Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (10 page)

Hayden took one glance at the book’s strangely shaped letters, like different-sized squares and little decorative spirals, and shook his head. Peering down over his shoulder, his father made a fascinated noise and asked, “Where did you get this? I’ve never seen such a script…and the book itself…it’s in pristine condition, despite its obvious age. Beautiful.”

“So you have no idea where the language is from?”

“No,” Hayden and Hugh said together.

Frowning, Reece swung a chair about and straddled it. “It was Liem’s.” He pulled a handful of tiny metal fragments out of his coat pocket and rolled them in the flat of his hand. Cufflinks, Hayden saw in bewilderment. “It’s the only thing I got out of his study before the Veritas swept in and confiscated everything down to his dirty socks. That and these cufflinks.”

“We just heard, I’m so sorry—”

“Think it’s important?” Gideon broke in, grabbing the book out of Hayden’s hand and squinting down at it.

“Wishful thinking, I’m sure.” Wrapping his fist around the cufflinks, Reece rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes. “But look at the last page.”

Licking his thumb, Gideon turned to the last page. His dark eyebrows pinched together. “I don’t get it.”

“What?” Hayden asked, craning his neck to see.

Reece raised his head and gratefully accepted a cup of tea from Hugh even though he hadn’t wanted one. “It’s on a few other pages, too. I found it early this morning when I was flipping through there. It struck me as odd after these.” He rattled Liem’s cufflinks in a fist.

“What?” Hayden repeated.

Gideon brought the book around to Hayden and Reece’s side of the table and laid it open on its back. He jabbed a finger at the emblem messily scribbled in the margin of the righthand page—an A inside a circle, inside a pair of wings.

“Aurelia’s emblem. It keeps turning up. Like I wish Nivy would.” Reece sighed. Aware of the confused looks passing over his head, he explained, “She’s gone. She bleeding disappeared with all my answers the same time Liem did. I searched for her all night on my bim, but it’s like she just vanished. I couldn’t have picked up a trail if I had a Triton-class ship to level the whole forest.”

Thumbing the barrel of his revolver, Gideon raised his eyebrows, impressed. “You want I should go look for her?”

Before Reece could say either way, Hugh cleared his throat pointedly, cupping his mug of tea in long, bony fingers. “Reece, Gideon, you know you both are like sons to me. And while I know that doesn’t guarantee me any sort of authority…maybe you’ll hear me out as a friend.” Gideon and Reece both looked up curiously. “Don’t do this. The deeper you delve into this—”

“Hey!” Sophie’s delighted voice broke in. She was so light and quiet when she walked, they hadn’t even heard her come in the back door. Standing in the doorway in a faded yellow dress and bloomers, she looked like a flower, like a bright posy. “Golly, it’s crowded in here. I didn’t know you were coming over, Reece.”

Reece smiled and straightened up in his chair, smart enough to know not to let Sophie think anything was wrong. If she was a posy, she was a posy with the most curious disposition a flower ever had. There was also her knack of remembering things she heard almost to-the-word to consider; it made her a quick learner, a valuable employee at The Postal Office, and a very adequate little spy.

“Does that mean you didn’t make me any biscuits?” Reece teased.

Glowing, Sophie stepped up to her father, who stooped to let her plant a kiss on his pale cheek. “I’ll make a batch quicker than you can say chimera.”

As Reece started teasingly, “Ccchhh….”, and Sophie laughed, rushing about to gather her ingredients, Hayden thoughtfully fiddled with the red pin on his father’s jacket, a lion’s head in the shape of a heart. It had been Mother’s. Juliet Rice had had such a strong personality, warm, selfless, brave—lionhearted—sometimes he felt the echo of her here in this house, like she’d left an imprint of herself behind for them. He tried to wrap up himself in that now, to ward off the sudden cold he didn’t know if anyone else felt.

