Angelmaker (52 page)

Frankie. What have you done?

The
Lovelace
creaked to and fro in the darkness of Frankie’s cavern, a tiny incremental rocking like a shudder, on axles not powered but not restrained. Every so often, Edie could hear something which might
have been footsteps, and beneath them and the sound of nervous soldiers standing guard in a circle around the train, came a steady, cockroach rustling she could not name. At one end of the passenger section, a single light flicked on and off, on and off.

Songbird swore softly and crossed himself. Edie had never seen him do that before. In S2:A, very few men prayed; they’d seen too many stupid chances, for good or ill. The same unfamiliar itch was tickling Edie’s fingers, a sense that this was too big to be her problem, too strange and desperate.
There must be someone above me to deal with this
. But that was the other thing you got used to in S2:A—the person who came along and took over when things were bad was you.

“Radio?” she asked.

Songbird’s radio man, Jesper, shook his head. “More crackle than a pigling roast.”

Abel Jasmine had told Edie, in London, that Frankie might still be inside the train. Was she dead, then? Or at her desk with wide eyes, like the farmers and fishermen Edie had seen?

Edie gestured to Songbird and to the others: wait. Songbird frowned and shook his head.
Coming in with you, Countess
, his face said.
All for one, ey?

“Give me five minutes,” Edie said. “Then follow, but follow soft, you understand, because those are ours there, whatever’s happened.”

Songbird looked stubborn. Edie sighed.

“Please,” she said. “If Frankie’s dead in there, I just want to be the one to find her.” Although, until this moment, she had not allowed the thought to form in her mind.

Songbird scowled, but acquiesced. Edie turned and walked towards the train.

Edie stepped up onto the rearmost carriage.
Lovelace
had changed a bit since her time—new carriages added and others gone—but it was fundamentally the same train she had known: defiantly ornate, with the stamps of Ruskinite artisans pressed into the iron. Entering, she let the door spring shut against her back and push her gently in, so that it would make no noise in closing. The solid pressure reassured her, and then an instant later she felt a wild claustrophobia, a deep desire to go no further.

No time for that now
.

Inside, the carriage was only partly lit, the curtains closed and keeping out the light from the big siege lamps outside. Tiger stripes fell across one of the
Lovelace
’s communal spaces, a smoking room. Edie was about to move forward when a faint breath stopped her, a tiny puff of moving air. It smelled of laundry. She folded herself into a low crouch and slid smoothly away, finding her own patch of darkness. She peered around, but her eyes were still adjusting. A crawling sensation whispered along her spine.
I am in a room with a dead man walking
.

Unfair thought. Irrational. If there was a man in here, he was not a monster, he was a victim.
Unless he was eating when it happened. Then perhaps he is both
. She was sure it was a man, without knowing why. Scent, perhaps. The length of a stride she couldn’t hear, the weight of a person she could not feel. She just knew, as meat knows salt.

There was a game she used to play with the Sekunis, a training game in the dark. Feel your way. Know your body, your space. In the dark, she would take a guard, and in the dark, they would attack her. The key was not to expect anything, not to look for anything. You moved, you waited, you acted only when you knew.

She dropped her centre and relaxed her body, and waited.

He appeared in front of her as if stepping from behind a curtain. He must have been curled up on one of the seats. One hand reached out to embrace her, or to tear at her, or to take her gun from its holster at her side. She didn’t know. She slipped beneath the hand and laid her arm across his chest, twisting around her own centre and sweeping his leg.
O soto gari
, firm but not murderous. She followed him down and barred the arm as he tried to continue the motion.

Was he shaking hands? Opening a door?

Abruptly, he bucked, and she heard the shoulder pop, felt the bone shift under the skin. He twisted against the joint, destroying it, and when she saw his face she was so shocked she nearly let go of him. The look of emptiness was gone, replaced by an appallingly focused fury. His head lunged at her like a striking heron, snarling and snapping. He bridged, more vital components snapping in the arm, and she relinquished her lock as she realised it was useless on a man who didn’t care how badly he was hurt.

She backed away. She didn’t want to use the gun, because she had no idea how the other people in here—there were more, she was sure—would respond to a sudden noise. They might ignore it. Or they might converge on it and stare at her. Or they might suddenly try to tear her
apart. There was no evidence for that. There was no evidence of any kind, just Frankie inside, in the furthest carriage, the innermost keep of the
Lovelace
.

The man lurched upright and fell towards her, and she dodged. He lunged again, and this time she stepped in and wheeled him over her back, claiming a leg and twisting it hard as he went down. The knee dislocated. It might not knit properly, after this. He might walk with a limp. But she hadn’t shot him, and that was worth something, although she doubted in her heart he would ever be anything more than he was now, a man reduced to the level of a shark.

She watched him try to get up and fail, then lose interest in her altogether. A moment later she heard a strange, wrenching noise, and turned to see that he was swallowing the fingers of his useless arm.

