There Will Be Phlogiston (32 page)

Dil can’t hide anything. Byron Kae used to wonder
how he ever made much of a cardsharp until they saw him take four
airmen for everything at Calumny. They had expected cold eyes and
composure, like everyone else around the table, but Dil had laughed
and glittered, and lied with his whole face. And, afterwards,
they’d all had to run. Once they were flying, sky-safe and far
beyond pursuit, Dil had put his arms around
Shadowless
’s
neck, breathless with his own wickedness, and Byron Kae had felt
the heat of him, and his fast-beating heart.

Sometimes, oh just sometimes, on hot days, they fly
even higher, where the air is thin and the aether is close, and the
sun drenches
Shadowless
in sticky gold . . . and Dil takes
his shirt off. He’s so very different from the wan, hungry-eyed boy
they’d gathered bleeding from the ground in Prosperity. The boy
Byron Kae had nearly lost to fever, to Ruben Crowe, to a falling
world. He’s a little bit piratical now, with his longer braids, and
the wiry muscles that pull and shift beneath his smooth, dark skin,
but when he smiles his shiny, dimple-bracketed smile, he’s all Dil.
His feet are always light upon
Shadowless
, and Byron Kae
tastes the heavy sweetness of his sweat where it falls sometimes
upon the deck.

Jane, of course, always knows exactly what they’re
up to, emerging dishevelled and disgruntled from her cabin to put a
stop to it with a few sharp words. Makes them blush. Like the time
she glared through a haze of opium smoke, and told them, “When I
desire someone, I fuck them. It makes life so much simpler.”

But Byron Kae can’t see how it would make anything
simple at all.

It’s been turbulent up in the blue since Prosperity
fell. The kraken are restless, the airnavy patrols the skyways, and
the skytowns are subject to increasing scrutiny from the
authorities below. What has always been a transient life now feels
fragile in other ways, and even basic resources are scarce. Books
are almost impossible to find. As a commodity, they fall between
the cracks of precious and worthless, and wanting them becomes its
own trap. Some men would call this weakness. Certainly the pedlars,
salesmen, and storekeepers must, for they always drive a hard
bargain, and Byron Kae isn’t very good at haggling. Dil would
probably be horrified if he ever found out the cost of his ragged,
little library, but Byron Kae puts no price on his pleasure.

They dread the day they run out of books, or Dil’s
interest wanes. The end of starlit evenings, full of words and
Dil’s laughing. He likes mysteries and romances best, speculating
endlessly—Jane would say interminably—about what he thinks is going
to happen next and which characters are going to get together, as
if he has, at last, discovered all the friends his life has lacked.
He wept for hours over the injustice of
Vanity Fair
, and
“princock swells what were too far up their own arses to see folk
is just trying to get on in the world and shouldn’t be subject to
arbitrary moral punishment.” That last bit was all Ruben. It made
Byron Kae miss his friend and hurt a little at the same time.

The only book in Temperance is
Hard Times
,
and Dil is going to hate it.

But Byron Kae buys it anyway in exchange for one of
the opals strung through their hair. It’s a sad-looking,
water-damaged volume, bound in olive-green cloth, with the original
purchase price of five shillings rather mockingly inscribed in gilt
upon the spine.

They settle down with it that evening, and make it
to chapter three before Dil starts bristling.

“Coketown,” he scoffs. “Cos that ain’t obviously
supposed to be Gaslight.”

Byron Kae once made the mistake of telling him that
Dickens had spent three months working at a blacking factory at the
age of twelve, thus cementing him in Dil’s estimation as “a whiny
prick what don’t know what he’s talking about. Three months, my
arse.”

It doesn’t take much longer before the misery of it
all gradgrinds them both down, and they give up.

“’Tis like he don’t see ’em as people at all.” Dil
has his head in Byron Kae’s lap, spilling braids and smiles and
careless heat. “Just cogs in his Great Social Message or what ’ave
ye.”

Byron Kae wants to touch him. Always, but
particularly now, at the edge of day, on the cusp of night, in this
time that is theirs. They imagine him sun gilded and star limned, a
burnished man, and feel the curve of his spine as he shifts on the
pillows he has strewn across the deck.

