Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (13 page)

She looked right at him then, and lowered the gun to her side. Her blue eyes burned upon his face, and he felt a sort of gravity come over him, as if she was forcing something heavy on him with that gaze, something he should understand but couldn’t quite see. He opened and then closed his mouth. He wanted to shout, “
What
?”

“We…we thought the capsule might be some kind of escape pod,” Hayden bravely ventured. “Is it?” Something danced in Nivy’s hard eyes. Affirmation. “So it carried a person?” He suddenly gasped, and Reece looked at him sharply. “Wait…were
you
in the capsule?”

Reece’s stupefied choking noise sounded like a stepped-on crow.

Just then, Gideon lunged out of the stairwell behind Nivy, his revolver held in two hands and aimed at the back of her head. “Drop it!” he growled, standing in the deep stance of a Handler, legs spread, body facing sideways. “Drop it now!”

Reece opened his mouth to tell Gideon to stand down and swallowed his words as Nivy sprang into action, spinning and lifting her gun in the space of a blink. She and Gideon stared one another down like a pair of wolfdogs fighting for territory, each sizing the other up, neither blinking.

“Wait! Gid, lower your gun.”

“Not likely, Cap’n.”

“Just do it. She’s not going to hurt you.”

Nivy rolled her eyes back to look at Reece, amused, and Gideon used the chance to strike. Flashing out, he grabbed her arm and rolled it till her fingers uncurled and released her gun. Clearly he hadn’t planned on her spinning right on under the arm to come up beside him, pull back her fist, and hit him hard on the side of the face. He took the punch with a grunt and stared at her like she was a creature from the Freherian marshes.

“
Hey
!” Reece snapped again. “I said hold it! Both of you!”

“Please,” Hayden added while trying to piece his bifocals back together. “We’re on your side, Nivy. Really. Whatever you’re running from, we can help you. You can trust us.”

Nivy looked doubtful, but she lowered her fists.

For a moment, the four of them stood apart and waited for one of the others to speak. Reece knew he should be taking charge, but his head was dammed up with images, images brought on by Hayden’s realization…

They slowly fell into order in his head. Nivy came in the capsule, noticed only by a few—Eldritch and Liem included. Liem made it to the crash site first, took Nivy, chose to protect her. Eldritch found out and had him abducted, and then Nivy came here, to Aurelia, whose emblem had been on her escape capsule. But why?

“Hmph,” Gideon suddenly grumbled, turning Nivy’s gun sideways and running his eyes from its curving, elongated grip down to the end of its the barrel. The two bits of metal standing up on the end of the barrel—the front sight—gave it the look of a peculiar skeleton key.

Reece didn’t know guns, and he couldn’t say what made this one different apart from its outward design. But he knew ships; he knew Aurelia. The colors of the gun…half dark red wood, a cherry or rhubarb, and half tarnished gold…they made it as much a mystery as the capsule. Because they made it look like it belonged to this ship. It belonged to
The Aurelia
.

“She couldn’t’a shot you,” Gideon decided. “This ain’t loaded, and anyway, I think it’s broke. Never seen one like it, but I’m pretty sure it takes burstpowder, and the frizzen’s missin’.”

“Where did you get that?” Reece asked Nivy. “Did you find that on the ship? Wait, never mind that for now…Nivy,
were
you on that capsule?”

Nivy shut her eyes for just a second, then, when she opened them, nodded. She held out her hand to Gideon and waggled her fingers, asking for her gun, but he swung it around on his finger and slid it into his belt.

“For safe keepin’,” he told her. She dropped her hand, expressionless.

Reece drew a breath, ready to open the floodgates and let his questions pour out, but then paused to listen to a peculiar ticking sound coming from the museum lobby. He hushed the others with a gesture and strained an ear to the silence and the faint
tick, tick, tick
. Bleeding bogrosh. Those were footsteps on the marble.

“Sentries,” he mouthed.

