Masked (2010) (46 page)

“So I’ve lost the nights, which would have been the natural time for my business, but it’s not been too much of an obstacle. The days are mine. This city is going to be mine, soon now. With Nox gone there is no one left to stand in the way of Styx. All hail me.”

Marjorie M. Liu
is an attorney, and the
New York Times
bestselling author of two ongoing series: Dirk & Steele, novels of paranormal romance, and the Hunter Kiss urban fantasy series. She has also written the novel
X-Men: Dark Mirror
, and, in the world of comic books, is the writer of
NYX: No Way Home, Black Widow, X-23,
and
Dark Wolverine
(with Daniel Way, for Marvel). Here, she turns her imagination loose on one of comic books’ foundational archetypes, with brilliant and surprising results.

M
ARJORIE
M. L
IU

There were gods
in the sea, but Namid had never prayed to them; nor to any holy spirit since she had buried the tin star. But she found herself on the cusp of religion as she plummeted fifty feet to the dark Pacific, a leather harness buckled around her torso and shoulders, secured to a thick hemp cable that snapped tight the moment she hit the cold rough waters; dangling like some gristly worm at the end of a long hook. The cable was not quite long enough to accommodate the weather; and when the dirigible heaved upward, caught by the first smashing gust of the oncoming storm, Namid was torn from the brine, swinging madly, naked toes skimming foam. She would have vomited had there been anything in her stomach; but she had emptied her gut days ago. Never an admirer of flying.

“You see it?” roared one of the lieutenants, boots securely locked within the iron braces of the hangar floor. Namid, on
the ascending portion of her dizzying, madcap swing, managed to glimpse the young man leaning down, headfirst, into the fifty feet of air separating him from the churning sea. It was night, no moon. Low clouds. He was dressed in warm silver wool and leather, and wore search goggles over his eyes, crystal lenses lit like twin moons.

Namid wished to remind the young man that he was in a better position to see than she; but the dirigible dipped, plunging her back into the sea. The lieutenant shouted again, though the drone of the engines drowned his words. Namid, clinging to the cable as she kicked her legs, cast a wild glance around her.

Nothing. Impossible to see. The hull’s exterior lights had been dimmed, and the waters were black. A wave slammed, rolling Namid upward with sickening speed—and then down, sucked under. She held her breath as the ocean buried her, listening to a brief muted roar in her ears. She gripped the cable with all her strength.

When she resurfaced, the lieutenant was still calling out to her. His voice had gone hoarse. He held a knife in his hand, serrated steel reflecting the soft phosphorus glow of the night paint smeared against the wall around the exposed hangar gears. He was not looking at her, but at the sky.

Namid twisted around the cable, searching—and discovered pinpricks of light, burning behind the clouds, growing larger, brighter. Rumbling shuddered the air, metallic groans broken with pops and low whistles that cut through her eardrums. She gritted her teeth and threw back her head. The lieutenant was staring at her again, his knife pressed to the cable. Namid fumbled to free her own blade, sheathed among the sealed packages strapped to her body.

One-way trip.
She had understood that, even before leaving the mountains; before saying yes; before packing her guns and memories, and her father’s chemicals.

“Go!” she screamed at him, cutting through the cable in one swipe, nearly breaking off the blade in her haste. The dirigible surged upward at the last moment, leaving her airborne. As she fell
backward into the sea, swallowing a scream, she glimpsed that final surge of light through the clouds.

And then, nothing. Just down, down deep into the ocean. Her eyes squeezed shut. She lost her knife and did not care. All she could hear was her hammering heart, and another kind of pulse—longer, deeper, a single shock wave that boomed through her body like thunder. She clawed upward, lungs burning, and burst through the surface with a gasp.

The dirigible was trying to flee. It was a small airship, built for speed and the transport of politicians, intercontinental couriers—but not war. Silver as a bullet, and slender as one, engine-fired with some of the finest core crystals the skull engineers could produce; and still, it had no chance against the vessel plunging from the clouds: an iron maiden, bristling with the sharp mouths of canons, each one silhouetted like needles against the beacon lights shining from the hull. A monstrous thing, blotting out the sky as its belly rode overhead, radiating such heat from its exposed crystalline core that her face felt burned.

Namid heard the thrumming charge before the canons fired—felt the vibration in the water. Flinched, instinctively, at that first shot—blasted in rings of fire at the escaping dirigible, which was making a sharp ascent into the clouds. Shells tore through the silken sail, igniting hot gas. She stared, resigned and horrified, as a fireball erupted around the dirigible.

Reminded her of a man burning alive. Or a mass coffin in the oven, souls trapped inside. She imagined bodies tumbling, falling, swallowed by the sea.

Just as she was swallowed, moments later.

Hands grabbed her ankles, and yanked her under.

There had been experiments in her youth involving a pressure chamber, performed by a man on loan from the redcoats who had something to prove. The ocean brought back those memories: all that immense, inescapable strain, as though the sea wanted to
squeeze her vital organs into pudding, or implode her eyes and brain.

Namid had no skill for water, having never been able to stand its weight against her body. The men had to drag her along, blind, like a child. One of them, only moments after slinging lead hooks through her harness and tugging her unbearably deep, guided her hand to her nose. He forced her to pinch her nostrils shut, and then held a tube against her mouth. Bubbles tickled her lips. She opened then, just enough, choking—swallowing ocean and air as her mouth clamped tight around the tube. The ache in her lungs eased, but little else.

