Fall of Sky City (A Steampunk Fantasy Sci-Fi Adventure Novel) (Devices of War) (37 page)

It sounded harsh, but it was a good idea. “Got one in mind?”

“Our scientists say there’s a new chain of islands forming by Koko Nadie.”

The submersibles had stopped. The boiler hadn’t dropped yet, the mass still not showing up on our screen. I watched as we inched further away, the other
letharan
nearly off screen now. “Wouldn’t we want to find a group of islands that are populated?”

“Think about it, Synn,” Ryo said, his fist clenched and blocking out part of the screen. “We don’t know how the Hands are going to react. They nearly had you. They know they’re close, and now that we have people on board our vessel? The Hands are going to be after them, searching for information.”

“Synn,” Joshua called, his tone filled with anxiety. “Just got word from the El’Asim fleet.”

Not now, I groaned.

“They’ve been hit.”

“How bad?” My eyes didn’t leave the sonar screen.

“Three ships fell.” A series of clicking that I could hear came out of his headphones. “But Ino City and a couple of other underwater towns were able to pick up most of the survivors.”

Crap. I nodded and pushed Ryo’s hand out of the way on the screen. “How far away are these islands?”

“They’re a few days out. We could be there by the end of the week.”

The boiler pinged into existence.

“Keep a scan on the Hands’ frequencies. Hopefully, by now, word will have spread that I’m not on the fleet, I’m underwater.” Not great news for the other
letharan
cities hiding here.

I let out a sigh as the submersibles moved, trailing us. “Well, let’s see if we can make it less than that and…” I stood up, meeting his gaze. “Let’s see if we can’t disable those sky-felled submersibles before they decide to destroy us.”

Ryo grinned. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

I frowned.

His grin widened. “Those submersibles have no weapons.”

Haji and Joshua looked up, sharing a chuckle.

I looked to Ryo in question.

“We took them all.”

Well, that was one thing in our favor. “Nicely played.” We were going to need all the help we could get.

CHAPTER 33

TRUST

We managed
to get to the deeper waters without getting much of the poison on our
lethara
. What little damage it had taken was easy to work around. As the
letharan
technicians described it, the damage was like getting your hair singed. There wasn’t much you could do about it, and it didn’t hurt.

That was one bit of good news at least.

Things quieted down a bit as we got everyone settled. Joshua and I strategized about how to deal with the remaining submersibles while Haji and Ryo dealt with our new guests. After the way they’d reacted to me earlier and since I was the reason their city was destroyed in the first place, I didn’t think I’d be the best liaison. Everyone else basically agreed.

Joshua thumped the metallic table beside him as he leaned against it, a stormy expression on his face. “Damn it, Synn, now isn’t the time to be playing around with them. Do you have any idea the amount of intel they could be gettin’ on us?”

I rolled my head and punched the control panel beside me lightly. It didn’t look like it worked yet. “You’re missing the point.”

“No, lad, I think you bloody well are.” He pushed off the table and met me in the middle. “We just narrowly escaped being taken out as they blew apart an entire
letharan
city.”

“I was kinda there for that, Josh.”

He smacked me on the shoulder.

I winced. I really needed to get a shirt, but I hadn’t taken the time to go to the living quarters yet. I didn’t want to walk through the throng of survivors. Not yet. I would later because I had no choice.

“I don’t know how much more we can take, lad.” He ran his hand through his shaggy red hair and turned away.

I took in a deep breath, hoping this was the last time I was going to have to repeat this. “They’re using a different frequency.”

“We’ve been scanning all the frequencies, and we’ve still found nothing.”

I tipped my head. “Are you sure we found nothing?” I folded my arms over my chest and then let them fall again as pain shot through my shoulder. “Or are they just playing mouse?”

“You should really get that looked at.”

“I will.” I brushed him off.

He grimaced but stared at his radio. “So what are you hoping for by playing bait to three submersibles? Why aren’t we doing something to shake them off our tails?”

“I’m hoping that they’ve been playing radio silence, making it harder for us to find their new frequency. I’m hoping that by letting them tail us, we’ll find their slip up.”

He let out a short breath and daggered me with his eyes. “That’s a pretty high hope.”

I shrugged. “Call me an optimist.”

“All right, fine. Then what do we do with them after they’ve given us the information we need?”

I scratched my nose, which was about the only place that didn’t hurt. “Then we disable them the same way you did before and take their boilers for parts.”

“What are we going to do about the El’Asim fleet?” he asked quietly.

I shook my head and let the table beside him prop me up. “They really need better weapons. They’re a target. I hope that when these submersibles do make contact with the other Hands, they make sure to tell everyone I’m not there.”

“Well.” Joshua smashed his lips to his nose in thought. “I want to go to El’Asim, work with them and their Mark.”

I nodded. “I thought you might. So, I guess you should start melting the boilers and making some prototypes that you can modify to their Mark when you get up there.”

He looked at me, his expression blank, but not in the kind of “blank” that made you wonder if there was anything going on in his brain. It was the kind of “blank” that made you wonder what
wasn’t
going on in his brain. Finally, he nodded and headed toward the stair.

Keeley met him, taking a step back before they plowed into one another. They mumbled something in passing, but I wasn’t paying them any attention. I had more than just a few problems, and for whatever reason, I’d decided to volunteer to lead this campaign. What had I been thinking? Glory? Fame?

I shook my head. No. I was thinking I was the only one capable of doing it with any margin of success. Had I been hallucinating on drugs to think I could do this?

Keeley’s cool hand touched my shoulder. “I brought you a shirt.”