“If they’re in, they’ll be seein’ Aurelia’s hatch sittin’ open any second,” Gid added. He grabbed Hayden’s sleeve and yanked him to the back of the bridge, away from the canopy window. A heartbeat later, beams of light from high-power photon wands swept across the heavyglass.

“That’s our cue.” Reece turned back to Nivy, whose face looked especially gaunt in the harsh contrast of the beams and shadows. “What Hayden said about trusting us is true. You can or you can’t, but you’re coming with us either way.” Nivy raised an eyebrow. “Oh, we can make you, alright. Gideon knows a dozen ways to knock a person unconscious, and that’s
without
the help of blunt objects.”

A distant voice sounded, “Look! Under Aurelia!”

“Know a back way off this boat?” Gideon asked.

Reece considered, and then began feeling his way along the cabin wall till his hand found a padded lever. “We’ll use the ladder tray to get on top of the ship. We can climb down her wing and end up by the door.”

“Which will probably be guarded,” Hayden pointed out as Reece forced the lever. There was a loud rush of decompression as the sealants released the overhead hatch.

Hanging back near the cabin door to make certain Nivy—whose slight frown was the only sign she was fazed at all by their dilemma—didn’t bolt, Gideon said, “So long as there ain’t more than seven or eight of them, I’ll manage.”

Enough milky light outlined the edges of the hatch for Reece to make out the ladder folded up against it. With a jump, he grabbed the lowest rung and drew it out. “Hayden after me, then Nivy, then Gideon. Keep to your stomachs.” He clambered up the ancient rungs, hoping they could take the weight. 

Aurelia was tall enough that the sentries wouldn’t spot them unless they were searching the museum’s upper levels, which spiraled like a continuous balcony up to the top of the dome. And by their voices, they were under the ship, checking out the gut engine nook. Reece began dragging himself along the smooth metal surface of
The Aurelia
, planting his palms to keep from sliding when the fuselage began to slope down.

He led the way to the tip of the wing, the head of a silent train. He felt Hayden let out a relieved breath down by his ankles when they reached the door and found only one sentry on post, blocking the way out with his considerable width and nervously trading his ALP from hand to hand. Reece waved with two fingers for Gideon to do his business.

Gid always assumed an air of reckless casualness when he was on the prowl. Like a cat balanced on the edge of a fence, daring to leap from post to post because he knew he couldn’t possibly fall. In three quick steps, he had the sentry slumping unconsciously against the wall and was nodding for Reece, Hayden, and Nivy to hurry down.

“You didn’t hurt him, did you?” Hayden whispered.

Gideon nudged the sentry’s leg with his boot. “Nothin’ more than a mornin’ headache’s worth.” He grabbed Hayden by the back of his collar before he could inspect the sleeping man. “It’s just a bump on the skull, he ain’t gonna bleed to death!” He gave him a shove in the right direction, and Hayden, holding his twisted bifocals to his face with both hands, very nearly fell out the door.

Reece waited till Nivy dropped silently from the wing, then latched onto her arm. He wasn’t about to risk her running off with his answers again, and if him being a little rough with her as he hauled her out the door for fear she’d disappear again was an overreaction, well, it was her fault for disappearing in the first place.

They ran in a cluster, their photon wands’ beams cutting less than a foot into the dense fog. From the Musical Arts building, the bell tower sang its midnight melody, tolling the hour.

“Do you…” Hayden panted as they stopped in the square separating The Owl’s motor vehicle stables from the largest of the male dormitories, Linus. “Do you think we were followed?”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll have lost them by now.” Reece glared into the fog over his shoulder. “We should get back to Taurus. They might search the dormitories if they think it was a student who broke in. We don’t want to get caught out of our suites.”

“What about her?” Gideon’s blue eyes darted to Nivy, who, intent on ignoring him, casually peeled Reece’s hand off her arm. “She stayin’ with you?”

Hayden made a despairing noise in the back of his throat. “Girls aren’t allowed in the male dormitories!” Blushing, he quickly added, “No offense, Nivy, but I’ve had enough rule-breaking for one night.”

