VI

February 20, 1882

Gunner the Deadly—the country’s number-one wanted outlaw. The gentleman thief. The vigilante. Six feet of all-black-wearing, deadeye marksmanship skills, with a penchant for Crown perfume and Black Jack chewing gum. A learned man of literature, with a husky voice from years of smoking Virginia Brights, and eyes so blue that sapphires paled in comparison.

Constantine Gunner—the one man on God’s green Earth who’d considered me his. Who’d adored me without fear, without hesitation, without concern for the secrets that burdened my soul. The love and light of my life, who I’d pushed away to save and broken his heart in the process.

He was here.

Right now.

Of all places, sailing through the skies, somewhere over the Eastern Plains of Colorado.

Gunner lowered his Waterbury, yanked the bandana from his face, and reached out. He grabbed my arm the moment I allowed the lightning spell to dissolve, sparks of electricity dancing across the deck under my feet as he drew me up against himself and asked, “Are you okay?” I must have been staring at him as if I’d seen a spirit, because Gunner’s hold tightened on my bicep, and he said sternly, “Gillian?”

“Y-yes. I’m—what’re you… how are you here?”

Gunner didn’t answer, and instead pulled me to stand behind him as he raised the Waterbury and pointed it at Barrie a second time.

“Gunner, what the hell are you doing?”

“Putting a bullet in the good doctor’s head.”

I grabbed Gunner’s extended arm with both hands. “No, don’t! Dr. Barrie saved—”

Gunner twisted around to stare at me. “That man is Sawbones.”

“What?” I peered around Gunner as Barrie reached into his coat pocket and removed a glass bottle. He tore the cork off with his teeth and drank the contents of what I could only presume to be aether syrup, while blood seeped down his arm and dripped from his fingertips. I turned toward the windows of the dining room that overlooked the promenade—several passengers watched, their faces aghast. A waiter dropped his tray and ran through the maze of tables in the direction of the bridge, presumably to inform the captain of the situation. I said to Gunner, “That’s not possible.”

Gunner didn’t bother to argue further and turned toward Barrie.

I yanked Gunner to face me again, one hand clutching a fistful of his black winter coat, the other keeping a firm hold on his tie. “Barrie is helping me get to California to track down Weaver.”

Gunner said with frightening composure, “Eugene Barrie was a bloodthirsty surgeon during the war. He performed thousands of amputations—derived pleasure from it. Soldiers called him Sawbones. They were so afraid of being put under his knife, men chose to die in the fields rather than risk the agony of his hospital tent.”

My eyes stung and my vision blurred something horrible. “Why are you saying this?”

“My dear. He’s been in New York—”

“On a lecture tour.”

“No. Since December, when he was hired to build the mechanical men. He’s not helping you. He’s kidnapping you.”

I opened my mouth—to say what, I hadn’t a clue. Protest that I couldn’t possibly be so dense, so naïve, so oblivious? But more likely it was to sob, because Gunner the Deadly never lied, and I had been so, so stupid. My distress caused a delay in noticing movement over Gunner’s shoulder, and then Barrie was standing there, his wound no longer bleeding and his face contorted in blind fury. He looked like a completely different person from the soft-spoken and too-curious man I’d been sharing a bottle of wine with just moments earlier.

Barrie raised the needle he’d collected from the deck, stabbed it into Gunner’s left arm, and hit the plunger.

The magic atmosphere was suddenly alive with that awful sensation of wriggling, like maggots making home in the cavities of man. It was the activation of a spell I hadn’t felt since January, but one I couldn’t ever forget: quintessence.

And it was mixed in with the contents of the syringe.

I screamed, a kind of wordless, soulless rage, and heavy black clouds manifested in the sky. Thunder boomed and crashed overhead while lightning sparked from my body, coalesced into a spell, and slammed into Barrie with a force so concentrated that it could have illuminated all of New York City. Barrie had let go of the syringe, left it sticking in Gunner’s arm, and had taken a step back with just enough time to raise his hands and cast a shield of aether. Our magics exploded upon contact, and while I remained standing, the force of his spell propelled me backward several feet. When the blinding detonation let up enough that I could risk a glance, I could make out Barrie on his knees, shaking electricity from his hands and hastily patting down the smoke billowing from the sleeves of his coat. His carefully parted hair was in disarray, and he was bleeding from his nose or mouth or maybe, hopefully, both. The fact that he was still conscious was surprising, and I feared I’d most definitely underestimated his own level due to the way raw magic interacted so gently with his person.

