Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (38 page)

Breathin’ in was like takin’ a hot drink, so Gideon didn’t waste the breath talkin’—he attacked the shoelaces with his fingertips, rippin’ them as often as not. Po kept pullin’, and it occurred to Gideon that even over the sound’a the fan, he could hear her watch tickin’, tickin’ away their last few seconds…

There was a jerk, a change in balance on the ladder, and then Po screamed, “I’m out!”

“Well, don’t just sit there singin’ about it!” Gideon shouted. “
Move
!”

They clambered up, blinded by sweat, darkness, and the thick steam coilin’ up around them like snakes in a race for the surface. As the fan grumbled loudly, the tube began to shake, and Gideon could sense the hulkin’ body’a air rushin’ up from below, about to overtake them and melt them both into nothin’—

The dark lightened; there was an openin’ to Po’s left, the mouth of an intersectin’ tunnel. She yelled somethin’ and dove, but Gideon couldn’t make out her words because the grumble had turned into a roar like a waterfall’s. He scrambled into her place. She grabbed his shirt and helped him jump into the tunnel, and they both fell to their stomachs, and not a second later, felt the explosion’a hot air rush past their splayed feet.

After a moment’a layin’ in shock, wonderin’ if he was really alive, Gideon opened his eyes. This new tunnel was lighter than the last. He could make out Po’s freckles as she slowly leaned up, starin’ without blinkin’.

“My boot,” she whispered. “This was my last pair.”

“I’ll buy you a new pair,” Gideon promised as he started crawlin’ forward on his hands and knees. A gust’a fresh air swept down the tunnel; he could’ve drunk it in, it smelled so good.

The tunnel ended not a minute later in a hatch with a small round window. Orange light shone in through the window like a spotlight, lightin’ Po’s hands as they blurred over the knobs and buttons on the hatch, which eagerly sprang open at her touch.

They climbed outta the tunnel and into a different world, Po’s world. They were on a railinged wire bridge connected to the oversized cube that was the Quadrant 7. There were gaps in the walls’a the cube, places where the metal didn’t fit together, and through them, Gideon could see cogs and wheels workin’ together in perfect sync, like clockwork, like a giant heart.

Po suddenly grabbed a fistful’a his shirt and gasped. Far below, beneath the tangle’a tubes, wires, and bridges, two Vees were furiously tryin’ to jimmy their way in a door she and him had already been through once that night. Gideon’s hand closed around the hot silver handle’a his stolen gun, and he wriggled his fingers awkwardly, tryin’ to find a better grip that wasn’t there. The gun felt uncomfortable in his hand, wrong.

“Get me closer,” he ordered beneath his breath. “And be quiet about it.”

Noddin’, Po bent over, pulled off her remainin’ boot so that she was stockin’-footed, and set off on tiptoe. There was nothin’ for it but to follow and hope, different gun, same aim.

XXII

One, Two, Three, Traitor

Reece wondered if his nerves had overextended themselves. They had been sputtering wildly only minutes ago, and then suddenly flatlined, leaving him with an empty sort of calm. He supposed he preferred the calmness—he could think clearer this way—but he missed the adrenaline. As the night progressed and guests began to mill around the grounds, waiting to board the heliocraft, he felt almost stupid with tiredness. And irritable on top of it.

Upon being dismissed from the ballroom, Lucius had tipsied over to join some friends at the bar, but Scarlet had been harder to lose, sticking to him and Nivy like thermosphere gnats stuck to warm engines. How much she had figured out, Reece couldn’t tell. She didn’t ask questions. She was just there, a supervising presence trailing him and Nivy as they clung to the edge of the duke’s social circle.

“They’re going to notice you,” Reece growled at her.

“Why should they notice me?” she said crisply. “I have every reason to be here. You’re the one who stands out.”

It didn’t help that Nivy was too fascinated by Scarlet to take his side. She kept tipping her head and peering at her like something she’d found under an upturned rock. Reece half expected her to poke Scarlet with a stick.

