Suddenly, and inexplicably, Maria’s eyes were wet and it was not an actress’s trick.
She aimed the gun at his forehead and said, “Then go burn down Washington, you son of a bitch!”
And she fired, and a hole opened up in Ossian Steen’s face. The back of his skull went splattering out behind him, all over the desk, and all over the priceless piece of carbon that sat on the edge like a paperweight.
Maria gasped-at her own actions, or with frustration, or relief, or some other emotion that she couldn’t pin down as it raged inside her. But she squeezed the boy, whose small fingers were clawing at her neck as if he could burrow down inside her body and stay there, and not hear another gunshot so long as he lived.
She picked up her handbag and the diamond, stuffing the latter inside the former. She leaned on the knob and half pushed, half kicked her way out of the small building and she dashed into the yard with the child in her arm and the gun still smoking in her hand.
At the edge of the treeline she saw one of the guards face-down and unmoving, though she saw no sign of the second one, or of Brink, or of Croggon Hainey-who she’d inexplicably been hoping to glimpse. Her disappointment surprised her, but she did not have time to explore it. Somewhere beyond the hill she could hear the surging hum of an engine lifting itself high into the sky; and somewhere down beyond the sanatorium came the thunder of inrushing feet-Steen’s reinforcements, or the remainder of the garrison, or surely some other problematic bunch of men.
Maria disentangled the boy’s fingers from her neck and set him down on the ground where he shuddered, but stood.
She spoke to him in a hurried torrent of words. “Edwin, you’re a smart boy, aren’t you? That’s why you live with Doctor Smeeks, down in the basement, isn’t that right?” He nodded, and she continued with the same fast patter, “Doctor Smeeks is making a weapon, but only because that terrible man was threatening to harm you. Now you must do something for me, do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said so softly she barely heard him.
“You must return to the basement and destroy the machine-and I don’t think the doctor will stop you. He didn’t want to build it in the first place. You must demolish it completely, so it can never be used and never be fixed. You must run and do it now, before anyone realizes what’s happened here. Do you know where you are?”
He looked back at the building, and then at the trail. He said, “Yes” a bit louder this time.
“You know the way back to the sanatorium?”
“Yes,” he declared, and sounded stronger still.
“Then run. Go. Don’t stop and don’t tell anyone but the doctor what you must do. Or possibly,” she corrected herself, “if you need assistance, you must ask Anne. She’ll help you. Now-off with you.” She patted him on the back and he set off, stumbling at first, foot over foot, but then smoothing out to an ordinary gait that took him off at a sprint down the hill and along the path.
The whine of the engine above was coming closer and soon she could see its shadow, like a swarm of birds or a cloud of insects, rising up over the treetops, and she felt a tremendous surge of joy to see that it was the Free Crow and not the Valkyrie; and on the bridge, through the windshield glass she could see a hulking black figure clad in a blue coat.
“You there!” someone shouted behind her, and she spun ar-ound to see a Union soldier threatening her with a repeating rifle.
“Stop right there!” ordered another uniformed man, the second guard who she hadn’t spied after the commotion in the outbuilding. “Drop your weapon!”
She jerked her attention back and forth between them and for the first time yet, she was uncertain. Maria had no intention of dropping the Colt and even less intention of stopping where she was told; and when the Free Crow soared over the outbuilding even the soldiers who commanded her looked up, and were amazed.
Thusly distracted, she took one last look down the path and saw not the faintest trace of Edwin-so she ran the other direction, back to the trees.
Behind her, the soldiers began to shoot. Bullets bounced off tree trunks and split branches, sending leaves raining down on her escape. They were running, too, pursuing her across the clearing and nearing the woods; but another round of fire blew forth from the sky, cutting a dotted line across their chase and pegging one soldier to the earth with a hole in his chest.
From the corner of her eye, Maria spotted her carpetbag lying where she’d left it. She did not pause her pace, but swept it up by the handle in a jerking lift that just barely threw her cadence off. She staggered, recovered her balance and her rhythm, and kept running while the ship above threw fire to cover her wake.
13. CAPTAIN CROGGON BEAUREGARD HAINEY
“Well I’ll be damned,” the captain said from the bridge of the Free Crow. “That crazy little woman made it out in one piece.” He pointed down at the flat-roofed outbuilding, and the woman with the child on her hip. “That must be the boy she was talking about. Look, she’s sending him off.”
Simeon said, “Still no sign of Brink. Where’d you lose him?”
“Down there someplace.” Hainey swung his hand around, using his fingers to point out a general area to the east of the outbuilding. “He can’t have gone too far. I winged him, I’m pretty sure.”
“What bit of him did you wing?” Lamar asked.
“Shoulder, I think.”
The first mate shrugged and said, “He might run quite a ways with just a scratch on him. You should’ve aimed lower.”
“I was running,” Hainey groused. “Through a bunch of trees. You’ll have to pardon my lack of precision.”
“No one’s criticizing it,” Simeon said. “I was only saying, a winged kneecap would have dragged him a lot better.” He jammed his feet down on the pedals and slowed the craft, letting it pivot almost in place, the windshield scrolling a panorama of the scene.
The captain grumbled, “Too many goddamned trees. Too many goddamned leaves. I can’t see a thing on the ground except for her,” he cocked his head down towards Maria.
“Speaking of her,” Lamar said, drawing down a lever that would aim the engines at a slightly different tilt. “It looks like they’ve got her cornered.”
“Where? Who?” he asked, even as he spotted the blue uniforms scuttling out of the woods. “Oh hell.”
Simeon said with a small degree of pleasure, “They’re going to shoot her.”
“Or arrest her,” the captain halfway argued. “She’s been arrested plenty of times before. Maybe that’s all they’ll do.”
Then, as she turned tail and ran, even up inside the Free Crow he could hear the soldiers open fire.
“Well shit,” Hainey swore.
“Captain,” Simeon said warily, “You’re not thinking…”
He said grouchily, “Yes, I’m thinking. Lamar, how are the front swivel guns?”
“Um…” the engineer squinted at a set of gauges and said, “Mostly full. Not totally full, but mostly. We’ve got enough shot to give her some cover, if that’s what you want.”
He struggled with something for a minute, then said, “Yes, that’s what I want. Strafe the strip behind her-keep them in the clearing, let her get a lead on them.”