“Perhaps that’s the intention?” they suggest.

“Yeah, but it don’t make him no better than what
he’s talking about. That ain’t no reformer zeal. ’Tis hypocrisy, is
what.”

It’s a fair point. “I’m sorry, Dil. I didn’t . . .
There wasn’t—”

He startles and pulls away, and the loss of him
stirs the sails, and ripples through the rigging. “I didn’t mean
nowt.” Cross-legged now, and facing Byron Kae, he looks at them,
stricken. “’Tis still a princely gift.”

“There’s little value in an unread book.”

Dil reaches out and takes
Hard Times
from
their unresisting hands. “Before you, there was only ever unread
books.”

Byron Kae isn’t sure what to say. Dil sounds oddly
serious, and they’re mortifyingly distracted by the way the light
gleams on his eyelashes. Dil is not unfamiliar with his assets, nor
ashamed to use them, but right now there are no flutters, no
dimples, just Dil’s steady gaze.

“Thing is,” he goes on, “these ain’t the stories I
want no more.”

Oh.

“Fuck me sideways with a—” Dil scrabbles against the
deck, and just about manages to avoid being thrown into the mast.
“Is that krakens?”

“N-no. Just . . . aetherflow.” They blush. The wind
dies, and
Shadowless
calms. But Byron Kae’s heart still
beats too hard. “I understand. We . . . we’ve read a lot of books
and—”

“It ain’t about the books,” Dil cuts them off
abruptly, and then tugs a bit sheepishly at a braid. He has a way
of concealing uncertainty behind boldness that Byron Kae rather
admires. He acts when most would hesitate, laughs when others would
not, and takes, in general, too many chances. He goes on more
gently, “Thing is, I want a different story. I want yours.”

Byron Kae feels his attention like heat. Like a
touch. It fills them with fear and a kind of sweet, sharp hope that
is—if anything—just as painful. “Mine?”

“Aye.”

They look at their hands, at the rainbows on the
tips of their fingers, and feel the pulse of aether beneath their
skin. That’s their story. “I . . . I wouldn’t know how to
begin.”

“Popular opinion suggests, beginning’s a good
place.”

That makes them smile, and they don’t even try to
hide it. Dil makes it easy to smile. “I thought you hated all that,
um, nonsense about ‘what your father was called and where you was
squeezed yowling out your mother.’”

He’s so proud of his words, and grins to hear them
coming back to him. “Only when I ain’t got reason to give a
fuck.”

“Well, I’m honoured to be worthy of your . . .
fucks.”

They just about manage to say it without blushing,
and it’s worth it to hear Dil laugh. “I meant,” he says, “with
books and shit. Nowt more depressing than settling in for six
hundred pages and then stagging straightwise the hero’s four years
old or sommat, and ain’t going to do anything interesting for
ages.”

“I suppose some readers might say it helps them
really get to know a character.”

“Mebbe. But life—” Dil glitters wickedly “—is lived
in media res
.”

His mouth forms the Latin a little too carefully.
Byron Kae hears Ruben. “Then what does my past matter?” they
ask.

“It don’t matter a damn if you don’t want to tell
me. But I kinda want to know stuff about you.” Dil sounds so
unexpectedly solemn, so unexpectedly uncertain, before he continues
with characteristic avarice, “All the stuff.”

Byron Kae hides their smile this time so Dil doesn’t
think he’s being laughed at. But, truthfully, they like to be the
subject of his wanting. “Of course I want to tell you. I’ll tell
you anything.”

“’Tis sorta interesting to me sometimes cos I got no
clue about myself that way.” He settles back into Byron Kae’s lap,
stretching an arm into the last of the sunlight so that it glides
over his skin, honey-gold and mellow. “Parent’s could’ve been
anybugger. Though I got some inkling one or both ’em weren’t
perhaps entirely white.”

