The Timeseer's Gambit (The Faraday Files Book 2) (17 page)

Chris’s stomach flipped upside down. He turned away, remembering that night on the roof, staring at the Castle, wishing it would fall so that his father would die, and then watching it do just that. He bent at the waist―
please don’t vomit
―and he retched. Nothing came up. His early morning taxi disaster had spared him this ignominy, at least.

To her credit, Olivia said nothing as he straightened and wiped spittle on his handkerchief. She simply started up the stone walk of the house they’d stopped in front of.

“I suppose that’s one way to bring down property value,” she mused, craning her head to look at the bulk of the fallen Castle in the background, and she knocked. There was a foreclosure notice stuck to the door.

Sister Virginia Landon’s father let them in. There was no gaggle of children here, and no woman of the house in sight. Only Mister Landon. He was unshaved, malnourished, barefoot, dressed in loose trousers and shirtsleeves, and his eyes were bloodshot.

He smelled heavily of sweat and alcohol.

He didn’t invite them to a parlour. He didn’t give an apology for his appearance or for being intoxicated before noon on a weekday. He didn’t mention the foreclosure notice. When Olivia said that she was there about Virginia, he burst into tears.

Virginia Landon had been his only child. His wife had left him when he’d lost his fine job as a seeshifter at an illusion parlour when it had gone out of business, two years before the Floating Castle. He’d worked a series of low-categorization jobs and shifty illusion work since then, raising Virginia all the while. They’d shared great dreams of her helping him, of halving their burden once she’d been categorized. When Virginia had come home with her categorization card, their dreams had died, and so had Ginny’s dauntless spirit. He’d visited her as often as he could at her church, but Maidens and Youths were discouraged from maintaining ties with their worldly families when they were supposed to be bonding with their holy ones. No, she hadn’t mentioned any encounters with someone who might want to hurt her. No, she certainly hadn’t dealt with any of the visiting spiritbinders. Yes, she was “a poor priest,” what could Olivia expect? She’d lost all will to go on and if Olivia had a bad word to say about Ginny Landon, she was welcome to turn around and leave right this very moment. Yes, he had her categorization records. He had her card, too. Her Youth had given it to him as a keepsake after the funeral service, looking guilty and heartsick, but Mister Landon hadn’t wanted to look at it, seeing the death sentence of
N/A
under
CATEGORIZATION
every time he looked at it, and the miserable look on Virginia’s face.

Olivia seemed as eager to leave the house as Chris was, and they bid quick goodbyes to Mister Landon. He’d come back from obtaining the card and records with a half-empty bottle of something that smelled distressingly like surgical spirits and was already nursing it as the door shut behind them.

Olivia read the categorization reports as they sat in the back of the carriage. She shook her head, shivering a whole body sort of shiver that Chris certainly could identify with. “It’s messy business, isn’t it?” she mused, flipping the page and cringing as she read the next.

“I’ll never get used to talking to the families of the recently dead,” Chris admitted. “I don’t know how you do it. All that heartbreak, and…”

But Olivia was shaking her head. “I’ll toast to
that
being messy as anything,” she said, “but this is what I’m talking about.” She waved the report. She glanced up at him. “How many days for you?”

Well. He shouldn’t be surprised. Olivia had proven time and again there was no taboo she would not happily wade into like a pig in mud. He dropped his gaze, but his eyes only fell on his dark notes and the darker face of Timothy Lane’s categorization report. “… two,” he admitted. Why not just speak about it? What could it really hurt? This was the eternally shameless Olivia Faraday, and absolutely nothing daunted her. “Well. One and a half. They stopped when I slashed words right into the ceiling. They were impressed by how deep they went.”

Olivia cracked something that wasn’t exactly a smile. “Oh, lucky boy,” she said. “Hard to deny, that! Written right there in plain sight!” She paused. “Three days, for me,” she continued quietly. “But I think I awakened on the first. I’m sure you remember how it feels when it wakes in you, the gift, like some mischievous little gnome just spanked you on the brain.” She snorted. “I told the doctor in charge of my categorization right from the beginning, too. There’s no point in all these procedures. I’ll be a truthsniffer. I’m practically a wizard for it. Just run me through that test, won’t you?” She shrugged. The forced casual tone of it seemed terribly wrong on constantly cavalier Olivia Faraday. “But you know how it is. They want spiritbinders, not truthsniffers. They’re not going to ask you how many fingers until they’re good and confident you’re not hiding a drake-sized salamander up your sleeve.” Olivia paused and then laughed faintly. “And you know, I’ve heard it’s only gotten worse since the Floating Castle. Three days is
early
, now.”

