The Guild Conspiracy (26 page)

“Then that's where we'll go.” He shut the logbook and tucked the rest of the evidence inside the cover. “But first we need to get out of France.”

“How?” she asked. “We can't go back to the airships.”

“We have to,” he said, handing her the slim leather-­bound journal. “Otherwise we'll be captured and killed by the French before we ever make it out of the country.”

“Braith, the lieutenant-­general gave the order to kill anyone who knows the truth of the mission. If they find us, if anyone realizes who we are, what we know . . . They'll kill us.”

“Not if they don't recognize us.” He started to remove his uniform jacket, wincing slightly as he peeled the fabric away. It was then that she noticed the blood on his coat.

“You're hurt,” she said, reaching out and touching the damp fabric.

“A bit of shrapnel,” he said, peeling the shirt away from the wound. His skin was pierced through with a shard of metal. “It's fine.”

“Braith . . .”

“It looks worse than it is,” he said with a grimace, handing her the blood-­stained jacket. “Here. Put this on.”

She took the bloody uniform from his hands and slipped her arms into the sleeves, the warmth of his body still lingering in the fabric.

“Anyone looking for you will be looking for a girl, not a wounded soldier,” he explained. “We need to disguise you.” He gingerly touched the bright red stain of his shirt and pressed against the wound with a sharp intake of breath, fresh blood soaking his fingers in red. He stepped closer and gestured toward her face. “May I?”

Her stomach turned at the thought, but she gritted her teeth and nodded.

Braith pressed his fingers to her brow and wiped a sticky smear of blood down the side of her face, staining her jaw with red. Using the blood from his chest wound, he painted her neck and collar red, carefully combing the sticky blood through the hair at her temple. Then he stepped back. “There's one more thing . . . Your hair. I'll need to cut it.”

Petra raised her chin, the blood already drying on her face. “Do it.”

Drawing close, he slipped a knife from his belt and lifted the blade to the braid at the back of her neck, breathing steadily as he sawed through the thick plait. Her long tangled hair fell away in amber ribbons, landing in the mud at her feet.

“Braith . . .” she said quietly. “What if this doesn't work? What if we don't make it out?”

He paused a moment, not quite meeting her gaze; then he cut the last of her hair and withdrew, returning the knife to his belt. “We will,” he said firmly, quickly buttoning her jacket for her. His fingers trailed up the front of the bloodied uniform, slowing down only as he fastened the final clasp at her collar. “We just have to get aboard one of the recovery ships and lie low until we reach England.”

“And then?” She ran her fingers through her shortened hair, sticky with Braith's blood. “Even if we manage to escape, the Royal Forces will blame me for the massacre, accuse me of weakening the British army with my sabotage. If we're caught, if something happens and—­”

“Nothing is going to happen, Petra,” he said, his voice steady as he reached forward and took her hand. “We have evidence against the minister now. All we have to do is get it to the right ­people. If we can make someone listen, we have a chance to stop the minister's schemes and stop this war before it spirals out of control.” He squeezed her hand. “We have to try.”

Petra frowned, letting her gaze fall to their joined hands, sticky with blood and dirt. Of course they had to try.

She just hoped they survived the effort.

T
hey smuggled themselves onto one of the recovery airships, slipping past the notice of the Royal Forces officers and taking refuge among the many injured soldiers packed into the low-­ceilinged cabin. A team of field medics hurried from pallet to berth, applying bandages and distributing morphine among the more severely wounded—­men who were unlikely to make it back to London. Petra and Braith skirted the edge of the makeshift infirmary and settled in the corner of the cabin, still in sight of the rear bay doors. The battlefield smoldered beyond, embers of red and gold flickering across the ashen wasteland, the grave silence of night yielding to the groaning of dying men.

Petra sat against the wall with her knees hugged to her chest, the smell of blood and antiseptic sharp in her nose. A headache burrowed deep beneath her brow, and she ached all over, a deep pain that carved its way into the marrow of her bones, yet sleep seemed unlikely any time soon, not with the constant fear of discovery lurking just over her shoulder. Every footstep, every grunt of pain and sudden cry from the injured soldiers, every creak and whisper of the wooden ship exacerbated her unease. She jumped at every sound, Braith's solid presence little comfort to her.

