Heart of Veridon (13 page)

“You’re making a lot of noise, Jacob.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. My voice sounded flat in my head. “We’re having a little party, me and the Badge.” I coughed and pain lanced through my lungs. “You joining us?”

“No, no, I think we’ll be going now. Get in.”

“Not sure I should. Where you been, Em?”

She grimaced. “Get in or get fucked, Burn.”

“I gotta choose? Any way we could arrange both?”

Emily cuffed me and jerked my collar. I rolled into the carriage and lay down. Emily closed the door and, with one last look down the street at the iron carriage and its lurking guard, drove away.

I
WOKE UP
with most of my ribs broken and some guy’s bloody hands fiddling with the damage. He was a tall guy, thin, his skin paper smooth and his face long and narrow. He was formally dressed, the cuffs of his sleeves neatly folded back and pinned in place. His arms were all bone, like the meat had been sucked away. I didn’t know him, so I tried to sit up. The pain knocked me down before I’d gotten very far into it. It felt like my lungs were stapled to the table. I moaned and rolled my head to one side. Emily was there, her hands folded in her lap. She smiled a little.

“Who’s the guy?” I asked. My voice sounded ragged, and the pain in my chest bundled up again.

“Wilson. He’s a friend of mine, Jacob.”

“Wilson,” I grunted. “Wilson. You were part of that group of blockade runners, during the Waterday riots. That Wilson?”

“Different guy,” he said.

I started to pull myself up. “All respect, Emily. I don’t get cut by someone I don’t…”

“Stop being stubborn,” she said, pushing me down. I told myself I was struggling, but honestly I just collapsed. “You’re in pretty awful shape.”

“You’re in dead shape, son.” Wilson smiled and shrugged. It was a complicated shrug, like he had a collection of shoulders under his white smock. He turned away and I saw a hunch that covered both shoulders and traveled down his back. Anansi then, trying to fit in with the regular folks. The anansi were a spider-like people who had populated the cliffs around Veridon for years before humans had found their way to the delta. They resisted when we moved in. There weren’t many left, and most of those were in positions of virtual slavery to various academic and governmental organizations. Anansi had an uncanny knack for technology, for all that they lived in caves and ate their meat raw.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said, “but not in people who were talking.” He turned back to me, holding something that looked like a prehensile corkscrew. I saw the other signs of his type, the tiny sharp teeth, the hooked talon fingernails. He smiled. “You should hold still.”

I did. The next bit hurt a lot, and I probably passed out for the bloodier parts. Next clear thought I had was hunger, and I was sitting up in some kind of stiff chair. Wilson was looking at me curiously, like he wasn’t sure what I was. I nodded to him.

“Thanks for taking care of me. Kind.” I found it hard to talk, like I was short of breath from running. Wilson smiled that tiny teeth smile again.

“It’s the sort of kindness money can buy, Mr. Burn. Money and curiosity. You really should be dead.”

“PilotEngine.” I waved at my chest. “Keeps the meat going so the zep doesn’t flip out in case the Pilot gets hurt in bad weather or war. In some ways, a Pilot is the only important person on a ship.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. He was wearing city clothes now, a tight vest and dress shirt. The hunch was more pronounced. It shifted while he talked. “You’re no Pilot, Jacob Burn.”

“Fuck you, okay. I know my history, I know what happened. I remember. I don’t need people telling me.”

“Excuse me.” Wilson folded his arms. “Let me step in. I don’t know anything about you. Okay? Maybe you’re some kind of crime world celebrity or something, but I don’t fucking know. I find your reaction amusingly self-important, but you need to just listen to me. You’re not a Pilot.”

I stared at him. I didn’t know what to say.

“Not a Pilot. But, the Academy?”

“Oh, you might have trained to be a Pilot. But that,” he pointed one long, sharp finger at my chest. “That has nothing to do with piloting. Not in the immediate sense, at least. How much do you know about biotics?”

“Biotics. Like the Artificers Guild?” Like the Summer Girl, I thought.

“Right. Specifically, in how it relates to cogwork. Their relationship.”

“It doesn’t. I mean, they’re separate sciences,” I said.

“Separate sciences that do similar things.” He walked slowly around the room, and for the first time I became solidly aware of the space I was in. It looked like an operating theater, the surrounding tiers of seats dusty and abandoned, disappearing up into the unlit heights of the room. The ground level operating room had been strewn with the stuff of a house: a desk, two chairs, random narrow tables that held all manner of devices, even a bed shoved up against the circular wall. The tiled floor was grimy with mildew, and a few thin rugs had been set down around the perimeter. Wilson stopped by one of the tables and picked up a tiny jar. He began to unscrew the stopper. “Not so separate, once. The Academy, as you say, trains Pilots. But once it served a more civilian purpose. Do you know what this is?”

He held the jar out in front of me. It smelled, a sharp stink of decay and dry vomit. I wrinkled my nose and glanced inside. There was a blanket of crushed leaf, and a shiny beetle rooting around inside. Wilson plucked it out with two sharp fingers.

“Engram beetle,” I said.

“Yes. An engram beetle.” He held it in his palm and presented it to me. The beetle’s back was smooth. It hadn’t been imprinted yet. “One of the few remaining practices from the old Academy. Left over from a time when the institute was committed to learning, to exploring the world around us. But now all that’s left is the Artificer’s Guild, and their little entertainments.”

“I wouldn’t call them little. The engrams are pretty incredible.”