They moved in their small, awkward pack through the crowd, never more than twenty yards from the duke and Abigail. The Vee on the balcony had disappeared, but that didn’t mean anything. He, or one of his brothers, would be back.

The duke, Abigail, and their procession of fans left the ballroom through a pair of elegant glass doors leading to one of the estate’s gardens. This one, called The Shifting Green, literally revolved around its centerpiece, a tall brass statue of a buck rearing on its hind legs. All the different hedges of midnight black roses, blue fairy bulbs, and emerald nevermore blossoms were on their own track, and the tracks orbited the statue, shifting and working together like clockwork. It could be quite disconcerting, looking down at your feet and seeing the different planes of grass moving every which way.

Nivy almost tripped coming onto the first plane of moving grass, but Reece and Scarlet simultaneously caught either of her arms. For whatever reason, this irked Reece further.

“Go away,” he said acidly.

“I can help you, if you’d just let me.” Scarlet irritably smoothed back a wave of her cornsilk hair. The night had gone from brisk to chilly to downright cold, and there was a kind of stillness to the air that made Reece think they might be in for snow. “I’ve made enough sense of what’s going on.”

“You don’t know anything about what’s going on.”

“Why are you being so stubborn?”

“Because this is already complicated enough without adding the help of a pampered politician with no grasp on the real world.”

Scarlet’s green eyes flashed as she, Nivy, and Reece stepped together onto the next track of grass, shifting now to the right, scrolling past the nevermore blossoms. “This coming from the boy who fell off the MA Building’s roof because he was playing Airship Captain in the bell tower!”

“Scarlet,” Reece groaned, “I need to focus. I can’t fight with you and protect them.” He jerked his chin pointedly at his parents.

“And how to you propose to keep them safe, hiding behind a rosebush? What are you going to do against a knife hidden in a handshake, or a gunner a quarter of a mile away?”

Reece just shook his head. Because he had a bigger problem. With the duke determined to let this happen, he was working against Reece as much as Eldritch. Why?

Nivy snapped her fingers to get Reece and Scarlet’s attention, then gesticulated an idea, keeping her hands close to her body so no one else would see. It looked like she thought they should shoot the duke themselves, to get him out of the way.

“Clever,” Scarlet said dryly, “but rather counterproductive.”

Reece caught on quicker. “If we took him out of the picture ourselves…just a leg wound…” The idea clicked as Nivy tried to finish the sentence with her hand motions. “Everyone would swarm around him. It’d be hard for the assassin to get in close or get a clear distance shot.”

Scarlet’s face cleared, and she began nodding. “I see. Get him out of danger tonight, then—”

She jumped with everyone else in The Shifting Green as an unmistakable
boom
rattled the mansion’s upstairs windows. It sounded like someone had set off a firework indoors. A few people, who like Reece and Nivy had recognized the sound of a gunshot, gasped.

Reece instantly looked for the duke and Abigail, but his parents were staring at the mansion with everyone else. The duke, looking especially solemn, bent over his wife’s shoulder and whispered something that she nodded to with pursed lips. She began hurrying away with her skirts drawn up in her hands.

“I believe that is the signal for us to move ourselves to the heliocraft for the duration of our evening,” the duke announced. He gestured towards a silver gate lodged between two hedges. “If you will kindly gather yourselves aboard the ship, the crew should be waiting to accommodate you all.”

A pair of flustered-looking sentries hurried up and started speaking to him in hushed voices as everyone in the garden drifted
towards the gate, nervously chuckling at their jitteriness or frowning at the mansion over their shoulders.

Nivy grabbed Reece’s arm and turned him to face her, eyes beseeching.

“That didn’t sound like a revolver to me, and you know Gideon will always get the first shot out,” he told her. “I’m sure they’re fine.”

He winced as if he could feel the pain of the seam in his chest straining. One gunshot. It could’ve been meant for any one of them—Gideon, Hayden, Po, Hugh, Sophie. He braced himself as if waiting for four more shots to tear him apart.