Another week passed, the first uneventful one in what felt like ages. Hayden didn’t see much of Gideon and Reece, Reece because he was being forced to help Abigail in her preparations for the duke’s return, Gideon because he kept slinking off in the middle of the night to work jobs probably of the illegal sort, but he was busy enough on his own. He watched six projector books cover-to-cover, practiced his physician skills on elderly Mr. Muggets next door (who had the hissing sniffles), dug the house out of the dust and disrepair that Hugh never had time to tend to, and tried not to think about what his return to The Owl would entail.

Being friends with someone like Reece sometimes occasioned the kind of adventure Hayden would rather read about. This time, Reece had it in his head they should sneak aboard
The Aurelia
…with her sitting square in the middle of The Aurelian Academy’s Museum of Antiquities! It wasn’t that Hayden didn’t think they might find something of value aboard the ship—there was no denying that her emblem did seem to be showing itself in conspicuous places—but the fact remained. In real life, villains were smart enough not to leave a trail, and protagonists were smart enough not to follow them if they did.

The end of holiday came too quickly. Hayden had only gotten through half of his library when he’d wanted to review all of it, and it wasn’t till his second to last day on Honora that he realized he’d been badly neglecting Sophie.

His little sister tapped on his open bedroom door as he pinched a test tube between his gloved thumb and forefinger and lowered it into a tarnished stand already holding three seemingly empty tubes. One of them actually held a gas, if a gas that was a fairly common household commodity. Coal gas.

“Hmm?” he said idly. “What is it Soph?”

“Do you want to go for frozen dairy in the city? I’ve saved up, I could buy us a trolley ride in, wouldn’t that be fun? Hayden? Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Just a minute. I’m almost…blast!” Hayden leaned up off his rusted old desk and glowered at the tube filled partway with dark metallic flecks. “I must have miscalculated. I’ve done this a thousand times!”

Walking in her birdlike way around the room, her hands behind her back, Sophie said, “Maybe you need a break. Did you hear what I said? Do you want to go for frozen dairy?”

But Hayden was still staring at the tube, the thought of frozen dairy not breeching the buildup of numbers he had bubbling in his head. What had he done wrong? The triphospherine should have started to take on a telling blue tint…but it looked rather green.

Making an exasperated noise, Sophie moved in on the desk, bent over to examine Hayden’s array of beakers, and carelessly snatched up the triphospherine in her bare fist, studying it. Hayden yelped and gently prized apart her fingers to take it back.

“Sophie!”

“What?”

After the tube was returned to its safe and proper place, Hayden scolded, “Never do that! Ever! Do you realize what that is?”

Sophie gave him a wry look as she dusted the lap of her blue skirts. “Triphospherine?”

“I…yes, but do you know what it is is? Triphospherine is the base component in burstpowder!”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be playing with it, then.”

“I’m not
playing
with it, Soph. I’m doing homework, and—look, that’s not the point. See this?” Hayden pointed carefully at the clear but not empty beaker. “That’s coal gas. Very flammable. If you’d spilled one…if there had been a leak in either…if—”

Sophie suddenly snorted. “If
I
know both those things are mostly harmless on their own, then you certainly should.”

Drawing a shaky breath, Hayden lowered his face into his hand and rubbed his forehead. “I wouldn’t say
harmless
...”

“Burstpowder doesn’t just explode randomly, Hayden. That’s why guns that use burstpowder have a flint, and burstpowder shells have a trigger.”

“Remind me not to let you alone with Gideon anymore,” Hayden chuckled despite himself.

Shrugging, Sophie perched herself on his windowsill and cocked her head to the side. “What’s your homework?”

“It’s actually quite interesting. You and Gideon would both enjoy it,” he said dryly. “It has to do with how triphospherine can cause explosions in The Voice of Space where most projectile bombs fail to because of the oxidant it contains. It doesn’t require outside oxygen to create fire.”

Sophie looked at him for a minute, computing what he said, and then laughed and kicked her feet. “Oh, Hayden, you’re such a brain. Can we please go for frozen dairy now? I don’t have to work today, and it’s so sunny out.” She rolled down her bottom lip in a pathetic pout.