“Nothing compared to what they could be. What they were before you were born, before the Church... nevermind. Bitterness clouds my argument.” Wilson held up his hand. The beetle was crawling around his knuckles, eventually climbed its way to the top of his finger, clinging to the talon. “Biotics is the study of the living form. What it can do, and what it can be. The patterns found inside, and how those patterns can be used to change the form.”

“Sounds like the Church.”

“The Church is interested in the pattern without. The Algorithm of the Unseen, as their Wrights are fond of saying. They try to divine a pattern from the cogwork they dredge up from the river, the scraps that come downstream, and they seek to impose that pattern on the world.” He flourished the beetle, waving it at my face in slow circles. “But there is already a pattern. Here,” holding up the beetle, and then waving at me, then at himself, “And here, and here.”

“Still sounds like the Church to me,” I grumbled. “Is this going somewhere?”

“It is,” he said and smiled. “Your engine, supposedly designed to allow you to impose your will on the mighty zepliner, is something else. All cogwork derives from the patterns of the Church, and yet this is something different. Something I have never seen, and I have seen a great many things. It is a pattern.” His smile was uncomfortably bright. He presented the beetle, “That I wish to understand.”

“The Academy installed it. Ask them.”

“They are not here. Beetling is nothing to be afraid of, Jacob Burn.”

I looked around the room, desperately. My chest hurt like hell, and Wilson’s eyes were exceptionally bright, his teeth exceptionally sharp. “Where’s Emily?”

“She’s not here either. Take the beetle. I only want to imprint the pattern of your heart, to see what has been done to you.”

“I told you, it’s a PilotEngine, the Academy installed it.”

“They may have, but I assure you.” He leaned into me, close. His breath smelled like old linen stored too long. “That is no Pilot’s Engine. If it were, you would be dead. The Engine can do many things, and yes, it is designed to provide the Pilot with a great deal of resiliency. But nothing the Church can produce would have saved your life today. So.” He took my chin in his hand and forced my jaw open. He placed the beetle delicately on my teeth. I struggled, I put my hand on his wrist but in my weakened state his muscles were like iron bands. The beetle scurried forward, clicked against my back teeth as I gagged to keep it away, and then it was down, it was forcing its way down my throat until all I could feel was a dry scuttling in my lungs and heart.

I fell back against the table, the light leaving my eyes, the darkened ceiling of the theater swelling down to fill my head and I was gone.

Chapter Six

The Daintiest Whore

E
MILY WAS LEANING
across me, her breasts smashed against my ribs. I tried to make a joke and coughed instead. It sounded like a rusty winch, that cough. She sat up suddenly and put her palm in the middle of my chest.

“You look horrible,” she said.

“Feel it.” My throat was sandy-dry. I put a hand to my mouth and felt sticky blood on my lips. “Nice friends you got.”

Emily shrugged. “Wilson does his things, and he does them well. You should feel lucky that he owes me. His services are expensive.”

“My debt.” I tried to sit up, but the pain in my chest was too much. “Where is he?”

“Out. Some things he needed. He wanted to wait until I was back. Didn’t want to leave you unattended.”

“And you? Where were you, while your expensive friend was stuffing bugs down my throat?”

“Some errands.” She leaned away from me and looked around the theater. The room looked brighter, but that might have just been my tired eyes. “Strange things going on, and I have interests to protect.”

I coughed. My throat was a little better, but not well. Felt like I was breathing glass. “You want to errand me up some water?”

Emily stood up and got me a glass, poured from a tap in the grimy wall. She sat next to me on the bed while I drank. The water was warm and cloudy. It tasted like blood. That might have just been me.

“Better?” Emily asked. She was standing by the bed with her hands on her hips.

“Some.” I tried to sit up again, and it went better. My chest felt like a stack of very precariously balanced plates, cracked and tottering. I put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. Her skin was cold. “What the hell’s wrong with me?”

“Wilson said something about the bug not reading right. And you’re mending fast, like nothing he’s seen.” She carefully shrugged off my hand, took the empty glass and set it on one of the work benches that circled the room. “The healing is taking up a lot of you, all at once. Here it is.”

She came back to the bed, holding a stoppered bottle. She presented it to me, turning it so the bug inside clinked against the glass. “Make any sense to you?”

I peered in at the bug. The beetle was dead, its legs curled up like burnt eyelashes, its back shiny and black. The pattern scrawled across its shell was complicated and unfamiliar.

“What do I know about engrams?” I peered at the pattern on its back. When you took foetal metal for an implant, the docs had you memorize a pattern for the living steel to imprint upon. That pattern should somehow be reflected on the beetle. It had been a while for me, but the bizarre scraping in my hand looked like nothing I’d seen before. It hurt to look at. “Mean anything to you?”

“Mm,” Emily said, her lips pursed. “Means you’re one complicated son of a bitch. Wilson thinks maybe the beetle was bad, or the massive damage in your body threw it off. He insists you couldn’t make anything with a pattern like that.”

“Well.” I slid the beetle back into the bottle from my cupped hand, put the stopper in and set it by the bed. “That’s a mystery for another mind. How’d your errands go?”

“Poorly. Lots of Badge out there. Most folks are just staying low. You’ve made a hell of a mess out there, Jacob Burn.”

“I have. Did you get in touch with Cacher?”

“No,” Emily said quickly. “I was… his business and mine don’t cross, right now.”

“Business.” I grimaced. “He seemed pretty worried about you, last I saw him.”