Strange Lands. More than that, it was integral to everything that was happening. Not just the Grand Bargain they made here, but the entire endeavor to save Zoey. She thought of Gideon, the former leader of the White Helix, how he had told her it would become important later, how he had bargained with Tiberius Marseilles and the Menagerie to attain it. He had been right, after all.
As she watched, a White Helix Adzer opened one of the box’s heavy doors. Another placed a green Antimatter crystal inside the open compartment lined with soft, red felt cushions, but unlike the crystals she had grown used to, this one was huge, maybe three feet in diameter. It was meant to be fired from the new Landship cannons, and it was the only reason the fragile agreement with the Wind Traders existed at all.
The Adzer shut the door of the box. A second passed, then it was as if the light around her dimmed … and the box flashed. A loud boom, like a thunderclap, shook the foundation of the old building. No one nearby even flinched. It was funny, Mira thought, what you could get used to.
The Adzers opened both lids of the box … and lifted out two identical, green Antimatter crystal shells. Mira smiled. The Reflection Box replicated anything put inside it, and the box allowed them to produce, at a rapid pace, what would normally have taken months or even years.
“Just give the word,” a tense, yet zealous voice stated.
Mira was in the Shipyard’s salvage repository, a giant junkyard of pieces and parts the Wind Traders constantly acquired in order to build their massive ships. Airplanes, cars and vans, construction equipment, passenger trains, semitrucks. There was a lumberyard too, full of planks of all kinds of wood, and it was smoking from a fire that had engulfed it. There were no flames now, but the damage was apparent, and it looked like something had exploded. To make matters worse, lying in front of it was the crippled, unmoving form of a large Assembly Brute, one of the five-legged, shielded-ramming machines, the same kind Ambassador inhabited.
In front of her was a large, angry gathering. Wind Trader engineers stood between two other groups that couldn’t have been more different. About a dozen White Helix, dressed in their usual patterns of black and gray, utility belts crisscrossing their torsos. Their Lancets were loose and some of them had their masks pulled up. It was a bad sign, it meant they were ready to fight.
In the empty grass behind the junkyard, the Assembly encampment sat. There were no tents or buildings, of course, just the walkers and an array of Osprey dropships. There were four-legged Mantises and giant, towering, eight-legged Spiders, both from the blue and whites, a clan Ambassador called Mas’Shinra. What was left of the green and orange Mas’Erinhah, the smaller, quick three-legged Hunters with their cloaking abilities and a few of their powerful artillery walkers. More Brutes, like the crumpled one near the lumber, the five-legged walkers of the purple clan. And all of them bore one thing in common: their colors were gone, stripped away, leaving only bright, gleaming silver metal. A line of the walkers, mostly Hunters and Mantises, stood in front of the angry, yelling kids.
Guardian, a projection came. It was what the Assembly called her, a reference to her perceived role as the protector of Zoey, their Scion, and every time Mira heard it, she felt a sting. It was an i
ronic reminder of just how badly she had failed in that task, not all that long ago. She ignored the projections, listening to the argument.
“You saw the explosion,” a White Helix stated, a girl, her mask still undrawn. She was tall, lithe, and agile like all Helix, and kept her hair razored in a thin layer of what probably would have been the whitest blond Mira had ever seen, had it been allowed to grow.
“And what was left of one of those Brutes is on the ground right next to it,” said another, staring heatedly at a tall boy in grimy overalls. “What else would it have been?”
“Personally, my money’s on you,” the kid replied, folding his arms. Mira knew him. His name was Christian, one of the Wind Trader engineers.
“Us?” The Helix seemed aghast.
“Just give the word,” one of the Helix stated again.
“You guys are flipping around in here every day, shooting off those sticks,” Christian stated. “You said yourself you don’t have much to do with artifacts. Which means you have no real idea what happens when one of those crystals comes into contact with—”
“You’re really reaching,” the Helix girl said. “Why are you so eager to protect them?”
“Just. Give. The word.”
Guardian.
What? Mira thought back, her eyes moving to their source, a five-legged walker standing out front of the others. There were no discerning marks or technology on Ambassador to tell it apart from the others, but still she knew. It was in the projections themselves, they were unique in ways she couldn’t describe.
We tried to contain, it projected.
The answer, as usual, was cryptic. The translation her mind made of the Assembly’s feelings was never a smooth process, but she was getting better at understanding. Mira looked to the smoke rising from the lumberyard and the ruined walker there. She moved for it as the arguments continued.
Mira scrutinized the scene, studying the remains, the smoking lumber, and something else, the remnants scattered everywhere, and they were barely recognizable. A car battery, regular AA batteries, coins, washers, all everyday objects, or at least they used to be. They were artifact components, from the Strange Lands, a powerful, dangerous place that no longer existed, and one that, long ago, had meant everything to her.
Valley of Fires: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) Page 2
