Noir (9 page)

Tw
elve

Eyelet

“Where is he?” I crank my head round from the mount of the freak train, searching for signs of C.L. in the woods behind. I see nothing but fog and trees and lines of lingering Vapours. It’s been that way for almost twenty minutes now.

I lift up my mask to get a better look.

“He’ll be here, miss,” Martin says, knocking my mask back into place. “You really shouldn’t do that. I suspect that’s why you have that cough of yours.”

“You’d suspect incorrectly,” I say, a little more curtly than intended, not wanting to get into my exposure to the machine, and the serum, and my worried suspicions about all of it. “C.L. said he’d be straight behind us.” I turn round again.

“And he will be, miss.” Martin grins. “He was fast enough to get away from this train once, surely he’ll be fast enough to catch up to it today.”

I know Martin’s trying to comfort me, but I can tell by the look in his eyes he’s worried, too. It’s been fifteen long minutes since I heard the splash. I look down at my chrono-cuff. Twenty.

“What are you doing?” Martin objects.

I slow the horses down, guide them up a side road off the main one, and turn them around. “Waiting here until C.L. catches up,” I say, throwing the brake once the horses have stopped.

“But we’re less than half a kilometre from the checkpoint.” Martin looks frantic.

“I know where we are,” I snap at him again. “We’ll be fine under this cover of wood.” I look around, searching the trees for lights. I see nothing, though a small piece of me is worried, too. We can’t sit here for long. But we can sit here for now. Time ticks, agonizingly slowly, my chrono-cuff the only heartbeat in the forest. “Maybe I should go back.” I twist round again, scanning the road behind us for signs of C.L. “Dress Clementine and me in the armour and go back.”

Martin lowers his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re too close to the city for you to reveal that. One sighting of a winged horse and the whole plan is blown.”

He has a point. I lower my chin. My mind leaps ahead to Urlick in his cell. If we don’t reach him today, he’ll face his fate first thing in the morning. That is, if they’ve stuck to their word, not holding dippings on the Sabbath. If they haven’t, we’re already too late. I shake the niggling thought from my mind. I don’t know what the officials will do in Smrt’s absence.
Oh, where is C.L.?
I close my eyes and imagine him back there in the woods, surrounded by criminals, their teeth bared, crowding in.
Please don’t make me choose who to save, Lord. Please don’t make me choose between the two of them.

“It’s almost second twilight, miss.” Martin’s voice pulls me back to the moment. “We need to make a decision. And quick.” His eyes are kissed with a forlorn sadness. “We need to think of what’s best for ourselves.”

I fling myself around one more time and stare into the woods. The dashes of cloud cover reveal nothing. No sight of C.L. anywhere. Perhaps it’s already too late.

“He would have wanted you to continue on, miss. He wouldn’t want you to give up on the mission.”

I turn round, gazing into the swollen, glassy eyes of one of C.L.’s dearest friends, feeling the bubble of hope I’ve been holding on to burst in my chest.

“You’ve got us now, miss. We won’t let you down. Master Urlick, he’s waiting.”

I pray that it’s true and that he’s not already gone like C.L. Sorrow bunches in my throat.

Urlick will be sorry to learn that C.L. lost his life trying to save his, and even sorrier to find out I left C.L. behind. I don’t know what to do. Something soft tears in my heart. We can’t sit here any longer or I jeopardize the lives of all the rest. I reach up, steering a tear from my eye. “You’re right,” I say weakly, picking up the reins. “C.L. would have wanted us to save Urlick.”

Martin nods his head. He hesitates as if saying a quick, silent prayer, then looks to me. “I’d better take my place behind the bars, now, miss. We can’t be sailing through the checkpoint with me up here. You be all right up here alone?”

“I’ll have to be, won’t I?” I swallow hard.

Martin stands and hikes himself up onto the roof of the train car. “Remember, whistle twice if they ask if they can search. That’ll give us time to fake the chains. And keep your hat down low over your eyes, and your hair under it. That way, they’ve less chance of figuring out you’re female.”

He jogs his way to the next car along the centre path on the roof, opens the trapdoor, and drops down into his cage below with a thud. There’s a release of the bars, a creak of the hinge, then a whistle, signalling for me to go ahead. He’s ready. Am I ready? No.

I take one last look into the forest through soggy eyes, dreading the thought of C.L. at the hands of the criminals. I never should have agreed to leave him there. I never should have gone ahead without him. I can only hope they kill him first and don’t eat him alive.

