Aether Rising

Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve

Somewhere over New England, 11 March 1871

Iris followed Lieutenant Crow through the hallways and narrow passages that led from the passenger areas to the bridge. Trotted to keep up with the taller woman’s heel-sparked stalking would be a better description.

“Stupid girl,” Crow muttered. “We’ll have her precious n***o lover soon.”

“But you don’t have him yet,” Iris pointed out. “And you can’t blame her for not trusting you. Plus you can’t expect us to condone the killing of hundreds of innocent people to get rid of one horrible woman.”

“You don’t know what’s at stake.” Crow whirled around, forcing Iris to dart to the side so she wouldn’t run into the lieutenant. “Why are you still here?” Crow demanded. “Shouldn’t you go and join your aetherist husband in Escape Hatch Three?”

Iris straightened to her full, albeit not so intimidating, height. “Marie’s gone to fetch him and Maestro Bledsoe. We’re going to make sure you don’t crash the airship.” Not that she had any idea how they would prevent it, but they’d do their best.

Crow looked down at her with a half-grin. “I admire your feistiness. I’d heard about you, but I’m glad to see our dossier wasn’t exaggerating.”

Iris recalled Crow’s tattoo, but she didn’t move in spite of the shudder that made her back muscles dance. What else did the neo-Pythagoreans have in her file? Were they the ones who spread rumors about her involvement in Jeremy Scott’s death?

And did they know about the Eros Element’s evil side? They wanted to stop its use, that much Iris knew.

“What you have on me doesn’t matter,” Iris said. “Stop the attack. Now.”

“As you wish. Madame.” Crow bowed mockingly, then turned down a corridor that didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

“Look, we want the same thing,” Iris said, somewhat breathlessly as she had to hold her skirts and almost run to keep Crow in sight. Had the woman’s legs gotten longer?

“And what is that?” Lieutenant Crow made another sharp turn, and Iris would have skidded had the metal grate not prevented her.

“For the Eros Element not to fall into the wrong hands, to keep it from being used for evil things.”

Crow stopped suddenly again, but this time Iris executed a graceful half-spin and stood beside Crow. Iris couldn’t help but raise her chin. So there.

“How do I know I can trust you?” Crow asked. “You could turn me in as soon as we arrive in Boston. You know your friend Henry Davidson wants us all jailed or worse.”

“He’s not my friend. He appears when he’s least wanted and makes things unnecessarily complicated.” Iris couldn’t help the bitterness in her tone. Yes, he’d been somewhat of a help in Paris, but only after making them all feel threatened and under suspicion. And he hadn’t given them enough help with rescuing Patrick.

Crow’s half-smirk reappeared. “That sounds about right. Fine, we’ll declare a truce for now.” She unlocked the door, and Iris followed her into a room with a small window. The rhythm of the engine throbbed in Iris’s ears, and the stink of hot metal and coal made her nose run and eyes water.

Lieutenant Crow took a deep breath. “It doesn’t always smell pleasant in the belly of the beast.” She went to a trunk shoved in the corner and removed one of the clockwork butterfly mechanisms. She wound it up, and as it unspooled, she said, “Stand down. Truce achieved.” Then she opened the window and let it out.

“There, are you happy?” she asked.

Iris’s heart thumped in time with the engine. Would the device reach the right person? Would the message be understood? It seemed silly to rely on such a delicate means of communication, but she said, “I suppose.”

“You’ll have to trust me,” Crow put out a hand. “Do you agree to the truce?”

Iris again wondered how she got to be the spokesperson for their group, but she nodded and took the other woman’s hand. “I agree.”

“Good, then we’ll figure out how to stop Cobb together.”

“While I can agree to a truce, I cannot do anything further without talking to my colleagues,” Iris told her. “All of them.”

“Very well. But don’t think you can give me the slip. I will find you again once you’re on the ground.”

Iris shrugged. She didn’t even know what their plans were in Boston beyond rescuing Patrick, so she couldn’t imagine how Crow could find them once they disappeared into the city. But the neo-Pythagoreans did have spies all over.

In spite of the warmth seeping into the room from the engines, Iris shivered. What had she just done?

By the time Patrick regained consciousness, he was surrounded by crates. He unpacked the boxes without much organization, seeking anything that would allow him to fashion a lock pick or other means of escape. His concentration on his goal allowed Patrick to distract himself from the vision of the woman who looked like but unlike Louisa. Had he been in his right mind, he would have guessed the ghost of Louisa’s mother had come to check him out. However, he knew that an influx of electricity to the brain could cause people to sense things that weren’t there. Chadwick had mentioned something like that when he’d taken his nervous system class and talked about frog legs that jumped of their own accord.

