Steamscape Read online

  “What? Where are you from?”

  “The mountain.”

  “Which mountain? There are hundreds between here and Codic alone.”

  She shook her head and rolled against the wall.

  Theo sighed and leaned back against the gate. He rubbed his face with his dirty hands, only smearing the sweat and grime.

  “Ah ha! Trying to escape, eh? Well, you should have kept running!”

  Theo and Solindra whirled.

  Five soldiers pointed their rifles at them from behind the gate. The one in front smirked.

  The chubby trooper waved his gun at them. “How the hell did they get over it?”

  Another one fumbled with his keys and then yanked open the gate. Theo jumped to run, but the leader of the soldiers slammed his shoulder with the butt of his rifle.

  He smashed face first into a wall. Two more guards grabbed his arms. Another seized Solindra. “Jing! Drina! Jing! Drina!”

  She let her feet go limp, but the soldier just dragged her along as the guards hauled them both into the train yard.

  After a few minutes, the engine began to chug and wheels started to roll. The whistle hissed its four-one note pattern as the train started to roll out of town.

  ***

  The glass cane clicked over the cooling remains of masonry strewn about the street. Cooper Smith, Esquire twiddled his mustache. His gaze quickly passed over the bucket chain and hoses attacking the smoldering lump of metal that had once been a boiler tower.

  He stepped over a corpse of a guard, kept warm by the nearby fire.

  The man in black frowned and turned at the sound of an engine’s steam whistle. The glass cane clicked over the brick street as he strolled toward the train yard.

  Chapter Four

  “Where is that girl?” Jing shaded his eyes against the glaring sunlight, reflecting off all the rails and boxcars in the train yard. The brightness had all but diluted the aether bands to nothing but twirling shadows in the sky.

  Drina, bent low in the shadow of the alley, straightened. “Not here, that’s for certain.”

  “I thought her voice came from this way.” He clenched his jaw and glared at the conspicuously empty train track. “You don’t think…”

  The cook smoothed out her skirt. “Of course I do. And so do you.” She nodded toward the alley. “And now we’d better get out of sight before–”

  “Hey! Trespassers!”

  “Before we’re seen,” Drina growled. Her hands disappeared inside her front pockets as she and Jing backed away into the darkness of the corkscrew alley.

  Three Codic soldiers, coming from the street, brought their rifles to their shoulders and stalked into the alleyway. The shadow of the buildings closed over them and their eyes slowly started to adjust. They rounded another corner. No one there.

  The first one called, “Come out! Hands up!”

  Nothing stirred in the shadows.

  The smallest man, barely two inches over five feet, started to back toward a wall. “I bet they skedaddled already. But where?”

  “Hands up!” the first one yelled again.

  “Have you ever been caught in a web?” a woman’s voice whispered from behind his ear. He felt the heat from her breath on his skin.

  A cord tightened around his throat. He’d never even felt it slide around his neck.

  The third soldier spun and fired. He hit his choking comrade in the chest. The bullet passed right through his body, but Drina had been twisted enough to the side that it bounced harmlessly off the brick building behind her.

  Jing slid a large, flat knife into the spine of the short soldier from behind. He sagged forward, eyes widening in surprise.

  The remaining soldier swung his rifle at Jing and heaved on the lever-action. The new bullet slipped into the chamber just as he stumbled forward, pushed by Drina’s unseen hand behind him. His entire body clenched at a sudden cold sensation. He squeezed the trigger and fired off into the sky.

  A heavy hand helped his collapsing body faster to the ground, and then Jing slammed his metal leg down onto the soldier’s skull and all the way down to the brick paving below. The skull popped apart with several splintering cracks.

  Jing sighed and scraped his bloody and brain-splattered heel against the ground.

  Drina pushed her long hair back behind her shoulders. “That was clumsy of us.”

  “We’ve gotten old.” Jing exhaled and held his metal leg up as high as he could. After a moment, he let it smash back to the ground. His single metallic footstep reverberated around the twists of the alley.

