MY SHOULDERS AND wrists burned with such flaring agony that I was barely aware of the sudden cold wind cutting across my whole body. Again I was in midair, my eyes watering as much from the wind as the pain. I barely had the presence of mind to push myself back into the airship.
I slammed ungracefully onto the metal of the catwalk, rolling down the slope a couple of feet until I came to a crumpled moaning stop.
A Russian-accented voice came from far away, “Are you all right?”
“No,” I groaned. I blinked my eyes and looked at my wrists. Fortunately, my hands were still attached. But they were covered in blood, and the skin was badly abraded where they had been torn free of the ropes. It took three tries before I got my pained arms to support my weight and push myself up.
No time to recover. My evil sibling would have sensed my use of the Mark. Her people were probably already coming back here. The moment I could get my arms to obey me, I scrambled to the guard’s body. I pulled my sort-of-Luger from the man’s belt with one hand and retrieved his dagger with the other. Then I ran to Ivan. The ropes suspending him ran over the strut above and down to tie to the railing of the catwalk.
“Get ready to drop,” I told Ivan as I started sawing through the rope with the dagger. It didn’t go well. The dagger may have been sharp, but it wasn’t designed to hack rope apart, and the effort was made worse because the grip from my injured hands was poor and slick with smeared blood. I was barely a third of the way through the rope when I saw movement by the wreckage of the biplane. I dropped prone before I heard the crack of a rifle.
“Shit!”
I dropped the dagger and got my gun up in a two-handed grip in front of me. Flat on the ground made me less of a target, but that wouldn’t faze someone who took time to aim, especially since the floor of the catwalk tilted toward the enemy. I fired one of my five shots simply to pin them down and deny them that chance for a moment. The gunshot seemed an order of magnitude louder than the rifle crack.
They hesitated just a fraction too long before returning fire, time for my hands to stop shaking, time for me to aim down the length of the catwalk. The first guy sprang from the alcove of pipes and struts where Ivan had hidden us shortly after the crash. He was using a rifle and had to swing it around to bear on me after leaving his cramped cover. Time enough for me to place a single shot into his center of mass.
The explosive gunshot set the surface of the catwalk ringing under my arms, not that I could hear it because I was already half deafened. My injured wrists stung from the recoil from the massive pistol. The sound had barely faded from my noise-ravaged ears when the next guy tried to shoot me. I saw the muzzle flash, but barely heard the shot. This guy used the biplane for cover, but that meant he was mostly hidden by fabric. I fired a fraction of a second after he did, aiming at a point about five inches below the flash of his rifle. The shot blew through the body of the biplane, and the gunman dropped behind it.
I saw another flash and felt something hot and stinging against my leg. It took a moment for me to zero in on the new shooter, enough time for him to get off another shot that, thankfully, missed. I found him past the biplane, using the stairs downward for cover. He was twice as far from me as either of his fallen comrades. Before he managed a third shot, I fired, striking the catwalk in front of him. He ducked below the level of the catwalk.
Damn!
I only had one shot left; it needed to count. I held my breath and aimed at the small area at the top of the steps he needed to take a shot. I waited and waited.
And waited.
I exhaled. Did I actually get him? I doubted it. My shot had hit the ground maybe three feet in front of him. At best he’d been stung by a sliver of shrapnel. Did he retreat?
Another few breaths, and the airship seemed to shudder beneath me. “What was that?”
I barely heard Ivan through ears that felt packed with cotton. “Ballast.”
No more shots came, and I scrambled back, grabbing the dagger and sawing frantically at Ivan’s rope. I finally cut through it, and Ivan dropped. He crouched and rolled as if he did this all the time. When he came up, he held his wrists out. I approached with the dagger when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.
“Down!” I shoved Ivan, and we both collapsed to the deck as a bullet sparked the handrail next to us.
Our friend had circled around to come up behind us at the other end of the catwalk. Like before, he used the stairs for cover, but from that direction, without the wreckage half-blocking the catwalk, he had a much clearer field of fire. Prone, I brought my gun to bear again. My position was even worse now. Given the still tilted airship, the gunman had the high ground. He was also twice as far from us, not a huge amount for the rifle but enough to impact the accuracy of my handgun.
