The Mark of the Dragonfly (15 page)

“Just because I want them off the train doesn’t mean I want them to end up on the slave market,” Gee said, absently rubbing the scars on his neck. “I’m not a monster. I mean … you know what I mean.”

“Never said you were, my friend.” Trimble wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Jeyne’s checking the boxcars to make sure everything’s in place for Cutting Gap. She won’t need you for a while. Why don’t you fly over the city, get some air? You might see them.”

Gee snorted. “Why bother? She said she didn’t want me to protect them.” He remembered the look on Piper’s face when she’d shouted at him, her voice filling that tiny vestibule. Brown eyes burning, she’d looked at him as if she hated him. Her expression conjured a memory of a time, years ago, when he’d looked and shouted at Jeyne Steel the same way.

“What do you expect me to do? I don’t have anywhere else to go!”

Gee shook the memory away.

“Well, if you’re not going out, do you want to help me shovel some of this lovely ash?” Trimble asked hopefully. “Wonderful stuff, really—heavy gray dust everywhere, smelly, makes you cough. It’ll be fun.”

“Actually, maybe I will make a few circles around
the town,” Gee said hastily, unbuttoning his shirt. Anything was better than shoveling ash. “Just to make sure no one else is trying to sneak onto the train. Can’t be too careful.”

“Of course not,” Trimble said dryly. “I’ll be here covered in coal dust and sweat if you need me.” He sighed theatrically and reached for a shovel.

Gee slid out the window and dropped into the shadows beside the engine. He was more comfortable transforming under cover of darkness. Chamelins weren’t a common sight, even in the midlands and the north, and they tended to remain in human form for the majority of their life spans. In many ways, it made life easier. In his beast form, Gee couldn’t speak in any language humans understood, and he was more susceptible to illness and infection. More than anything, the transformation itself was what kept chamelins in their human forms. Witnessing a human change into a beast was an unsettling experience for the other races. They tended to react with fear at best, violence in the worst cases.

Gee had heard stories of chamelins killed by mobs in the south where the people mistook them for monsters. Though he felt relatively safe in these lands, Gee avoided transforming when he could, and at all other times he tried his best to hide until the change was complete.

Heady floral scents filled his nostrils, and the noise coming from Tevshal grew louder as Gee’s senses shifted. He spread his wings and took off, soaring over the 401’s
nose and into the town, trusting the darkness to conceal him.

Circling the area once or twice couldn’t hurt. Whether or not the girls wanted his protection, Gee was responsible for the passengers on board the 401, and he took his job seriously. Over the years, he’d learned to trust his instincts, and tonight he felt a sense of foreboding in his gut. Something bad was about to happen.

At the bottom of the stairs, a hallway branched off to the left and right. Night eyes lit the way in both directions, but Piper felt an invisible pull, like a string around her waist, drawing her to the left. Beside her, Anna fidgeted as if she too felt the phantom string.

They walked slowly down the hall, Piper casting nervous glances behind her every few steps, though she didn’t know exactly why she was anxious. Maybe it was because she had heard the sarnun’s voice in her head, yet so far, Raenoll’s house appeared to be empty.

The hallway ended, opening up into a sitting room with a large rug laid out on the earthen floor. A padded bench and two comfortable-looking chairs took up most of the space, and white sheets covered the curved walls and ceiling. It made the room look stark and uninviting. Only a handful of the night eyes lit the room, so the
space was dim, but Piper could see, and feel by the damp chill, that there was no fireplace, and she shivered.

It was a few moments before she noticed, seated in one of the chairs, a shrunken old sarnun woman. Her dry, leathery blue skin barely held her bones, and her feelers were nearly all calcified. Only two remained mobile, and they lifted toward Piper and Anna in a feeble greeting.

Piper nodded in return. “Raenoll?” she asked.

The woman nodded. “You are welcome here,” she said. The echo of her mind voice seemed louder now that they were in the same room. Piper wondered if sarnuns were able to communicate with each other over long distances, speaking from city to city, country to country. She tried to imagine all those voices traveling hundreds of miles, overlapping and jumbled.

