Fire & Frost (27 page)

Beneath the machine, only a powdering of snow lay over stiff, dried grasses. It must have been sitting for a while. Rust darkened the iron legs and flaked off beneath Elizabeth’s glove. The body squatted low to the ground, the legs folded like a locust’s—but the belly was still well over their heads. They peered upward, searching the shadows for a hatch.

How could they possibly see it? Tension gripped her chest as a moan sounded from inside the outpost. They both froze, watching in that direction.

Nothing.

Caius glanced up again and whispered, “We can’t risk a light.”

Only a fool would. But they were
already
being fools, Elizabeth realized. Even mobile structures had deliberately placed entrances.

She tugged on his sleeve. “South.”

And there it was, on the side of the machine; an oval door with a simple lever latch waited above the third leg. In plain sight, but it took another five minutes of searching to find the ladder built into the leg—a disappearing ladder, designed to prevent more than one person from going up. Pulling on small metal rings while climbing opened handholds and footholds above her and closed the panels below. Only two holds were available at any time: one to stand on, and the next one up.

Because it was a war machine, she realized. They wouldn’t have wanted an enemy to attack their entrance in force.

“Go on up and open the door,” Caius said softly. “Zombies can’t climb.”

So the creatures wouldn’t be up there…unless they’d already been trapped inside. But Elizabeth wouldn’t think of that.

Tucking her aluminum poker under her arm, she hauled herself up. A tiny platform the size of her foot projected from beside the door. She gingerly stepped onto it and looked down at the top of Caius’s hat ten feet below.

On a steadying breath, she gripped the latch. Rusted tight, the lever wouldn’t budge, even when she threw her full weight onto it.

She glanced down, met Caius’s eyes, and shook her head.

He gestured her back down and waited for her beside the leg. Her heart thumped when he pushed the machete into her grip.

“Will you stand guard?” he whispered. “I’ll try to open it. If I can’t, we’ll head around to the other machine.”

She nodded. A grin widened his mouth and his firm lips swiftly pressed to hers. Before she could kiss him back, he was climbing.

Smiling, she pivoted in a slow circle. A movement farther south froze Elizabeth’s blood, her fingers tight on the machete’s handle—but the zombie continued on, heading east toward the airships. She glanced toward the outpost doors to make certain nothing had wandered out, then looked up. Caius had reached the little step beside the hatch. Gripping the lever in his left hand, he hauled up.

A metallic
screeeech
ripped the air like a scream.

Snarls sounded through the dark. Elizabeth whipped around, searching for the zombies.

“Bludging hell!” He tore open the hatch, hinges squealing in protest. “Climb, Elizabeth!”

But one was coming fast, tearing through the outpost doors. She wouldn’t be able to climb high enough before it was on her. Gripping the machete, she faced the zombie.

A heavy thud beside her. Elizabeth stifled her scream. Just Caius. He’d jumped to the ground and now he spun toward her, his long coat flaring out around him.

“Up!” He grabbed the machete, pushed her to the ladder. “Up!”

Another moan behind them. Elizabeth frantically yanked on the first ring, shoved her foot into the first step. A wet
thunk
silenced the first zombie’s snarls. More were coming across the snow. Faster she went, yanking and climbing. She glanced back as Caius razed the neck of one zombie while slamming a second away with a boot to its chest. It staggered back and he chopped through its head. Then another came and she climbed faster, faster. Sick with fear, she reached the top and scrambled onto the step in front of the hatch.

“I’m at the door! Come up, come up!”

Below, Caius grunted as he hacked through a zombie’s head. Another rushed at him and Elizabeth cried a warning as a small zombie came from behind—a child. His machete embedded in a skull, Caius reached back and caught the little one’s face. Its head thrashed like a rabid dog’s with Caius’s gloved hand between its teeth before a hard shove knocked the creature back. Something dropped wetly from its mouth and then the child rushed him again, stopped suddenly with a chop through its head.

Caius yanked a ring and began to climb.

Her heart frozen, Elizabeth stared at the piece of Caius’s glove on the snow. The zombie’s teeth had ripped through the leather and torn it away.