After an interminable length of time—during which she suffered a slow-burning hysteria—the men holding her arms stopped swimming and the top of her head brushed a hard surface. The hooks were removed from her harness, and the air tube pulled from her grasping lips. The men shoved her up a long metal tube, and she kicked and clawed toward the light that burned through her closed eyelids. Strong hands grabbed the harness knotted around her body. She was hauled upward. Dragged from the ocean onto a warm steel floor.

A thick blanket was spread immediately over her body, tucked against her legs with immeasurable care. The cold had never bothered her, but nevertheless, Namid lay for a long moment, shuddering, focused on nothing but the air in her lungs and the pleasure of no longer enduring that unspeakable pressure. Aware, even with her eyes closed, of all the men packed into that small space around her. Every sound was amplified: the rasp of their breathing, the shuffle of boots, the hum of the crystals and the coal furnaces burning somewhere beneath her.

“Lady Marshal,” said a quiet voice. “You, MacNamara.”

Namid exhaled, going still. Suffocating again, but in a different way. Until, with all the grace and strength she could muster, she pushed herself to her knees. Strong quick fingers tugged the blanket higher upon her shoulders so that it would not slip, and she helped, clutching it to her as she tried to sit straight and strong.
The crew would talk. Best to make a good impression, what little was left.

But it was difficult. When she looked into the faces of those silent staring boys who were crammed around the hatch—hardly a man with real years among them—she was unprepared for the awe and fear in their eyes.

She did not feel fearsome. Just wet and cold, and tired. A woman old enough to be their mother, black silvered braids dripping seawater against skin the color of sun-dried walnuts. She had been pretty once, or so others had said, but she had not looked at herself in a reflecting glass for more than ten years. Namid could only guess that she had aged like her mother.

The sealskin parcels strapped to her body were heavy, as was her soaked clothing: rough cotton shirt and a man’s trousers, clinging to her, perhaps indecently. Gold glinted above her left breast, hammered in the shape of a star. A new badge. The envoys from the fledgling American government had given it to her, right before she left the warm Pacifica coast of New China. She had almost tossed the badge into the sea, but at the last decided to wear it. It meant nothing to her—but to the aircrew, it had been legend. Part of a costume. A mask.

A sinewy brown hand appeared. Namid stared, taking in the thick cuff of scar tissue around that muscled wrist, and then allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. She glimpsed a dizzying blur of navy wool and gold stars before anchoring her gaze on handsome cheekbones, a shaved head. The man had a Chinese look about him—in his eyes, mostly—but something else, too. Mixed blood, like her. Namid searched his face with great care, finding wrinkles about his weathered eyes, and a touch of silver in the bristle around his jaw. She had been finding white in her own hair for five years, but had not thought much of it until now.

“Captain Shao.” Namid tightened her grip on his hand, as he did hers, before letting go.

He inclined his head. “I apologize for our late arrival. The British have dropped mines throughout the Pacific. We had to
alter course almost a dozen times before we found a safe route.”

“The airship that brought me here,” she began, and then stopped, unable to continue. Gone soft, when she could not even speak of the dead.

Captain Shao rubbed his scarred wrist. “My swimmers witnessed the attack. They’re searching for jumpers who might have survived the explosion.”

Namid thought again of that aircrew, young as this one, all earnest and red-blooded, most of them too nervous to look her in the eyes. “Beijing,” she said hoarsely. “The Emperor.”

Captain Shao hesitated. “Best if you come with me.”

Namid gave him a sharp look. He issued a command. Boys scattered, returning to their duties, many with lingering, backward glances. She had not realized how many had come to see her until they dispersed. All of them, bursting with rumors and the damnable old stories. As she followed the captain down the corridor, every boy she passed—every single one—pressed his knuckles to his brow. None could have been older than sixteen.

“They’ve talked of nothing else since learning you’d be coming aboard,” Captain Shao told her, gently patting one of those genuflecting boys on the head. The teen blushed, tearing his gaze from Namid, and stooped to pick up a brush and pot of night paint. He began streaking a fresh layer into the grooves set along the iron wall, and the immediate glow was cool as winter light.

She almost reached for the captain, but pressed her fist against her thigh. “They should know better. You’re all in danger now. When I discovered who they had sent to meet me—”

“We’re always in danger,” Captain Shao interrupted, glancing at her over his shoulder with eyes that were far harder than the soft, pleasant tone of his voice. “But I do believe they think you’re worth it.”

“They’re only children.”

“My men,” he corrected sternly. “Don’t belittle them,
Marshal MacNamara
. Not when you know why there’s no one else left to fight. Not when they admire you so. They need a hero. We all do.”

The admonishment cut deeper than it should have. “Call me Namid. I stopped being a Marshal after the war.”

“Did you?” Captain Shao gave her a faintly mocking smile, glancing down at the gold star pinned to her shirt. “I don’t think the world has quite caught up with your resignation.”

He turned before she could think of an appropriate response—though there was none. Stories had been spun for years, becoming larger and more fantastic, turning her into a woman, a creature, that she could never hope to be. Legends were not flesh and blood. And she was no hero.