  “Out of practice,” she corrected, deftly replacing her silk cord back into her pocket. “I haven’t had the chance to kill too many people up on the mountain.”

  He frowned. “Too many?” He wiped his knife clean on a soldier’s trousers and replaced it into the metal casing of his artificial limb.

  The cook shrugged indifferently.

  He blew out a sigh. “I hope they were worth it.”

  “It was to keep the peace. And if you noticed, no one was ever murdered or raped at the Pitchstone.”

  “No one was murdered,” he repeated deliberately.

  She lifted her chin. “No one that I didn’t approve of.”

  “Oh right, because that makes all the difference. Did Mark know?”

  She shrugged. “He never asked.”

  Jing pressed his back to the wall and glanced around the yard again. “She’s on that train, you know.”

  “Likely, but…”

  “We’re not certain, I’m aware. If we choose wrongly, we’ll have failed in our orders to protect her.”

  She pressed her lips together. “The others, they didn’t–”

  “Don’t you dare finish that! Don’t you dare.” His gaze softened. “And besides, I like the kid, orders or no.”

  “I know.” She jerked up a hand for silence and pointed.

  Strolling across the train yard as if on a walk in a sunny park, Cooper Smith, Esquire chatted casually with the soldiers. His glass cane clinked against the iron rails.

  “I want to know who he works for,” she whispered, drawing back toward the shadows.

  “I want to know his leads,” Jing countered. “How could he have guessed we’d come here?”

  Drina raised her eyebrows. “I think we can learn both.” She tapped the warehouse wall behind her and looked through the iron gate. She stabbed the ancient lock with a very thin knife she’d pulled from a casing on her wrist. It fell away. Then they eased their way quietly through.

  Ahead by the rails, Smith strolled on beyond the warehouse. The two soldiers accompanying him saluted and then hastily jogged back the way they had come. Smith ambled on alone, his cane clicking continuously against the metal walkway.

  Jing and Drina hustled, albeit not quickly with the mechanic’s perpetual limp, alongside the building to the corner. The soldiers were congregating up on the other end of the train yard, shouting orders ahead, waiting on the arrival of the next train.

  The pair slipped around the corner of the warehouse, where Smith’s cane had been echoing. But the man in black was gone like a ghost into the mist. Behind them, the ground rumbled as the next Killing Train rolled into the station.

  ***

  The train cars rumbled along the tracks. Solindra swayed with the alien seesaw motion. Despite having lived her life next to trains, she’d never been on a moving one.

  Nor had she ever seen people packed in as livestock. She’d rarely seen any livestock cars roll through Pitchstone to stop for water, but she’d always remembered the stench of terrified cattle.

  It was the same here. Everyone tried to crowd to the center of the car. No one dared touch the door or the tiny, high vents. A scalding steampipe barred each opening to discourage any escape attempt. There was often a cry from someone pushed into the heated pipes by the sheer weight of the people.

  Solindra traced the trail to the front of the car where the master pipe connected to a coal
boilerbox built on the outside of the car. She couldn’t see the box itself, but she knew exactly how it worked.

  She inhaled again. The air was too laden with the stench to breathe. Her hair seemed to be the only color in the room. Over in the far corner stood a knot of Steampower soldiers, gazes broken and shoulders slumping forward. Their black uniforms bore fresh tears and stains.

  “You have very strange eyes.”

  She whirled to Theo, almost slapping him. So, he’d made his way back over to her. How dare he! It was his fault she was here.

  He grinned, despite the hopelessness around him. “What’s your name?”

  She licked her lips. “Marissa Clifton?”

  “Right.” He rolled his dark eyes. “And I’m Boras Indecent Saturni.”

  She sighed. “I’m Cylinder.”

  He barked a laugh, raising a few faces directly around them.

  She blushed as red as her hair. “No, Solindra! Solindra Canon.”

