“OH, FUCK!” I shouted at the dash. My voice had a bit of breathy vibrato caused by the Mark caressing my insides raw as the gray twilight Chaos roiled outside the car. My frustration fought its way out through the layers of building tension and physical sensation as I allowed Ivan to guide me.
“What’s the matter?” Jacob’s voice had an edge of concern that sounded barely in check.
“The ‘check engine’ light,” I half gasped, half snapped in frustration.
“What? What does that mean?”
“That must have been leaded gas we filled up with.” You’re a guy, I thought, you should know this stuff.
“I thought they didn’t start using leaded gas until the 20s.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and the Civil War ended in 1865.”
“Point taken,” he said. “Are we going to break down?”
I sighed. “No. But it means I probably just fucked up the catalytic converter.”
“Oh, that’s all?” The relief in his voice pissed me off.
“That’s all? You know what it costs to replace one? Over a grand, damn it! I can’t afford this crap.”
“Dana, after the last day or so, does it seem that important?”
“It’s my car.” Even as I said it, I knew how crazy it sounded. But, well, it was my car. But it was looking less and less practical as a mode of travel between universes.
Ivan interrupted my automotive angst to tell us, “We’ve reached the Empire.”
I drove out of Chaos, and the Charger pounced onto a concrete highway like a captive cheetah finally being released back on the savanna. Six arrow-straight lanes worth of freedom, and I think I could hear the Hemi almost sigh in relief.
I patted the wheel and thought, Sorry about the bad gas.
After all the travel through Chaos, I was getting a feel for relative dates. I guessed that we had landed about a decade farther away from home than the universe of the risen South, and I asked Ivan what year it was here.
“1908,” he responded.
Right on the money.
The highway paralleled a set of train tracks as it headed east. Dawn shaded the sky ahead of us in reds and yellows, and we passed the first road sign proclaiming Ten Miles to Imperial District, in English, French, and Russian.
Imperial District, aka the District of Columbia.
Jacob leaned forward from the back seat and asked, “So how does the Napoleonic Empire gain a foothold in North America?”
“I should ask of you, how could it not? The old United States destroys itself in civil war and asks the Franco-Russian alliance for aid. The Empire saved this nation.”
“I guess Napoleon’s invasion of Russia ended differently,” Jacob said.
Ivan laughed.
“What?” Jacob asked.
“There was no need to invade. Marriage is so much simpler.”
The history of Ivan’s world diverged from my own somewhere in the first decade of the nineteenth century where the Napoleonic Wars didn’t take the bad turn in Russia that my Napoleon had suffered—here there was no Waterloo, no Elba, no disintegration of French domination in Europe. Instead, there had been a tense stalemate that ended with the joining of the Imperial families of Russia and France. When the US started breaking apart here, and things went bad for the Union, the North pleaded for intervention by the Empire.
It worked, since the Empire was the most powerful nation on the planet. It was also expansionist as all hell, and once it had troops on the ground, the “assistance” quickly managed to reunify the country—under the Empire’s flag. For half a century, the Empire had been peaceful, since no one was really interested in pissing it off.
I listened with half an ear because the scene I drove into was even farther removed from me than the world with the Johnny Reb biplane. The highway was arrow-straight through the Maryland countryside, the kind of road that was more an expression of power than logistical necessity. Every wrinkle of the ground was smoothed or filled so that the road never wavered from level. The surface was unmarked, but I kept to the right, by the train tracks, to avoid other traffic.
And, as the dawn light grew, I began to see other traffic, much of it horse-drawn. There were self-propelled things as well, but they seemed too ornate for me to call them cars. They puttered along on spidery-thin wheels, and the passengers sat in plush lounges nestled in cabins as elaborately decorated and as fragile as a Fabergé egg.
I wondered at the lack of anything but horse-drawn cargo until a train approached on the tracks next to us. I heard it whistle and glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the massive engine bearing down on us. On the nose was a massive shield, with a painted golden double-headed eagle on a midnight-blue field. It clutched thunderbolts in its talons.