Hayden couldn’t help but laugh, though it felt rather weak. Frozen dairy. Something cold to jam up all the worries in his brain.

They did ride the trolley into the city, but Hayden paid for it and told Sophie to keep her savings for the Mead Moon Festival. They left behind the identical row houses with their chipped paintjobs and chugged in the steam-powered boxcar into the eastern end of the Honoran capital, Caldonia. The houses here were still packed together, leaving only narrow alleys between them, but they were wealthy, huge, with steepled roofs and elaborate trimmings often painted in a spectrum of clashing colors.

It was a half hour ride into the heart of Caldonia, where the buildings all loomed, dark and uniform in brick and black glass. The birds perched on their ledges wouldn’t have looked real if it weren’t for the twitching of their heads that gave them away as they watched the traffic below for signs of littered food. Screaming black owls pressed wing to wing with spotted owls and tiny yapping owlets, snowy owls with their draping wings, and the terrible king grey owls, with their flat black faces and perpetually surprised eyes, all used to the tumult of the city and the ships whizzing by over the buildings’ peaks.

And there were
so
many ships, ships Hayden couldn’t name but Reece could’ve recited the engine type and model number for without looking twice. They were mostly small, zippy vessels, but there were a few that had to be Kraken class because of their size. They looked like huge wooden sea ships floating on the clouds, with house-sized hot air balloons suspended above them. Those were the heliocrafts, luxury cruisers, another indulgence of the rich.

There were also automobiles bumbling along the roads, boxy and much less graceful than their cousins in the sky. Bims growled as their drivers tried to maneuver them through the holiday traffic, but there were horse-drawn buggies to be managed as well, and horses never took kindly to the loud rumbling of a bim.

All along the streets, people milled in their fine or else not-so-fine city wear. Milling among the downtown folk, the Westerners in their grungy work clothes and sleeveless undershirts all looked as if they’d been coated in ash, because the downtowners’ clothes were as colorful as their houses. The ladies carried parasols and wore pillbox hats with little veils, and a lot of the men had handlebar mustaches or overly wide sideburns that came all the way down to their chins.

“Can we walk by Victoria’s Hat Menagerie?” Sophie begged Hayden as he deposited a copper cog into the automated expense till on the side of the trolley. The coin clanked to the bottom of the till.

“Must we?” Hayden pretended to moan as he led her away from the trolley, which started to scoot along again after spraying them with the cold mist of its pipes.

“Please? It’s just beside the dairy stand.”

“I suppose we could walk
by
it,” Hayden teased, “so long as you don’t make me walk
through
it…” He trailed off, pausing on the busy pedestrian walkway, as he saw her.

His first glimpse was so brief, he wasn’t sure it was really her, but when he pushed up onto his toes and looked out over the shoppers jostling about him, there couldn’t be any doubt. Nivy was barreling
towards him, wearing the same clothes she had when they’d met, though she didn’t fill them out nearly at all now, she’d gotten so thin. Her hair was in a tail on the back of her head that kept whipping her hardened face as she sprinted right through the middle of the crowd, determined to outrun her pursuers.

“Nivy?” Hayden choked, and barely yanked a confused and startled Sophie out of the charging girl’s way. Nivy hurtled past, ignoring or not seeing him. The three sentries doggedly tailing her with their ALPs drawn were huffing and puffing when they passed Hayden a second later.

Sophie tugged on Hayden’s sleeve. “Do you know her?”

Hayden gaped down the street, watching Nivy disappear around an alley corner, little more than a blur of black clothing.

“I…Soph, do you feel like running? Just a little? To see where she goes?”

With a grin, Sophie plucked up her skirt in two handfuls and started the pursuit, Hayden jumping to follow and probably having a harder time breathing besides.

Sophie led the chase hard down East Capitol Street, then turned into the mouth of the alleyway where Nivy and the sentries had disappeared. It was empty save for disposal bins and a few stray dogs that were yapping at each other’s heels, but it broke off at a sharp right angle, and Hayden could hear the echo of the sentries shouting, “Halt! You are bound by law to halt!”