Cobb had been too canny in his order. There was nothing Patrick, even at his cleverest, could use to escape. Any metal implements were too frail or too thick for the lock, and there were no tools he could use to widen the hole over his privy, even if he could stack the crates to reach it. As for those, whoever had dropped them off had pulled the nails out, so they would collapse under any weight.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Patrick muttered. “That rich bastard. And I doonna know what happened to Chadwick.” He collapsed on to one of the crates when the horrible possibilities for his friend’s fate slammed into his mind.

The crate, of course, crashed to the floor.

I better not have splinters in my arse. He stumbled to his feet and leaned over with his hands on his knees, trying to calm his whirling thoughts. He’d managed to push them aside while looking for his own escape because he knew the first thing he’d do would be to go looking for Chad. As for Claire, whom they both had great affection for, although Patrick’s feelings for her resembled those of a brother for his younger sister, she would be next.

Patrick knew Chad was clever and could possibly figure his own way out of the mess he was in. But Patrick had protected Chadwick since the day on the quad when some of the white students in Chad’s medical school class had tried to make an example of him for doing better on the first test than they had. Patrick had been delivering something and had dropped it to jump into the fray and even out what he’d thought was an unfair fight. Since then, Patrick had served as a bodyguard, advisor, and friend, and Chad had returned the friendship and encouraged Patrick to be his best self. Chad had convinced Patrick to get his master’s degree in engineering.

Then they’d met Cobb and gotten dragged into this mess. Patrick straightened up as much as possible. He couldn’t stand a cluttered workspace, although that was all he’d had at Fort Daniels. More evidence of Chadwick’s influence—his being in the military had instilled in him an obsession with neatness, and at some point, his tendencies had tempered Patrick’s external chaos as much as Chad’s calm rationality had influenced Patrick’s tendencies to get into trouble.

Yes, Patrick had to escape. Whether he needed more to rescue Chad or to keep his own worst characteristics from emerging, he didn’t know.

“Well, let’s see if you can help me out here, Eros you trickster.”

He assembled the aether isolating device—glass and copper spheres connected by a rubber stopper that could be closed—on a work table too rickety to support him but sturdy enough for his work, then cursed under his breath. He would need the ice water to cool the copper globe to make a vacuum, so he couldn’t progress until someone brought him some. Or maybe it was chilly enough—he could see his breath, and he put his coat on.

It wasn’t this cold in here a minute ago, was it? Rats, whoever is in here is curious. Just what I need—a nosy spirit. Or perhaps a useful one. He closed his eyes. He’d sworn after Paris that he didn’t want any more contact with the supernatural. But sometimes oaths didn’t work out.

“Whoever you are, could you concentrate your cold over this sphere when I ask you to?” He waited and didn’t get a reply, but the temperature seemed to warm slightly. Thank you.

Patrick warmed a little bit of room-temperature water from the glass bottle that had come with the supplies until it steamed in the two globes. Then he said, “Now, please, chill this one.”

He snatched his hand away from the copper globe before a finger froze off. Ice crystals formed on the globe, and once the steam condensed into water again, but this time only inside the copper, he shut the stopper between the two spheres.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now I just need a tad more light.”

The lamp above the table flared brighter, and Patrick selected two tuning forks and placed the ends on the globe after striking them. An undulating mass appeared in the middle of the glass like an opalescent snake eating its own tail. He picked up two more, did the same procedure, and the aether stabilized into something that looked almost solid.

“Thanks again.” The light dimmed to normal. Patrick put the tuning forks on the table and, leaning on his hands, studied the aether cloud he’d isolated. Most aetherists and other scientists thought of aether as the substance light passed through, but he, Edward Bailey, and the others knew it could be and do much more.

“That’s fascinating,” a soft female voice said from just behind Patrick’s left shoulder, “but what do you do with it?”

Patrick turned slowly to see a misty woman standing behind him. It was the same one he’d seen when Paul Farrell had shocked him, but this time she shimmered along with the aether, and her features were so clear he could see the small mole on her left cheekbone under her eye. His thumb had found a similar one on Louisa’s cheek, but hers was flesh-colored, not darker like the ghost’s.

“Who are you?” he whispered and tried to back away, but he was trapped by the table.

“Oh, you can scoot around all you want,” she said with a laugh, “but you’re stuck down here with me and my bones. Now please tell me, do you have news of my daughter Louisa?”

Louisa should have been exhausted, but after the light dinner she’d taken in her sitting room, she couldn’t settle. She wondered again whether the events of the previous night had been a dream, but when she touched her left cheekbone, where a tiny mole just like her mother’s sat, she felt the tenderness left from Cobb’s slap. She regretted again that she hadn’t taken Patrick’s invitation to run away with him, and then she wished harder that she hadn’t inadvertently led Morlock right to him. Above all, she regretted that Patrick thought she betrayed him.