Edie retched, recovered, and then lost control of her stomach again, emptying it into a corner bin. Then she wiped her mouth on a hand-woven curtain and moved on.

In the connecting section between carriages was an alcove with a wind-up lantern. It would make light. It would also make her a target. She considered, then took it down and cranked the handle. Better to see what was going on than miss an ambush, whether intended as such or not.

She opened the door and shone the lantern into the next compartment. It was a dormitory, with berths on alternate sides of the carriage to make a sense of privacy and to block enfilading fire. She listened, and knew that it was full.

Edie rounded the first bend and found a Ruskinite and two soldiers, all vacant and still. She shone her lantern directly upon the face of the nearest, and watched his pupils contract. He showed no other sign of having noticed, just stood, loosely. She was walking past him, looking full into his face, when he spoke.

“I think you’ll find—” He seemed to have more to say, but somehow he didn’t. He just stopped.

“I think you’ll find—”

She stepped back.

“I think you’ll find—”

That same intonation, over and over. A recording. Or rather, all
that was left of the man. A trace of him, the rest obliterated. She heard a sigh, and turned sharply, gun pointed at the next man, but it wasn’t an expression of anything, just a noise made by air in his lungs when he moved.

Edie surveyed them all, and they watched her in return. They were not curious, but they watched all the same, endlessly. There was an African word she had heard from Songbird when she arrived:
zumbi
. A corpse which hasn’t the decency to lie down. You have to tie his jaw shut so he doesn’t speak. (Back down the corridor the man said: “I think you’ll find—”)

“Hello?”

Edie turned sharply and raised her gun. The man flinched. He was young, in his thirties, and stout. A hamsterish sort of fellow in a robe. A Ruskinite. She was so glad to see him, alive, in here, that she almost hugged him. Instead, she growled: “Who are you?”

Her gun was still pointed at his head.

“Sholt,” he said. “Call me Ted. I came this morning.”

He was holding a glass. She realised after a moment that it had milk in it, that his chest was covered in splatter and what might be milky vomit.

“Don’t corner them,” Ted Sholt said, “and don’t put them in a position where they cannot possibly do whatever they seem to be doing. That makes them …” He glanced up, saw her face. “Oh. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“What … did you have to …” He was asking her if she had killed one of his friends.

“No,” Edie said, and they shared a moment of stark understanding:
not that it will probably make a great deal of difference
.

One of the
zumbi
brushed past, very close, and she jerked away. He pursued, brushing against her. She turned. He turned, too, slack-jawed face following her own like a reflection. She bobbed. He bobbed. When she straightened, so did he, and when she stopped still, he did too. She turned, walked straight ahead, and he stopped, his path blocked by a chair. He stood still, hips resting against the chair’s back, making no effort to sidestep, as if the concept was far beyond him.

“I’ve been trying to feed them,” Sholt said, following her gaze. “They don’t swallow. You can make them, but it just comes back up
again. I’m not sure why they’re still breathing. I’d have thought …” He stopped. She looked at him again, seeing him properly for the first time. He must have come in here in spite of—no, because of—what had happened. No gun, and no lantern. Just a bottle of milk and a lot of faith, or maybe this counted as charity.

Plucky little hamster.

“I’m Edie.”

He nodded. “Hello.”

“Have you been in?” She gestured up the line of carriages towards Abel Jasmine’s office.

“No,” Ted Sholt said. He raised the milk, lowered it again. Edie saw him for a moment in her mind, patiently pouring the stuff into the mouths of men he knew, even loved, and having them gargle at him, or choke, or let the milk trickle out down their chins.

They moved on. Corridor. Living spaces. Galley kitchen.

And then the Code Room—where Edie worked before the night of Clarissa Foxglove and the great train burglary.

Ted Sholt made a little noise of grief.

There were Ruskinites in the Code Room, or men and women who had been Ruskinites. Edie recognised a boy named Paul, a glassblower. He had made a set of wine glasses for her and Frankie a year ago, beautiful things. He was lying on the ground, staring at the ceiling. She waved her hand in front of his face.

“Glah,” he said. When she did it again, he repeated the one word, with exactly the same intonation, and she thought for a moment he was alive, still in residence, still Paul, but it was the only response she could get from him.
Glah, glah, glah, glah …
She had a moment of horror when she thought he was never going to stop, that the eerie, sad little noise would follow her through the train, but when he had said it exactly as many times as she had moved her hand across his vision, he stopped.

Edie moved on.
Frankie, I love you. Please don’t say “glah.”

At the door to the room which was apparently Frankie’s laboratory, she found two Ruskinites and a crowd of soldiers, and a woman from the support staff. They were moving forward, bouncing gently off the wall, then moving forward again, as if the architecture of the train might somehow be worn away by their repeated attempts. As they walked, they rose and fell slightly, and Edie realised after a moment that they were standing on another man, or his corpse, because he had
been slowly flattened and pulped by the footfalls. As she drew closer, she realised that he had not actually died yet. Nor was he trying to scream; whatever had happened had removed even his sense of his own shattering.