Ninth City Burning (41 page)

I am afraid to look at Jax, or Charles, afraid I will see in them this same conviction, this foggy but powerful perception that leaving Earth
would be a fatal mistake. And then I hear the voice of Princept Azemon speaking over the surrounding din. “Consul Seppora,” he says, “there is another proposal I think the Consulate should hear. If you would please acknowledge Curator Ellmore of the Academy of Ninth City, I believe she can explain further.”

I follow the room's collective gaze down to the steely figure of Curator Ellmore, and beside her, Vinneas.

W
hile Curator Ellmore delivers an eloquent and politically dexterous account of the poor decision-making that led us to this dire state, carefully avoiding any assignment of blame while simultaneously issuing an unequivocal I-told-you-so to everyone who saw fit to ignore Romeo's perplexing behavior over the past months, praising Vinneas's foresight and tactical wherewithal without dwelling too long upon the details of his actions, insubordinate and not-quite-treasonous-but-with-a-strong-scent-of-mutiny as they were, I flip nervously through my notes. The heavy stack of diagrams, maps, schematics, tables, and figures I've spent the last twenty-six hours preparing looks unnervingly similar to the delirious scrawlings of an insane person—which, incidentally, is about how I feel. Insane. Vinneas, meanwhile, is utterly self-possessed, casually jotting notes on a small pad of paper, his only accessory.

The Consulate towers over us, its members listening intently, their expressions ranging from intrigued to concerned to potentially cannibalistic. I decide Consul Seppora is without question the most intimidating person I have ever seen. For all her aged frailty, she has the scaly, contemplative demeanor of a slow-moving reptile capable of snapping out with blinding speed, and I get the sense she could literally bite my head off with her crocodilian jaw. For the fourth or fifth time since sitting down, I tip my coffee cup to my lips and find it empty. In the lower right-hand corner of his notepad, Vinneas has doodled a castle surrounded by mounted knights. Stifling a yawn, I attempt to discreetly rub my eyes and roll the kinks from my neck.

I spent the first night of what is now being called the Battle of Lunar Veil in an uncomfortable cell in Shelter Block East, the guest of Ninth
City's Gendarmerie.
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I will be the first to admit that I was apprehended under decidedly incriminating circumstances, having first gained access to the Fabrica by underhanded means, then outright broken into my former workshop, strong-arming a duly authorized city instarus in the process. But I still don't think the pair of gendarmes who discovered me in the wreckage of my workshop, cackling to myself beneath a Snuggles-shaped hole
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in the ceiling, needed to tackle me quite so enthusiastically.

When I objected to this unfriendly treatment, I was informed that during incursions, the entire Principate was considered to be in combat, and anyone taking advantage of the general distraction for the perpetration of mischief was in fact aiding the enemy and should be treated accordingly. At that point, it's possible I might have claimed my so-called mischief was actually part of a plan to save the world, and on that count I was doing a whole lot more than a couple of potbellied gendarmes like the ones carrying me down to Shelter Block East. Needless to say, things did not improve. Names were called, accusations leveled, and, in the end, I was deposited in a locked cell
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to wait out the remainder of the incursion.

It was an awful night, not so much because of the cell itself—which was small but generally not so bad—as my increasing certainty that the world was about to end. Vinneas was right about the impending Valentine invasion, I was sure of it, and if Rae was going to reveal the truth, I knew she had to do it soon. The more time passed, the surer I became she was dead, and we were all going to die, too.

But then, sometime around 0630, I heard shouting from the direction
of the room where my captors had retired to their all-important duty of drinking and telling dirty jokes, and Rae appeared, frog-marching the gendarmes to my cell, her accent, usually easy enough to understand, rendered incomprehensible by her rage. I learned afterward that she had come with orders for my release from Princept Azemon himself, but at the time, she appeared to have freed me with pure righteous fury.