Frost edged the windowpanes, and Louisa looked out into the dark cold, where streetlights became stage lamps for dancing snowflakes. She shivered. Where had her father stashed Patrick? Was he warm enough? Was this weather a shock for him after being in the warmer southern states?

And why did she care so much? Even if she could manage to somehow rescue him, she couldn’t ever be with him. Being Parnaby Cobb’s stepdaughter and only heir made her a valuable commodity to be traded for the biggest payoff possible.

The crack of something near her face startled her into drawing back from the window. Then another sharp tap made her douse her light and pause, her heartbeat replaying the timpani line from the symphony she’d heard earlier. Girlish fantasies of Patrick standing underneath her window and throwing rocks to get her attention battled with the practical knowledge that it couldn’t be him—Cobb wouldn’t have put him in a situation easy to escape from.

Then who dared disturb her by aiming pebbles at her window?

Now that she’d turned the lamp off and her eyes adjusted, Louisa could see more outside. A shadowy figure stood in the winter-dormant garden two floors below her window, its face turned upward. For a moment, she thought the automaton lurked below waiting for its opportunity to lure her out, but she knew it couldn’t act of its own accord, could it?

Another tick at the window infuriated her. The stepdaughter of the city’s most powerful businessman, she didn’t have time to trifle with some worthless suitor, although she admired the gumption of whoever had scaled the spiked garden wall. Still, she decided this pointless exercise needed to end lest she be accused of encouraging strange men to rendezvous at late hours. She’d gotten in enough trouble that day.

Louisa threw open the sash and whisper-snapped into the darkness, “Whoever that is, cease at once. I have no desire to meet with you, and if you continue hurling stones at my window, I’ll let the dogs out.” They didn’t have dogs, but she gambled the person below didn’t know that.

“Miss Cobb, you don’t have dogs,” came the reply in a voice that sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

Well, merde, she thought, borrowing a phrase Marie had uttered when the maid didn’t think anyone could hear her. “Fine, but I still want you to leave.”

“It’s about Patrick O’Connell. You need to speak with him, deter him from his current course.”

Louisa couldn’t keep her cheeks from lifting, but she stifled a mocking laugh. “You’ve obviously never met the man. Nothing keeps him from what he wants.” Except his own honor. He had pulled away before ruining her although they’d both craved it in the moment.

“Please, you have to come. You’re the only one he’ll listen to. Plus, I can show you where he is and how to get him out.”

Louisa’s left eyebrow escaped from her control and raised in an arc of interest. “Oh?”

“Yes, but you have to come quickly.”

Now she recognized the man—Paul Farrell, Cobb’s pet inventor who was good with automatons and creepy steam-powered animals, but not much else.

“Why should I trust you?” she asked.

“Because…” A huff that could be a sigh produced a cloud of vapor. “Because you should.”

“Or it could be a trap set by my father to show how unreliable I am. Go home, Mister Farrell. I’m not interested in playing his games tonight.”

She closed the sash with a satisfying click. Who did he think he was, or how gullible did he think she was? She’d confront Parnaby in the morning.

But when she dreamed that night, it was of streams of shining light emanating from her father’s new street lamps in the poorest part of town. Instead of illuminating, they captured and devoured anyone who came near.

At one point, when Louisa woke, she found the automaton staring at her from the foot of the bed, but she was paralyzed and couldn’t scream. It reached for her, its blank eyes flashed golden, and a faint took her away.

The passenger airship landed in Boston at around ten o’clock after having been diverted around New York due to the snowstorm that produced a lovely intermittent flurry in Boston but had caused a snarl in air traffic around other large Northern cities. Plus the captain had had to slow their speed to give himself as much time to maneuver should another airship come at them from out of the clouds.

Finally they touched down. Iris, who’d thought she had gotten her air legs, found herself glad to be on solid ground, where gusts of wind wouldn’t make the entire world lurch.

The passengers had talked of not much but the mysterious golden cloud, and the few who had speculated that the Clockwork Guild—a notorious international organization—had appeared were quickly silenced by the officers. Then the captain had bought the entire first class lounge alcoholic beverages, and talk had turned to other, more lively topics with the help of some of the officers who appeared to imbibe but actually nursed their drink for hours.

Lieutenant Crow had brought Iris back to the first-class lounge and disappeared. Iris was disappointed not to see Claire again, but she understood and hoped that she would be able to call on Claire at some point so they could plot the girl’s next move.

While Iris waited with Marie and Edward for Johann to find a cab, a boy approached them with a telegram. He studied each of them in turn, and when he saw Iris, a large grin showed off his missing front top teeth.

“I’m to give this to the lady who looks like a fairy,” he said. “You’ve got white hair and purple eyes, so it must be you.”

