Zoe Archer - [Ether Chronicles 03] (3 page)

She might be in utter isolation, but this wasn’t a punishment. There could be no life without her books.

Back at South Uist, she’d bought peat-cutting tools. Yet it was already too dark for her to go searching for fuel. She’d come prepared, though, with a few precut blocks, so she laid them in the firebox and set them alight. Soon, the cottage filled with warmth and the glow of a fire. It felt so different from what she’d known. Even with her cook-apparatus, it was a primitive existence she’d lead out here. Liverpool had been at the forefront of technology—it had to be, with the wealth of its ports, the constant ebb and flow of goods that fed the nation.

Exactly why it had been targeted.

But no one and nothing would find her in Eilean Comhachag. In the silence and solitude of her cottage, she exhaled.

Night fell like a curtain. One moment, ashen light marked the horizon. The next, utter darkness.

She cooked herself a simple supper of eggs, toasted bread, and tea. Here would be another challenge. Almost all her meals at home had been purchased. Oh, her mother would cover her head in playful shame that her only daughter knew nearly nothing of cooking, especially the
daal
and
pulao
and
naan
on which Kali had been raised. But there had always been devices to take apart and diagrams of machines to study.

Sitting at the rough table in the cottage, eating her plain meal and listening to the wind and isolation, homesickness formed an ache at the back of her throat. Her father’s laugh. Her mother’s singing. The din and color of Nagpur—its skies full of silk-draped gyrocopters and gliders. Trees full of jewel-colored birds both real and clockwork. Air full of heat and spice.

This gray and bleached island was Nagpur’s barren counterpart.

Kali wiped down her plate and mug. Tomorrow, she’d set up her system that would connect to the water pump, so she’d have hot and cold running water.

Changing into her nightgown, she climbed into her cot, bringing a treatise on developments in tetrol-powered direct current generators with her. She’d read it three times already, but a comfort read was what she needed for her first night on Eilean Comhachag.

But as she settled down and turned the pages, it began.

The owls.

Their hoots surrounded her cottage and punctuated the night like rapid gunfire. Not a sound from them earlier. She’d begun to doubt their existence, despite the island’s name. Now, as if to mock her, the nocturnal predators cried out into the darkness, their numbers far too great to count.

Who
?
Who
?
Who is this stranger in our cloistered home
?

Good God, if this is what her ancestors had to contend with every night, no wonder they’d all fled for other islands. It was a barrage of sound. Eerie and ominous.

Where her forefathers had failed, Kali wouldn’t. She’d either learn to endure the sound, or fashion some noise protection—stoppers for her ears, or a muffling head wrap.

Tonight, she’d bear it as best she could.

She studied the treatise, trying to lose herself in the mechanics of internal combustion and electromagnetics.

But after a moment, she lowered the publication. Tilted her head.

There was another sound, beneath the owls.

A humming. An unearthly, metallic humming.

Jumping out of bed, she donned her boots and threw on her cloak. Grabbed her pistol. After checking to make certain it was loaded, she flung the door open and hurried outside.

Stars flooded the sky, undimmed by any city lights. But Kali didn’t marvel at them. Their beauty was cold as diamonds, and just as useless to her now. But the humming persisted. She turned in a circle, searching for its origin.

Her breath caught as she faced north. There, at the northern end of the island. Something
glowed.
A pale corona of light pushed back the darkness.

The island was uninhabited. She
knew
this. Campbell and everyone on South Uist had sworn it to be so. They’d no reason to lie.

Then what the hell is that
?

Two impulses warred in her. Part of her wanted to run and hide beneath her bed. The other part wanted to race across the island and investigate. She had a weapon. Knew how to use it. But what awaited her? And could she cross the island’s rugged terrain in the dark? She could carry her lantern, but only a fool ran around in her nightgown carrying a lantern, like some grease-brained girl in a Gothic novel. Why not simply scream out into the night, “Vulnerable target!”

No matter what it was out there, she had no way off this island. Campbell wasn’t coming back for a month.

So either she hid in terror for four weeks, or she learned what it was that made the sinister noise and gave off that unsettling light.

