Skybuilders (Sorcery and Science Book 4) (5 page)

“There’s one sitting at the docks with gigantic garish SIN logos plastered all over its bright and shiny hull.”

“Again, I say it. I don’t have an airplane to give you.”

“Fine, you don’t have to get me the keys. Just tell me the code to turn off the security system. I can hotwire a stupid plane.”

Darren gave him a hard look. “And how exactly do you think stealing from the Selpe Intelligence Network will help you clear your name?”

“It’s all part of the plan.”

“Dare I ask what this plan is?”

“Better not. You don’t want to incriminate yourself,” said Leonidas.

“Probably too late for that anyway,” he grumbled. “Ok, Leonidas. Fine. I’ll help you.”

Finally, a bit of luck.

“But I can’t give you the codes. Each of us has a different code to unlock the plane. If I give you mine, they’ll know. And it will all come back to me.”

Trust it to spies to be so paranoid. If only Marin were here, Leonidas wouldn’t need any stinking codes. She would just hack the damn thing. Of course, if Marin were here, he wouldn’t need to be.

“Give me her code,” Leonidas suggested, nodding toward the redheaded spy. She was still absorbed with whatever was on her screen and didn’t seem to notice.

“Sadly, I don’t know it.” Darren actually did look genuinely disappointed.

“You’re slipping, my friend.”

“Spare me,” he retorted, picking at the worn edges of his book.

Leonidas watched him, and then it hit him. “You like her.”

“What?” Darren straightened. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Yes, you do.”
Why didn’t I see it right away?
He, too, was slipping. “You bring out that stupid book whenever a new infatuation hits. And you always read it in front of the girl you like, thinking it makes you look like an intellectual.”

“I
am
an intellectual.”

“Sure, sure.” Leonidas chuckled. “Then, tell me. What’s your favorite part of the job, Darren? Sitting in your office? Or being out in the field, really living it?”

Darren frowned. “That doesn’t prove anything. And if you want my help in your misguided scheme, you’ll stop teasing me.”

Leonidas intertwined his fingers together and set his hands on the table. He gave Darren a congenial smile and began to hum a tune under his breath.

“That’s better. So, I can’t get you that plane, but I can tell you where in Auster you can find another one.”

“I’m listening.”

“Right at the docks at the outer eastern edge of town is the city junkyard.”

A junkyard? He could not be serious. Leonidas sighed. “Continue.”

“It turns out the proprietor has gotten his hands on an old Seabird. He’s hidden it away inside the dome-shaped shack at the waterfront edge of his property.”

“Do the soldiers patrolling the docks know he’s storing illegal goods?”

Darren smiled. “I saw no reason to tell them.”

Leonidas didn’t need to ask why. Selpe soldiers and spies did not get along.

“It’s their job to keep an eye on the Avans, not police the streets of Auster,” Darren added.

“And do the city guards know?”

“I saw even less reason to tell them. Not after they confiscated my electric scooter. It was not
that
loud, I tell you. There’s no way it broke any city noise level ordinance. Nitpicking ninnies.”

“So, what kind of Seabird is sitting in this junkyard?” Leonidas asked.
Please don’t say the Seabird-4. Please, please—

“A Seabird-4.”

Damn.
“A series of superb planes, and it had to be the lemon of the line. You know, it was the Seabird-4 that killed the line.”

Darren shrugged. “The one in the junkyard seemed mostly functional when I saw it.”

“When was that?”

“About four months ago.”

In other words, an eternity in scrapyard parts time. “Someone just shoot me now,” sighed Leonidas.

“Careful, man. With that bounty on your head, you might just get your wish.”

“I thought I was just another poster on the SIN board.”

Darren snorted at the word ‘just’. “Inside the Selpe Intelligence Network, yes. But to the scavengers of the world, you’re worth twenty thousand Crowns. You really haven’t seen the posters? They’re plastered all over the main street.”

Leonidas had been avoiding the main street. He dropped his face into his hands. “No.”

“SIN didn’t want them put up. You know how it is. We deal with our own traitors,” Darren said. “But this came directly from the Selpe Advisory Council just last week. They put the bounty on your head.”