He shoved the folded paper at Iris and scampered off so quickly she didn’t have time to get a coin from the swiftly dwindling supply in her reticule to tip him. She opened the telegram, which had come from Terminus.

“Regards McT. Have you fetched red yet. Working on CR. Rooms for you at Oasis, my compliments. Wait for contact in a.m. LFATB.”

The ending, which stood for Light Fantastique at the Théâtre Bohème, was Davidson’s coded signature. Iris wanted to be annoyed at him—as if “fetching” Patrick were as easy as going to the Irish tinkerer section at a grocer and saying, “I’ll take that one, please.” But as she and Edward had talked and discovered that they only had enough funds for the cheapest of accommodations for the four of them, she decided to be grateful instead for his help.

“What does it say?” Marie asked. “I’m guessing it’s from H?”

Iris nodded and told her the gist of it. “So we’ll figure out things in the morning.”

Lieutenant Crow appeared with a very unhappy-looking Johann.

“My carriage will be here at any moment,” she said. “I can give you a ride to your hotel.”

“No, thank you,” Iris told her. “We’re fine.”

“She chased off the last cab,” Johann grumbled. “We’re stuck.”

Iris, Edward, and Marie exchanged glances. If they accepted transportation from Crow, she would know where they stayed, and they’d all four agreed they wanted nothing to do with the ruthless neo-Pythagoreans.

“So I’m afraid you’ll have to take me up on my offer.” Crow hefted Iris’s valise. “Come with me.”

Iris had to follow, if only to make sure her valise didn’t disappear. Not that she had much of ordinary value in there, but she had brought what few items she had from her father. Edward and Johann grabbed the rest of the bags, and they all trotted after Crow into the darkness.

“By the way,” Crow said over her shoulder without slowing her stride. “I have a contact at the Boston Museum of Ancient Cultures who knew your father. He’s looking forward to meeting you.”

Iris almost tripped as her mind whirled from excitement at the prospect of meeting a fellow archaeologist who could potentially help her figure out what to do job-wise to dismay that Crow had beaten her to that avenue. Plus she didn’t need the distraction.

“Thank you, but my time here is spoken for,” she said. Marie squeezed her hand.

“It’s all right,” Marie whispered. “There are more museums here than you would believe.”

“Nonsense.” Crow tossed Iris’s valise on to the rear of a steamcart. “You wanted me to prove to you that you can trust me. I’m trying to help.”

“I don’t want your help.” Iris knew she sounded like a petulant child, but she had no patience for others telling her what she should and should not do. “I want you to leave me alone.”

“Not here,” Marie clarified.“Since we need a ride into town.”

Iris shot her friend a look, but Marie squeezed Iris’s shoulder. Iris couldn’t help her rueful grin at the reversal of roles—typically Iris played the part of the logical one.

“We can figure it out tomorrow,” Marie said. “We’re all very tired.”

Edward and Johann caught up and helped Crow to load the rest of the baggage on to the cart. Then Edward handed Marie and Iris into the passenger compartment.

“If you like, you can keep the door cracked so you know I’m not locking you in,” Crow announced. “But I do recommend you use the safety braces.”

“That’s quite all right,” Iris replied stiffly. The wind had picked up, and she didn’t want to add the breeze from the moving air.

Crow climbed into the front seat, and Johann took the front passenger spot.

“It’s a bit crowded on the back bench,” he said with a grin. “Besides, I’ve been looking forward to seeing Boston. I’ve heard so much about it.”

Crow didn’t say anything, only nodded, and Iris wondered if Johann was using his own talent. She and Marie had discussed it, how he could charm anyone, and sometimes it seemed that he had an extra push similar to Marie’s ability to make anyone believe she was what she portrayed, but weaker. She appreciated his stepping in to help. Meanwhile, Edward held her hand, and although two layers of glove separated their skin, she felt his love and support. Not for the first time, she sent a mental prayer of gratitude to whoever had put them all together.

“Now where are you staying?” Crow asked once she’d driven out of the airfield.

“The Oasis,” Iris said. She blinked away the disorientation of the steamcart driving on what seemed to be the wrong side of the road. No matter how many places she’d been, driving on the right side always seemed backwards until she was accustomed to it.

Crow shouted, and something clanged against the steamcart, causing it to shudder. It rolled to a stop.

“Johann?” Marie called. “Are you all right?” She unclipped her safety brace.

“We’re fine,” he said. “Stay back there.” The vehicle moved forward again. Iris peered through the window but couldn’t see anything in the shadows outside.

“What was it?” Iris asked loud enough for Crow and Johann to hear.

“I don’t know.” Crow sounded shaken. “Just sit tight. I’m getting us out of here as quick as I can.”