Reece said dryly, “Yeah, we don’t want to push him too hard. One doesn’t become a criminal mastermind overnight, after all.”

When it came to hiding Nivy, he had two things to consider. First, her safety. Secondly, the safety of whomever he hid her with. That being said, he didn’t have many choices.

“Gideon, take Nivy on your bim and go to Mordecai’s. Tell him I have a job for him, and that it’ll pay well.”

“A job?”

Nivy looked up at Reece as if anticipating what he was going to say. He returned her unenthused look with a smirk.

“Babysitting.”

X

N…I…V…Y

He wasn’t gonna say he wasn’t as mystified as Reece and Hayden were by the girl…he just thought he might understand her a little better. Not because he knew anythin’ about where she’d been or what all she was hidin’, but because he knew the look’a someone resigned to livin’ on the run. Dirt hard not to, when you’d lived in the western slums’a Caldonia and seen folk that ain’t ever had a meal that wasn’t taken off’a someone else’s plate. Most’a those folk hated havin’ to steal, but they did what they had to to keep livin’. Nivy had that look about her.

She waited patiently while he rolled his bim outta the stables.

“Don’t try anythin’ funny,” he warned her. Usin’ his heel, he kicked the bim to life and settled himself on it. Nivy sat behind him and tentatively put her hands on his shoulders. “Grab around my middle if you don’t wanna fly off.”

After a pause, she roped her arms around him, weavin’ her fingers together rather than actually touchin’ him. Good enough.

It started rainin’, turnin’ the back roads to Mordecai’s into a minefield’a muddy potholes. Couple’a times they started to twist in the mud and Gideon had to plant a foot, but Nivy still didn’t grab hold’a him, just sat quiet and still like an owlet on its perch.

“You don’t say much, even for someone who don’t talk,” he said, spittin’ out the rain runnin’ down his face. Another mile down the road, Praxis’s lights showed blurry and blue through the rain. “But you’re gonna have to learn to. The cap’n ain’t gonna—bleedin’—” He jerked his handles sideways and saved them from tippin’ over in the mud. Then he shifted down, puttin’ the bim in a lower gear.

They put-putted into Praxis’s abandoned downtown, in between shops with darkened storefronts and lampposts that flickered through the rainfall. Instead’a stoppin’ in front’a the gun shop, Gideon drove his bim right onto the pedestrian walkway and rolled it around the corner’a the buildin’ and into the three walled shed where the shop tools were stored. A tunnel ran from the shed into the basement’a the shop, which Mordecai had refurbished, made his home.

After Gideon had turned off his bim, he crossed the shed and pulled the tambour door to the ground, lockin’ it in place. He turned. Nivy was against the wall, gazin’ at the different mallets, tongs, and wedges.

“Hey,” he barked. When she looked up, he knelt, grabbed hold’a the handle to the trapdoor, and held it open. “In.”

The tunnel was lit with lamps that smelled like old oil, and it had floors’a gritty cement and bellyin’ walls’a dirt and beams. It was long and straight; the round door at its end, an old escape hatch from a dissembled Nyad, had fire glow creepin’ under its bottom.

Liftin’ the hatch, Gideon jerked his chin at Nivy, and she ducked into the livin’ area. Kinda looked like one’a them old sea ships, with its wooden beams and creakin’ floors and the bulbous woodstove in its corner, blushin’ red with flames. ‘Course, most’a the house was just parts salvaged from junkyards, condemned buildin’s and the like. Here a table that was actually a piano with its keys gutted, there a photon chandelier made outta an old sea ship helm. Mordecai could make somethin’ functional outta any kind’a junk.

“What’s this, now?” boomed a tenor voice from the kitchen. Mordecai stepped through the saloon-style swingin’ doors and brought a cloud’a pipe smoke with him. He fanned it away from his white push broom mustache. “Well, heckles and hoots, you dirt brought a girl to see me, finally.”