Caius was moving too quickly and it was too shadowed to be certain, but she spotted a faint gleam on the side of his hand. Like something dark and wet.

Like blood.

Her chest seemed to fold in, crushing her heart. Her lungs only emitted short, broken breaths, and she clung to him when he reached the door, clung with tears in her eyes but she couldn’t speak at all, because her throat was too thick and her heart was wrecked, smashed beyond repair.

Caius had been bitten.

“Shh,” he soothed against her ear. “It’s all right. It’s over. Let’s go in.”

Into the cold and dark. A low ceiling forced them to hunch over. He shut the hatch and they listened. Silence. He called out, his deep voice echoing. Nothing. If any zombies had been inside the machine, they would have been snarling and groaning.

But it was already too late. It wouldn’t be long until Caius was one of them. That bite would take him away from her, and Elizabeth wouldn’t be able to chase after him.

Her mind dull, she barely registered the sudden glow—a small flame from Caius’s spark lighter. Copper pipes ran along the sides of a low passageway leading into the belly. Rust roughened the iron plates under their feet. To their right, a short ladder extended up through a hatch in the ceiling. Caius climbed up a few steps before dropping back to the floor, his boots clanging against iron.

“That looked like an access to the leg pistons and gun ports,” Caius said softly. Bent at the waist, he led her into the passageway. “We’ll find the living quarters. They walked these machines across two continents. They didn’t come all that way without sleeping.”

Throat aching, she nodded. They entered a chamber lined by two rows of levers and foot paddles—propulsion controls for the legs in this segment of the machine, she realized. An open panel in the floor exposed the machinery beneath, flywheels and long crankshaft arms with offset bearings that looked like teeth. On the walls, the faint outlines of several painted figures remained. A lion or tiger, and what she thought might have been a horse and foal. The ceiling had been painted blue—as if the men or women who’d worked those foot pedals were running across a cloudless plain instead of laboring inside the belly of a machine.

They followed another low corridor to the right, passing more chambers filled with levers and controls. A tattered cloth covered the entrance to the next; Caius glanced inside and pulled her in.

An altar chamber or a hearth chamber. Maybe both. It was roughly circular, and constructing that shape out of the metal must have been difficult; the room must have been important enough to warrant the effort. Embroidered fabric hung on the walls, the colors faded. Cushions covered in brown felt ringed the chamber, the stuffing all but flat.

A small dais sat opposite the door, topped by three clay pots. Caius strode across the chamber.

“Oil lamps,” he said, lifting one and tipping it back and forth slightly—in the hand that was killing him. He glanced back with a grin. “With oil. And just enough of a wick.”

She tried to smile, but the choking pain in her throat and chest must have made it look as false as it felt. His brows drawing in, Caius touched his spark lighter to the lamp and crossed to her side again.

His gaze searched her face. “Elizabeth?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to…”
Cry.
But that was becoming more difficult—and impossible when he wrapped her in his arms. Her heart a solid ache, she whispered hoarsely, “I shouldn’t have run. I should have just gone with him.”

But she hadn’t. And now so many people were dead.

Caius soon among them.

“No.” His voice was rough. “Your father gave you no good choice. And this wasn’t your fault.”

This
was. She drew a sobbing breath. “I shouldn’t have let you help me. I should have stopped you.”

“Do you think I would have let you?”

No. Not the Caius she knew. Not the man who’d promised to be her friend.

And that promise had killed him.

Desperately she tried to stop her shudders. He was the one dying and she was the one crying. That was wrong, wrong—yet the tears didn’t stop. He gathered her up in his arms and carried her to the dais, where the lamp burned with a steady glow. Kicking a few cushions together, he sank onto them, holding her against his chest.

So strong and warm. She couldn’t let him go.

Her face felt hot and swollen. She dragged off her hat and curled against him, slipping her fingers beneath the chest strap of his harness. “What do we do now?”

“Wait until morning,” he said softly. “And maybe we’ll find something inside the outpost that’ll take us out of here.”

She didn’t want to, but had to ask, “How long can you go on?”

