The Perilous In-Between (The Chuzzlewit Chronicles Book 1)

by Cortney Pearson

  Victoria scanned each face. Dahlia’s pointed nose and downturned mouth, Bronwyn’s disapproving grimace, Maizey’s worried gaze, Emma’s teeth chewing her lip. Victoria opened her mouth, but she couldn’t very well tell the group what had really happened. They’d think she was mad.

  She could tell Dahlia, perhaps. Dahlia Covington had been Victoria’s closest friend since their training had started two years before. Dahlia’s vigor had kept her neck-and-neck with Victoria through their simulations, through written testing, and even through disagreements that occasionally burbled up among the five of them.

  But now wasn’t the time, especially not with another figure making his way across the dirt.

  Uncle Jarvis stormed toward her. His expression was calloused. The tails of his stately gray jacket flapped in his wake.

  “Just my luck,” Victoria muttered with a sinking feeling.

  “Steady on, old girl,” said Dahlia with a look of sympathy.

  Victoria pursed her lips and lifted her chin, making her way toward her uncle. His upper lip curled and he glared at the girls behind Victoria for a moment before meeting her gaze. His left eye twitched.

  “Uncle, I can explain—”

  He pulled her aside, his hand pinching her elbow. “I come to monitor your training session in time to see you pull a stunt like that? That was reckless! What were you thinking?”

  “If I can get closer, I may be able to collect a sample. Study the monster, find its weakness! You have to know our methods aren’t working.”

  “Our methods work well enough. It’s not worth killing yourself over, Victoria. You were not made squadron leader as an opportunity to show off.”

  “I wasn’t showing off. It will work, I’m certain of it! I just—”

  “You lost control, Victoria!”

  “I wouldn’t have if . . .”

  “Well?”

  If she couldn’t tell her squad, she certainly couldn’t tell her uncle what had happened. She wasn’t even sure what it was that had taken over her mind like that.

  “Last week you received a demerit for unlicensed tinkering with your plane. Two weeks before you went into the Exodus training squad and spouted your nonsense about stopping the creature. We cannot give those young girls false hope. They’re going to replace you one day, and it’s your job to set the best example you can.”

  “I am doing my best!”

  Uncle Jarvis stepped back, pinching the bridge of his nose. When he spoke again, his voice was deadly soft. “This is your final warning, Victoria. We serve to protect. And we do that without endangering lives unnecessarily. My methods are the only methods we’ll be using.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but he spoke over her. “I don’t care how excellent a pilot you are. If you can’t obey protocol, you’re useless. This is your final warning. One more deliberate act of disobedience and you’re off the squad.”

  Two

  Victoria dismissed her Nauts to return their planes to their hangars, leaving the training area last to give herself time to think. To fume. She couldn’t believe Uncle Jarvis would do that to her. It wasn’t her fault something had overtaken her mind as though transporting her somewhere else entirely. If it wasn’t for that she would have had complete control.

  She parked her plane, backing it into its hangar before returning her goggles to their post, closing the door, and meeting the others outside.

  “No death penalty?” Dahlia asked with a smile.

  “It’s only a matter of time,” said Bronwyn, who had her back to the hangar. Her brown curls tangled, falling from their knot to land on her broad shoulders. “Keep coming up with these new maneuvers of yours, Digby. I’ll be only too glad to help you out when the time comes.”

  Victoria gritted her teeth, not missing the implied threat. “I earned my place, Bronwyn, and you know it.”

  “Sure. And you’ll earn your way right out of it.”

  “Back off,” Dahlia said. “She has the ability to remove you from Dauntless.”

  Bronwyn blinked in a bored sort of way. “Yes, but she won’t.” And she sauntered off toward their dormitory.

  “Tell me again why you won’t remove her?” said Dahlia, falling into step beside Victoria.

  Victoria dusted her hands and stared ahead. Bronwyn joined the girls from Exodus squad basking in the sun on the green, flowered landscape around the dormitory they all shared. It was square and unremarkable, two-level, brick building set off by a lovely array of flowering dogwood trees.