Gideon grimaced sideways at Nivy. “This here’s a job from Reece. He wants you to keep an eye on Nivy, make sure she don’t go nowhere.”

Mordecai leveled a stare at him and smacked his lips around the stem’a his long black pipe. “Wish I had more jobs like that. Sittin’ around and watchin’ pretty girls.” He waved with his pipe for Gideon to join him in the kitchen. “Nivy, is it? You just sit tight and make yourself comfortable in front’a the fire. I’m gonna have me a word with my grandson. When he comes back, I reckon he’ll be a tad more polite.”

In the kitchen, Mordecai sat in one’a the metal desk chairs The Owl had thrown out a few years back. Tappin’ his pipe on his chin, he asked, “So who is she?”

Gideon leaned against the tin countertop holdin’ a couple’a days worth’a dirty dishes. “Don’t know. She came outta that capsule I told you about.”

“Really? An alien. That’s fascinatin’. What’s Reece fixin’ to do with her?”

“Not sure. Not your place to ask, though.”

Blowin’ out his mustache, Mordecai leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up onto the kitchen table. He was still wearin’ his work boots, all charred with burstpowder and scuffed. “I just wanna make certain he ain’t gonna bring Parliament down on our lovely establishment. Sometimes that boy’s gotta head like a goose.”

Gideon snorted, not disagreein’. Suddenly aware’a the cold metal seepin’ through his shirt, he reached behind his back and pulled out Nivy’s strange gun. Mordecai lowered his pipe and squinted so that the lines about his bright blue eyes gathered.

“That’s a pretty iron if I ever seen one.”

“It’s the girl’s. It’s busted; I’m gonna try to fix it up.”

“For her?”

“For me. Trust me, I ain’t ever puttin’ a gun in that girl’s hands.”

“So you brought her to a gun shop. And folks say I’m the crazy one.”

Examinin’ the gun by holdin’ it level with his eyes and glarin’ down its barrel, Gideon muttered, “Reece’s idea. Anyhow, where can I put her up to sleep?”

“We don’t exactly got guestrooms. Put her on the cot or the couch, whichever one you don’t want. Or whichever one you
do
want, if you wanna be all gentleman like.”

Gideon blew out a long breath. He knew Nivy was just a job, but she
was
a girl, and girls had that thing about them where they generally liked to bathe more than once a week. She might fancy a stand in the water closet, not to mention a clean change’a clothes, though Gideon himself didn’t have any that wouldn’t fall right off her. He had a box’a his mum’s old stuff, though. Leah’d been tiny. Maybe he’d find somethin’ that wasn’t eaten through by mothballs.

He found Nivy hunchin’ by the woodstove, drippin’ wet, her teeth chitterin’. She glanced over her shoulder at him without really liftin’ her eyes.

“Come on,” he said stiffly. “I’ll show you where you can wash up.”

The head was positioned off’a Mordecai’s personal workshop so he could rinse down after work. Gideon stood at the door and waved Nivy in to show her what knobs to turn to make it so the water wasn’t scaldin’ hot, as it tended to be. Then he backed away from the spicket and waited for her to get started.

Nivy stared at him, foldin’ her arms over her chest awkwardly.

“What?”

She widened her eyes with meanin’.

“I ain’t leavin’,” he snapped. “I don’t wanna have to shoot you, if you try runnin’.”

Rollin’ her eyes, Nivy held up a finger and twirled it around, askin’ him to turn. He recoiled, felt his face goin’ red like a beet.

“Listen, you ain’t gettin’ nekkid while I’m in here. Just—just wash with your clothes on.”

Sighin’ silently, Nivy started pullin’ her hair outta its tail. It fell down past the middle’a her back. Hesitantly lookin’ at him, she motioned as if brushin’ her hair, then held out a hand. Gideon irritably pointed at his own hair, which never stopped lookin’ like it had bed head.

“Does it look like I own a brush? Use your fingers.”