She crept back into her cottage. Doused her lantern and huddled in her bed, her gun across her lap. It had been a long, exhausting day. But sleep kept itself hidden. When the sun rose, she’d have to go investigate.

T
he owls stopped their infernal chorus at some point during the night, and in the silence, she must’ve dropped into a fatigued sleep. She woke with a start, a knot in her neck, and a revolver in her lap. For a moment, she stared at the rough stone walls surrounding her, grayish light coming through clumsily patched windows. This wasn’t her flat, not even the temporary shelter set up for survivors and refugees. And there was that silence, encompassing everything.

But the gun across her legs and the distant crash of waves upon a pebbled shore reminded her. Eilean Comhachag. And the lonely cottage that was her birthright.

But perhaps the cottage wasn’t as alone as she’d thought. There’d been that odd metallic humming and light last night. Something else was on this island besides herself.

Rising from bed, she massaged her left thigh, easing out the kinks in the muscles. She’d need all her mobility today. She set her cook-apparatus to brew her some tea, and as it prepared her beverage, she put on a heavy wool dress, one that could suitably face bogs and brambles. Her boots were sturdy, too. Fashionable little kid boots served no purpose out here. Quickly, she braided her hair, to keep it out of her face.

After she bolted down cheese, bread, and tea, she strapped on a thick leather belt laden with pouches and tools. She tucked her revolver into her belt, then checked the barrels of her shotgun. They weren’t ether guns, but when she’d packed, she hadn’t expected more than a possible wild dog that might need scaring off. What she carried would have to suffice. She slung the shotgun’s strap across her shoulder.

Please let me just meet with a hungry wild dog
.

But she hadn’t heard any howling last night. Only owls. And that strange humming. Wild dogs generally didn’t emit a peculiar light, either. Not in her limited experience. She’d read that there were some experiments being conducted, similar to what they’d done with Man O’ Wars, where they took animals and—

Now you’re delaying.

She was out the door before she could make any more excuses.

Sometime in the night, a heavy mist had settled over the island. Everything appeared in hues of murk and ash. The field in which the cottage stood. The grassland and rocky hills beyond. Fifteen feet away from her doorway, and she could barely see the little stone house. A newcomer or someone unwary could get lost as a bolt in a scrap heap. Fortunately, she wore a leather gauntlet with a miniscope and compass mounted to it. Marking her position, she headed north, with her heartbeat keeping noisy company.

She kept the ridge of hills to her left, using them as a guide as she carefully picked her way across the uneven terrain. More trees and scrub dotted the landscape. A rodent of some kind darted between the bushes, and she cursed herself for starting in surprise. After all she’d faced, a tiny animal was nothing.

As she walked, she used a retractable pencil to make additions to her old map. The hills rose up more sharply three miles from where the cottage stood, and they continued on in rough peaks, with hardly any access to their summits. No grasses were flattened into trails, not even game trails. A small pond lay four miles from the cottage, its green edges choked with waterweeds and long-legged insects skimming across its surface. If fish lived in the pond, they hid themselves in its silty bottom. She’d have better luck catching fish off the beach.

But her note-taking was another delaying tactic. She had to press farther north to find out the origin of the light and last night’s humming sound.

Edging along the gravel-covered base of the hills, she moved slowly onward, telling herself stories of goddesses who’d braved hordes of demons without fear.

Yet she was no goddess. Only a woman, completely on her own.

A shape appeared out of the mists. A large, dark shape. Heading right toward her. It moved noiselessly over the gravel, notwithstanding its size.

She grabbed her revolver, aiming it at the shadow.

It immediately stopped moving. Then it spoke.

“You’re not from the Admiralty.”

A man. With a deep, rasping voice. As if he hadn’t spoken in a long time.

Even through the heavy mist, she saw that he didn’t hold up his hands, despite the gun trained on him.

“No,” she answered, her mouth dry. “Not the Admiralty.” Yet she didn’t want to tell him where she was from. She’d no idea
who
this stranger was.