The door to the promenade burst open, and the ship’s captain stood in the threshold, a pistol in hand. “Stop right where you are!” he exclaimed. “Hands in the air!”

I shot my palm out and a squall of wind blew him off his feet, back into the dining room, and the door slammed shut in his wake. I spun toward Gunner as he holstered his Waterbury and ripped the syringe from his arm. He stared at the glass tube, shook it, but it was empty, then dropped it to the deck and stomped on it with the heel of his boot. That squirming, unnatural magic sent another shiver up my spine.

Gunner turned around as one knee buckled. He reached for the railing to steady himself.

I grabbed his chest and righted him when he staggered a second time. “Oh God. Gunner?”

“Morphine,” he answered with a grunt.

“I’m researching methods in which to use aether that won’t overtax a physician….”

Not just aether, I thought with sudden horror. Barrie was researching how to use quintessence outside of the mechanical army he’d been constructing for Tick Tock. Quintessence, a new and illegal spell, its casting method and usage unknown to me, other than it was sort of an antithesis to aether.

Gunner was right.

And now… was he going to die?

My heart was pounding so hard, I was light-headed. I couldn’t catch my breath. There was no time to consider the limitless catalogue of possible reactions Gunner would have to the quintessence, no time to dwell in despair over something that hadn’t yet occurred. I needed to get him somewhere safe, somewhere I could think for half a second without bullets flying or two-timing sadistic surgeons trying to—

“Climb onto the handrail,” I ordered Gunner.

A second aether spell crashed into me, knocking me off my feet and flinging me across the deck. All of my hurts screamed in protest as I slammed into the polished wood, but I didn’t allow the adrenaline rush to wane, and scrambled to my feet. Barrie stood several yards away, with Gunner between us, still leaning against the rail. The doctor’s expensive suit was scorched, and he wiped blood off his face with the back of his hand, the other maintaining an aether spell the size of my head, glowing white-hot.

“You pack a hell of a wallop for such a small man, Fitzgerald,” Barrie called.

Thunder continued to crash overhead, and I smelled ozone as lightning snapped and crackled around me. “I allowed the country to call me a butcher, but all the while, you were the real monster of that war.” The lightning unleashed, shot forward like a rabid animal, and slammed into Barrie’s aether. I tore more power from the atmosphere to feed the spell, watched as the lightning swallowed the aether, and the magics shattered like a mirror constructed from light. I shielded my eyes with my forearm, and when I was able to look again, Barrie was flat on his stomach and coughing a storm of his own.

I rushed back to Gunner and kept a hand on him as he unsteadily hoisted himself onto the railing and turned, back to the sky. I climbed up beside him, keeping hold of the nearest baluster while swinging myself behind Gunner. I gripped around his middle and asked, “Ready?”

“Whatever you’re considering, please do it before I pass out,” Gunner answered.

I glanced at his grip on the same baluster I held. “Let go.”

Gunner did, without question or hesitation.

And we fell backward into the stars.

Viciously strong winds whipped our bodies back and forth. I held Gunner against myself for all I was worth, while I watched the landscape below and used my free hand to cast a wind spell that would counteract the sky’s attempt to tear us apart.

A streak of blinding aether light shot past us, and I craned my neck for a view of the airship—at Barrie, leaning over the rail, casting aether, his manic voice carrying on the current: “Fitzgerald!”

Gunner’s arm wavered in the wind, but then he unholstered the Waterbury, aimed, and fired. Again and again, round after round, as a means of keeping Barrie at bay, until he was too far away to pose a threat.

The flat, frozen plains were reaching up to meet us, and I swore while pulling more energy from the atmosphere to maintain the wind spell. The magic hit the ground ahead of us, tearing prairie grass and kicking up chunks of frozen snow and dirt before ricocheting back at me to slow our plunge. Still not feeling up to full strength, coupled with having just exerted myself against Barrie, and with the added weight of Gunner in my arms, my landing didn’t stick. I stumbled, tried to pick back up into the air and retry, but Gunner suddenly went limp, offsetting my balance, and we crashed.