Well, that ended up takin’ about three times longer than it should’ve. He was dirt near positive she dillydallied on purpose, too.

He ended up sittin’ on the floor by the door while she stood in the stream’a water and rung out her sticky clothes. He dug through his mum’s old box and picked out the only thing fit to be seen, a short sleeved nightgown with funny little stichin’s around its gathered neck. Nivy took it from him and then firmly pointed him out the door so she could change. He obliged. Still red as a beet.

She emerged in the gown, wet-haired and still wearin’ that black ribbon necklace of hers. The gown funny on her because she was so skinny, which made him remember that she probably hadn’t eaten. He wasn’t really tryin’ to be hospitable on purpose, but he was supposed to be helpin’ keep her safe, and that kinda entailed makin’ sure she didn’t starve to death.

They silently returned to the sittin’ room together, and Gideon pulled the retractable cot outta the wall under Mordecai’s old oil paintin’ of Panteda.

“You’ll sleep here,” he grunted at Nivy, who was waitin’ by the wayside, her hands behind her back. “I’ll be on the couch. I’m a light sleeper, in case you was wonderin’.”

Since the kitchen was attached to the livin’ area, he felt alright leavin’ her on the cot and steppin’ out to see if he couldn’t find somethin’ halfways edible to keep her alive with. He dug up some room-temperature butterscotch puddin’ and a pear and some dried beef, and carried them out to her with a glass’a famous Pantedan burnthroat.

He found Nivy sittin’ with her knees pulled to her chest, studyin’ the paintin’ over her. Gideon knew she was famished, so was surprised when she started in on the puddin’ good and slow. As he made up his bed on the couch, she slowly polished off the lackluster meal and downed the burnthroat without coughin’ even once.

When Gideon bent over to take away her dirty dishes and add them to the heap in the kitchen, she pointed at the paintin’, curious. He glanced at it even though he knew it by heart. Crimson grasslands and lakes bluer than a summer sky, cliffs carpeted with moss, fields full’a wild antlered horses. He frowned and looked away again.

“Panteda. Where I’m from.”

He stood to go, but with worrisome quickness, Nivy snapped out a hand and caught his wrist. She looked back up at the paintin’, eyebrows pushed together in question.

“It ain’t there no more. Got burned up in war.”

It was odd, talkin’ (in a manner, anyhow) with someone who didn’t know about Panteda and the Eudoran Civil War. Sometimes that was all Gideon felt his life was about, the war. First half had been about survivin’ it while it swallowed his family and left him and Mordecai alone. The second half was about livin’ on Honora and tryin’ to forget it had ever happened. Either way, it all came back to the war. Kinda felt like he’d never stop runnin’ from it.

Risin’ to her knees on the cot, Nivy pointed at the paintin’, then spread her hands in a graceful kind’a way.

“Yeah. It was nice,” Gideon said, watchin’ her carefully as he stacked the dishes against the wall. He’d move them later.

For a long moment, they stared at each other, not talkin’, and not just because Nivy couldn’t. Then Gideon lamely nodded at the the paintin’.

“The place you’re from. It anythin’ like that?”

She was like a wild animal retreatin’ into its cave when someone got too close. Shuttin’ out his words, Nivy rolled up in the heavy quilt on the cot and turned away.

“Fine,” Gideon growled in her direction as he pressed his back into the couch’s uneven cushions. “Hope you like the cot. It’s like sleepin’ on plywood.”

Gideon expected Reece first thing in the mornin’. Could hardly wait for him to come, actually, because Reece was good at makin’ things unawkward, at sayin’ all the right things at the right time and makin’ people laugh. Gideon didn’t care about bein’ bad at that, but the quiet between him and Nivy was an uncomfortable sort.

“Sit here,” Gideon instructed as he upended an empty barrel in the corner of a dim upstairs workshop, the smallish one away from the other gunsmiths’. It was past time to start the day, and Reece still hadn’t shown up. “Don’t talk, don’t touch nothin’, and don’t get in the way.”