  His grin curled toward the side of his face. “Well, Ms. Solindra Canon, we are going to die. I hear that when we arrive, they stick brush and logs underneath the cars and light them on fire. We burn alive in our very own oven.”

  Solindra jerked her face away. “Shows how little you know. That would warp the axles, and more. The cars would be useless afterward, and Codic is already reusing boxcars that should’ve been retired five years ago. I saw them at the yard.”

  He rocked back half a step and raised his eyebrows. “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” she asked back.

  “Just another bricoleur.” He winked.

  “One of those traveling thieves? My father taught me about you.”

  “Itinerant tinsmith,” he corrected with that devilish grin. He glanced around. There were other bricoleurs on the train, too. They weren’t part of the war; it was just an excuse to get rid of them.

  The train rocked. Theo went with the motion and crashed into her. Solindra stared at him directly in the eye.

  He held up the faintly glowing red medallion in his gloved fingers. “What the hell is this?”

  The girl went for her skirt pocket. It was empty of its now familiar weight. “Give me back the sancta!”

  “The what?” He squinted at it and held it up to his nose. Around them, the train’s other unwilling occupants stared at the walls or the floor, taking an intentional disinterest.

  His dark eyes widened. “This is a cipher medallion! Why do you–?”

  His internal voice cut in and demanded, steal it! It’s worth a fortune to those old, crusty cooks!

  “Some collector will buy this,” he murmured. “I wonder if the Priory really exists.”

  Solindra grabbed at the sancta. “Give it back!” She wrapped her hands around his and jerked. “And I want no truck with stupid secret sects that don’t exist! The Priory isn’t real.”

  Theo had to mentally acknowledge the point. They probably didn’t exist, but persistent stories like that one often had flakes of truth in them. He bet there really were men who sat around in candlelight and heavy robes pretending to talk to the steam. The mysterious “they” even claimed that the Priory owned all of Codic’s higher-ups, including President LaBier.

  He stared hard at the cipher medallion. It seemed to expand in his hand, driving out the noise and smells of the car, pulsing in time with his rising heartbeat. His grip loosened on the device.

  He narrowed his gaze, letting it fall deeper inside the glowing hammer. There was something further down there, hiding in the center. Some image floated like a lily pad. Something bright. Something burning.

  Theo screamed from the back of his throat, the yell bursting up from the pit of his stomach. He tried to shake away the medallion, but the thing seemed glued to his hand. He opened his fingers and hurled it, but it didn’t move.

  “Fire! Fire!” He leaped back, barreling over several people behind him. His free hand flailed at the invisible flames lighting up his body and clothes.

  “What?” Solindra jumped after him, her hand going again for the sancta. “There’s no fire, you idiot.”

  “Fire!” Theo started to tear at his shirt with his gloved hands. He could smell his clothes and flesh, and he knew very well what he smelled like on fire. It had been seared into his memory that day Flame had come to town.

  He heard his mother howling as she died all over again.

  A flash of silver interrupted him.

  Solindra smacked him in the jaw and kneed him in the crotch, just like Drina had taught her to do.

  Theo managed to focus on a pair of steam-colored eyes in the middle of the burning wagons, hanging there in the sky.

  A face faded into view, her red hair mixing with the flames. Then the memory released its hold. The motion of the train rocked him back to the present. He suddenly lurched forward in pain, realizing that he’d been struck.

  Solindra glanced at the scars all across the young man’s torso underneath his torn clothing, but then focused back on the sancta. “Give it back!”

  Theo started to raise his hand to throw the thing clear across the boxcar. The hated part of him wrapped his fingers even tighter. It whispered, it’s worth money!

  Solindra clawed at his glove. “It’s mine!”

  Theo grunted. “Not right now it isn’t.”

  She didn’t let go and stared in concentration at the red device. She let her own gaze fall toward the center of it. Now she was back in the closet, letting the steam rise and dance all around her. She knew she could do it then. “It’s mine.”

  “It’s mine now.”