She still had the evidence against Julian and the lieutenant-­general tucked away in her pocket, the weight of it burning against her leg, but so much could still happen between here and London. So much could still go wrong.

There was movement at the bay door, and Petra glanced up to see a redcoat jog up to the officer stationed outside the ship. “The French are starting to remobilize,” he reported, swallowing a gulp of air to catch his breath. “They've had reinforcements from the south.”

“Then it's time we take off,” said the ship's officer. “Deliver the order to the other ship and signal the medics back. We leave in five minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

Another soldier approached. “What if there are more survivors?”

“Then they're on their own now,” said the ranking officer, throwing a switch on the wall. A red light pulsed across the night, throwing the battlefield into sharp relief. “If they can make it to the ships before we take off, God be with them, but our priority has to be getting the rest of these men to safety.”

“And the girl? Did anyone find her?”

Petra tensed, her pulse slowing as Braith's hand found hers. She squeezed his fingers and leaned hard against the wall, her ear trained on the soldiers.

“Not that I heard,” answered the officer. “She's probably dead after that fall from the airship. We were up almost three hundred feet when she launched. There's no way the quadruped survived impact. But no matter. Even if she did survive, she won't last long out there. Once the recovery ships are clear, the lieutenant-­general plans to launch a second counterstrike against the French. Anyone left alive will soon be dead.”

“To think she sabotaged the entire battalion. Why would—­”

But their conversation was cut short by a shout somewhere beyond the ship, the last group of medics and wounded soldiers approaching.

Petra pressed the back of her head against the wall, heat welling up behind her eyes. Already, the lieutenant-­general had spread word of her sabotage. The rumor would burn through the Royal Forces fleet like wildfire until every single soldier aboard the British ships knew of her sabotage. The blame for their failure would be on her head. They wouldn't know that she had tried to fix her mistake before it came to this, wouldn't know that she repaired the prototype, that it was Julian's machinations that led to the quadrupeds' failure on the battlefield. In their eyes, she was a traitor—­and maybe rightly so. The failure would not have happened if not for her.

Once the rest of the medics and wounded soldiers were aboard, the bay door closed and the recovery ship took to the air, leaving the ghastly battlefield behind. Echoes of it remained in the rasps of shallow breathing, the muttered opiate dreams, the tortured cries of pain . . . and in the deep red stains that seemed to seep through everything, the stench of blood and sweat and soot on the air. It clouded the cabin like a dense plague.

This was the cost of Julian's war, the cost of his new world, painted in such vivid detail, Petra would never fully erase it from her mind. This was the war she had to stop, this needless sacrifice of life, this lust for progress that left only death in its wake. It was worse than she ever could have imagined.

The distant booms of mortar shells rippled through the ship, and Petra hugged her knees tighter to her chest.

She had to stop him.

Whatever the cost.

P
etra awoke to the sudden jolt of the airship landing on English soil, startled out of dark, ashen dreams she would rather soon forget. The bay doors cracked open at the far side of the cabin, letting in a cool gust of crisp morning air, the early glow of dawn peeping over the distant horizon.

Braith laid a hand on her arm and gestured toward the door. “We should hurry,” he whispered, his voice the first human thing she had heard since they left the battlefield behind. “Before anyone has a chance to recognize us.”

She nodded and climbed to her feet. Her breath stitched in her chest, and she winced, tender bruises where the quadruped harness had grappled with her on impact. She gingerly touched the line of her collarbone, grimacing as she did.

Three hundred feet.

She never should have survived such a fall.

Petra followed Braith through the cabin, and they came to the bay door, where they gave false names to the officers tasked with identifying the surviving soldiers. Then they moved through the makeshift hospital that had been erected near the landing zone, the area already crawling with surgeons, nurses, and wounded soldiers. The first medical tent they passed, a nurse took one look at Braith's bloodied shirt, streaked with a thick swath of red from chest to hem, and quickly ushered him inside. He protested at first, but the nurse dragged him to a bed and ordered him to lie down with the authority only a nurse could command, and he grudgingly obeyed.

