Zoe Archer - [Ether Chronicles 03] (7 page)

“No.” When she looked horrified, he added quickly, “I was the only one on board when she wrecked. I’d made everyone else abandon ship as soon as I saw she wasn’t going to make it.”

“You couldn’t abandon ship, too?”

“Someone needed to pilot it, make sure it didn’t crash into anywhere inhabited.”

She stared at him. “But . . . you could’ve died.”

“I did, in a way.” He paced over to the heap of broken pictures in the corner and toed his boot through them. Prints of other airships and seafaring vessels—as though he or his officers would ever forget that they were in the navy. Maybe the men outfitting the ships thought images of land would make him and the rest of the crew long for things they couldn’t have. But he never missed dry—or solid—land. His home had been the sea, and then the air.

From behind him, she murmured, “You must’ve been scared.”

“As hell.” He turned back to her. The ashen light through the portholes traced along the angles of her face, and the golden hoops in her ears. Women had seldom been aboard—the Aerial Navy had a strict policy about spouses on airships, and as the captain of the
Persephone
, he insisted his crew find their pleasures on land rather than bring hired companionship on board. Kali was incongruous here for many reasons.

“Wasn’t much choice in the matter,” he continued. “And I’d just been in battle. Death’s always a possibility when engaging with the enemy. The biggest surprise came when I awoke after crashing.” He glanced down at his shirt and coat, covering the telumium plate on his pectoral. “We’re durable, us Man O’ Wars.” But he needed to stay dead. A fate he’d learned not just to accept, but embrace.

Except when she’d arrived on the island. Then his heart had begun to beat again. It had always beat, but now, now . . . he felt the chill of his self-dug grave begin to dissipate every moment in her presence.

“Battle,” she mused, walking toward the portholes. She lightly touched the empty brass frames. “And you crashed here three months ago.”

He waited. It was only a matter of minutes before she understood.

No, he was wrong. It was a matter of seconds, because she whirled back to face him, color leeching once more from her cheeks.

“You were there at Liverpool,” she said quietly.

He nodded.

Her gaze was hot. “You said nothing earlier.”

“I didn’t know what . . .” He dragged his hands through his hair. “It’s not a topic that’s easy to breach. And I thought that you wouldn’t be much pleased with me if you knew.” As if her opinion of him meant something.

“Why the hell not?” She took a step forward, eyes snapping electric fire.

He glanced down at her leg.

She snorted. “As though I’d blame you for that. This”—she tapped the artificial limb beneath her skirts—“was a gift from the Hapsburgs and the Russians when they attacked. I’d probably be dead if the navy hadn’t shown. There wouldn’t have been any medical teams looking for survivors.” Still, she continued to scowl. “Gods and goddesses, it confounds me that you’d think I’d be angry.”

Strange. He’d faced brutal combat on sea and in the air, had undergone the incredibly lengthy and painful process of becoming a Man O’ War, and had stared down death dozens of times. Yet the potent force of this one woman actually made him edgy, gave him an uncertainty he’d never once known.

“I thought maybe you’d blame us for not getting there sooner. Not doing enough. For being the cause of your loss.”

“From the enemy’s first fusillade to the appearance of the navy,” she argued, “it was a matter of hours. You couldn’t have gotten to Liverpool much sooner. As for not doing enough”—she shook her head—“when I was able to watch the skies, I saw the skirmishes. It made me dread the airships. But I also saw the British aerial fleet trying to save the ports, pushing the Hapsburgs and Russians away from civilian targets. One British ship deliberately took Russian fire to keep them from dropping bombs on one of the worst slums in the city. I saw it.”

He smiled mirthlessly. “Then we’ve already met.”

Her scowl dropped away. “That was your ship?
This
ship?”

“The same.”

“You must’ve realized that Valentine Grove was just a slum. But you saved it anyway.”

He glanced away, then back. “Lives are lives.”

Several moments passed with her simply staring at him, looking baffled, angry, awed. Suddenly, she strode out of the wardroom. He set down the cricket, then followed at a distance, not trying to catch her, even when she clambered up the companionway. But when she reached the top deck, instead of trying to scramble down the side, she paced what was left of the quarterdeck. He stood near the ramshackle remains of the pilot’s house, watching her. At least she no longer looked frightened of the airship.