  “My uncle said it himself. I’ve stepped out of line one too many times.”

  “Well, if you did leave the squad,” Dahlia said with a gleam in her eyes. “Lord Merek would positively injure himself.”

  Lord Merek was the last person Victoria wanted to think about right now. “He can do whatever he likes, so long as he leaves me out of it.”

  “The last time I checked, he meant to include you in his life in a very real way.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him right now,” Victoria said, needing to tell her what happened. She needed to think aloud, to share it with someone. The truth was, her uncle’s words rattled her. He was right—she had lost control. But she couldn’t figure out why. What was that memory flash?

  It wasn’t uncommon to be fearful before patrol, especially since it hadn’t been that long since she’d advanced from flight school and become an official Naut in the Program. The Kreak’s poisonous breath tacked fear to the very air they breathed. Touching a person’s skin, the breath had no harmful effect. But if a person inhaled it, they rarely lived. Victoria’s own father had died from it. She hadn’t even been able to say goodbye. His body was so mangled by the poison that she wasn’t able to get even a final look at him before they laid him in the ground.

  Victoria didn’t want to admit to nerves, but what if this same déjà vu flash happened again, during an actual patrol? “Listen, Dahlia—”

  “That’s a shame, since he’s waiting to speak with you now.”

  “What?”

  Victoria’s thoughts derailed. Sure enough, Lord Charles Merek stood beneath a tree, aloof and away from the other young ladies sitting along benches and bending over flowers. He wore a fitted suit with a green waistcoat, and he was looking right at her.

  She fingered one of the corset’s buckles along her stomach. The pressure of the steel seemed to tighten that much more around her strained ribs.

  “Look at him, practically salivating over the chance to speak with you. When is the joyous event to take place, anyway?”

  Victoria snatched Dahlia’s wrist guiding the other girl in a completely different direction southward, toward town, toward the sea.

  “It isn’t,” Victoria said, fighting the desire to glance over her shoulder. “I have no desire to marry any more than I do to quit the Aviatory. Let’s head to the boardwalk. Hopefully he won’t follow us.”

  “Not handsome enough for you?” Dahlia had no qualms about looking over her shoulder, smirking back at Lord Merek. The two girls crossed the street in front of a puttering hovercarriage, moving in long strides.

  “Charles Merek is handsome enough,” Victoria snapped. And he was, with that carefree smile, those bright green eyes and dark hair curling behind his ears. Any girl would be ravenous over the amount of time Victoria was being forced to spend with him lately. But Charles was a glint of silver in the grass, sparkling and alluring, and deep enough one didn’t see the trap until it snapped around her ankle.

  Victoria saw it, though. And she would not be baited.

  “He is just like my mother,” Victoria said as the two of them rounded the bend beyond a patch of trees, nearing closer and closer to the smaller homes and businesses beside the seashore. “He wishes me to settle—something I have no intention of doing.”

  “But what if you do get taken off the squad? I mea
n, your uncle seemed pretty upset.”

  The air escaped anew from Victoria’s lungs. Dahlia’s usual knack for speaking her mind didn’t eliminate the sting of her words.

  “I’m not going to get taken off the squad.”

  It had only been a few days since Victoria’s position as Flying Officer Naut was announced. She’d aced the final examination that awarded the top position over the four other girls in her squad, alongside Orpha who’d won the Stonewall training squad. The five girls from Dauntless were selected to protect their town. Their patrol later that evening would be the final step in securing Victoria’s post as leader.

  Dahlia’s mouth dropped open. “I just meant, if you don’t succeed at this, your mother is pulling you from the program.”

  Victoria’s mother didn’t see the Program as an honor. She saw only a deviant daughter, willful and independent, determined to sully the name of Digby much as Victoria sullied her clothing every time she came near a wrench.

