Heart of Veridon (40 page)

I stood and walked towards him evenly. Every third step I paused, sighted the ’rifle, and fired. His body groaned with each impact, the shot disappearing into the confused cogwork of his body. He was slowing down.

“This is too fucking easy,” I said, then placed the barrel gently against the back of his head. He reached up and crushed the chamber. The shell exploded, peeling back the fingers of his hand and shattering the iron stock. He kept looking for the Cog.

“Jacob!” Wilson yelled from up near the Torch. I looked his way. He waved the Cog in the air. I ran to him.

“What the hell is he doing?” he asked.

“Looking for that. It’s his heart, his pattern. He shouldn’t even be able to hold himself together.” The Angel’s wings were beating slowly. “He doesn’t give a rat’s ass for us. Here,” I took the Cog and looked over at Emily. “I’ll keep his attention. You free her and get out of here.”

“The Badge is swarming,” he said. Down by the launch derricks a whole crowd of graycoats were milling about, staring up at us and the Angel. “We’ll never get out that way.”

“Just get Emily. Meet me down by the
Dawn
. I’ll get us out.”

Wilson went over to Sloane’s body and started searching his clothes. I watched long enough to wonder at how little blood there was, and how Sloane’s body had fallen in such symmetrical lines. I turned back and saw the Angel looking at me, at the Cog in my hand. I ran down the hill in the other direction, toward the open expanses of the Torch’ and away from the hangars. He spread his wings and followed, the slow beat of those sharp feathers blustering him around in the wind.

There was a little wood on the downslope opposite the city. It was made up of iron-hard trees that grew out of the rocks, their roots pushing deep into ancient cracks, living on the barest soil. Their leaves were pale yellow, and their trunks were thin and springy. They whipped in the storm’s fury like breakers on the shore. I threw myself among them just yards in front of the Angel. The trees knocked me down, and I tore the skin on my knees as I skidded down the hill, bashing into the tough bark of their trunks.

I came to a halt against the bole of the largest of these trees. Its roots spread across a large area, like a carpet of knuckles over the stone. I lay there, insensate, staring up at the beating rain.

“We had a deal, the man Sloane and I.” His voice carried over the storm. I rolled over onto my stomach. The Angel wasn’t in sight. “A proper host, and the location of the one he called Camilla. And then I was to kill you. Eventually, he would return the Cog to me.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” I yelled, then quickly moved away. I didn’t think he’d be able to tell where I was just by my voice. The wind was howling, seeming to come from all directions. His answer seemed to come from the sky itself.

“He would never have given it to me. He knew what it was, where it came from. He would have betrayed me, before the exchange.”

“Sounds right.”

“You were about to give the heart to him, though.”

I put the Cog into my pocket. I was out of weapons. I had seen him fight before, knew that I didn’t have a chance. I just had to delay him. I just had to get away.

“Part of my plan,” I yelled over the storm. “I wouldn’t have let him keep it.”

“Because you, too, know what it is.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I wonder. Do you know the power it holds? I know what is in you, Burn. Part of her. I will need to take that, as well.”

“You’re shit at negotiating,” I said.

“I am… not negotiating. But I am offering you a choice. You can live without the Cog. I can not. And you can live without the thing in you. I can show you, make you whole.”

“Let’s get back to the part where you can’t live without the Cog! How do we go about making that happen more quickly?”

A low, rolling thunder filled the woods. He was laughing.

“You are an admirable man, Jacob Burn. Brave. But you have been used horribly by this city and its rulers. Do not let them trick you into dying in their place. Give me the Cog and be done with it.”

I hunkered down behind the tree and stared at my hands. He was right, of course. I was here because of the Council, and the decisions they made. He was going to find me, hiding behind a tree, and when he did he was going to kill me. I took out the Cog and looked at it in the dim light of the woods. It flickered in my hands like solid lightning.

“Sloane, he promised me the girl. The one on the stick back there. Emily. He was going to make her a host for me, until the Cog could be secured.”

