Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3) (20 page)

Vadim. He had betrayed them. And there would be a Founders’ man waiting for her at the other end of that tunnel.

The bang of a Founders’ pistol thundered behind Sabrina, the wallop of it funneling down the alley. The lead ball zipped past her ear with a rattling buzz and dinged off something metal where the alley exited into the street twenty feet ahead.

“Don’t kill her!” Tunney shouted somewhere behind, a thousand echoes behind. “Fawkes wants her alive!”

Sabrina burst out into the busy street, sliding and slipping, and cut to the right, dodging the currents of pedestrians as she’d done for years as a child. She knew how to lose pursuers, how to use the crooked streets to her advantage as child pickpockets do. Don’t look back. Never look back. She heard the shouts of the steampipers behind her, the dismayed grunts and cries of people as they were knocked aside.

Sabrina slid under a wagon, the rippled ice bruising the skin of her right thigh before she hopped to her feet and sprinted down another alley. Now that she could breathe freely she wanted to sob, to scream her heart out of her body, to throw herself down and die. But she had to run. She had to live. Because so many had to pay for what they had done, and now there were three more.

Tunney, Hackett, and Vadim.

Sabrina clambered up the bricks of a collapsed wall and dashed along the shantytown rooftops, her feet banging on the wooden planks and scrap metal. Dodging the loose coverings and tarpaulins, she accelerated and made the six-foot leap to the drainpipe of the old church and pulled herself up hand over hand. On the high church roof she scrabbled across the ice-slickened, crumbling clay tiles until she made it to the bell tower and squeezed through a hole in the belfry.

The tall, wooden square compartment which housed the old bell was just big enough for Sabrina to stretch out and this she did, lying still, waiting for her lungs and heart to ease back from nearly bursting. The belfry hole was her own private discovery. She’d hidden here before, the coin purses of angry merchants clutched to her stomach, laughing silently. The belfry had been closed up long ago and though the old rusty nails still held the original boards in place, the wood had grayed and shrunk and warped. It was all white and gray. The bird and bat guano was white and gray and the outside light filled the space with a hundred gray-white columns.

Sabrina heard Tunney shouting in the square below, frustration ringing in her voice as it bounced off the stone walls. Sabrina envisioned Tunney striding through the churchyard with its bare concrete pedestals, their bronze statues long gone and melted down, their inscriptions dissolving away.

“Where is she?” Tunney howled. “You promised us the girl, Hackett!”

“You had your girl!” Hackett roared. “I’m not responsible for you bungling a capture!”

“This way!” It was Vadim’s voice, frightened and high, girlish, but it was Vadim’s voice. “I know where the urchins hide!”

Sabrina lay still, breathing through her mouth now. She was glad Vadim didn’t know about the bell tower. Actually, Vadim didn’t know about a lot of things. The Founders had chosen a poor snitch.

Sabrina remained in the bell tower for two days. She was cold, wearing only her ratty woolen sweater, but she didn’t allow herself to suffer. She thought of Marter, all warm memories, and she occasionally had to remind herself that he was dead. She wasn’t going to cry. She wanted no food, no water, no sleep, only a whip with which to lash the world. By the morning of the third day she started to hallucinate. The peaked roof of the tower expanded and contracted and the universe expanded and contracted with it. At times she floated in white-gray nothingness or drifted through wooden-ribbed space. She gave herself up to the comforting oblivion for a while, becoming nothing more than the whistle of the wind through the cracks, the glimmer of the ice on the edges of the cantilevered vents, the swirling peel of white paint lifted up from a board the color of an old man’s beard.

At noon on the third day in the bell tower Sabrina drew her dagger from her belt and laid it over her heart.

XXXIV

SEMAPHORE BRIDGE

At midnight on the third day in the bell tower Sabrina climbed down from the church roof and walked to the Semaphore Bridge.

Vadim—a snake-oil-salesman to the core—always wanted to make the big score, to get rich quick, and he was most comfortable with a little gang of dangerous pretenders who always gathered under the Semaphore Bridge.