Never in his life had he heard such a frank discussion of the system. He forced his mouth closed. He was appalled, shocked, but at the same time… at the same time, there was something almost liberating in hearing the words spoken out loud, awful though they may be. He was blushing when he finally got up the nerve to fill the silence. “Do you know what’s completely unfair?” he continued before she could ask, sure he would lose his courage again if she spoke. “On the day I got home with my card, Rosemary… she looked at me with such disappointment and almost―almost disgust, and it was the one and only time I wanted to hit her. It didn’t seem fair, that she would
never
have to go through what I had experienced, and she had the nerve to look at me with those eyes…”

To his genuine surprise, Olivia laughed aloud.

He snapped his gaze up, fixing her with a glare. “It’s not easy to talk about this!” he snapped. “We shouldn’t even be―it’s completely inappropriate!”

“Oh, yes,” Olivia shook her head, chuckling. “Keep all the sheep good and quiet so they don’t discuss the shearing process and get
ideas
.” She leaned back in her chair and shook her head, grinning.

“I thought you weren’t a reformist.”

She laughed delightedly. “I am most
certainly
not a reformist. But no, Christopher, I’m laughing because you just admitted that you considered slapping a twelve-year-old girl. It’s the most endearing thing you’ve ever told me. I want to slap every twelve-year-old girl I meet. And the boys, for that matter. We’re kindred spirits, you and I!”

“Rosemary isn’t―” Chris began, his fury not in the least bit assuaged.

“Rosemary,” Olivia said firmly, “is a precocious little brat, which, before you come over here and use those big man-hands to strangle my fragile female neck, is a
highly
underrated thing for an adolescent girl to be. Precocious brats grow up to be strong-willed and confident young ladies. I would know.”

“Oh, gods,” Chris moaned. “The last thing I want is for my sister to grow up to be…” But he trailed off. He imagined Rosemary as an adult with the strength of character, self-assuredness, sharp intellect, and complete inability to be bullied by anyone that Olivia had. He reframed his reaction. A thousand Avery Combses and Garrett Albanys combined couldn’t get a woman like that to do something that wasn’t in her best interests.

Olivia was giving him a knowing look. “Being me is considerably better than you might imagine it is.” She grinned. “I highly recommend the experience.”

“What else made you decide that Livingstone might be innocent?” Chris asked, unwilling to admit that she might be right.

Olivia laughed. She knew he was conceding, and she loved it. She leaned forward, dropping her voice conspiratorially. “Do you remember Evelyn val Daren?” she asked.

Chris could never forget the Duchess. A noblewoman of the Old Blood, fierce, elegant, and strong, whom Olivia had hounded tirelessly in the matter of her husband and daughter’s murders. The night the Duchess had died on the table at Deorwynn’s Heart Hospital had been the first time he and Olivia had truly seen one another. The val Daren case remained in Chris’s mind even all these months and jobs later. He nodded. “She was involved with the conspiracy,” he said, thinking back. “She was funding Sir Ambrose Combs and the efforts to bring Livingstone in for sabotage.” He tried to remember the conversation they had had with her about the affair, the last time he’d seen her alive, but all he could recall was her taunting him about how the traditionalists would get ahold of Rosemary one way or another. He clenched his jaw. “Did she reveal something?”

“I think she did,” Olivia nodded. She leaned forward in her seat and her eyes shone. “I think that’s why they killed her.”

Chris blinked. He opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Excuse me? No. Ethan Grey killed her.”

“He never confessed to that, though,” Olivia reminded him. “You told me that yourself. He never even
mentioned
the Duchess during your confrontation with him that day.”

She spoke the truth, and yet. “He had a firepistol. The Duchess was killed by the same weapon.”