“Both of us there,” she muttered. “Both of us here.
Kismat
? Is something written in our astrological charts? Fate?”

Though she spoke under her breath to herself, he could still hear every word as if spoken plainly.

“Coincidence, not fate,” he said, causing her to stop in her pacing. “A string of choices we both made and now here we are.” He spread his hands, taking in the deck of the downed airship, the moors rolling all around them, and the whole of the island, set apart from the world. “You’re a woman of science. You know fate or kismat or whatever word you want to call it doesn’t exist.”

She stalked to him. “Tell me. Everything.”

He didn’t want to speak of it, to think of those last few hours of his life before he’d come here, to this rocky, windswept hereafter.

It was clear she wouldn’t be put off. May as well rip the plaster off and get it over with, he thought.

Most of the forecastle had broken apart when the ship had crashed, but enough remained for him to stride to it. He rested his boot on the bottom of the rail and looked out over the moorland as if they were waves or the tops of clouds.

“I was at Greenwich when the telegram came,” he said. “The enemy had taken too many defeats—an important munitions plant destroyed a year ago, the failed attempts at incursion in the United States—and they wanted to strike a devastating assault against us. Hurt us. Make a statement. So they went for our most important port: Liverpool. Any airship stationed in Britain was dispatched. We got there as soon as we could, but the enemy had worked fast. Half the city was gone by the time the
Persephone
arrived.”

“
My
half,” she said, coming to stand behind him. “My offices were near the docks.”

He cursed lowly. The docks had been one of the hardest hit. Even from the height of his airship, he’d smelled the burning wood and charred flesh. And she’d been there, in the thick of it. Her leg crushed and death all around her.

He wouldn’t have been able to help her, or the people at her offices. The damage had been wrought. Slim comfort in that knowledge, though.

Thoughts like that had haunted him since he’d crashed here. They were always close, like whispers in corners.

“We did what we could to minimize civilian casualties,” he said. “That meant chasing the Huns and Russians away from the city, so if their airships crashed, they wouldn’t do it on anyone below. The
Persephone
went after a Russian cruiser. Herded the ship north. But we took heavy damage in the pursuit.”

He turned his gaze skyward, his mind conjuring images of the Russian ship ablaze, and the ghostly picture of his own airship, barely holding together as she hunted her prey.

“The Russian ship broke apart over the sea in the Inner Hebrides,” he went on. “It wouldn’t be much longer before the
Persephone
met the same fate. But I had to save my crew and keep the airship from hitting any settlements. So I made them abandon ship.”

“And then you were alone,” she said quietly.

“A Man O’ War is never alone, so long as he’s got his ship. Like a married couple, we are.”

“So you and your
wife
crashed together. Here.”

“Romantic, wouldn’t you say?” His smile felt wry while his insides turned cold. “She dies, I die.”

“Except neither of you died.” She nodded toward the turbines. “I can still hear her humming, and her lights shine at night.”

“She’ll never fly again,” he said. “Poor lady. A bird with her wings clipped. Not much of an existence for an airship. And me . . .” He stared down at his hands. “I’m living,” he conceded, “but not.”

She eyed him. “You’re breathing, talking. Eating. You seem alive to me.”

“That’s
survival
, but not living.” He knocked his fist against the rail. “We’re two wrecks who’ll never take to the sky again. Which is how it ought to be.”

Her brow furrowed at his words, but he didn’t want to explain himself.

“There had to be some way to signal for help,” she insisted.

“Not many telegraph poles out here.”

She threw him a look that said his sarcasm wasn’t appreciated.

“All I could do was wait for rescue,” he said at last. He looked up at the sky again. “It never came.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she complained. “Whatever crew survived abandoning ship had to have made their way back to the Admiralty and give them an idea as to where you’d be.”

He shrugged. “If they did, they were worse navigators than I’d believed. Because no airships or seafaring vessels ever came. I was marooned.”

“What about swimming to the nearest inhabited island? Man O’ Wars are famed for their strength and stamina. I know you can’t be away from a battery for too long, not without consequences, but surely a half day’s swim to Vatersay and then another day for an airship to retrieve you could be possible.”