Leonidas tried to pinpoint which person on the council he had managed to piss off, but it was no use. He was pretty sure he’d annoyed all of them. Well, never mind. He’d deal with that problem. Eventually. Or he’d save Marin and the Selpe boys and then not have to. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all that Ariella and Silas had come to get him from Precipice.

“Ok, I’ll check out the junkyard. But I’m still going to need to borrow a few SIN stickers from you,” he told Darren.

“I hope you’re not planning on impersonating an agent of the Selpe Intelligence Network.”

“Darren, I am an agent of the Selpe Intelligence Network.”

“No, you
were
an agent. But you aren’t any more,” Darren reminded him. As though he needed the reminder.

“Well, then it wouldn’t be hard to impersonate one.”

“I hope you’re not planning on impersonating an agent of the Selpe Intelligence Network,” Darren repeated, this time deadpan.

“No, I’d just like a few of those snazzy SIN stickers for my bed’s headboard, so I can play spy whenever I have nocturnal visitors.”

Darren stared at him blankly, then managed to stammer out, “Sometimes, I don’t know whether to take you seriously, Leonidas.”

Join the club.
“Stickers, please.”

Darren leaned over to reach into his bag. “And then we’re even.”

As soon as Darren’s back was turned, Leonidas slipped the SIN identification badge out of his pocket. “Sure. If the plane is actually flight-worthy,” he added, making a fist to hide the pilfered badge.

Leonidas waited for his friend to hand him the stickers, then tucked the badge between the papers as he stuffed the stack into his backpack. He stood and swung a strap over his shoulder.

“Well, good luck, Leonidas,” Darren said, raising his glass. “You will most certainly be needing it.”

 
“Thanks. It’s always nice to have someone rooting for me,” replied Leonidas, and then he walked back to the staircase and spiraled his way down, stealing one final glance at the redhead.

CHAPTER FIVE

~
Junkyard ~

526AX August 20, Auster

SILAS DIDN’T TRUST the spy. In fact, he didn’t trust most people. Especially Selpes. Even less so Selpe spies. And least of all that particular Selpe spy, who’d already lied to them.

What Silas did trust was Leonidas’s sense of preservation and his desire to see Marin safe again. That’s why he was indulging this detour to Auster, even as the days slipped away. Three days. Nearly half a week. That was how long it had been since the explosion in Oasis and how long since the Crescent Order had flown up there. The assassins were after Hayden and Ian Selpe. The question was why? Who had hired them, and what did they want?

Half a week was no more than the blink of an eye in Silas’s long life, but he knew it felt like a lifetime to two boys being pursued by assassins. And the human world moved quickly. The Selpes had already written Hayden and Ian off as dead. They would crown a new emperor before winter. Silas knew the potential candidates for the job—those few remaining relations of Ambrose Selpe—and he didn’t trust a single one of them. He wouldn’t let it come to that.

Not if I can help it
, Silas thought to himself as he walked beside Leonidas on the way to the city junkyard. He knew the spy would have preferred to bring along Ariella, but she’d bolted at the suggestion of visiting a ‘graveyard of mechanical menaces’.

Now that Leonidas had a bounty on his head—a well-deserved bounty as far as Silas was concerned—it was prudent to bring someone along to watch his back as he tried to talk the proprietor of the junkyard into illegally selling him an airplane. Since that plane seemed to be their only way up to Oasis, Silas didn’t really mind going with him. Leonidas was usually smart enough not to provoke him needlessly. Silas had long since learned to control his Phantom rage, but that didn’t mean doing so wasn’t a strain on his mental faculties. Ambrose had been all right, but the same could not be said for all those brain-splitting lords that swarmed around him, filling his schedule—and, by extension, Silas’s—with needless meetings. They had made those sixteen years one gigantic, never-ending migraine.

“Here it is. I think I should go first,” Leonidas said as they reached a lopsided rusty sign dangling from the chain-link fence by a single loose screw.

The sign read, ‘Welcome to Master Dominick’s Metal Works and Parts, Dock 192, Auster. Please ring the bell before entering. Trespassers and thieves will be shot dead on sight.’

Leonidas blinked. “On second thought, maybe you should go first. You look rather bulletproof.”

