9

We floated together in the frigid liquid of my tank, Ashton’s dark hair drifting about his chiseled jaw as his presence pulled me back from the brink of the void. Bubbles escaped his lips as he tried to speak. He cradled my face in the palms of his hands and his warmth, though seeping away quickly, made me tremble. So much pain. It pulsed through every nerve, every fiber of my being. I had no more strength, not an ounce more will.

Ashton held my gaze, seemed to know my desperation. His teeth chattered, the cold sapping his life away. Resounding knocks on the glass of my prison sent a wave of panic through me. Above us, slipping through the undulating surface of the liquid, gloved hands reached down, searching for him.

Please do not leave me here alone.

I pled with my eyes, trying to cry for help against the air pumping into my mouth and nose via the breathing mask. His thumbs brushed against the devices at my temples and bright lights flashed in my head. A voice echoed; a mixture of his and my father’s.

Fight, Charlie…fight to live…

I tried to hold onto him, keep him with me, but my tethered wrists swiped ineffectively.

He shoved something into my palm a moment before they pulled him up, dragged him coughing and shaking to the floor. He reached out as they tried to wrap him in blankets and his hand made a muffled squeak on the glass between us.

Hot tears burned behind my cold eyes. I wrapped my fingers around the metal bracelet, the symbol of his faith, desperate for something real. In the darkness and cold. In the abyss of quiet in which I floated, his prayers gripped tightly in my hand kept me from fading to nothing.

I cannot do this. I cannot do this alone.

~*~

The next morning Riley came to check that I had not fled in the dead of night. His silhouette in the doorway was at once a relief and a source of worry when I took in the dark circles under his eyes.

“What is it?” I asked, opening the door wider.

“Mara?” He glanced around furtively.

“At the market getting supplies.”

He waved me inside and shut the door behind him. “We’ve got a bit of a problem.”

The look on his face was all I needed. My heart sank. “They want me to leave.”

“Not all of them and not in so many words, but,” he shifted from foot to foot, “they expressed some concerns.” The bruise under his eye spoke of how they’d expressed said concerns, as did his torn knuckles.

Turning to hide the sorrowful ache that pierced me and pulled at my lips, I crossed my arms, hugging myself as I wandered Mara’s workshop. “I do not blame them.”

“They’re ignorant and superstitious.” Riley walked over, turned me to face him. “They somehow have it in their collective heads that you are the reason the Trembling Sickness is changing. Rumors about what you can do, what you did do, on that ship are making things worse.”

“So I will go.”

“No, Charlotte, I will.”

“How will that help?” I asked, incredulous. “You are quite possibly the only one who does not want to toss me into the ocean.”

“I’m leaving Port Hayden with the most vocal objectors. I figure I’ll take them with me on a supply run to the wasteland.”

“Is it Percy?”

Nodding, Riley scratched at the stubble on chin. “I think with him and a few of his easily swayed friends gone for a time, sentiment here will die down.”

“Any chance of you leaving them out there?” I asked morosely.

Riley’s low chuckle filled the small room. “I haven’t ruled it out entirely.”

“When do you leave?”

“Today. This morning.” He fiddled with this hat, flicking the brim with the seam of his glove and avoiding my eyes. “You have to lay low until I get back.”

“I will.”

“That means you stay inside. Not sure who knows where you are right now, but no need to advertise it.”

“This is much bigger than my last place,” I said and smiled, trying to chase away his guilt-ridden mood. “Drier, too.”

He smiled back, but it was pained, sad. “Charlotte…”

“I have plenty to do, Riley,” I said and held up a sketchbook. “Mara has me helping with her tinkering.” I did not let him know it was designs for air apparatuses and hoped he did not know what he was looking at.

“Three days at most. I’m hoping to get back before the storm hits.” Shoving his hat on his head, he sighed. “Not long.”

“I will be fine.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because it is true.” I hugged the sketchbook to my chest. “Go…be safe out there.”