“Possible, aye.”

“Maybe you didn’t want to risk it,” she said, half to herself. “But,” she added, brightening, “the ferryman comes back in three weeks. He can take you to South Uist, and you’ll be back in Greenwich in a day.”

“There’s the catch, Kali m’dear.” He gazed at her. “I don’t want to go back.”

“S
tay?” Kali asked. She took in the rocky, barren moor, the half-destroyed airship. “Why?”

His expression darkened. “You going to berate me? Shame me for dereliction of duty?”

“I only asked
why.
If you’re looking for someone to tell you to rejoin the world,” she answered, “you’ll have to search elsewhere.”

Leaning against the rail, he studied her, his arms crossed over his wide chest. He looked at her as one ghost might recognize another, two spirits passing through the realm of the living, unseen to everyone but other phantoms.

A need welled up in her. Words and images and memories demanding to be let out, when they’d been held inside for so long in a death’s grip. In her telegraphs and letters home, she’d been elliptical in her language, sparing her parents the horror of what she’d seen. And there’d been no one left in Liverpool she could speak with—no one she trusted, anyway. There had been brusque, weary doctors and sad-eyed nurses who’d come up from London when most of the medical professionals in Liverpool had been killed. Even hospitals hadn’t been spared from the destruction.

How do you feel, Miss MacNeil
?
Is there anything you’d like to talk about
?

I’m perfectly well,
she’d always answered.
There’s nothing I want to discuss.

She’d lived, hadn’t she? No cause for complaint. But she knew no one would understand. Not even other survivors.

As she’d recovered, she forced herself into numbness. Retreating farther and farther from the world. Talking less. Wincing at the slightest sound. Keeping herself locked tight as a strongbox.

Yet she could speak to Fletcher. He knew. He understood.

She walked along the tilted, partially shattered deck, trying to divert her attention with the embedded panels and their levers and switches, one part of her speaking, the other part distracting herself by attempting to figure out the functions of all the technology on the airship. “The enemy airships were spotted just after luncheon,” she said. Her voice sounded far away. “They came in so suddenly, no one thought to take shelter in the basement. People actually stood out in the street and stared at the sky. Nobody could believe that the Hapsburgs and Russians would do more than fire on the shipyards and docks. From my office window, I could see them, the workers hurrying away, probably thinking they’d be safe if they got away from the water. But they weren’t. None of us were.”

She crouched next to a panel that must have at one time directed more power into the turbines. Without any crew to tend to it, the brass had tarnished, and her reflection in the metal was muddy.

“I heard this . . . whistling . . . from above,” she continued, pulling on the useless levers. “But I couldn’t believe it. There’d been rumors about experiments with shells and other explosive devices dropped from airships onto the ground. Not just firefights between ships, but actually attacking whatever was below. Factories or military installations. Yet I never believed it. Surely wars couldn’t be fought in such an . . . inhumane way. So detached and callous.”

“It’s a modern era.” He spoke with no inflection. “Enemies have always tried to pretend that whoever they fought wasn’t human. It’s even easier to do that from a mile above a city.”

She stared at him. “Tell me that the British Aerial Navy isn’t doing that.”

His expression was granite. “There’ve been arguments on both sides about aerial bombing. No conclusions. Yet.”

That was something of a relief.

“So you heard them,” he pressed. “The bombs.”

She plunged back into that day. How innocuously it had started. She’d dressed and eaten a breakfast of tea and toast with no thought to what might happen in a few hours. Wasn’t that the way of disaster? It never announced itself well in advance, but like a rude guest, it simply arrived. But this rude guest didn’t demand tea and biscuits when there weren’t any. This guest tore one’s life apart. Or ended it.

“I saw these . . . things . . . falling from the sky. From the enemy airships. And wherever they landed, buildings exploded. I’d experienced earthquakes in Nagpur. Nothing felt like this. The ground shaking. Fire like Hell itself opening up. People screaming and running in every direction. In my offices, we tried to be calm, get out of the building as quickly and orderly as we could. But while we gathered to evacuate . . .” She swallowed past the bile in her throat. “The bomb struck.”