“Anyone with you?” he demanded. He spoke with an air of command, as though used to obedience.

Despite the authority in his voice, she kept silent. Telling him she was alone could endanger her. At least she was armed.

He didn’t seem to care about the revolver in her hand. He moved closer, emerging out of the fog.

Oh, God. He
was
big. Well over six feet tall, with shoulders as wide as ironclads. His body seemed a collection of hard muscles, knitted together to make the world’s most imposing man. He had black hair, longish and wild, as if he hadn’t seen a barber in some time, and a thick beard, also in need of trimming. He stood too far away for her to see his eyes, but she could feel his gaze on her, dark and piercing, hyper-vigilant like a feral animal.

And he stepped still nearer to her.

“My father was in the army,” she said, clipped. She raised her gun. “He was a crack shot. He trained me to be one, too. Stay where you are.”

She thought a corner of his mouth edged up in a smile, but the beard hid his expression. “I’d knock that Webley out of your hand before you could pull the trigger.”

Words poised on her lips that no man could move that quickly—he was still ten feet away—but those words faded the more she looked at him. His massive hands could likely crush a welder’s gas tanks. But more than the raw strength he exuded, a palpable but unseen energy radiated from him, something barely contained.

She couldn’t tell if she was fascinated or terrified. Or both.

“You’re doing a poor job of putting me at ease,” she answered.

Again, that hint of a smile. “Never said I wanted to put you at ease.”

“Not another step,” she snapped. Instinctively, she moved back, out of striking distance. But as she did, her left boot caught in the rocks, and she stumbled.

Unseated, the stones tumbled down in a small rockslide. They knocked her down, twisting her leg at an unnatural angle. She sprawled on the ground.

Instantly, the stranger darted forward, a frown of concern between his brows.

She kept the gun pointed at him, despite lying awkwardly upon the rocks. “Back. I’m fine.”

“Your leg—”

Her skirts had come up, revealing both her limbs.

The stranger must have been civilized at one point, because he quickly turned his gaze away.

“Go ahead and look,” she said. “I gave up on modesty months ago.”

He did, and when he saw her leg, he cursed softly. “Mechanical.”

Kali studied her prosthetic leg, trying to see it through the stranger’s eyes. It was a complex device of brass, leather, and wood, carefully calibrated to move as smoothly and with the same range of motion as a normal leg made of flesh and bone. The apparatus strapped to her upper thigh, kept on much the same way a garter belt held on stockings. Though it wasn’t necessary to give the leg the shape and form of an actual limb—all it really needed to do was function properly, and beneath her skirts, no one could truly tell what it looked like—she’d taken pains to shape the metal and carve the wood so that it resembled her other, whole leg. Vanity, perhaps, but when a woman lost her leg, she could be forgiven for a little pride.

Few people had seen her prosthetic leg. She hadn’t been eager to show it off. A few doctors had run her through some tests to see how it functioned. They’d looked at her like a science experiment, not a person. Not a woman. Other than the doctors, however, nobody had laid eyes upon the evidence of her broken life, her ruined body.

Until now.

She stared at the unknown man. Waiting. Watching. Her heart slamming against the inside of her ribs. As though this feral stranger’s opinion mattered.

It shouldn’t. It did.

Slowly, he crouched down. Through the wild tangle of his hair, his expression was . . . fascinated. No disgust or horror. No looking at her as if she were an attraction at a traveling fair, displayed beside the conjoined twins. But genuine wonderment—not revulsion—gleamed in his eyes.

Her head grew light, muddled with confusion.

“Scuttle me,” he murmured. “Never seen its equal.”

“Have you seen a lot of cripples and their fake limbs?”

His gaze was solemn. “Sailors see many wounded men. With injuries far more severe than yours.”

An odd heat crept into her cheeks.

“The sawbones and tinkerers try to fit them with artificial limbs,” he continued, “but none that I’ve seen are so advanced. So elegant.”

More heat filled her cheeks to hear her prosthetic called
elegant
. She pushed herself to sitting and dug through the tools and pouches on her belt. “It’s doubtful you would see anything like this. Since I made it.”