Gliding across the snowy walkways, Sabrina reached the concrete side of the Semaphore riverbed, now nothing more than a big snowy concrete ditch with a bottom of yellow ice. Fires, their wooden fuel purloined from abandoned houses, burned under the bridge as they always did, warming the hands of the homeless beggars. The light of the flames gave the iron bridge and the snowbound ravine a weird, fluttering aspect, like a wavering orange tunnel leading into eternity.

Sabrina skidded down the embankment and found herself walking past knots of sleeping people huddled under mountains of blankets or packed inside ramshackle shacks, their fires burning, dozens of them, along both sides of the ravine. Directly under the bridge, the choicest spot because it was sheltered, burned the largest fire. Around it three young men and one young woman sat on old dining room chairs, sipping from ceramic mugs. Drawing her knife and holding it behind her back, Sabrina strode directly toward them.

The first to notice Sabrina was Leper, the shortest of the group, a mean streets pretender with a real home like Vadim, and he jumped to his feet.

“What the?” Leper groaned. “Vadim—look.”

The others stood up from their chairs. Vadim looked frightened, already backing up. The other two were Semyon and Birdie, shady-eyed customers, true street thugs, slick and dangerous.

“Hello, Sabrina,” Semyon said with a sleepy grin. “People have been looking for you.”

Sabrina smelled chocolate. They were drinking hot chocolate. One of them had recently come into a nice pile of money, then. “I want Vadim.”

Semyon laughed. “Why? He isn’t good-looking like me.”

“You three should leave,” Sabrina said, still advancing.

Semyon’s smile vanished. “What’s behind your back, girl?” He tossed his mug aside, sloshing dark liquid across the dirty snow. “Vadim is one of us, girl. We don’t abandon each other.”

“He betrayed me,” Sabrina said, never taking her eyes off of Vadim, who cowered behind the others.

“And he got paid,” Leper said. He threw down his mug and Birdie did the same.

“There is a fine bounty out on your head,” Semyon said, reaching inside his coat for a knife or pistol as he stepped in front of the others. “I’ll take you in, after I make you my girlfriend for a little while, first.”

If outnumbered you must run, Marter’s voice echoed in Sabrina’s head. If you choose not to run then you must act first, before the enemy thinks you’re willing to act. Take advantage of them before they can organize to take advantage of their numbers.

Sabrina kept walking straight at Vadim, Leper, Birdie, and Semyon, almost right into their fire in the midst of them.

Hit them, Marter would say. When suddenly and unexpectedly hit, even when they see you coming at the last moment, most human beings will freeze. It may be only a fraction of a second, but the brain needs time to understand, to sort out information before reacting with something more than instinct.

Sabrina planted her foot, hurling her knife at Semyon’s throat. The blade flashed once in rotation, so short was the distance between them. Semyon staggered, clutching at the knife buried in his throat. He dropped his newly drawn dagger and fell backwards. He landed hard, convulsing in the snow, his blood spurting, glittering in the air.

“You bitch!” Leper shouted but his voice squeaked with fear. He clumsily yanked a pistol out from inside his big overcoat.

Sabrina rolled, grabbing Semyon’s dagger out of the snow. She sensed the blade was ill-weighted but she had no intention of throwing this one. Springing up in front of Leper, she knocked aside his gun hand and thrust Semyon’s dagger deep into his stomach. Leper shuddered, his eyes wide and dark and peering into hers. She wrenched the blade around inside of him. He jerked and gurgled, mouth splayed wide open, and fell to the side. Sabrina lifted the pistol out of his hand as he dropped.

Birdie turned and ran.

Vadim was already running.

Sabrina cocked the pistol. A thundering roar rose in her head, deafening her, making the world shake beneath her boots. Chunks of snow dropped in reams from the trestles above. She realized a train was passing overhead, the locomotive pounding over the bridge. In the shadows dozens of faces looked at her, dirty faces poking out of blanket piles and holes in the tarpaper shacks. These people would do nothing. All they wanted was to ransack the bodies once Sabrina left.

And they were welcome to it. Sabrina was already on the run, scrambling up the embankment, her boots kicking apart the crumbling footprints Vadim had made just seconds before. Birdie was out of sight but Sabrina didn’t care. Birdie could go. Sabrina leapt through the snow like a gazelle. Ahead of her, Vadim stumbled and shambled, gasping and weeping, slowing himself down as he clawed with his good hand at whatever weapon he’d stored inside his coat.