I was pinned underneath Gunner, and it took a moment to catch my breath and wriggle free from his height and muscle. I got to my knees, put my hands on his shoulders, and gave him a firm shake. “Gunner? Gunner! Christ Almighty.” I leaned close, my ear to his mouth, and felt warm breath more than I heard it. He was alive, but out cold. And who was to say if it was a morphine overdose or the quintessence magic introduced to his body?

I raised my hand, snapped, and used a flame to study the dark, desolate wasteland where so many homesteaders lived these days. I had heard that these poor folk were susceptible to something called Prairie Madness, and as I stumbled to my feet and turned in a complete circle, only to realize we were utterly alone in this flat, unforgiving land, I understood how madness could be lying in wait. Afterall, I had come close to insanity after only three days in isolation at the asylum.

My breath stuttered in little plumes of white smoke as I crouched beside Gunner a second time. He was dressed appropriately, whereas I was not, but lying on the frozen ground for even a short period of time would leach the heat from his body entirely. What took precedence was examining the spot in which Barrie had injected him, but I couldn’t expose Gunner’s bare skin to these elements.

I could drag him, I thought. But drag him where? With the exception of wind—so cold, it was like my bones were being hacked open to expose the marrow—the plains were still and silent. I couldn’t even pinpoint a single rock outcropping or cluster of trees that might have served as an impromptu shelter until daybreak because of how utterly black the night was.

I had been, quite literally, leaping from one chaotic mess to another for the last three days and I was… absolutely overwhelmed. I didn’t know what to do anymore. That familiar, crushing weight of the world on my shoulders was back, deforming my spine, forcing me to my knees, and sooner rather than later, I’d be dead from the burden. The sense of feeling unmoored in that moment was, at least in part, due to the revelation regarding Eugene Barrie. I hadn’t been given an opportunity to question him, let alone digest the truth, and now I had an entirely new problem to deal with because of it.

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a very deep breath. When I opened them, I was still in the same situation, but a sense of clarity, of truth, of devotion, had docked at the empty harbor in my soul.

Gunner had had no sense of obligation toward me.

Not anymore, at least.

And yet, he’d tracked me down. He’d rushed to my aid when I wasn’t aware of the danger. He’d called me Gillian—the man I wished I was. He’d called me his dear—the man I once had been.

Gunner meant everything to me.

Perhaps… I still meant something to him.

Holding the flame in one hand, I set my other on Gunner’s chest and leaned over to study his placid face. “Constantine?” I didn’t know how to encompass all of my thoughts, my emotions, my past actions in a way that made sense—that was explainable—but love wasn’t sensible. That’s why we misspoke when we were scared, and that’s why we made a scene when we didn’t want to live with any regrets. I kissed his forehead and whispered, “You’re loved too.”

A rifle shot cracked the air, and I extinguished the flame before throwing myself on top of Gunner to shield his prone body.

A woman’s voice called from the darkness, “Consider this your warning: I only miss once!”

“Don’t shoot! Jesus Christ, lady!”

“Don’t you be takin’ the Lord’s name in vain, sir,” the woman retorted, and she cocked the weapon. “You’re on my property.”

“Wait,” I called, and I raised my head enough to look over my shoulder toward where I thought the shot originated from, although the vast monotone landscape made a sense of direction impossible without the sun to act as a guide, and I had always been too much of a city boy to navigate by stars alone. But then I saw a flicker of light, like a kerosene lantern being set on the ground, and a shift of black shadow against the even darker night. “I’m not trying to pull the wool over your eyes,” I promised. “My friend is in need of medical attention.”

The light of the lantern was then lifted from the ground, and the crunch of frozen earth and grass sounded under the woman’s boots as she approached. She stopped a few feet short and raised the lantern eye-level, illuminating her face by the lick of yellow flame. She had a dark complexion and black hair pulled into what looked like a hasty bun, as if she’d already let it down for the evening. She wore a pair of men’s trousers and a shirt with braces that rested against her bosom.

Shifting her hold to accommodate both the lantern and rifle, she aimed the weapon at me while asking, “How’d you get here? The road’s that way.” She jerked her head toward the right.

My hands were raised up, palms out, as I said, “Would you please stop pointing that gun at me?”

