Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3) (18 page)

Odessa paused, locking her gaze on Sabrina as the hatch closed behind her. She crossed her arms, her black-gloved fingers sinking deep into the folds of her uniform cloth above the elbows. She was nervous also.

“Hello, sister,” Sabrina said.

“Hello, sister,” Odessa repeated coldly.

Odessa’s voice was strong, with a hoarse quality that Sabrina remembered. “You look well,” Sabrina said.

Odessa nodded. “As do you.” She motioned for Sabrina to sit at the table, sweeping her cloak aside as she seated herself.

Sabrina sat down. It was strange, unsettling, to suddenly be so close to Odessa, and she could not tell if there was any connection left between them or not. If there was, it was at first blush entirely imperceptible.

“You wished to speak with me,” Odessa said. “I am here.”

“Had you never wanted for us to see each other again?” Sabrina asked.

“I had thought you to be dead for the longest time,” Odessa said slowly.

“In some ways I was.”

Odessa folded her hands on the table in a slow, deliberate movement. “Not long ago, perhaps a year, I was informed that you had survived the purge and now lived among the Crankshafts. At least you could have picked a proper clan to live with and not trader-pirates.”

“At least they don’t murder each other.”

Odessa stiffened. “Was it you—were you the traitor who led the Crankshafts and Alchemists into the city that day, the day Balthazar was taken from the prison?”

“Yes, I did.”

Odessa’s mouth tightened. “You are my blood, my sister. I do not think I need to speak with you anymore.”

“What has become of you, sister? Sabrina asked. “Isambard murdered our parents, everyone we knew.”

“That is not true.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Who told you that—Marter?”

“Yes,” Sabrina answered.

“You should not believe the things Marter said,” Odessa replied. “Look at what his association has brought you to. A life of hiding? Leading enemy forces against your own clan? Many good citizens, comrades of mine, were killed during your incursion. Since when did you become my enemy, sister?”

“If Isambard has not stolen every last bit of who you are, Odessa,” Sabrina said, unable to contain an anxious current from rising in her voice, “you must listen to me. You must believe what is the truth!”

Odessa looked angry for an instant and recovered with a dark, pond-still calm. “Why am I here? Not to comfort the enemy. Ah, yes. The Vicar thought it would be appropriate that I invite you back into the family.”

“The Vicar? What about you?”

Odessa did not blink. “Isambard approved of the request. He too, wants you back. You are one of us. You are the blood of Fawkes. Come home and you shall be forgiven.”

“I left the family of Fawkes with its rivers of blood. I no longer wish to be a part of it.”

Bristling, Odessa leaned forward. Sabrina felt her sister’s anger and frustration and she knew that the connection between them, deeply submerged, was still strong. “You have no idea what happened,” Odessa whispered, “why it was necessary for Isambard to order the purge. Many of the people you remember were not as innocent as you might think.”

“Including mother and father?”

“Including mother and father,” Odessa said slowly, leaning back.

“What kind of monster—” Sabrina stopped herself. She was shaking on the inside. She had to choose her words carefully. Isambard had raised Odessa. “I may no longer wish to be a part of Isambard’s family but no matter how long we are apart we shall always be a part of each other.”

Odessa’s eyes had now gone cold, their sleek green mirrors betraying nothing, no vulnerability or emotion, but Sabrina could feel the tightness of her muscles vibrating the chamber air. “I am Fawkes. You are Fawkes. You are a part of Isambard’s family whether you think you wish to be or not.”

“I reject all of it but you,” Sabrina whispered. She almost said something else, words rushing from her mouth unbidden, but she stopped herself. The memories upon seeing Odessa, some long repressed, flooded back to her, reawakened echoes, vague childhood memories of sunlight in the atrium and birds in the Crystal Palace, of her father’s bouncing knee and statues of the three Founders, of gurgling fountains and red-headed relatives and the lurking, rarely seen shadows of the tall, black-violet-eyed Martians standing in the shadows wearing hoods over their strange black and white faces, whispering into the ears of the powerful.

Sabrina grabbed Odessa’s arm and squeezed. The move shocked Sabrina—as if a part of her she did not understand was now taking action. “Sister,” she whispered.

Odessa ripped her arm out of Sabrina’s grasp and stood abruptly, her chair legs screeching across the metal floor. “There is no family here, as you have said. If you are here to negotiate with the Founders, know this: Isambard will accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the rebellious Grand Alliance. Is this what you offer?”

Sabrina’s stomach hurt. The woman sitting across from her looked exactly like her, shared memories with her, but perhaps they were not sisters anymore. “Odessa, please be reasonable,” Sabrina said. “You have the ear of Isambard and I have the ear of Balthazar. Perhaps the two of us can help stop this war.”

“I do not know what you have become, sister,” Odessa replied coldly. “But you disappoint me. I am Odessa Fawkes, blood of the Fawkes, adopted daughter of Isambard Fawkes, and I do not negotiate with the enemy.” Odessa spun on her heel and swung the hatch open, vanishing through it without a glance behind her.

Sabrina placed her hands palms down on the table, unsure as to whether she was upset or not, unsure as to whether there had ever been another person in the room with her or if she had been speaking with a ghost.