“Oh.” I focused on her and took the shirt from her. “Thanks. You didn’t have to do that.”

She raised her pale eyebrows and shook her head. “Do you want me to look at any of those?”

I winced. I didn’t, but I knew she’d better. I nodded.

She pushed me toward a tall stool, setting down a brown leather bag on the table. “How are you doin’?”

I shrugged. “Aside from the fact that I hurt just about everywhere, thanks to the city exploding around me, I’m doing pretty well.”

She was silent for a while as she worked. She wasn’t too gentle about pulling out the fragments of thick dried flax or the other bits of shrapnel embedded in me.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I suppose I’m okay.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But then I tried putting myself in her shoes. She’d escaped, knowing that a lot of people wouldn’t make it. “Almost everyone survived, Keel.”

She nodded, dabbing something that bit onto my wounds. “I know. It just—It brought back memories, I guess.”

Oh. Right. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I need to get over it. I mean, we were able to help for a change, right?”

“Yes. We were.”

Keeley was quiet as she tortured me with her healing. “What are we doing, Synn? Are we helping?”

That was a good question and one I didn’t have an answer for. So I didn’t provide one.

The days slipped by slowly and tensions grew as we continued to hide. The submersibles communicated several times. We discovered that embedded in their communications, there were codes that said when they would broadcast again. With their frequency and their codes in hand, we decided it was time to get them off our tails. Especially since the last communication had been a request to send reinforcements. They’d somehow confirmed that I was onboard the
lethara
they were following. The Hands were calling us Asim City. Why not?

Yvette volunteered with a vengeance I’d never seen in her before. Since escaping from Sky City, she’d changed a great deal. Gone was the girl who loved clompy shoes and ridiculous hats, and in her place stood a warrior, ready to take on just about anything that came at her.

I was glad, not for the first time, that she’d decided to escape with us.

I pulled her aside. “I have a question for you. I don’t know how you’ll take it.”

She looked up at me, her violet eyes gauging me. “What?”

“Are you still spying for the Hands?”

She paused, blinking once, twice. “Yes.”

I nodded, my eyes scanning the room of the observatory. “Are you working for them or are you helping us?”

Her pink tongue darted out, her lips flat. “I’m feeding them the information you want them to have, and giving them some bad information.”

“And how are you doing that?”

“Joshua knows. He’s been helping me.”

“And you two didn’t tell me because?”

She frowned, taking a step back. “You’re compulsed and you’re supposed to be leading us, so as far as people being able to tell me I’m wrong, you’re not the right person for the job.” She glared and turned away. Removing the robe, her black hair falling around her, she leapt into the pool.

All in all, that hadn’t gone as badly as I thought it might.

Sabine was staring at me through her cool violet eyes, not saying anything.

I met her gaze. “I had to be sure.”

She nodded, walking with a sedate grace to the pool, her robe pooling on the floor behind her, her hair shielding her body from the prying eyes of the visitors clogging the hallway outside. “So did she.” She disappeared with a small splash.

I honestly didn’t know what to do with myself. I was pretty useless in the water, and there wasn’t much I could do that was helpful on the
lethara
. Joshua had everything under control in his lab. Keeley didn’t need my help with whatever she was doing, and she was busy a lot. Half the time, I couldn’t even find Haji.

With a deep sigh, I headed out of the observatory and towards the stair that would take me to my room.

Before I could make it very far, I was stopped by a man, his face shadowed with the rough starts of a beard. “Primus, you and I need to speak.”

I closed my eyes for patience and stopped. “I’m not a Primus.”

“The Hands say you are.”

I took his hand and removed it from my shoulder. “I’m not. Now, what do you need?”

“What do I need?” He turned to the people scattered along the wide corridor for support. “We need off this damned
lethara
. We need air, sunshine and most importantly, we need to get away from you.”

Obviously he hadn’t heard that I’d managed to save the people of his city even if I’d failed to save their city itself.

“You’re a danger to all of us just by being here. We have kids we need to protect.”

I nodded. “I understand that.”

He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and took a step back. “Name’s Garrett.”

“Garrett.” Great. What was I supposed to do? “We just need you to stay calm—”

“Stay calm? Seriously? Not likely.” He leveled a frustrated glare in my direction. “What’s your plan? What are you going to do with us? We’re not pawns in whatever is going on between you and your rotting queen.”

My teeth gnashed together. “She’s not…” My hands fisted and I had to work really hard to calm my Marks. “…my queen.”

“That’s not what we hear from her,” he said, his face in mine.

I bit off the words that came instantly to my tongue. He was scared and had no idea what we were doing to try and save them, to keep them safe. I took a step back, relaxing my hands. “We think we’ve found some islands that will be a safe place for you and your people.”

Garrett stopped what he was about to say and looked at me, his stance relaxing. “Where?”

“Just south of Kiwidinok.”

“Koko Nadie?”

I shook my head. Everyone knew that the islands of Koko Nadie were uninhabitable due to the violently active volcanoes. “They’re newly formed, which means they haven’t been civilized yet. Things will be a bit rough, but all things considered, we think it’s your best bet to stay safe.”

“Safe because now we’re known to have sided with you?”

I held out my hands. “Safe because we tried to keep you protect and because you’ve had free reign of my home, which means you have valuable information for the Hands. They won’t be gentle.”

“They’ve helped more than the Families,” one woman said, holding her daughter close. “They’ve given us technologies the Families kept for themselves.”

I had no idea what the Hands had given to their cities. “But at what price? How many of you lost your children because the Hands demanded it?”