And I only had one shot left.
He’d ducked down the stairs, so I couldn’t see him. I did my best to aim, waiting for him to pop up. When he did, I fired. The shot missed him entirely, shredding the edge of a gas cell three feet away from him. I watched helplessly as he levered his rifle in my direction.
I dimly heard the rifle shot, but I saw no flash from his gun. Instead, I saw his head snap back in a fog of red mist. I looked off to my right and saw Ivan. He had managed to get one hand free and had liberated the rifle from the guard’s body next to us.
Ivan’s voice sounded far away. “By my count, that leaves three, plus the woman.”
After we untangled the rope from Ivan’s other wrist, we headed up the catwalk toward our last attacker. I was beginning to realize how beat up I was. My wrists burned and throbbed. As the adrenaline ebbed, I could feel the two wounds on my left leg, one slice from our guard’s dagger, and one graze either from a rifle shot or wayward shrapnel. I limped now, and my bare foot was slippery with a slick of blood.
We stopped by the body by the stairs and I picked up the dead man’s rifle. As I did, the whole airship seemed to shudder around us. “More ballast,” Ivan said, his voice a little clearer now that my ears had stopped ringing.
“Can they keep this thing airborne?”
He shook his head. “I doubt it, especially now with all the bullet holes.”
“We have to stop her,” I said.
“I know.”
I swallowed. “I’m sorry for dragging you into my fight.”
“It is my fight once they attack the Empire.”
I nodded. I still felt guilty, but I didn’t want to argue the point. “I don’t think any of them know how to fly an airship.”
“Someone’s flying.”
I nodded. “She must have the crew hostage. She was taking her people to the bridge.”
“Then we should head to the bridge.”
WE climbed down from the catwalk into the stern of the airship. As we made our way down, we passed signs of fighting beyond our own gunfight; bullet holes marred bulkheads, smears of blood covered the walls, and the smell of smoke filled the air. We passed a few corpses that had been left where they had fallen. Two were Shadows that had taken bullets to the head. The remainder appeared to be normal humans who had taken wounds from things more gruesome than gunfire: skinned, disemboweled, dismembered.
The air in the ship stank of blood and smoke, bile and death. The nausea I had felt aboard the biplane returned in more force.
“Where is everyone?” Ivan asked quietly. “There would be many more passengers and crew than this.”
I looked at the latest dead body, bisected to spill its entrails across the tilting corridor in front of us. “They’re on the Emperor’s airship.”
“What?”
I knelt by the upper half of the body and pulled the shreds of the dead man’s jacket and shirt away from the skin of his back. Above the massive wound and smears of blood, parts of a Mark were visible traced into the skin. “The dead they left. They’re all Walkers.” I stood up.
“But the other people? This airship carried dozens.”
“That’s who was attacking you.”
“My Lady?”
“The Shadows came from this airship’s passengers.” I looked up from the corpse and realized that Ivan wouldn’t have understood anything my sister had said. “She talked of making Shadows.”
“What?”
I described what she had said, and Ivan responded with a horrified expression. “Just using Shadows is abominable enough. Creating them . . .”
I felt a rumble through the floor of the deck, and suddenly the floor tilted against itself, throwing me against one wall and forcing me to step into the gore left by the bisected corpse.
“What’s that? Ballast again?”
“Maybe they’re venting gas,” Ivan said. “Trying to straighten us out.”
The floor had flattened out side to side, but it still tilted downward, even more steeply toward the nose of the aircraft. I felt my stomach lurch.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Ivan grabbed the wall as the tilt became more pronounced, and my gut felt like I was in an elevator in free-fall. “Why—”
He must have felt the same thing I had, the sense of being torn through the skin of the world and into Chaos.
“The airship?” Ivan whispered incredulously. “She’s moving the whole airship?”
“And diving to pick up speed,” I said.
We started running toward the bridge.