Silas smirked at the spy, then walked past him. He pounded both chain-link doors, and they swung open so far that they bounced off the back side of the fence with clanging accompaniment.

Silas and Leonidas passed by an alley of old kitchen and bathroom parts, then turned the corner. The narrow path opened up into a field of neatly stacked cars. Too neatly stacked. The missing glass, rusted bodies, and overall shabby state of the vehicles was not worthy of the time someone had invested in arranging them so precisely.

There were three of these car walls, each one six cars high and a single car wide. The length of the stacks extended anywhere between twenty to thirty cars, nearly from one edge of the yard to the other. In short, the area was a party of a million blind spots. And that grated on Silas’s sensibilities—both Phantom and bodyguard. One didn’t simply stroll onto a scene such as this.

Those same instincts were also screaming for him to notice a wheezy, raspy cough that was coming from behind the first wall of cars. The cough belonged to a man who’d inhaled enough smoke and fumes in his lifetime to kill him three times over. It was a wonder he was still alive. His heart and the hearts of his three companions beat out a steady rhythm. They were calm, which told Silas two things. First, the four men had set up this same ambush before. And second, they were complete morons. They thought those stacked car barricades made them impervious.

“So, do you want to shoot them, or shall I?” Leonidas whispered.

Well, what do you know, the spy has skills after all.
Silas looked at him. “How many do you count?”

“Four,” he answered without pause. “Two in the red car with the roof torn off and two inside that yellow truck without a back bumper. They’re armed.”

“Yes, I heard the guns.”

Silas scanned the area surrounding the two vehicles. From a superficial glance, they appeared to be integrated into the stack of cars, but they’d merely been neatly tucked into gaps in the wall. Neither the bus above the red car, nor the taxi above the truck were putting any weight on them. They could drive in and out of those camouflaged parking spots with relative ease. So that was their game.

“They’re far too cozy to be just any common thugs. They’re acting like this is their territory. Like they’re guarding it,” said Silas. “I think we’re about to be greeted by Master Dominick’s welcoming party.”

“Ok.” Leonidas’s face hardened into one of dispassionate professionalism. “How do you want to play this?”

“You step out there and get them to focus their attention on you.”

“You mean, focus their guns on me.”

“Just for a few seconds until I can get behind the next stack of cars.”

“And then?”

“And then you wait for the crash.”

Leonidas bit down on his lip. “Fine. But you’d better not dilly-dally while I’m being shot through with bullets.”

“Don’t get shot then.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Leonidas said, and he walked toward the first car wall.

Silas ran up the fence, darted across the top edge, then ran back down to land behind the second stack. As two engines revved up, he peeked through a gap to see the cars occupied by the junkyard bouncers drive out of their coves in opposite directions. They passed through the narrow opening on each side without even braking. This was certainly not their first time. The men expelled crass jeers at Leonidas, and their engines roared in accompaniment. They began to drive in wide circles around him. With each lap, the cars moved in closer.

It was an intimidation game, and it wouldn’t be long before they moved from pounding their chests and waving their guns in the air like delinquent teenagers, to shooting something a bit more potent than insults at Leonidas. Silas dashed off to stand behind the first wall. He pressed his palms against the car wall, and it tottered. Neat lines or not, the thing was as unstable as cake pudding.

As the cars curled around, their tires screeched and their engines roared. His hands still pressed against the wall, Silas waited for the two cars to cross paths, and then he gave it a forceful shove. The wall toppled over and smacked down hard against the tops of the thugs’ two cars, trapping them beneath the weight of several dozen vehicles. Surprised gasps turned into indignant curses.

At the edge of the wall, Leonidas dove through an opening in the falling cars. He turned the dive into a roll and bounced back to his feet.

“Thanks for the warning,” Leonidas grumbled, dusting off his fancy suit.

“I did mention a crash,” said Silas.

“Yes, but I didn’t realize that involved me dodging falling cars.”

“You performed the maneuver as though you’ve done it many times before.”

“I have.”

“Then I’m not sure what the problem is.”

Leonidas shook his head but didn’t comment. Instead, he looked to the four men shifting about, trying to free themselves from the pile of cars pressing down on their intimidation vehicles. “What should we do about them?”