Nivy lifted herself onto the barrel and folded her legs beneath her. He grabbed his weldin’ helmet and sat it on his head, but before lowerin’ its screen, put on a pair’a leather gloves with just the fingertips cut outta them, because his were all calluses anyways.

Mordecai strolled into the workshop, wearin’ a leather tabard with a tool belt and smokin’ a cigar. His wavy white hair was pulled in a tight tail away from his brass weldin’ goggles. “Don’t you let him talk to you like that, Nivy Girl. If he gets your goat, you clock him one, alright? Split his face clean open, if you like.”

“This is a job, old man,” Gideon told his grandfather as he opened one’a the many drawers built into the cave-like walls’a the workshop and pulled out the gun he’d left half finished before holiday. “Quit bein’ so nice. I’ve gotta class tonight. I won’t be here to make sure she doesn’t kill you.”

“Kill me?” Mordecai twirled his cigar between his lips as he picked up a thermal torch and spun its dial to adjust the heat settin’s. “Wha’dya do to him, Nivy? He seems to think you’ve got some kind’a problem with shootin’ folk.”

She kept her face guarded, but Gideon thought he saw her wince a little before the shield went up.

Mordecai gazed at her through his goggles. “Well, now. That’s interestin’. You ain’t denyin’ nothin’. I’ve gotta bit’a problem with it myself, truth be told. Once shot six men in one day. Over a llama. Not
physically
over a llama, you understand. Just
because’a
it. Anyhow—”

Forcin’ Mordecai and Nivy outta his thoughts, Gideon turned his unfinished artwork over in his hands a few times, to refamiliarize himself with its weight. “I need a couple more grams’a scrap metal,” he realized aloud. He frowned over at Mordecai and pointed a finger. “Watch her. No more flirtin’.”

Downstairs, he grabbed a couple’a hard steel pegs picked up at the locomotive tracks, bounced them on his palm calculatingly, and then slipped them into the front pocket’a his lap apron. He couldn’t’a been there more than five minutes when Reece and Hayden stumbled in the shop’s front door, pantin’ and lookin’ like they’d run all the way from The Owl.

“Somethin’ wrong?” Gideon asked, reachin’ without thinkin’ for his revolver. A habit from Handling since he was eight years old. Back then, he hadn’t used a revolver—he couldn’t’ve, not with little kid arms and hands. He’d forged this revolver when he was fourteen, and it’d taken every bit’a two years to work up the forearm strength and dexterity to wield it like he could now.

Reece glanced at Hayden, who had doubled over and put his hands on his knees. “We’ve been drafted.”

Gideon dropped his hand. “What?”

“Battle drafted. Recruited into the Honoran military by lottery.”

“But…there ain’t no war goin’ on…”

Interruptin’ him with an impatient gesture, Reece started for the staircase, towin’ the gaspin’ Hayden along behind him. “Forget that.
Both
of us drafted, on the same day? Not only that, but on the day after we broke into Aurelia and kidnapped Nivy?”

Mouth twistin’ around a grimace, Gideon grunted, “Guess that does seem a bit much. You think someone wants you outta their way?” His grip tightened on the steel pikes just thinkin’ about it, and his steps fell heavy on the stairs he marched up behind his friends.

“Reece…” Hayden panted, “Reece i-isn’t even s-supposed to get drafted. He’s exempt. Palatine…Second.”

“Which means someone inside Parliament set me up. I’m thinking Eldritch.” Reece paused at the top’a the stairs, briefly listenin’ to the metallic grindin’ of Mordecai’s tools. “Where’s Nivy?”

Gideon started to answer when he felt a flicker’a somethin’ inside’a him. “Hold up. Why didn’t I get drafted?”

“You can’t be,” Hayden explained. He’d replaced last night’s busted bifocals with another one’a his hand-me-down pairs. This one had thick, square red rims that were too wide for his face. “Aliens are prohibited from serving either voluntarily or involuntarily. No exceptions.”