“We’re sorry for coming here so late,” Piper said, “but we aren’t going to be in Tevshal very long, and we need your help.”

“I understand. You have an object for me to identify?” Raenoll asked.

Out of the corner of her eye, Piper saw Anna squirm. “Not an object,” she said firmly, “a person. See, my friend here has lost her memory. She doesn’t know who she is or where she comes from. We were hoping you might be able to … look at her, or something, and see if you can tell us about her.”

Raenoll gestured to the bench and waited for Piper
and Anna to sit down. “I can promise you nothing,” she said. “My power lies in reading purpose—destiny, if you will. The purpose of an object is fixed. Its destiny rarely changes, and so it is a simple matter to divine where it has been and where it is going. A person is mutable, an entity that changes and evolves. Their destinies are similarly uncertain, but occasionally I am able to catch glimpses, flashes of their purpose and future.”

“That’s all we ask,” Piper said hopefully.

“A challenge of this nature undertaken so late at night—it will of course affect the price.”

Piper had been waiting for this part. Sarnuns were master bargainers, and though they couldn’t read human minds, they read their facial expressions so well that it was almost impossible to bluff them. Piper knew they had enough money to meet any price Raenoll named, but she had no intention of letting a sarnun grandmother wring them out. It was a matter of scrapper pride. “Sure, sure, the extra coin’s a given,” she said, “but you just said you can’t guarantee results. I don’t buy a fish if it smells rotten, and I won’t hand over a fistful of coins for a machine I don’t even know will work.”

“You would like a test, then?” The sarnun’s feelers swayed back and forth in what looked to Piper like a considering motion. Finally, she answered. “Accepted. Give me an object that is dear to you.”

Piper reached inside her shirt and pulled out the
pocket watch. She took off the chain and handed it to the sarnun. “This came from Scrap Town Sixteen in the north,” she said.

“You are a long way from home,” Raenoll said as she took the watch. It looked big and heavy in her shriveled hands. Piper had heard sarnuns were so physically weak that they couldn’t lift anything heavier than a soup pot. There were other stories, though, of what they could move with their minds.

“What can you tell me about it?” Piper asked.

Raenoll’s feelers brushed the watch face tentatively. She closed her eyes.

The blank room suddenly came to life, startling Piper.

A man’s face appeared on the white-sheeted wall closest to Piper. Piper turned, her hand automatically reaching for her knife before she realized the man wasn’t real. It was only a blurry picture fading in and out but with more details slowly appearing in the background. Gradually, the picture widened, covering all the sheets in the room like wet paint poured across a canvas. Objects took shape. Behind the man loomed an immense square tower and the largest clock Piper had ever seen. A river flowed nearby, and other figures walked in and out of the picture, but they were mostly indistinct shapes, little blots of gray and black.

“The man who owned this watch cast it off in the
river,” Raenoll said, opening her eyes. “Broken beyond repair, he said. It drifted away, forgotten, and when it came to you in this world, it was in pieces.”

The scene was a wonder, Piper thought. She folded her arms, forcing herself to look at Raenoll instead of the sheets. She didn’t want the sarnun to see how captivated she was by the moving pictures, but it was almost impossible not to stare at the man and the strange, ominous-looking tower rising behind him. Beside her, Anna watched the images with her hands half covering her eyes, her mouth open in awe.

So much for subtlety.

“You put on a good show,” Piper admitted, and thought she saw Raenoll’s feelers vibrate in the sarnun equivalent of a smile. “But how do we know you didn’t just dream all this up to impress us? Maybe you show these same pictures to every stiff-hip trader who comes knocking.” Piper didn’t really think that was the case, but she had to try the bluff. She didn’t want Raenoll to know how impressed she truly was by the stunning sights the sarnun had put on display.

Abruptly, the pictures on the sheets disappeared, and the sarnun’s voice rang shrill in Piper’s mind. “You call me a charlatan!” she screeched, and Piper winced. “Would a charlatan know that you tried three times yourself to cast off this watch, and three times you failed? It owes you its existence. Without you it
is
broken beyond repair.” The sarnun’s feelers moved agitatedly
around her face. “Would a charlatan tell you that, scrapper child?”