Petra touched his shoulder, the close quarters making it hard to breathe. “I'll be just outside,” she said, offering a gentle squeeze. Then she slipped out of the overcrowded tent, thick with the stench of injured men and disinfectant.

While Braith had his shrapnel wound cleaned and stitched, she waited by the entrance to the medical tent. The sun climbed steadily higher over the London skyline to the east, casting a warm yellow glow over the dewy airfield, and she breathed in the fresh air, listening to the idle chatter of the less wounded soldiers passing through the camp.

Most of the soldiers here were not part of the wounded from Amiens—­she quickly learned—­but from Calais, part of a second attack force meant to take the port city in the night. The quadrupeds had failed there as well, taking heavy damage from the French naval forces in the ensuing skirmish, but with the artillery support of the British warships, they eventually emerged victorious, claiming the port for the Empire and driving the French further inland. But they weren't without their losses. The airfield was littered with wounded, far more than the injured from Amiens, despite the smaller attack force.

And then she realized . . . that was because most of the soldiers who fought at Amiens were still there, lying dead in the mud and ash, sent into dark oblivion at the hands of the lieutenant-­general. All at Julian's command.

She curled her hands into fists, shaking with the sudden wave of anger that flooded her veins. He would pay for this, for every life lost because of his madness. All she had to do was get the evidence against him to the right ­people, and despite her misgivings, Vice-­Chancellor Lyndon was the one person who could help them now. No matter Julian's accusations, he would believe her.

He had to.

A touch on her shoulder made her jump, and she whirled around to find Braith at her side, his chest freshly bandaged. “Time to go.”

They left the medical tents behind, and when they were certain their escape would go unnoticed, they slipped past the airfield borders and stole a parked steam-­lorry at the edge of the city. They stopped only to ditch their bloody military garb in the Thames before abandoning the vehicle some thirty miles west of the airfield.

It took two days to travel from London to the furthest reaches of Wales, catching rides from passing carriages when they were fortunate enough to find a kind driver near some of the larger towns, but mostly, they walked, taking long dirt roads and crossing expansive farms, resting in barns and wayside hovels when they were too tired to keep going. They had no money to spend on a pair of rooms in a pub house, or to buy train tickets that might have hastened their journey cross-­country. But eventually, they came to Milford Haven train station, battered and exhausted after two days of travel, but alive.

News of the massacre at Amiens had spread quickly across the Empire, the impending war on everyone's mind, and by the time Petra and Braith reached the Milford Haven train station, the local papers had printed several dreadfully accurate lithographs of the charred battlefield—­corpses of quadrupeds alongside French war machines, a tattered British flag flying overhead.

BRITAIN AT WAR!

France Mobilizes Against British Empire

Six Hundred British Soldiers Dead

Petra unfolded a discarded newspaper and began to read.

The article reported over five hundred dead at Amiens, and another one hundred at Calais. Officially, the cause of the failure of the two armies was unknown, but according to the article, the Royal Society was launching an investigation into the matter, sending a delegation of engineers and police officials to consult with the Guild and discern the technological cause behind the failure, in case the rumors of sabotage were true.

She lowered the paper with shaking hands, crumpling the images of war-­torn machines in her fists. “We have to get back to the city,” she said to Braith, sitting beside her on the bench. “Tonight.”

“How?” he said, rubbing his eyes with a weary sigh. “There's no ship that will take us until morning.”

“Then we have to leave first thing tomorrow. As soon as possible. The Royal Society is launching an investigation into the quadruped failure,” she explained, shoving the paper into his hands. “They start their trials tomorrow. We have to get to them before Julian or the lieutenant-­general. We have to tell them what really happened at Amiens. If Julian or the lieutenant-­general convince them that I sabotaged the army, that I was the reason the battle was lost . . . This could be our one chance to expose them, our one chance to set things right.”