XXXII

THE PONTUS CHILDREN

“I am a child but I am also very old,” Penny Dreadful said.

Buckle nodded. He sat on the edge of his chaise lounge as Penny Dreadful stood in front of him, her eyes glowing, her arm manacles rattling on any occasion she might move. She whispered with a metallic whir and she seemed not averse to answering his question about her past but he could not shake the sense that she was an unreliable narrator of her own history.

They were alone, at least, alone in the sense that Welly was fast asleep again. Buckle had not removed his clothing, not even his sword belt, since Lady Julia’s visit. He didn’t trust the Atlanteans with their secret passageways. “How did you survive after all of the adults died in the Pontus?” he asked Penny. “You were just children.”

“It was terrible, of course, for all of us little ones,” Penny said. “Uncle Lombard did his best to save as many of us as he could but so many died during the transfer of brain to machine. I was distraught when my parents died of the plague, but it was so long ago I can speak of it with little emotional distress now. There are good memories of my first family and the families I lived with after.”

“But how did the twenty of you children survive alone for decades?”

“We played a great deal in the beginning,” Penny said.

“That isn’t surviving, Penny,” Buckle said. But he had to be more careful now. This was a child, a very old child, but a child nonetheless.

“It was surviving for us, you see, Captain. Once we had recovered from our bereavements and disposed of the decomposing bodies in the ejectae tubes we needed joy. But the urge to play left us, perhaps within a year. One of our machines, Teresa, malfunctioned after thirteen months. Just dropped dead. That frightened us. We had a ceremony for her and buried her in the sea. After that we put ourselves on very low settings and waited. For decades, we just waited. Our biological elements are maintained through a mixture of water, carbon, and minerals drawn from steam humidity and byproducts of fuel incineration, so food was not a problem. With the exception of combustibles and oil my system is largely self-sustaining.”

“But the organic elements of yours, how could they be immortal?”

“They are not immoral. They do decay, though slowly, I suppose. Uncle Lombard constructed a system whereby our human parts are refreshed with a mix of carbon and electric currents. I have lived through many families, Captain. In my first adoption, cousins of my mother, I was treated as a child, and over time, as one family more distant in relation took me after another, I was handled in different ways: as a baby, a servant, a pet, and even some kind of coat rack providing amusement at parties.”

“What happened when they came to terminate you?” Buckle asked. “How did you escape?”

Penny paused as if considering her answer carefully. “At the end I lived with a nice family and they had a little boy. His name was Hallas and I was something of a nanny to him. We were related. He was a descendant of my original family. He was six years old when we heard of the other living machines malfunctioning in such horrible ways, killing people. Fourteen of us, fourteen of the nineteen metal children, fell apart within three months of each other, as if we had all been intentionally set with the same biological expiry mechanism.”

She turned her head and looked at the viewing window. Buckle heard a sigh, a very human sigh, pass from her metal lips. The neck rotated and she looked at him again. “I was once comforted by the presence of water. But no more. There were leaks in the Pontus dome, small ones that gradually grew larger and larger over the decades we were locked inside. We could not repair the cracks. We did not know how. I remember, I remember shutting myself down just so I would not have to listen to that sound, that sound of the water trickling down the inside of the dome, every day increasing ever so slightly. Tarquinus Lombard had not informed us that our metal bodies were equipped to survive submersion. We assumed that if the dome failed we would drown. It was awful, shutting down to wait to drown.”

“I am sorry that you had to go through that,” Buckle said. “Losing your family. Everything.”

“I appreciate your concern,” Penny said, her eyes glowing a touch brighter, the hum of her engine rising a chord higher. “I am sound, Captain. I am not about to malfunction. I shall warn you if ever I sense my mind, my control, slipping away.”

“I trust that you shall, Penny Dreadful.”

Penny’s glow pulsed as if she was well reassured. “Hallas, the little boy—when the senate ordered all living machines be taken to the foundries for immediate destruction—that little boy made me promise to him that I would run, that I would escape, that I would live. I promised him. I hugged him and slipped away. I climbed into the ventilation shafts and exited through an exhaust tube. I walked on the ocean floor for, well, for what seemed like a lifetime. I did not know where I was, nor where I was heading. I eventually hit a place where the sea floor rose up and kept rising until it broke the surface of the sea. I had arrived at the coast. I remained in hiding after that.”

“What of the other living machine who escaped?”

“I know not who the other survivor was though I suspect it was a boy named Cassius,” Penny replied thoughtfully. “He was always the smartest of us, and our leader, in a way.”

Penny sighed and sniffed, signaling she was done telling whatever part of her story she was willing to tell.

“Thank you for telling me this,” Buckle said. “One day I do very much wish to hear you tell of your adventures afterwards.”

“There were no adventures afterwards, Captain. Just running. Just hiding. Just having nowhere to belong. I cannot say as I blame Atlantis for wanting to destroy us, if the stories of the horrors committed by my companions so long ago are true.”

Buckle looked at Penny’s metal face. He still had a difficult time believing there was a human child behind it. Surely there was very little human residue left. And where had she been for the last one hundred and seventy-four years? “If you were under an execution order, why did you come back to Atlantis with us?” he asked.