  They progressed, moving from open grasslands and trees to the smaller, more clustered homes. The two of them slowed their pace as they reached the boardwalk and its row of shops. The waves crashed lazily in the distance as if welcoming her to them. She considered forcing confidence in her voice, the way she did around the other girls. But this was Dahlia.

  “Mama will try, I suppose. And my uncle is no help. I think it’s wrong for him to be so cautious. With the way things are going, the Kreak just keeps coming back. Our methods aren’t working, and something needs to change.”

  “He won’t like hearing that,” Dahlia said.

  “And if he wants to pull me from the squad for disagreeing with him, then I suppose he can. I’m just going to do my best to keep from giving him a reason.”

  “Then you’d better stop with these new maneuvers. What happened up there, anyway? It was like you were on a suicide mission. I didn’t think you’d pull out in time.”

  Now that things had settled somewhat, Victoria wasn’t sure she wanted to tell Dahlia what happened. She didn’t know herself.

  “I—I’m not sure,” she said. She couldn’t help hearing Bronwyn’s taunt in her mind again. She kicked a rock off of the planks of wood leading toward the sand.

  “I’m only glad you’re all right,” Dahlia said, stopping to look directly at her friend.

  Victoria’s heart swelled. She smiled in return, warmed by the kind words.

  “Are you going to walk for a while?” Dahlia asked, breaking their silence. “I think I’ll head back to the dorm. See if Charles Merek wants some company.”

  Victoria snorted a laugh. Dahlia could have him. “Yes. I think I will keep walking.”

  “I’ll see you at dinner before patrol?”

  Victoria nodded and bade her friend goodbye before squinting toward the ocean. Her mind raced with questions. It wasn’t the first time her thoughts had scattered, but to overcome her like that? To dull her senses and blanket her vision? She couldn’t afford to let it happen again. She refused to let it happen again.

  Waves crashed, and she basked in the beauty of the sky, marveling at the way it disappeared behind the ocean, and yet lingered still, out of sight. It was so beautiful, with the shore watcher’s shed on the small cliff overlooking the water, the gulls circling overhead, the sand inviting her to remove her shoes and feel it between her toes.

  Peering behind her, Victoria tucked herself near the rocks and watched the waves crash, feeling the spray against her cheeks and arms. She should return as well. She longed to change from her battle leathers, but evening patrol was coming soon and, for the moment, she just wanted to be alone.

  Something glimmered from the wettest part of the sand. Curious, Victoria stepped near. She relished the sinking of her feet in the sand, wishing again she could remove her boots.

  It was a metal cog, circular and jagged along its edges, marked not with rust, but with what looked like gold chunked in with the silver. A gasp lodged in her throat. Her heart began to pound. She’d seen this metal before. Not in the workshops of the Aviatory where engineers worked to create the hovercarriages and machinery needed to build homes and factories. No manmade metal she knew looked like this. It was woven and melted in, the colors blending like cream stirred into coffee.

  She thought again of her failed maneuver that afternoon, of her argument with Bronwyn and her uncle, of Dahlia’s reminder that she would be removed from the squad if she wasn’t careful.

  She wasn’t sure how this piece had come to be here. There hadn’t been an attack for a few days now—perhaps it had been dislodged during the last one. Protocol demanded she turn it in.

  But where was the good in that? If Uncle Jarvis wouldn’t allow her to fight the brute, the least she could do was learn more about it. With a glance over her shoulder, she tucked the cog into her skirt pocket beside the wrench she always kept hidden there, and turned back toward the town, a new lightness in her chest.

  Three

  Victoria waited behind a tree, making sure Charles Merek had gone before slipping inside. It was nearly sunset, but she couldn’t wait. She crossed through the hall and headed toward the abandoned instruction rooms upstairs. She ducked into the third door on the left.