  “No, it’s not!” The rivets mounting the steampipes popped free from the walls. The pipes crackled like old newspaper, and they danced in the air like snakes on fire. People screamed, trying to stampede away from the steam, but there was nowhere to run.

  The Killing Train’s boxcar exploded into a riot.

  “Kill the crypter!” A woman in a faded bonnet leveled a finger at Solindra’s nose from less than a foot away. “Kill her!”

  Solindra stared, all the words she wanted to say dying in the back of her throat.

  From the corner, the Steampower soldiers shoved their way through the crowd. Solindra cried aloud as someone behind ripped out a length of her hair. Many more hands pawed at her clothing.

  “Stay back!” Theo roared, putting the cipher medallion into Solindra’s hand and raising her arm. “Stay back or she’ll turn the steam on you!”

  He kicked the nearest person in the face. The press of people around them lessened slightly as everyone in the car watched the glowing sancta.

  “What are you doing?” Solindra hissed.

  “Saving you so you can save me. Think you can burst the boxcar door open?” He dropped his grip on the medallion, brought up his gloved fists and eased into a fighting stance. “Now would be good.” People tightened around them again.

  She stared at the sancta in her hand. “But I don’t know how!”

  Chapter Five

  The sagebrush scratched against Jing’s metal leg as he knelt in front of the tracks. He couldn’t feel it.

  His fingers, however, could sense the slightest vibrations across the sandy surface. He didn’t even need to touch the track to know the train would soon be in view.

  He fingered the hose leading away from his prosthesis and into the Pitchstone’s escape dinghy. “Time to hurry.” He pulled out the welding torch’s head from his leg.

  Drina nodded and dropped more coal into the box. “We were lucky to get ahead.” She reached down into the dinghy and retrieved a hatchet. She’d swapped out her skirt for her old uniform trousers and had braided her hair into a crown on top of her head.

  With barely a footprint left behind her, she walked to the nearest telegraph and telephone pole in a line of thousands that followed the railway, where the words effortlessly streamed across the vast desert. The entire wooden pole shuddered at the hatchet’s bite. Drina struck again.

  Jing attached the fuel tube from
the dinghy to the welding torch from his leg.

  The hatchet hammered and, after awhile, Drina kicked the shredding wood over. The pole sagged forward on a broken back toward the tracks, tethered by the wires.

  “Drina!”

  “I know,” she called back, marching intently to the next pole.

  On the horizon, a pillar of smoke was beginning to come into focus. Jing laid a hand on the track and felt the vibrations travel up his fingers and his arm.

  With a thundering crack, Drina dropped the second pole. The first pole crashed down onto the steel rails. Jing lit the torch and knelt over the telegraph and telephone wires and the tracks.

  Sweat beads immediately crowded his forehead. He straightened the wires to the track and welded them into place along a good foot-long section, with them still attached to their poles.

  He slammed the torch against the sand to extinguish it and limped away from the track. With his free hand, he wiped his forehead. “Should cause trouble.”

  Drina frowned. “But not derail it. Just enough to make them to stop.”

  He grinned. “Probably. I know if I were the engineer of that thing what I would do.” He knelt back down to replace the tools inside their casing.

  “You’d speed up, expecting a trap.”

  “Hey now.” He stood up and shaded his eyes at the oncoming steam engine. “Just be safe, Cylinder.”

  ***

  “Kill the crypter!”

  Solindra stared at the sancta. Someone knocked it out of her hand. Others grabbed at her skirt and ripped at her hair. Fingernails dug deep and yanked back layers of skin.

  The shouts became so solid that her ears simply shut down. She tried to push back toward Theo, but too many hands pulled her the other way. Helpless, she was dragged like a fish caught in a riptide.

  Daylight suddenly brightened the room from above. Gunfire outshouted the screams of the captives.

  Solindra froze, her heart stopping for a second as the woman trying to pull her arm out of its socket died. Hot blood splashed her face from the gunshot wound. The woman’s body sagged and collapsed.