“Reece, you need to do whatever it is you’re going to do before the duke boards
The Jester
,” Scarlet murmured, drifting to join the guests en route for the airship. Lucius was already at the gate, hiccupping and beckoning for her to join him.  “If nothing has happened before now, it’s because the assassin means to act during the skywaltz…when the duke has nowhere to go.” Her hands clutched over her stomach, she let the track carry her to Lucius, and then disappeared through the gate.

She was right. No matter what Reece did to save the duke once they were airborne, until they landed again, there was nowhere to run that an assassin couldn’t run also. Now was the time to act. The garden was emptying, the duke was occupied, Abigail had already gone—he was never going to get a clearer shot.

He reached for Nivy’s bag and was surprised when she swatted down his hand defiantly and pointed at herself.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told her, exasperated, and reached for the bag only to have his hands land on air. Nivy had put it behind her back. “Give it to me, Nivy.”

She gestured furiously; Reece caught only half of what her hands said, but he got the point. If he shot the duke, he’d be arrested, and then what good would he be? Let her do it. She could outrun the sentries.

“
No
. Now give me the bleeding bag before—”

Neither one had noticed, but as they’d argued, their track of grass had made a full rotation around the buck statue and was now passing within ten feet of the duke and the sentries. Reece made a garbled sound and on instinct, shoved Nivy with all his might into the fairy bulbs. The sound of rattling bushes drew the duke and the sentries’ eye.

Any other night, it would’ve been funny—Reece standing there alone, gliding slowly past his father, who looked positively nonplussed. Reece lifted a hand and sheepishly waved as his track bore him silently on. The duke’s expression turned murderous.

“Arrest him,” he said to the sentries. The sentries were so astounded by this sudden development that he had to say a second time, in a much rougher voice, “I said
arrest him
.”

There was no point in running, so Reece didn’t bother. He even met the sentries halfway, hands raised.

“Foolish, headstrong boy,” Thaddeus Sheppard growled as the sentries brought Reece before him. He threw a glance around the garden, which had emptied quickly after the mysterious gunshot. “See to the ship,” he ordered the sentries. As they disappeared beyond the hedges, he began, his voice a dangerous sort of quiet, “I warned you against coming to Honora, and this is what you do.”

“You know why I had to come.”

It was odd, but now that the sneaking around was over, now that it was just him and the duke, Reece felt calmer than he had yet. It wasn’t the empty kind of calm he’d felt before. This was readiness.

Considering him, the duke moved onto the next track over, the one that rolled by the firehearts dangling like little red and orange bells from their bushes. “I should’ve had you arrested on the spot when I heard you were at The Guild House. I should’ve known you’d never do the unthinkable and actually obey your father.” There was a trace of grim humor in his voice that made Reece smirk. “You’ve done a very stupid thing.”

“Not nearly as stupid as what you are about to do,” Reece retorted. It began to snow, glittering flakes softly kissing the ground. “Why are you letting this happen? Why are you letting The Kreft have their way?”

“I have my reasons.”

“It’s suicide!”

“It’s sacrifice.”

“For the good of Honora? Is that what you think? That letting The Kreft keep playing their game with our lives is—”

Another gunshot rumbled distantly, from somewhere deep within the house. Before he could stop himself, Reece twisted and looked up at the big bay window overlooking the garden. The seam gave slightly to one side.

Following his gaze, the duke murmured through a sigh, “I suppose you have something to do with that.”

“With what?”

“The Veritas are in a state. Their presence tonight was supposed to be minimal, discreet, but there must be at least a dozen on the grounds, and I’ve never seen them unhappier. Supposing, of course, those things can be unhappy.”

“You know why that is?” With effort, Reece tore his eyes from the mansion. “It’s because Eldritch knew I was coming and tried to distract me by using Hugh and Sophie Rice as bait!”