Then the engine shot by us. The engine itself was at least fifty feet long and loomed over the Charger as if it was a toy. The drive wheels were easily half again as tall as my car. The rest of it screamed by the highway in an endless chain, a great moving wall of elaborately painted passenger cars and somewhat more dull cargo containers.
I passed a sign announcing that the Imperial District was five miles ahead, and the farmland next to the highway gave way to long aisles of trees flanking the highway. Something floated in the sky above us and Jacob asked Ivan incredulously, “Is that a zeppelin?”
Ivan looked where Jacob pointed and said, “What? Do you mean the airship?”
“Yeah . . .”
“So, what’s a zeppelin?”
“An airship designed by a German engineer.”
“Then that is probably not a zeppelin.”
THE traffic became more congested as we approached a sign announcing the border of the Imperial District in elaborate cursive English, French, and Russian. Our fellow travelers gave the Charger odd looks, but nothing as bad as the Amish in Fascist Pennsylvania had given us. Still, the road was crowded with slower moving traffic, and I had to ease back and go less than twenty-five for fear of running over a horse-drawn fruit cart.
We’d barely crossed the border into the district proper, when the traffic ahead of us began pulling aside. At first, I had a hope they were pulling apart to let us through, until I saw past the traffic ahead, someone bearing a banner with the golden double eagle on it. The bearer was the one causing the traffic to part, more efficiently than a police siren, and probably for the same reason.
The carriage in front of us pulled over to the side of the road so I had a clear view. A dozen horsemen galloped down the road toward us, the point man bearing a lance on which the banner fluttered ahead of them. The rest of the men behind him seemed more practically armed, with swords and rifles. Their uniforms consisted of tall black boots, scarlet trousers, navy jackets with brass buttons, elaborate braids, and insignia. A few of the riders, the ones with swords, wore white gloves and elaborate plumed hats. The riflemen had bare hands and wore plainer caps that reminded me of movies about the Foreign Legion.
I pulled the Charger over and asked Ivan, “So is that our welcoming committee?”
He nodded and said, “Let me go out and talk to them.” He left the car before I had a chance to say anything to him.
“I don’t like this,” Jacob said quietly.
“I know.”
Ivan spread his hands and walked up next to the front of my car on the passenger side as the cavalry surrounded us. He shuffled his feet as the horseman with the nicest hat called out in Russian-accented English, “Everyone must exit the carriage now.”
I frowned when Ivan started talking back in Russian. “Okay,” I whispered, “he’s hiding something.” I put my foot on the brake and shifted out of park. It had worked with the Fascist cop and the strafing biplane. I’d just let the car roll forward and push slightly with the Mark and we’d be somewhere else where the Franco-Russian police weren’t.
I lifted my foot off the brake and pushed with the Mark. Nothing happened except a distracting shudder. “What?”
“The bastard shoved something under your front tire!” Jacob undid his belt and reached for his gun—which still wasn’t there.
“Jacob,” I said, “They’re the cops here.”
My foot moved to the gas, but I hesitated. They had leveled rifles at the car, and if I didn’t goose the car into motion with the first try, we’d be dead. If it was only me in the car, I might have risked it. Then walls of horse flesh clopped into place immediately ahead and behind the car.
I really wish I’d thought about reverse before they’d done that.
I shifted back into park and cut the engine. The Charger shut down with a few barks from the exhaust to remind me that I had fed it bad gas. Then I made sure to keep my hands on the steering wheel. The lead horseman repeated, “Out of the carriage. Now.”
I opened the door and stepped out. Free of the confinement of the vehicle I had a moment of freedom where I could have run into a neighboring universe, but I didn’t want to abandon Jacob. Then a horseman dismounted and took my arm firmly in a gloved hand and the point was moot. Jacob followed suit, shooting me a dark look. Ivan wasn’t looking at us at all.