Olivia nodded. “Which is why, at the time, holding him responsible for her murder seemed the most reasonable. Oh, but it never sat well with me. Do you recall? She had other wounds, too. Small cuts that were mostly consistent with those inflicted by a windpistol.” She wiggled her eyebrows and held up a finger. “Ah, but that wasn’t good enough for me, either! I quietly requested a thorough autopsy despite the fact that one didn’t seem necessary. I had to fight Maris tooth and nail for it, too, believe me! Anyway. The medical examiner discerned an actual sylph and salamander were an equally likely cause of death.”

Chris gaped at her. “You’re implying that she was killed by a spiritbinder actually wielding the spirits like weapons!”

“Yes!” Olivia agreed excitedly. “Isn’t it perfect?”

“Wha―no!” Chris shook his head. “No, absolutely not! Evelyn val Daren was
part
of them. Wasn’t she donating them so much money their family was collapsing?”

“Yes,” Olivia said. “And she was also observed confessing key details of the conspiracy to a young man who had employed the sister of Garrett Albany, who has since risen up to become the new face of the reformist movement…”

Chris stared. Olivia showed her teeth. Chris shook his head slowly. “You think they had her killed because she was… talking to
us
? To―
me?
”

“
Think
about it, Christopher!” Olivia effused. “What motive did Grey have to kill Duchess val Daren? Absolutely none! He was already on the run at that point! No one had even seen him since he killed the daughter! She didn’t suspect him. He knew he’d made a mistake killing Lady Analaea. And there was no indication that he ever had access to a windpistol! That’s what’s lead me to this, you see? If Grey didn’t kill the Duchess… who did?”

Chris shook his head. “That’s…” Incredibly plausible, was what it was. He looked up at her. “What does this have to do with Livingstone?” he asked.

“Just that it makes a framing so much more likely! Think about it, Christopher, please,
try
and keep up, here! If the legitimate evidence outweighed the fabricated, then there would be no real threat to the conspiracy and thus no harm in it being exposed to us―to
you
. But as you recall, she didn’t even know whether or not he was actually guilty, and still, they considered it worth the risk of murdering an Old Blood Duchess to keep her silent!”

“So the fabricated evidence must outweigh the legitimate…” Chris murmured. It… made sense. It made so much sense. Hope spread through him like wildfire. He imagined Doctor Livingstone in his cell, haggard, miserable, getting this news. Finally, someone to stand for him. Someone had actually poked a hole in this conspiracy. “Olivia! You’ve done it! You
need
to testify at the trial next week!”

But Olivia was shaking her head, her smile fading a bit. “And say what? It all fits quite well, but there’s absolutely no evidence. I haven’t even
seen
what the conspiracy brought against Livingstone. How could I even speculate that some of it is fabricated?”

“Then…” Chris searched for answers. “Then you need to get on the case. We need to convince Maris―”

“Maris is a staunch traditionalist,” Olivia countered and cracked a smile again at the crestfallen look that came on his face. “Oh, look at you. Didn’t you guess? Most police are. Reformists are rabble-rousers, trouble-makers, and ten times more likely than anyone else to get hauled into that office. Even the ones who started out cursing the Combs family turn to his side after five years in the force. You see things, I’m afraid.” She sighed.

“But Maris is better than that,” Chris said helplessly. “She’s not the sort of woman who’d let her prejudices decide a man’s fate!”

Olivia tittered a little laugh. “Oh, and you know Maris so well!” Before he could protest, though he didn’t know what he could say, she kept on. “Did you know there have been five separate attempts to break the good doctor out of prison? And an officer was killed in one? Shot dead.”

“What?” Chris asked faintly. He’d read about one in the paper, and it had made it clear that it had been little more than mischief stirred up by Garrett Albany, not taken seriously, easily beat back.

“The situation is a lot more complex than you think it is,” Olivia said. She eyed him. “There was another instance where Officer Hannah Burke’s credentials were stolen to sneak an unknown person in to speak with Livingstone. The thief was caught, but because of his… unique position on the force, he wasn’t punished for it.”

Chris’s cheeks burned. He fought down an almost hysterical urge to to tell Olivia he’d apologized to William, everything was better between them, their friendship was not entirely based on Chris manipulating Will into potentially losing his job for him by performing objectively illegal activities. But that would take the conversation back away from Livingstone, and he couldn’t allow it to escape him. “We can’t just let him hang,” he said.