I close my eyes and slap the reins down over the horses’ backs. Two black Persian mares surge forward, hooves slopping over the mucky ground. I drop my head and start to cry softly to myself, knowing I’ll have to straighten up in little time. I can’t believe it’s true. I can’t believe I’ve lost C.L. After all the things that have happened.

I can’t believe the void in my heart, for a man I barely knew.

“What’s this mutiny!” I hear someone scream.

I twist my head round. The fog is too dense to make out anything. “C.L.?” I shout. “Is that you?” A wisp of blackish-grey smoke trundles past, twisting and sweeping over the landscape in front of me. Then, like smoke over fire, disturbed by wind, it bends and sweeps past me again.

“Careful, miss,” Sadar hollers up from his train car. “Remember, the Infirmed can throw their voices.”

“No,” I say, slowing the horses to a crawl. “No, it’s C.L. It’s him.” I stand, hand to my eyes, squinting, searching the clouds for any faint sign of a figure. Something howls, and my heart plunges to my knees. Perhaps Sadar is right. The Infirmed. They do prey on your deepest desires. I wave my hand through the cloud cover, not willing to give up on C.L. just yet. “Ernest, is it you?” I’ve never called him that before—but I figure if I do, he’s sure to answer.

The black entity curls past me again. Out of the stream a face appears, white vapour through the curling, dark mist. The piercing eyes of a ghoul stare through me like burning fire. It bares teeth as sharp as pins.

“Oh, God! It’s not him!” I fall back into my seat, bringing the reins down hard. The horses leap forward, apparitions whirling round my head. The horses spook and rear. I fight to get them down on the ground and moving. We shoot forward through the chanting mist, apparitions forming all around us.

“Wait!” I hear someone calling but don’t look back. “Wait! Please, Eyelet, it’s me!” It’s a ruse. It’s not true. The Infirmed are trying to fool me. I mustn’t listen to them.

“Eyelet!” The voice calls again.

What’s going on? What’s happening? The spirits cackle. Is it really C.L.? My neck wrenches toward the sound.

“Eyelet, slow down!”

Feet hit the back platform of the caboose, scuttling up the rails to the roof.

“Eyelet!”

“C.L.?” I breathe, wanting so badly to turn, yet at the same time so,
so
afraid to. Apparitions swoop and dip in front of me, their voices taunting. I close my eyes tight and slap the reins harder. The horses jerk forward under the pressure.

“What’s this?” A voice niggles its way into my ears. Something plops down beside me, its weight bouncing me on the bench. “Thought yuh could pull this caper off without me, did yuh?”

I pop open my eyes. C.L. sits beside me, looking a bit battered and bruised, sporting a toothless grin.

“Never!” I shout, throwing my arms round his neck.

Th
irteen

Flossie

“What do you mean, you couldn’t catch her? You’re ghouls, aren’t you?” I whirl around on them, staring hard into the daunting silver faces. The Infirmed cower and hang their heads.

“We almost had her, miss, but then the train sped up and . . .”

“Train? What do you mean, train?” I vex my brows. “I sent you after a coach, not a train!”

The Infirmed’s heads swing back and forth, their white eyes pinched and confused. “But you said you wanted the girl,” one of them bravely speaks. “We thought you meant—”

“You found the girl? Where?” I swish toward them.

“Just outside the entrance bridge to Gears.”

“Was he with her?”

“Who, miss?”

“The boy with the purple scars on his face, of course.”

The Infirmed look to each other. “Theys was a lot of people there, but none with a raised purple scar, miss,” says one.

“There
was
one without any arms,” says another.

“C.L.” I whirl around, agile now on my newfound appendages. “She must be travelling with him.” I bite a nail and pace on my tentacles, in complete command. “They must be on their way to save him.”

“Save who, miss?”

“Never mind!” I snap at the dimwitted lot that surrounds me. “We need to catch her before she reaches him. But however will we get into town?” I tap my withering chin.

“We can’t, miss. We’ll be sucked up by the scrubbers, or shredded in the screens.”

“Unless . . .” I tighten my lips into a smile.

The Infirmed wince their paper-thin brows and stare at me.

“We need to stop that coach!” I swish toward them, shooting forward on creeping tentacles.

The Infirmed shake their heads. “But we just told you we tried, miss—”

“Not
that
coach! The OTHER ONE!” I shout so loudly their cloth-like bodies stretch back from their sterns. For a moment, they look like they’ve seen a ghost themselves.