Vadim cut down an alley but Sabrina was already on him, catching up to him so fast it surprised her. She stopped, raised the pistol and fired. The gunpowder flash lit up the high brick walls, the discharge ringing sharply. Through the burst of black smoke Sabrina saw Vadim hurled forward, his arms and legs flinging out as he landed on his stomach and sent up a wave of displaced snow.

Sabrina tossed the pistol aside and approached Vadim, stepping over the red streak he had left behind as he skidded across the ice. The wall masonry dripped with blood. The ball had blown Vadim out from the inside, from back to front. Vadim gasped, face down, the hurl and ebb of his last agonized breaths puffing the snow back and forth around his cheeks.

Bits of things lay scattered in the snow; irregular chunks of pink and white and pale yellow—Sabrina realized they were cookies, wrapped in wax paper, blasted out of Vadim’s coat pocket. They had been a sweet reward for betrayal, like the chocolate, bought with Marter’s blood money.

Sabrina knelt alongside Vadim and yanked at his blood-soaked coat until she found his coin purse, fat and heavy, and jammed it into her own pocket. She was going to need money now. Vadim’s form went rigid as Sabrina stood up. She heard his death rattle, saw his muscles lose so much tension the body almost dissolved into the snow.

Sabrina stood still in the silence, the blast of the gun and the thunder of the train echoing in her ears, her heart racing in her chest. The moon, a bright haze within the clouds, cast a silver-blue light upon the world and looked alien after the warm orange fires of the ravine. Snowflakes drifted down thick and soft and unaffected. Tomorrow the footprints would be gone, the pools of blood frozen, the bodies no one cared about buried under the white.

One down, Sabrina thought. One down and an army to go.

Sabrina froze.

Someone was behind her.

Sabrina spun around. A figure stood night shadows, heavily cloaked, so indistinguishable through the snowfall it seemed there might not actually be someone there.

But she was there.

It was Elizabeth.

***

Sabrina woke from her dream with a start. Staring at the dark luminiferous aether tubes on the ceiling, it took her a moment to remember where she was; her quarters in the undersea city of Atlantis. It was quiet. The dark sea gurgled outside the viewing window. Air hummed gently out of an overhead vent. She rose from the bed into a sitting position. Welly and Buckle were both asleep, Welly on the divan and Buckle flopped in a plush chair with his boots on. She was truly surprised that Buckle had managed to get some shut-eye.

“Are you well, Sabrina?” Penny Dreadful asked, a breathy metallic whisper.

Sabrina saw Penny standing in the area of the secret passageway, her amber eyes glowing in the dark.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Sabrina whispered. “Be quiet now, so as not to wake the others.” Sabrina swung off the bed and moved into the bathroom. She shut the door and, plunging both hands into the silver basin, splashed cold water her face. She breathed through her nose, feeling droplets of water trickle down her neck and soak into her shirt collar. She looked at herself in the mirror: the person staring back at her seemed a stranger.

The old nightmares of her last day with Marter and the killing of Vadim were as vivid as they always were. Except, this time, Elizabeth’s appearance at the end was new, horrifyingly new.

I’ll be damned
, Sabrina thought. She wiped her face and neck with a towel and exited the washroom, returning to sit on her bed. Penny still watched her but she didn’t make eye contact, choosing to gaze out the sea window instead. Sabrina felt groggy, detached, as if she was unable to pull her head out of the dream world she’d just left. The ocean pulsed outside the glass, pulsed with a pressure as old and dark as the beginning of the world, and she felt it, felt it reaching for her, felt its weight on the surface of her eyeballs. She stared into the sea until her head hurt and bits of stars flickered inside her eyes.

Sabrina shut her eyelids. A vision struck her from the darkness: the window glass shattered and the freezing sea burst in. She saw her dead body suspended, floating in a galaxy of flickering luminiferous aether and glowing, purple-bellied jellyfish. After the initial dismay it gave her an odd sense of relief.