“Can you shut up?” I yelled. “I’m tired of listening to you, and I’m tired of this godsdamn Cog!”

He stepped from around a tree and wrapped the fingers of his undamaged hand in my collar. His other hand was a ruin at his side. He was weakening, without the Cogheart. He wasn’t reforming as he should.

“Then give it to me, as you know you should.”

“What happens then? If I give it to you.”

“The girl goes free, and we leave.”

I sagged in his grip. My back was against the tree. I took the Cog out of my pocket and held it in both hands.

“Which girl?” I asked.

“The buried girl. The hidden girl. The girl this city has profaned.”

“Camilla,” I said. He nodded. “She won’t let Veridon go unharmed.”

He almost smiled. “Can you say the city deserves any less? I have been following you, Jacob Burn. I know what has happened to you, what has been done to you. By those you love, and those you counted as friends. And still you protect it. Give me the heart, and stand aside.”

I held up the Cog. “Take it.”

He set me down. As soon as his fingers were away from my throat, I slammed the Cog across his face. He faltered. His ruined hand came up and began its imperfect transformation into blade. I kicked at his feet. We fell, the knuckle roots of the tree digging into our backs. As he struggled to stand I came to my knees and put the Cog just below his eye, all of my weight behind it. His head snapped, cogs clattered away. He was coming apart. I pulled back to hit him again when his other hand, his good hand, tore into me.

I felt the blood across my leg and looked down. The pain was a second away, and I had a good look at the inside of my ribcage before the agony blinded me. His hand had become a thing of scythes and axles, spinning like a tornado. I collapsed, and the Cog skipped away behind me.

“My time is short,” he said, rising slowly. His wings looked thin, and his chest was heaving. The rain that poured off his face fell to the ground black with oil and blood. “But I would do this one thing well. You have defied me at every turn, Jacob Burn.” He slapped me awkwardly, and I fell onto my back. My secret engine was pumping hard to remake me, but I could feel it losing ground. “Every step of the way here, I have run across your people, your Veridians. Your soldiers and your thugs and your gods.” I dragged myself backwards. He towered over me, unforming and reforming. He slapped me again, this time with his bladed hand. My cheek shredded.

“I am tired of your people. I am tired of this horrible city, perched on this rock, dredging up the trash of greater empires. You live on the junk of history, Jacob Burn, and history will wash you away. No one will remember your dreadful empire of filth and misery.”

“I’m starting to take this personally,” I gasped through blood and broken bone. I dragged myself backwards and found the Cog. He looked down at it, glimmering under my bloody hand. His eyes flashed furiously. He reached for it.

I rolled over onto my front, shielding the Cog from his view. I saw that I was on the edge of a cliff, one of the jagged walls that fell straight down into the Reine. It stretched out before me like a flat gray road that led straight down, far down. I dangled an arm over the cliff, jammed the Cog into the root bole of a scraggly tree clinging to the edge of the cliff. He put a hand on my shoulder and flipped me over.

“Give me the heart,” he said. “And die as you should.”

I put both feet into his chest and pushed. I slid off the cliff with a scrape then pitched down and back. The wind roared past me, the Reine rushed to take me in its wide, flat arms. A second later and the Angel’s arms were around me, shaking me violently.

“Give me the heart or you die!”

“Fuck off,” I said, but my voice was failing me. There was a lot of blood across my pants. I was battling to stay awake.

“Give it to me!”

“I don’t have it!” I yelled, then held out my hands. “Do you see it? No. I don’t have it.”

He screamed in frustration and tried to drop me. I hooked my arms around his neck and squeezed. We floundered in the storm, corkscrewing down towards the water.

“This is how it’s going to end, you bastard,” I hissed into his ear as I rode him down towards the water. “You’re going to fail, we’re both going to die, and the bitch Camilla stays in the city. This is how it’s going to happen.”