“What coach is that?” one meekly asks once their hair and clothes have fallen back into position.

“The one with the woman in it! The woman who was just here!” I turn my back, rubbing what’s left of my hands together. “It’s time to strike a deal.”

Fo
urteen

Eyelet

We trundle over the bridge and through the gates of Gears at high speed, causing quite the commotion, townspeople staring as we whisk by, but there isn’t much else I could do given the circumstances.

I daren’t slow down.

Once we’re inside the gates, I allow myself to turn around, basking in the warm glow of the apparitions’ screams as they get caught up in the filtration web. It’s shoddy at best, compared to the highly technological system of scrubbers and filters that guard Brethren’s perimeter, but I sure am thankful it’s there.

I draw the horses down to a brisk trot and veer off the main street onto a back one, with a plan to afford C.L. the chance to take his place in one of the cages along with the rest of the freaks before we attempt crossing into Brethren at the checkpoint on the opposite end of the city. I stop the train when I’m sure the street is clear, hands trembling, a ball of jumbled nerves wedged in my throat.

“What happened to you back there?” I whirl around on him, sitting upright next to me on the front bench seat. “We were worried sick.”

“And well you should ’ave been,” he says, real casual, like my eyes
aren’t
bugging out of my head. “We was wrong about those whoops, they wasn’t the Brigsmen at all.” He cinches in close to me, his face just a breath from my own. “Theys was a gang of criminals,” he whispers, looking around. “They ambushed me, they did, just as you pulled off. I barely ’ad time to drop the acid on the master before tryin’ to get away. I could see the train cars driftin’ up the road, but I couldn’t get to yuh. They ’ad me surrounded, they did. But I fought me way through ’em, knockin’ ’em down”—he jumps from the mount and dances around, showing me, flinging his legs in the air—“until finally a brainstorm come over me, and I dumped the second bucket of chemical over one of the criminal’s ’eads. Once ’e disappeared, yuh shoulda seen the others vanish.” C.L. rolls back on his heels in laughter. “Never seen anything move that quick!”

I laugh along with him, relieved by his story, though my mind skips on to thoughts of the freakmaster, and then my stomach balls up in a knot. Had C.L. enough time and potion to completely do away with him? I don’t ask. I don’t want to know that answer. I’m just glad to have C.L. back.

Surely, knowing C.L., he finished the job. Wouldn’t he?

I shudder, hearing in my mind the slosh of the chemical being thrown.

C.L. hops down from the mount and rounds the train, hopping up onto a train car and then the rooftop. Shuttling along, he finds the trapdoor, throws it open with a foot, then lowers himself into place inside, behind bars. He drops the roof down over his head and whistles to me, signalling all clear, then shouts, “Wait!” His head pops back up through the rooftop again. “I almost forgot. Take this!” He passes something forward; raised arms from the cages bring it to the front.

“What is it?” I look at the piece of folded paper in my hand.

“A moustache.”

“A what?” I peel the paper open and quiver.

“His moustache.”

I gulp.

“I stripped it from ’im before, well . . . yuh know, for yuh to wear it.”

“But I can’t—”

“I knew yuh wouldn’t take kindly to it, but there’s no other way. Yuh’ve got to wear it—it’s ’is signature trademark. Elsewise the guards at the post’ll know yuh ain’t ’im.”

I look down at the wad of whiskers in my hand, fastened together in the centre with a lock of the master’s hair, spirit gum dripping from its back.

“I lathered it up there for yuh. All you got to do is pop it on—”

“You want me to put this on my face,” I say, still stunned by the revelation.

“Precisely.” C.L. nods. “Yuh need to complete the look if yer to be believable.” He says it like this happens every day.

I look down at my reflection in the chrono-cuff lens. C.L.’s right. As it stands, I look like a waif of a girl stuffed into big man’s clothing, wearing a hat two sizes too large. I’m never going to be able to pull this off, moustache or not. A strike of panic stills my heart.

“Second thought, perhaps yuh’ll need a bit of this, too.” I turn to see C.L. holding a footful of straw. “If we stuff yuh in just the right places . . .”

My face sours. I don’t fancy the idea of being stuffed, but then again, I don’t fancy the idea of getting arrested, either, and I could use a little bulk.

“It’ll just be for a few moments whilst we pass through the checkpoint.” C.L. shrugs his shoulders. “’Ow bad can it be?”