“I will once you disarm yourself, sir.”

“I don’t carry a weapon.”

“I see a holster on your friend.”

Keeping my sight trained on the stranger, I awkwardly leaned back and fumbled blindly for Gunner’s Waterbury. “It’s empty,” I explained, showing her the cylinder once I’d wrenched the pistol free from Gunner’s hip.

She studied me another long, hard minute, then lowered the rifle. “You got no damn sense.”

“Sorry?”

“Stumbling around out here, in the dark, in winter, without even a proper coat.”

“It’s a long story,” I answered, dropping my hands and keeping my voice low so that she didn’t catch the chatter of my teeth.

“How’d you get here?”

“That’s an even longer story.” I shifted on my knees in order to put a hand on Gunner’s chest. “I need to get my friend inside. He’s been poisoned, I think, and needs to be tended to right away.” I dug into the inner pockets of Gunner’s coat before finding the coin purse I knew he kept on his person. “I can pay,” I finished, shaking it so the heavy coins clinked together.

The woman slung her rifle over one shoulder and said, with a hint of exasperation, “And I’m sure you expect me to help carry his sorry backside too. C’mon. Lift him up—that’s right—I’ll take this arm.”

We were able to haul Gunner’s dead weight into a sitting position before each getting a shoulder under either arm and standing. Unfortunately, Gunner was a great deal taller than both me and my irritable rescuer, so his feet dragged uselessly behind him as the woman steered us in the direction of what looked like more endless night.

“I didn’t catch your name, ma’am,” I said, a bit breathless from both the cold and exertion.

“That’s because I didn’t offer it, sir.”

I’d have happily traded places with Gunner at that moment, if only because he was certain to enjoy this woman’s chutzpah more than me. “May I have your name?”

“Winona Brown.”

Despite the probability of a nonmagical homesteader knowing the history of either Simon Fitzgerald or Gillian Hamilton being astoundingly low, I didn’t dare drop those names. Instead, I introduced myself as Malcom Ackerman.

Winona made a sound in the back of her throat. “And your friend, here?”

“John Gaylord.”

She made that sound again.

“Is there a problem?”

Winona looked around Gunner at me. The lantern bouncing in her right hand cast strange shadows along her handsome face. “Those really the names you want to go with?”

My heart beat a little faster, but calmly, I said, “Those are our names.”

“If you say so.”

Just ahead of us, another lantern flickered to life, its subtle glow outlining a structure I hadn’t even realized was there. It was a squat, one-story home that didn’t appear to have any windows, at least on the side facing us, and perhaps had what might have been a stove pipe sticking out of the roof. One of those sod homes, I imagined.

And then a second figure stepped out of a doorway, holding the lantern high like a beacon as she called, “Who is it, Winona?”

“Some simpleminded menfolk. One of them’s in a spot. We got any brandy?”

We finally drew close enough to the sod home that I could make out the details of the second occupant and, suffice it to say, they were not sisters. Oh sure, they were both close to me in age, but this other woman was much more slight, wearing a green checkered-pattern dress and shawl draped over her shoulders, with a pale face and very blond hair. Society had a distinct lack of vocabulary for women like this and, I’d noticed, a tendency to outright ignore, even pretend it wasn’t happening and that the sodomite affliction affected only men. But I had to wonder at the likelihood of these women sharing a similar tendency… given the current circumstances. After all, I could understand the appeal of moving far away from prying eyes and living life by your own set of rules, even more so for women, given the strict limitations so many were forced to endure within “polite society.”

“We got some,” the second woman confirmed, disappearing back inside.

Winona led the way into the home, her other half shutting the door behind me and locking out the cold. We dragged Gunner the last few feet to a bed in the corner of the one room, where Winona deposited him before moving to the small table near the stove to set her lantern down. She turned it off, likely to save fuel, and the humble home was near-dark, illuminated only by the second lantern, which outlined the other woman moving some bottles on a shelf and reading the labels.

I shucked off my suit coat so as to work without hinderance, and hastily rolled back my sleeves, asking, “How’d you know we were out there? We were less than a hundred feet away, and I couldn’t see your home, it’s so dark out here.”