  The room saw little use. It was an old instruction room for boys just learning the mechanic’s trade, and a collection of tools was all that remained, forgotten in drawers. Forgotten by some, that is. Victoria had stumbled upon the room and its tools when she’d lost a bet to Albert Tenneman and owed him a kiss because of it. The kiss hadn’t been anything to write home about—not that she would have—but the clanking tools she’d discovered certainly made up for that.

  She quietly closed the door, lit a candle in the corner, and pulled the cog from her skirt pocket. A smudge of grease stained her fingertips. Something told her she should be ashamed at the sight, but the devil inside her relished the feeling.

  The cog was beautiful. Giddiness filled her chest. Perhaps if she could figure out a way to destroy this, they could apply that method to the larger creature. The flames she and her Nauts blew at the beast every time it emerged obviously caused it no damage. What kind of chemicals could dissolve metal?

  She didn’t have time to think on it further. A piercing wail stained the air, plunging her stomach and making her skin prickle. She dropped the cog with a squeal.

  “It’s not sunset yet,” she muttered to the empty room, bending to scrape the cog back into her hand. She thrust it into her pocket, threw open the door, and ran for it.

  The Kreak was attacking.

  Victoria raced back through the dormitory, catching up with the other frantic young ladies still in their battle leathers rushing for the door.

  It had been fairly sunny when she’d found the cog not more than an hour before. Now she flew through a bleak, gray palette amid the clouds. A bubbling froth gurgled in the center of the ocean. She’d seen those clouds and that burble too many times. She hadn’t realized it’d been so close to sunset, otherwise she never would have taken as much time as she had.

  “Hang back, Dauntless,” Victoria commanded. The girls’ frantic exclamations rattled in her headset. She gave them no reply. She was watching that burble.

  Though it hadn’t yet emerged, the Kreak was twice the size of any building. It resembled the pictures she’d seen of gorillas hidden in remote jungles—except no gorilla was made up piece by piece of brilliant, shining metal with claws on each hand. Cogs and wheels, circles, nuts and bolts and bars all intertwined and collaborated to build the domineering thirty foot high monster.

  Victoria’s panicked glance shot to the boardwalk where a few shoppers and sightseers stood in shock. She calculated the potential casualties and time necessary for those people to find shelter. Protocol clanked in her mind, and she opened her mouth to give orders when the frothing tremor shot across the water. It skimmed across the sea, leaving a foaming white
trail in its wake.

  The clouds loomed, creeping over the town and dimming any remaining doses of sunlight. The Kreak swam closer. Twenty feet, then ten . . . five . . .

  “Line up!” Victoria cried. “Get to shore, get in formation!”

  The other planes jetted toward the sand, following command. Hands slick on the joystick, Victoria steered forward to meet the enormous creature crawling from the tide, dripping with sea foam and gleaming with fury.

  Dauntless squad drifted over the edges of the sea shore. Victoria couldn’t help but think they looked like large bugs waiting to be swatted. The girls’ grid formation—two in front, three behind—was dead-on, hovering and creating an airborne barrier between the enormous, metallic creature and the town. Victoria joined the barricade on the south end, parking in midair.

  “Why does this fiend keep coming back?” Emma asked in her high-pitched voice. For being so bashful in social situations, she had surprising gumption when it came to confronting the Kreak.

  “Some kind of vengeful desire to claim victims?” Maizey offered.

  “I don’t know,” said Victoria. She knew the brute’s tendencies. Typically, it would lumber along the sand. The planes would stagger and blow flames once they approached the fifteen-foot buffer. Any closer would expose them to danger. Any farther would be too far for the flames to effectively push the brute back.

  “Add that to your list of questions for dear Uncle Jarvis,” said Dahlia. “Or on second thought, maybe you’d better not.”

  Bronwyn, Victoria noticed, was silent. She waited for another snide remark about losing her position, but it never came.

  Victoria did have questions, questions she hadn’t been at liberty to investigate. The Kreak’s movements were somewhat unpredictable. But they did know that whenever the Kreak regained its strength after an attack, it returned to claim its next victim.

  Always from the sea’s edge.