Penny lifted her hand to her face and rubbed her cheek, absentmindedly, in the fashion a human might do. But what kind of itch might copper skin have? Buckle wondered if the familiar movements were part of the machine’s attempt to appear humanlike or if they were the mouldering scraps of a human brain telling the fingers to wander the way they once did when they were flesh and blood. He heard the cogs gently turning inside Penny’s metal skull, supporting the old remnants of her human brain. She smelled like hot metal because her insides were hot metal. “Because you gave me a home. Because you needed me, Captain.”

Buckle nodded. She was loyal, though she had not proven much help in finding the underwater city. More of an enthusiastic disher of red herrings, to be accurate. An enthusiastic disher of red herrings who, rather than being perturbed when her suggestions failed, readily offered another with promises of certain success, even though those instructions led them nowhere as well. He was certain her shamblings were well intentioned but he also worried they might be a sign of her impending mental collapse. He felt sorry for the child. He wondered, for a fleeting instant, if she now considered him her father, but that seemed an idea too weird to entertain. “You could have told me what awaited you here.”

“It does not matter,” Penny replied. “I wanted to see Atlantis again. Now you should get some sleep, Captain. I shall stand watch.”

“Yes,” Buckle said; though he knew that he would be unable to sleep, he needed to try. He was tired, emotionally drained, and lying down would at least provide some measure of rest, even if his brain refused to stop spinning. He stood, stretched and walked to the chamber basin where he splashed cold water on his face.

“I hope Sabrina returns soon,” Penny said. “I worry about her being alone in the presence of the Founders.”

“As do I,” Buckle answered as he dried his skin with a towel. He considered pouring himself a glass of rum from a bottle the Atlanteans had provided but he was too tired to do the work required to uncork it. He sat on the chaise lounge where he would try to fall asleep and fail, considered and rejected the idea of taking a shot at the rum bottle again, and rubbed his face with his hands. Already he had to fight the urge to jump up and pace. He was jealous of Welly, always ready to slumber, snoring softly on his lounge.

The Atlanteans were going to fold. Buckle was certain of it. For all of their blustering and promises they were going to cut some kind of deal with the Founders.

But there was nothing Buckle could do for it now. He forced himself to lay back and rest his head on the pillow. The chaise lounge was soft. He crossed his legs, adjusted his scabbard so it rested neatly alongside his hip, folded his hands behind his head and looked up at the dark lines of the luminiferous tubes on the ceiling.

In his peripheral vision Buckle caught the glimmer of Penny’s two yellow eyes. She had moved into the area of the secret hatch, her manacle chains swinging lightly in the shadows. He scratched his chin through his beard, which seemed to be getting thicker. Was Penny as dangerous as the Atlanteans had warned? He wanted to comfort her, but what was she? The last of the plague children, the Pontus children, a will-o-the-wisp essence of a child in the armored body of a machine, an unknown, a frantically designed hybrid in a state of advanced mental deterioration.

And now she watched over him as he slept.

What was Buckle to do? Shut her off? She had stood with them against the Guardians, fought to protect the group. He wasn’t going to do anything about it now. He felt better having her there.

The main door opened, spilling light from the passageway as Sabrina entered. An Atlantean guard shut the hatch behind her, cutting off the illumination. Sabrina paused, most likely allowing her eyes to adjust to the dark chamber.

“Good evening, Lieutenant,” Penny said.

“Good evening, Penny,” Sabrina whispered.

“How did it go?” Buckle asked, sitting up.

“The Founders offered nothing but ultimatums,” Sabrina replied. “My sister offered nothing at all. That is the long and short of it. Nothing more.”

“Unfortunate,” Buckle replied. He wasn’t surprised but still he felt disappointed.

“Welly is asleep, I see,” Sabrina said. Buckle could sense her smile as she spoke. She walked to the washroom door and engaged a small, round glass orb, frosted on the interior, which lit up with a faint, soft aether glow designed to not interfere with sleep. Sabrina entered the washroom and shut the door.

Sabrina didn’t want to talk about her time with her sister, Buckle knew. Understandable. Buckle hoped to have the opportunity to meet with the Founders himself, but it looked like that wasn’t going to happen. He thought of the Founders zeppelin officer, the man he had saved from the
Bellerophon
, lying in the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s infirmary. Buckle had very much hoped to have a conversation with him but, according to surgeon Fogg, the man would die of his wounds without ever regaining consciousness. Pity. It was all such a pity.

Buckle looked out the viewing portal into the dark ocean. Now and again the Founders submarines slipped past in the murk—they looked like they were closer than they had been before. Buckle laid back and took a deep breath. The air was fresh and salty and sweet, freshly pumped down from the surface, tempered by the musky scent of the ever-present ambergris incense. He considered closing the viewing portal but decided to leave it open.

Buckle thrust his head against the pillow, trying to invite sleep. He ended up gazing at Penny and wondering if those golden mechanical eyes were the last thing the unfortunate Atlanteans saw before their own beloved automatons tore them to pieces in the night.