No sooner had the door to my cell opened than Rae threw herself at me, encircling me in her long arms and practically lifting me off the ground. “It worked,” she said, releasing me and clasping my hands.

Finding myself on the verge of tears, I took a moment to clear my throat to avoid any sort of emotional lacrimation. “They closed Lunar Veil?”

She nodded hesitantly. “Some of the Valentines got through. The fighting is still going on, but the Curator and Princept Azemon say the worst of it is over. We're all right for now.”

“What about Snuggles?”

Rae's expression took on an aggrieved twist. “Oh, Kizabel,” she said. “I don't know. He was in bad shape by the time we got back. I had them take him to your workshop.” She smiled weakly. “The Curator says you can have your workshop back, by the way. They'll even fix the ceiling. Do you want to go see him?”

What I really needed was sleep. I'd dozed off once or twice during my captivity but had been too worried and terrified overall to get any useful REM. But at the present moment, I was more interested in how Rae and Snuggles had fared in the battle. The two gendarmes, who had been listening in frowning befuddlement to our conversation, moved aside at a contemptuous glance from Rae, and we joined the columns of cadets and citizens just then being allowed to leave the shelters.

As we walked, Rae narrated the battle. Snuggles had performed even better than I'd hoped, allowing Rae to puddle-jump to the head of our formations and wing past a skirmish already in progress, all with only minor damage as far as I could tell. Rae was somewhat less informative on the subject of Snuggles's injuries,
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but by the time we reached my workshop, I was beginning to think they weren't as bad as she imagined.

Lady Jane was waiting for us, a blur in the brushed metal of my workshop door. “You did it!” she squealed. In the background, I heard loopy CE jazz music, one of the songs she played in celebratory moments. “We're not all dead!”

“We might all still die,” I felt compelled to point out.

“With that attitude, you can just stay outside, thank you very much,” Lady answered.

I didn't feel like arguing, and to be honest, I was pretty proud of myself, and of Rae, and of Lady, who had played her own part in our continued existence, overpowering the instarus that had been posted to keep me out of my workshop. In the spirit of the occasion, I offered her the sincerest “Yippee” I could muster.

“Good enough, I suppose.” Lady sighed, pulling back the door for us. The scenery behind her mirrors showed the aftermath of a wild party, a landscape of collapsed chairs, smashed glasses, balloons drifting among overturned bottles of champagne.
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My workshop was in a similar state of disarray, as was to be expected following the hastily arranged launch of an experimental and still-somewhat-unpolished equus.

The wall to Testing Floor Sixteen was open, and there Snuggles knelt, looking just like the statue of an ancient armored knight carved in white marble, luminous in the new daylight shining through the hole in my workshop ceiling. The cracks and erosions scarring his armor only added to his antiqued appearance, though if you looked closely, you could see a few spots of exposed thurgo-muscle glinting like shards of metal in white sand.

“I think I broke him,” Rae said miserably. “By the time we got back, I couldn't get him to fly anymore. He could hardly walk. Imway and his people had to carry us most of the way,” she added.

“What?” Imway still occupied the number one spot on my shit list, and hearing his name in the context of our present victory
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made no sense at all. I whirled on her, not sure I'd heard right, but the disgusted look on her face told me I had.

“He and his people were the ones who pulled me out of the fight,” she said, then smiled. “He thought he was rescuing you, because of Snuggles.”

Recently, my feelings toward Imway had rested largely along the resentful/homicidal end of the emotional spectrum, but hearing this caused an unexpected blip. If Rae was telling the truth, Imway had dived into an ongoing battle to rescue me—or a person he thought was me. Maybe our childhood friendship still counted for something after all.