Byron Kae traces a fingertip down Dil’s forearm, a
pale shadow, chasing the sun. They tremble a little with the
pleasure and the presumption of it, but Dil just closes his eyes
and makes a deep, rough sound at the back of his throat. The truth
is, Dil is full of hungers. Greedy for words and skin and the open
sky. They imagine too easily how he might respond to other touches.
The way he might move, the things he might say. His sly, graceful
hands knowing all the secrets of Byron Kae’s body.

“My father,” they tell him, “is Lord Wolfram.”

A blade-swift silence.

Then, “Ooh lah-di-dah.” Dil’s contempt for what he
calls the nib folk is instinctive, but at the same time tinged by a
kind of hopeless envy. Byron Kae finds it comforting to wonder
sometimes whether Dil was truly in love with Ruben, or simply with
the kind of life that would create someone like him.

“It’s a very minor title. He’s a navy man. An
admiral now.”

“So, you’re a . . . a—” Dil’s eyes open, and there’s
hurt gleaming in the darkness of them “—lord or . . . lady or what
’ave ye? This . . . flying about, then, ’tis just a hobby?”

“No.” Too sharp. Too certain. Heat and aether rushes
through them. “This is who I am.”

“You ain’t no Wolfram?”

“That will never be my name. I’m not . . . not
legitimate.” Such a strange word to wear. “I’m just me.”

Dil smiles up at them. “Ain’t no ‘just’ about it.
But how you’d figure Lord Wossname for your dad? Being a by-blow
and all.”

“I was politically embarrassing.” Byron Kae wonders
how to explain. “And Lord Wolfram always claims what he believes to
be his. Whether he values it or not.”

“Reckon I know the type. Dice roll any kinder for
your mam?”

“I don’t know. She passed away when I was very
young. I don’t . . . I don’t remember her at all.”

Those early years, before their mother died and
after, are all in fragments. Too many different people and too many
different places. Too little understanding. All muddled in a
sensory haze: the scent of blood and chrysanthemum tea, red-sailed
ships with watching eyes, a square white house on a hill, not like
the other houses, a garden with silver water and golden fish, the
sun slipping shadowless across a different sky.

“Well,” offers Dil cheerfully, “leastways you ain’t
got nowt to miss.”

They try to smile, not knowing what to say.

“How’d she die?”

Touch is suddenly the wrong thing. Dil is too much,
too much heat and skin and curiosity. They push him away as gently
as they can. Stand and let the wind catch their hair, shake the
feathers and the beads, stir the tails of their coat.

Over by the rail, the sky is everywhere.

“She killed herself. When the war ended and my
father didn’t come back.”

Dil moves like a cat, so they don’t hear him. But
they feel him in the shifting air, the ripple of his footsteps.
“Why?”

“Shame? Grief? Loneliness? I have no answers.”
Shadowless
is warm beneath Byron Kae’s hands, as familiar as
their own skin, pulsing with aether and power. “I heard . . . I
heard she was his housekeeper, while he was in Canton. I don’t know
if he made her promises, or if she loved him; if she was desperate,
or if she simply wanted a different world. I just know she . . . I
just know I was alone, and nobody knew what to do with me. Where I
belonged.”

Dil pushes up under their arm and wriggles and
wriggles until he’s right there, tucked between Byron Kae and
Shadowless
. He has to lean back a little to meet Byron Kae’s
eyes, his body pulled into lines at once both tough and yielding.
The scent of sun and sweat is all over him like the last of the
light.

And this time, touch isn’t wrong at all.

“I won’t never leave you ever,” Dil promises, with
all the certainty of his maybe nineteen years. “Cos we belong on
Shadowless
now, right?”

They nod.

Shadowless
.

Jane.

And Dil.

Whose mouth forms the shapes of untaken kisses when
he stands so close and says such things.

“Y’know—” Dil eases himself onto the railing “—why
don’t you start it properwise?”

He’s framed by Byron Kae, the horizon at his back,
with only trust to hold him. “Like this?” they ask.

“Exactly like this.”

For a moment, there’s nothing. Nothing but the wind
and the shadows and the first few snail-trails of starlight over
the darkening sky.

Then—for Dil, and Dil alone—come words.

A story.