Riley pulled me into a quick hug and was out the door before I could react. As I spied on him walking towards the harbor slips through Mara’s curtains, I wondered what he must be thinking. After searching for so long, he did not deserve the trouble my presence brought down on him. Catching sight of the mechanica embedded in the back of my hand, I gripped the lace, angry.

An abomination. That is what they had called me. Swallowing against the ache in my throat, I shook my head, whispering my anger.

Why did You save me only to make me a danger to those I care about? A creature they reel away from. Why did You not let me slip away in that dark tomb?

Squeezing my eyes, I tried to remember what had happened to the bracelet Ashton gave me. Or if that had happened at all. Was it a dream brought on by seeing him, or was it a memory escaping the twisted corridors of my battered mind? I had to know. I had to speak to him somehow.

I passed the rest of the day in a deep melancholy and the looming storm did little to remedy my dark mood. The only consolation was the workshop and its offerings of a thousand things to tinker with. Unable to move forward on the diving equipment without more parts, I worked on some old designs I’d constructed during my time on the Wind Reaper; the Shrieking Violet grenade, the throwing disc, both of which brought back memories of Tesla. The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, or how he called me “little sister” in his language. So much loss. So many gone.

Mara flitted in and out of the cottage meeting with customers, trading for metal scraps and supplies she needed, helping panicked neighbors struggling to prepare for the coming storm. I could do nothing to help. The baton Ashton gave me weighed heavy in my palm as I paced.

My gaze snapped to the door. I knew Mara would be gone for a time on a run to another port giving me the privacy I needed to inspect the weapon. I slipped onto her worktable chair and laid the metal cylinder on a soft cloth. Adjusting the peering glass and lighting the candle behind it, I focused the magnifying lens onto the weapon, staring in the hopes that the familiarity I felt when holding it would translate into something more concrete.

I ran the pad of my fingers along the ridged surface. Silvery-white with a high polish, the handle had the patina of use. A solid piece, the nested layers were visible when I peered into the recess. If I did not know better, I would mistake it for a spyglass without a lens. Reaching for the tin of small tools on the table, I selected a thin chisel and tried to wedge it in between the two layers to no avail. There were no bolts, no rivets or screws keeping the weapon together. The metal had been cold like the ambient air but now, it warmed in my hand, vibrating as it came in contact with my skin as if power coursed through it from me to it and back again. When I dropped it back down onto the table, the baton cooled immediately, the hum stilling. My gaze went to the metal fused to the back of my hand, and I realized they were of the same material.

This unfamiliar construction surpassed anything I had ever seen in either weaponry or invention despite having spent time with one of the greatest minds of our time. Tesla’s intelligent gaze flashed in my mind and my heart ached. How much I would love to have him here with me now.

“Sestrica,” he would say. Sister. “You must observe with what you know, not just what you see.”

If I could not take it apart, I would have to understand it another way. Wrapping the fingers of my left hand around the handle once more, I snapped the sections out in a quick motion. A whir sounded as they twisted, locking into place, and a vein of silver energy snaked from the mechanica in my hand and trailed down the shaft.

Raising the weapon over my head, I wielded it between my two hands as if it were a sword, crouching into a battle stance easily, my limbs remembering what my mind could not. Moving with the easy grace of an old dance, I twirled, parrying, lunging with riposte, and falling to the side on the ball of one foot, my other leg extended, ready to sweep the feet of my opponent. Gaze snapping up, I held the baton high and horizontal just outside my shoulder—my right hand extended out, ready. Heart racing, breath catching, I froze. I had done this before.

The sound of metal clashing as I’d attacked, the surge of power flowing from my hand to the metal and crawling along the body of my attacker flashed in my mind. Ashton’s shocked face to my right as he shouted, “Areté, Charlotte, mercy!” His eyes blazed with the fire behind me.

The memory hit me, and I gasped. Dropping the baton, I backed up with my hands to my mouth.