The cart in line in front of me moves ahead. I guide the horses up between the rails of the checkpoint, next to the guard’s hut. My heart is strumming as if it’s being bowed by a violinist, playing Beethoven’s Fifth. My hands feel like I’ve been shucking clams.

“Papers, please,” the checkpoint guard says. He smalls his eyes and squints up at me as if there were sun. I feel the heat of his gaze warming the glue beneath my fake moustache. Or perhaps it’s just the radiance of my own about-to-convulse, tremulous cheeks.

Papers? We hadn’t thought of papers. Had we? I lower my voice and small my own eyes. “Papers?” I say loud enough for C.L. to hear me. “I, the master of this travelling caravan, have no need for papers. As a traveller, I pass through cities all the time.”

I have no idea if that is true, but that’s what I say, loudly, deeply,
manly.

The guard gnaws on the wad of tobacco he had tucked in his cheek, and leans, draping an elbow over the side of my stage. “Travellers or not, I still need to know where the
lot of you
is from.” He smiles up at me smartly.

“From?” I repeat.

“Yeah. From where do you all hail?”

“All over,” I answer, shaking.

His eyes rake the bars of the cages stacked up behind me. “Sorry,” he says. “Can’t let you through without papers.”

My heart moves from Beethoven’s Fifth to his Fourth. I can’t stop my upper lip from twitching.

C.L. coughs in the cage behind me. I reach back and he passes a slip of paper through the top of the bars. Slowly I unfold it, my eyes focusing in on a birth certificate.
Connie Lovell, born Ramshackle Follies Cove, August 1860.
I struggle to contain the bubble of laughter that brims up inside my chest at the thought of that brute of a man having borne the name Connie.

“Will this do?” I say, repressing my urge as I pass the guard the paper.

His eyes flash over the paper, then my hand. I pull it back, fearing my nails are too long and well kept to be a male’s. Then again, with a name like Connie, it might not matter.

The corners of the guard’s lips lift. He raises his gaze, scans the cages.

“And the rest of them are mongrels,” he says, flashing another look at me.

“Property of the state, sold over to me,” I say, knowing they won’t need papers that way. “I don’t bother awarding them names.” I’m not very good at lying, and I’m afraid it’s showing. My cheeks are burning. My breath is hard. The straw under my armpits is digging in the skin. The guard stiff-eyes me a moment longer.

Sweat beads stretch the length of my forehead. I move to erase them, and the straw pricks my back. A strange, scratchy heat blusters up my neck from inside the collar, heating my skin.

“What’s that?” the guard says, pointing.

I reach up and touch a patch of what feels like raised hives. “I dunno,” I say, lowering my voice again. “Probably just some bad meat.”

“You look a little warm—you’re not virused, are you?” The guard steers back from me, billy club in his hand.

“No,” I stammer. My moustache gives way, shifting a titch on my face. I twist the other side of my lip up to compensate.

The guard stares at me hard. “What are you doing?”

“Noffin’,” I answer, trying to hold my lip in place—straw prickling, hives bursting, resisting the urge to disrobe.

“What’s that?” he points to the corner of my mouth.

I stick out my tongue, swiping in the rogue dab of spirit gum that’s drizzled loose down my face. “Just a bit of last night’s supper,” I jest, swallowing the bitter stuff. “Not the best gruel I’ve ever eaten. But beggars can’t be choosers on the road,” I add, feeling my moustache shift again. I wrench up the other side of my lip. I’m smiling like a madman now.

The guard glances down at the paper again, giving me time to shove my moustache back into place. My heart swings like a neurotic pendulum hitting the sides of my chest. The symphony inside my ears turns into a concerto. I feel another hive burst in a place it never should.

“William, is it?” I wriggle, catching a glimpse of the guard’s name tag. The guard looks down and then up. “You should know, these mongrels ’ere”—I jerk my thumb back at the freaks in their cages, feeling an unnatural breeze flirt with my upper lip—“’ave an appointment at the Royal Palace this afternoon.” I talk faster. My moustache travels south again, and I stuff it back up and keep talking. “They’s to perform for a royal occasion. A birthday,” I offer stupidly. Something easily checked. My heart seizes in my chest. Why did I have to say
that
?

I square my shoulders, narrow my gaze, and try to look intimidating. “Should we be late”—I swallow—“I’m sure the officials’ll be interested to know ’oo the culprit was ’oo ’eld us up.” My eyes flick to his name tag and back at him. “Isn’t that right, William?”