Winona said, while hanging her rifle on a hook near the door, “Went outside to make certain the chickens were locked in for the night—”

“Foxes on these plains are smart as hell,” her friend piped in.

Winona was nodding. “—and I saw fire.”

“Huh.” I began the arduous task of maneuvering Gunner free from his winter and suit coats.

After a beat, Winona said, “But you’ve got no lantern, Mr. Ackerman.”

“No, I don’t.”

The second woman moved around the table and joined me at the bedside as I’d begun working on the buttons of Gunner’s waistcoat. I glanced up. She was clutching a half-empty bottle of brandy in one hand, the other extended toward me.

“Lucy Vogel,” she said brightly.

“Malcom Ackerman.” I reached to quickly shake her hand, unable to be rude to the strangers who’d opened their home to us, but still near panicked regarding Gunner’s state, when a pop of electricity bounced and crackled between our hands.

“Oh!” She pulled back and shook her hand like it hurt a little, but was laughing and smiling. “I knew it.” She spun to Winona. “Explains the fire.”

“Sure does,” Winona answered, crossing her arms over her chest.

“You’re a caster?” I asked Lucy, because I hadn’t picked up on any tendrils of magic lingering about her, but then again, I wasn’t exactly looking for it.

“Just a touch of the gift, sir,” she explained. “Hardly a level one.”

“I see.” I hesitated a moment, but when neither of them suggested concern over my magic-inclined presence, I returned to undressing Gunner.

Wrangling him out of so many layers was a borderline ridiculous task, but seeing as how I had no money of my own and would be entirely dependent on whatever he had in his coin purse, I didn’t want to rip Gunner’s clothing to shreds and force him to buy new wares because I was panicking. Lucy had been politely gathering each article as I tossed it aside, and I think she was folding them into a neat pile, when she gasped loudly.

“Oh my word. What happened to his arm?” she asked.

I put a knee on the mattress—straw-filled, it felt—and leaned over Gunner’s bare chest to examine his bicep where Barrie had stabbed him with the syringe. “Hand me that lantern, would you?” I reached for the one Winona had placed on the tabletop, and after Lucy passed it over, careful this time that our hands didn’t make contact, I cast a small lightning spell and slipped the bouncing energy into the chimney of the lamp. It would save using the women’s limited fuel, was much brighter, and didn’t release noxious fumes. I set it on the small stand beside the bed before climbing over Gunner entirely in order to study the wound up close.

His upper arm was discolored, sort of like a bruise. It didn’t seem to be spreading, which was good, but a morphine overdose wouldn’t cause a visual disturbance like this. So it had to be because of the quintessence. I steeled myself for the squirming sensation the magic gave off, and gently wrapped both hands around Gunner’s arm.

And there it was—that twisting, burrowing, not quite right reaction I’d experienced with Tick Tock’s artificial magic ammunition, as well as the various mechanical monstrosities Barrie had built. Quintessence didn’t feel like aether. It wasn’t attempting to heal or destroy, both of which aether could do, depending on how it was cast and wielded. Quintessence was more like… a void. A middle ground that aether couldn’t exist upon. A miasma of strangeness and sorrow that weighed down—my stream of consciousness came to an abrupt stop right then.

Weighed down.

On New Year’s Eve, after throwing the intruder from my bedroom window, remnants of this magic dissipated from his body following death. Eugene Barrie—call him who he was, Sawbones—utilized precious metals in his construction that were meant to withstand not only the usage of certain magics in the ammunition, but reinforce the mechanical man’s own defense against real casters like me. Because prior to Tick Tock’s investments, the danger in homemade firearms and bullets was that aether was the only magic to be safely manipulated into tangible, everyday items. Fire, water, lightning—those spells all had disastrous and devastating results. That had been, in part, what led to Milo Ferguson’s deadly fate in Arizona. The artificial spells in his ammunition weren’t… weren’t weighed down. So by the time Barrie had been brought into the venture, he, Luther Jones, and the mysterious Weaver had devised a work-around: overlay the bullets, the guns, and the gangsters in brass and bronze and platinum infused with quintessence.

It was a heavy, black hole of a magic that didn’t seem to have any sort of offensive or defensive reaction. It was like a backbone, holding everything together, reinforcing other spells and keeping them from flying apart. Or in this case, the quintessence was reinforcing the bodily response to a medication.