He ignored me and beat his wings mightily. We crawled slowly up in the air. I clung to his back, tucked between his wings, and hammered his head with my bloody fists. My heart was burning with new energy. I could feel the hole in my side closing, the shreds of my cheek pinching shut.

“I can’t fucking die, monster! You can’t do it. You can’t kill me, and you can’t kill the city. I’ll see to it.”

“You are,” he grunted as we reached the Cliffside, “tremendously annoying.”

We climbed higher, high above the Torch’. He turned his head to me and stared into my eyes.

“Fly, Pilot. Fly, if you can.”

He folded his wings and we fell. I clung to him. If I let go he would just spread his wings and fly away.

“You’ll die, too!” I yelled.

“I will reform.”

“Not without the heart! Not without a body to possess.”

He considered this. Just before we hit, he flared his wings. I crashed into a tree, the ancient high tree I had hidden behind when first I ran into the woods. He peeled away, cartwheeling as he fell. I fell through the springy, fibrous branches of the tree. Things snapped inside me, but my fall was broken. The Angel fared less well.

When I came to the ground I lay there and spat blood. My left knee was ruined. Blood obscured my vision. The thing inside me was roaring, straining with the massive damage of my fall. I struggled to my hands and knees, and then, wavering, to my feet.

The Angel lay ten feet away, perfectly still. His limbs were indistinct pools of boiling cogwork. His wings were flat and immobile. He stared up at the rain.

I stumbled to the cliff’s edge and, carefully, retrieved the Cog. Using a stick to steady myself, I limped back up the hill.

Getting up the hill was difficult. Once I was out of the woods the wind battered me, the rain blinded me. My limp was horrible, the bones grinding. I was in shock. The stone was slick under my feet. But I was free, I was clear. I held the Cog in my hands, looking down at it with a faint murmur of stunned disbelief going through my head. Something cracked behind me. Another. I turned. He was rising, coming out of the woods, cracking trees in half as he came.

I dropped my stick, almost fell over in shock. He was emerging from the treeline, half apart, his chest unfolding, his wings expanding. He was abandoning any semblance of humanity. His two wings became four, his head was little more than a howling mouth. I saw the human body he had possessed poking through, the half-rotted corpse of a young Pilot, his face horribly deformed, his arms flapping out of the shifting geography of the Angel’s torso.

I held the Cog up like a talisman. He was yards away still. I felt my knee realign, the impossible health of my heart knitting bones. It used the last of my reserves. I could barely stand. I looked down at the Cog. It glittered in my hand.

What had Camilla said? Take the heart. Become the destruction of the city. Ruin the things you hate, save the things you love. I looked back up the hill. The Torch’ was a blurry shadow behind me. I couldn’t tell if Emily and Wilson were clear of the machine. I looked back to the Cog. How would I do it, how would it happen?

My body answered for me. My chest burst open bloodlessly, my ribs folding back. A flower of steel came out of my heart, spinning. It folded open, pulsing, yearning for the Cog in my hand. I stood there in the rain, shaking, staring down at the tortured mockery of my body. My hand quivered, the Angel’s heart shivering between my fingers. Take the heart. Become the destruction of the city. Of all you love.

The Angel was rushing me, roaring. Become that, I thought, become him to destroy him.

I wouldn’t. I would stand on my own and die on my own, but I would not become the dark angel Camilla dreamed of being. That was what the city was looking for, Sloane and his people trying to throw off the Church, the Church trying to keep the city in line with its secret, hidden girl. I wouldn’t.

I willed my chest to close, and it did. The Angel was nearly on me. I turned and ran, my head down, my body screaming.

The Torch formed up in front of me. Wilson, damn him, was still there, tugging Emily off the contraption. She was naked, the needles and half-grown cogwork weighing her down. He saw me coming and straightened up, a question in his eyes. A second later he saw the Angel behind me and started pulling roughly at Emily’s bonds. There was no time. No fucking time.