Once Snuggles was escorted back to Ninth City and his rider's identity revealed, no one could quite decide what to do, except for Rae, who was so exhausted she could barely stand and promptly collapsed in a heap. It was solidly six hours before she was either conscious or coherent enough to explain what had happened. I decided I couldn't begrudge her the nice night's sleep she'd had while I was cooped up in a four-and-a-half-square-meter cell worrying myself to death, given that she'd made it a priority to track me down as soon as she had regained the ability to form complete sentences—but mostly because of the disconsolate way she was now looking at Snuggles, like he was some adorable but pitifully injured woodland creature.

“He'll be fine,” I told her. And he would. Snuggles might have been almost inoperable at the moment, but he'd be an easy fix. The symptoms Rae described—the lag in responsiveness, her own debilitating exhaustion—were textbook gwayd loss. It was obvious he'd sustained a number of small injuries, and without any active sealing or cauterizing artifices—among the many finishing touches I'd left out during his hurried launch—he'd leaked gwayd at an absurd rate. I was impressed Rae had been able to keep him moving as long as she had; the strain must have been enormous.

“Really?” Rae asked, as if she didn't dare hope.

“Oh, sure. Flesh wounds only. I've done worse just testing him out here. We'll have him back on his feet in no time—maybe even a few hours, if you're up to try an activation later.”

“I thought we were celebrating!” Lady shouted indignantly.

I was already feeling better, bubbling with the energy I get whenever there's real, interesting work to be done. “This is how I celebrate,” I said, already searching for my tools amid the debris of the workshop.

I had erected the still-slightly-mangled egg crate and was stripping Snuggles from his armor, Rae playing tinker's assistant, running for riggings
and materials and answering questions regarding the Project's function during his first long flight—already I'd begun to imagine a few tweaks and improvements—when from the direction of my workshop door I heard Lady say, “Well, look who's decided to show his face!”

My first guess, based on Lady's saucy tone, was that it had to be Imway—I gathered from Rae's incipient scowl that she thought the same—but the rejoining voice belonged to Vinneas. “Lady! It's been ages. So lovely to see you again. Having a party?”

“All by
myself
,” she answered, slurring
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somewhat, “because everyone else is being
tedious
.”

“Unconscionable,” Vinneas answered, then paused. I had climbed down from the scaffolding around Snuggles, and when Vinneas saw me, he crossed the room in five long strides and clasped me to him. “Great work, Kiz,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “I don't know what I'd have done if anything had happened to you out there.”

“Yeah, no problem,” I said. It was my second very-tall-person hug of the day, and I was quite overcome. So nice to know your friends care. “I was actually pretty safe, down in the shelter holding cells. Rae did most of the dangerous stuff.”

Rae had been standing quietly a few steps back. Vinneas actually looked confused to find her there—a rare moment when he seemed unsure of himself. “Hello, Vinneas,” Rae said.

After the enthusiastic squeezing I'd received from both of them, I expected Vinneas and Rae would have some similar greeting for each other, but all that passed between them was a tentative smile, followed by several seconds of silence and hesitant shifts in posture—awkwardness, I realized with an insightful jolt, that resulted from as-yet-unexpressed romantic sentiments. An excited sound almost like a chirp escaped me before I could stop it, and I had to pretend a sudden tussive fit to avoid suspicion. This was big news. Imway, as one would expect from a gorgeous macho jerk, was quite the ladies' man, but I'd never known Vinneas to show any interest in females as such. Lady had obviously reached a similar conclusion: She was
giving me the bawdy eyebrow waggle she used to denote steamy drama afoot.

“Rae,” Vinneas said, overcoming his uncertainty by an obvious outlay of effort. “You took on half the Legion and an entire Valentine army for us. Thank you. I hear you fly like a shooting star.”

Rae rewarded him with a sparkling grin. “Don't forget Lady.”

“Yeah!” agreed Lady. “You know what those assholes wanted to do to me, Vinn? They were going to
archive
me, bottle me up in some snow globe and file me away as an example of an interesting but volatile and ultimately failed artifice.”

“Ingrates and cretins, all of them,” Vinneas affirmed, “and, unfortunately, it looks like they'll need your help again.”