Piper was too shocked to come up with a clever reply. Raenoll knew her whole history with the watch—it was as if the sarnun had opened a window into Piper’s mind. She felt Anna tugging on her sleeve. “What’s wrong, Piper?”

“Nothing,” Piper said, recovering her composure. “I just realized this is going to cost a lot more than I expected, but she’s the real thing.”

The sarnun’s feelers vibrated again. She handed the watch back to Piper. “Shall we say twenty?”

“Agreed,” Piper said, wincing. She’d never paid so much for anything in her life. She pulled out the money belt and counted the rectangular coins, then gave them to Raenoll. “Tell me about Anna,” she said.

“Now come over here, child,” Raenoll said, gesturing to Anna. “Sit before me.”

Piper felt Anna shrink from the sarnun. She’d been expecting this too. She gave Anna a reassuring smile. “Anna, remember what I said. I’ll be right here with you. You’re safe.”

“I’m not afraid of her,” Anna whispered.

“Then what’s wrong?”

Anna looked at her nervously. “What if she shows me something bad? What if I’m a bad person—another wolf?”

“That’s impossible,” Piper said, and she meant it.
Anna was a mystery, it was true, but Piper had never sensed any deception or malice in her. She grinned. “It’s true you talk funny, you eat like a grapa hound, and you’re incredibly annoying, but I’m actually starting to get used to all that.”

“But—”

“What I’m saying is, you’re not a bad person, Anna.” Piper squeezed her hand. “Trust me. I’ve got excellent instincts for these things.”

Anna nodded, but still she moved slowly to sit on the rug in front of Raenoll. The girl looked like a fly cuddling up to a spider, Piper thought. The sarnun leaned over so her feelers could brush the top of Anna’s head, and Anna tensed, but she didn’t draw away.

“Close your eyes,” Raenoll instructed. “Try to clear your mind and think of nothing at all.”

Obediently, Anna closed her eyes. Piper watched the blank sheets hanging on the walls around them, her own body tense in expectation.

A flash of color saturated the white canvases. Piper tried to make out what was in the picture, but it disappeared too fast for her to see any details. Then the room fell into darkness, with only the tiny lights of the silver flowers shining on the walls. The sheets had gone completely black.

“What’s happening?” Piper whispered, worried that Raenoll’s power wasn’t going to work. “What is that?”

“Piper?” Anna sounded frightened. “What’s going on?”

“Both of you be silent,” Raenoll said sharply. “Concentrate, and keep your eyes closed, child.”

Anna whimpered softly. Piper perched on the edge of the bench, resisting the urge to go over and slap the sarnun’s tentacles away from the girl.

A rush of motion passed over the dark canvases, and the blackness shrank to become a massive building made up of gray stone blocks. Piper squinted, trying to make sense of the new picture, which took up almost all the blank space on the sheets and filled the room with a gloomy haze.

Iron staircases ran up and down the sides of the building, and a film of dirt covered the few windows offset in the stone. There were trees surrounding the structure—their branches a mix of dead and living leaves, as if the shadow of the building was gradually suffocating them. Piper finally realized what the building was when she saw the thick black smoke rising from chimneys along its roof, and her stomach dropped.

Piper coughed as if trying to expel phantom smoke from her lungs. Her father had been too kind in his drawing of the factory. The image on the walls was a place of despair.

“That’s Noveen,” Piper said, trying to keep the sadness out of her voice. “We were right, Anna. You’re
from the capital.” She didn’t mention the factory or the deadly smoke.

Another flurry of motion crossed the walls, and the factory shrank to reveal a bird’s-eye view of the city. Piper watched as the land rose, leaving behind the haze of factory smoke, up a cliff side and over to a view of the ocean. The beauty of it, such a sharp contrast to the factory, stole her breath. It was so stunning she hoped for the image to widen so she could get a better view of the blue-green expanse, but the view stopped on a beautiful mansion situated at the top of the cliff. White stonework and columns formed the backdrop for a vibrant garden and a large stone fountain in front of the house. Unlike the factory, the mansion was all lightness and windows, and there wasn’t a hint of smoke to mar the pristine landscape.