That shot of morphine had originally been intended for me.

It certainly would’ve made me amiable and pliable, but it wouldn’t have lasted until we reached California tomorrow afternoon. Barrie would have had to keep dosing me, potentially even risk killing me. So the quintessence mixed into the drug was meant to weigh down the initial reaction, to prolong it without the danger of multiple doses. Barrie could have walked me right off the ship tomorrow and into a situation I’d not have been able to save myself from. But Gunner had mucked up Barrie’s plans and gotten the injection instead—whether by accident or on purpose, I couldn’t be certain, as the seconds that’d unfolded on the promenade were a blur in my mind.

Barrie hadn’t claimed he’d perfected his research, though. What if the syringe had had a touch too much morphine and the quintessence was weighing down the reaction of losing consciousness, instead of that lackadaisical high he’d been aiming for? In the past, the only way the quintessence had dissolved was when Frank Fishback and Mechanical Man had both died. It’d slithered away, like some creature vanishing into the night. Was that the only way the spell would be lifted from Gunner as well?

If he died?

“I thought you said he was poisoned.”

Winona’s voice had broken the avalanche of thoughts, and when I looked up, she was leaning over the bed, peering at Gunner’s arm.

“He was.”

“Ain’t like no poison I’ve seen.”

I declined to comment further and instead pulled my goggles on and cast aether. I pulled at the magic, elongating it like bread dough, until one end was a shimmering white needle point. I held Gunner’s shoulder firmly, punctured skin and muscle as I stuck the edge into his wound, and then began to reverse engineer the spell, like I’d done in Arizona. Because I didn’t want to simply try and heal Gunner. I didn’t know how the quintessence would react, if at all. So instead I was going to treat it like a festering, embedded thorn in need of extraction, and the only idea I could come up with was to pump Gunner full of aether, like I’d done to his Waterbury ammunition, until his body overflowed with the magic and physically forced the quintessence spell out.

Even with the eye protection, my hands glowed such a brilliant, blinding white that I winced behind the lenses. After I’d cast aether on myself enough times that I was itching with overstimulated energy, the magic began to drip, then pour from the palms of my hands, along my fingers, and through the spike of aether I’d stuck into Gunner’s arm. His body soaked it up like a sponge left to rot in the sun, and within a minute, the wound was as bright as my hands. So it was no surprise that I didn’t notice the black spot growing in size around the embedded spike acting as a funnel.

That is, until it moved.

I sat on my knees, so I couldn’t exactly recoil off the bed, so much as startle in a mixture of disbelief and fear. My flow of reverse aether faltered, but I managed to keep going, even as the… thing, now protruding from Gunner’s wound, squirmed like a fat, oily leech. My body began its telltale protest of overexertion from this illegal usage of the spell, but I didn’t dare stop. Not yet. Not until—

The leech popped free and fell to the mattress. Nearly four inches of the most vile, disgusting magic I’d ever had the misfortune to cast my eyes upon. And to make matters worse… it was still moving. Here was all the proof I needed for someone at the FBMS to take my side and defend me against the council—a spell that maintained its energy and cohesion without its caster there to physically feed it with raw power, and the side effect was the devastating tears and wounds in the magic atmosphere. Quintessence was versatile, powerful, and deadly in the hands of someone as unhinged as Sawbones.

I snapped, terminating the aether spell, then scrambled backward as the leech contorted and slithered toward me across the blankets. I swore and toppled off the side of the bed. Lucy—I was pretty sure it was Lucy, anyway—screamed at the sight of the magic refuse wriggling its way down the bedpost after me. A head rush from the aether hit me hard as I sat up and ripped the goggles down around my neck. The leech plopped to the rough floor planks, and instinctively, I grabbed for it. It dodged to the side, and I slammed my hand down on it. The slippery, greasy substance made an audible squish under my palm, and the black film squirted between my fingers.

After a few seconds of strained silence, Lucy squeaked from the opposite side of the bed, “Mr. Ackerman?”

I rose to my feet and held my hand up to show the remnants oozing down my scarred palm. “I got it,” I confirmed, and then my knees gave out. I fell forward, half on top of Gunner, half hanging off the mattress, and as I went under, I heard Winona shout:

“What the Dickens?”