What did I expect? I thought. I saw the bastard kill someone.
Ivan faced a trio of the mounted police himself. He still spoke Russian, so I had no clue what he was saying.
“Was it all lies, Ivan?”
I thought I might have seen him flinch. But I suspect that any sign of guilt or regret might have been wishful thinking on my part. Some part of me wanted to believe that he was explaining things to the guards and it was a misunderstanding.
Then someone snapped a black metal band on my wrist. The metal was cold, heavy, and felt like cast iron. It clicked shut on my wrist with a dense mechanical click. It not only weighed down my arm, but I could feel it weigh down my Mark.
Oh, crap! What the hell is this?
It wasn’t a handcuff or a manacle, the ring of metal was not connected to anything else. If it wasn’t so thick and heavy, it could have been a piece of jewelry. I stared at it, feeling it weigh me down as the man holding me let me go. I glanced over at Jacob and saw they had snapped a similar band on his wrist. He looked at it, but he just seemed puzzled about the thing. From the way he moved his arm, I could tell he didn’t feel the same weight on his that I did with mine.
I looked up at the officer who had held my arm and asked, “What is this?”
The officer glanced at Ivan and looked uncomfortable. He stood at attention and said. “Any Walker coming without leave into the Empire’s domain must be restrained. I apologize, but it is the law, my Lady.”
“My Lady,” again.
I felt the iron band with my opposite hand and thought of the way the officer said “restrained.” I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the weight I felt in my Mark. I took a step toward the officer, pushing myself with the Mark—and I almost doubled over in pain. It was like I tried to run without realizing that my wrist was chained to something massive and immobile. I felt a wrenching force tying me to Ivan’s world, so heavy that my movement with the Mark ended before it began.
Ivan turned to look at me as if he had sensed the effort.
I glared at him and balled my hand into a fist. The sudden rage I felt was horrifying in its intensity. I’d gone through all of this because of the Mark. I was able to take risks—even so far as coming here—because in the back of my mind there was nothing I could get into that I couldn’t walk away from.
Idiot! Ivan had even told me that this was possible. He didn’t explain it or go into detail, but there was the fact he said that the Emperor had held the dead old man a prisoner. Why did I never ask how they could imprison him?
If they’d been aware of Walkers for any length of time, of course they’d develop some sort of countermeasures. I felt stupid and helpless as it sank in that getting out of this was not going to be nearly as easy as getting into it.
THEY loaded me and Jacob into the back of a wagon with barred windows. We were the only passengers in the back as it rolled forward, continuing into the Imperial District.
Jacob leaned forward once the doors closed on us. “Okay, you followed Ivan to his Empire. You can get us out of here now.”
I stared at my hands, balled into fists on my knees, so I didn’t have to meet his eyes. I whispered, “No.”
“What?”
“The bracelets,” I said. “I can’t move with them. It’s like it chains me in place.”
He felt the band on his own wrist. “This? How can it keep you from doing your thing? You were driving that Charger of yours—”
“I don’t know!” I snapped, much more harshly than I intended. “I don’t even know how the Mark works; how should I know what can stop it?” My vision blurred. My eyes and my cheeks burned. “Oh, God, Jacob, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You shouldn’t even be here.”
“Dana? It’s not—”
“You told me not to trust him. I didn’t. But I followed him anyway. I was so damn sure I knew what I was doing. If we got into trouble, I could . . . Damn it, they have you, they have me, they even have my damn car.”
Jacob chuckled.
“What’s funny?”
“I actually got billing above your car.”
I frowned. “I’m serious.”
“I know. But you can’t blame yourself for me being here. I came freely, and you can’t even say I didn’t know what I was getting into. I pretty much saw firsthand before we reached this point.”
I bit my lip and turned away from him.
“What’s the matter?”
What isn’t? “I just was thinking about Whedon,” I said.
“That wasn’t your fault either.”
“I know, but it’s hard not to blame myself for it.”