Fighting to catch my breath, I twitched as the shocks from my devices sent chilling snaps of energy along my long muscles. I knew that word. My eyes went to the baton’s grip. The flicker of the candle’s flame caught the deep etching at the end of the handle. My knees turned to hot wax, and I sank to the small rug next to the weapon. I picked it up and peered at the engraving, my mouth dry. Areté. Honor, nobility, moral virtue; the code Ashton lived by as a knight of The Order.

My hands shook. Did he help Arecibo keep me captive? How did the Ashton that I remembered with my heart become the one I knew in my bones had a hand in my torture? Holding my hand up, the mechanica embedded in my skin flickered in the lamp light. How could both the mechanica and the weapon belong to the same creature? Honor and Mercy. Abomination and Wrath.

I felt as if the two parts of me, the human and the monster, could never exist together. How long until the opposing forces ripped my soul asunder? As I looked over at the stained blouse from the other night, a wave of dread pooled in my stomach. There were only so many steps I could take away from my humanity, from the girl I once was, before I became lost in that dark rage forever.

By the evening, Mara returned, and I paced her small abode, unable to keep my mind on anything for very long. Though I had spent the day poring over her communications with The Ferryman, I still had no idea if he was a friend or foe to the people of Outer City. This moniker was significant to me, yet I could not snag the answer.

The front door rattled in its frame. Winds from the storm howled through the floating city.

Mara looked up from her place at the table and blew a lock of hair from her eyes.

“You hardly ate anything.” She pushed the plate in my direction with her pliers.

“We are a mobile city,” I said, picking at the dry bread and cheese. “Why are we not going above the storm or more inland?”

“There is no way of knowing if we can go higher, Mr. Percy is gone.” Mara shrugged. “And we can’t very well take off without our Sheriff.”

“Each port has its own lawman. My concern is how much of the town will be left when Riley returns.” Worry knotted my stomach. “Have you heard from his search party?”

“No…”

“It has been three days,” I said, wringing my hands. “Surely we should have heard something by now.”

The look on her face sent my heart pounding.

A rattling crash just outside the door made us both jump, and Mara went to the window and pulled back the curtains. She closed the shutters, barring them, and then readjusted the material.

“Just a loose awning tossed in the winds.” Mara checked the section of plank across the doorway. “Those lawmen report to Sheriff Riley. He runs the entirety of Outer City and its outposts now. Without him…if he can’t find his way home, well, you know the brand of characters we have in and out of here.”

The wood planks of the floor shifted in the buffeting wind, and I splayed my arms out for balance. A torrent of wind roared through the buildings and shook the windows. Her entire workshop rocked, sending my heart to my throat. The last time a building up here had moved this much I had nearly plummeted to my death.

“It’s all right, Charlie,” Mara soothed, rushing to her bookcase and pulling straps across the spines to keep them on the shelves. “We’ve weathered worse ones than this. In fact, Mr. Percy predicted a possible thundersnow from the look of it.

“Thundersnow is rare,” I said, feeling a charge in the air. The hair on my head rose at the ends. “Lightning during a snowstorm happens rarely and usually up north.”

“The cloud layer is shallow and unstable. And I saw the strange bulge in the top layer this morning. Something about the unpredictable heat plumes rising from ocean…he seemed pretty convinced before he left with the sheriff, and the conditions weren’t nearly as bad as now.”

Peering down at my hands, I caught the fine silver arc of energy as it prickled its way between my fingers. “Explains why we have not seen the rain yet, but we should have had hail.”

“Well, the weather has gotten more and more peculiar since the quakes. There’s no telling—”

A blast tore across the marketplace, the flash flaring through the cracks in the shutters. The shockwave blasted her cottage backward on its tether, sending furniture and lamps flying, and throwing me to my knees.

“What is that?” Mara screamed, crawling towards me, her face contorted in fear. “That…was the storm?”

Pulling myself to my feet, I ripped open the shutters, peering out. A roiling fireball billowed up from a structure across the market…it was the doctor’s office.

“No!” I ran for the door and yanked it open. I cried out as a stab of pain pierced me from the device at the top of my spine sending a rush of adrenaline to my limbs. Strength surged as I sprinted for the burning building. “Lilah…Jack!”