Someone without nanoagents would only last a few hours after a bite. But the mechanical bugs in his body would allow Caius to fight off the zombie infection longer. Eventually, though, he’d succumb. There was no cure.

“As long as I need to,” he said. And when her tears spilled over again, groaned and buried his face in her hair. “Don’t cry, Elizabeth. I can’t bear it.”

Because he loved her. And she’d said that she despised him.

Elizabeth couldn’t bear that he might still believe she did.

Shifting off his lap, she kneeled beside him, face to face. Kissing him, her tears still falling and her throat raw, she said, “I lied to you, Caius.”

“Did you?” His hands tangled in her hair and she felt his smile against her lips. “Tell me.”

“I don’t despise you. I hate that you hurt me.” With every cold response and his refusal to believe her—yet none of that seemed to matter now. On a broken breath, she said, “But I don’t hate you. I love you. I think that I have for so long.”

Caius’s body stiffened. His mouth taut, he jerked his head up to look down at her. His dark blue gaze searched her features, and whatever he saw in her face must have echoed her words, because in the next moment he kissed her as if he’d never kissed her before, as if he would never let her go.

He would have to, but when the torrent passed he held her and tenderly pressed his lips to her cheek, kissing away the trail of her tears. “Then why these?”

“Because I can’t bear to lose you now.”

“You won’t.”

It sounded like a promise. Was he trying to protect her? “I saw the zombie bite you, Caius. Its teeth ripped through the leather of your glove.” Her chest gave an agonizing hitch. “I saw it.”

He drew back. His mouth curved, his lower lip still slightly swollen where she’d bit him earlier. “You’re the only one who’s almost taken a chunk out of me lately.”

“But I
saw
—”

Untangling his fingers from her hair, he snagged the wrist of his glove between his teeth and stripped it off his hand.

His
steel
hand.

Stunned out of her tears, Elizabeth stared at it. The skeletal prosthetic resembled bones, yet when he made a fist his fingers curled as smoothly as hers. She pushed up his coat sleeve. The prosthetic melded smoothly into his flesh halfway up the length of his strong forearm, and the flex of tendons and muscle was mirrored in the subtle movement of small pneumatic tubes in his wrist.

Astonished, she wordlessly shook her head—then realization and dread slipped beneath her shock.

Caius had said the first place he’d gone after removing the shackle was to England—one of the few places where such an apparatus could be grafted to his arm. He’d said a
friend
had removed the shackle for him.

Her gaze dropped to the handle of the machete sheathed in his harness.

“Oh, dear God.” The joy that the zombie’s bite hadn’t infected him collided with the horror of what he’d done. “You cut off your
hand
?”

“To remove the shackle.” His voice roughened. “After you jumped, I went back to the sanctuary and discovered that everything you’d told me was true. And I realized that I should have cut it off five years ago, the moment your father asked me to hunt you down.”

Elizabeth understood that all too well. She’d jumped, desperate for freedom. He’d made his own desperate choice. Nodding, she glanced up—and froze.

“Caius?”

His face bleak, he watched her. “You thought I was dying?”

“Yes.” And because his stark expression and empty gaze made her stomach tremble with worry, she gave a nervous laugh. “So much crying over nothing.”

He didn’t smile. “Is that why you said it?”

Why she’d told Caius she loved him?

It
had
been. She wouldn’t have dared say it yet, if he hadn’t been dying.

She didn’t know what to do now. What to say now. When she’d thought she would lose him, nothing else had mattered. Not fear, not doubt, not remembered hurt.

Voice ragged, he asked, “Were you lying, Elizabeth?”

Violent rejection shot through her in response. She’d said it because he was dying, but she hadn’t been lying. She’d told Caius she loved him because she
did
.

And nothing else mattered now, either.

“No,” she said softly. “Every word was true.”

She just hadn’t been ready to say them. But she was ready for this—Caius’s rough, sweet kiss, the strong hands that lifted her against him. Smiling and laughing, Elizabeth said it again the moment she could take a breath—
I love you, Caius
—because he wasn’t dying, and he was here with her, and she never had to let him go.

Then his kiss slowed and softened; her heart beat fast and hard. Her fingers clenched in his hair, everything inside her winding up tight.