Shocked, I backed away. Half its face had crumbled, but there was something else behind it, pale white and bleeding. He threw himself at me, clubbing me with the ruined stump of his arm, the iron fingers of his other hand around my throat. I fell backwards. Twisting, I was able to get the hammer hooked against his chest. There was resistance, then blood, and I flung him over me. I struggled to my knees, gasping for air. When I looked up, he was throwing himself at me again, the wings beating and flailing, falling apart as he rushed me. I met him with the hammer, again and again, stumbling backwards as I struck, just staying out of reach of his hand, the whirring bloody machine of his stump, the hammer arcing back and forth, head then claw, head then claw, each blow hard and wet with gore.
The end was sudden, like a light being switched off. He fell to his knees, then his hands. His whole body seemed to pour off him. A glittering tide plunked into the water of the drowned lawn and swept out, tiny smooth shells like a ripple in a pond. When they had scurried away, they left behind a body, a girl. I turned her over with the hammer’s claw, red blood smearing across her white dress. It was the Summer Girl, the performer, her mouth open. The delicate machines of her mouth were clenching in the rain.
I fished out my pistol and headed back to the Manor. The lights were still on, the Corpsmen running around shouting and pointing rifles. I snuck along the side and went to the carriage house. I stole one of the Tomb’s cogdriven carriages and crashed the gate, rumbling down the road, the long way to Veridon.
Chapter Four
I took the carriage to Toth and left it in a stable under the Tomb family name. It was still raining when I got to the Soldier’s Gate and my clothes were soaked through. The blood and oil had stopped leaking from my chest, but my heart had developed an awkward grind that I could feel in my teeth. Dawn was still an hour away, though the city’s earliest and latest denizens were already on the streets.
I finally pried the hammer out of my coldstiff fingers and left it in a gutter by the Bellingrow, then caught a ride on the pneumatic rail that circled the city’s core. I ignored the stares of the factory boys and businessmen, took a seat on the pneumatic and rested my head against the glass as we tore over the city, the car rocking around the corners. The pipe that ran between the tracks breathed in loud gasping sighs of steam and heat as we ripped along. Below us the city dropped away as we went over the terraces. The farther we got from the Bellingrow, the newer the buildings. Everything smelled like fire and energy, up here in the ambitious orbits of Veridon.
My mind was numb. A storm of concern gathered around my temples, but I couldn’t get through it yet. The Corps would be looking for me, asking questions about Prescott and the angel. Whoever sent the Summer Girl too, whoever had burned a killer’s pattern into her head and remade her body into a weapon out of myth. The gun must also lead somewhere, must have someone behind it. There were a lot of troubles rising out of the Glory ’s wreckage.
The storm was still tearing up the sky when the pneu, let me off at the Torchlight extension. I walked the Bridge District, bought some kettle soup and ate it as I went. I felt thin, like the night’s trouble had calved me over and over, leaving splinters of me behind with each step. My remnants drifted up into the Torchlight.
While I walked I fished the ID card out of my pocket. Wellons peered up at me, clean shaven, young. It was hard to match that with the overripe face I had seen up on the Heights. No matter. Someone must know who he was, and how he got into the Tomb’s summer estate. I put the card away and thought about it. Calvin, maybe? Would he be up yet?
Calvin’s place was an off-base barracks, really, an apartment block that the Corps hired to keep all the senior staff that it couldn’t stuff inside the walls of the fort. The building was old clapboard, thin planks peeling away from their nails, stains and pitch leaking down their warped sides. Nothing’s too good for the Corps.
Staying close to people like Calvin was why I kept my room on the Torch’. My contacts in the Corps were really all I had. That and a good name, but they could only get you so far. There was a guy out front, a guard, but he knew me. We smirked at each other, as I went inside. Calvin wasn’t up, at least not before I started pounding on his door. He opened it eventually, wearing his dress coat and little else.
“You look like shit,” he mumbled.
“You look like an ensign who’s been fucking sheep all night. Let me in, Cal.”
We went way back. Academy together. Expelled, for completely different reasons, together. I think Cal blamed me at some karmic level for his own fall from the ranks of Pilot. He had settled into a desk job, and I had settled into a life of crime. We both had our moments of envy, but we got along well for all that.
“Fair enough,” he said, and let me in. His room was a mess, but inspections outside the walls of the fort were infrequent. I sat on most of a chair while he spun up a tiny frictionlamp and scrounged up a largely empty bottle of rum.
“What’s eating Jacob Burn, at this hour? Unless this is a social call?” he asked, tipping the bottle my way. I shook my head.
“What are you into these days, Cal?”
“Debt,” he said with a smile. “And loose women. Less often than I’d like.”
“I mean professionally. Last we talked about work, you were overseeing requisitions for the downfalls campaign.”
“So, not a social call at all,” he said. He looked a little glum. “You never come around anymore, just to chat.”
“It’s because I no longer love you, Calvin. I’m in a very satisfying relationship with a signpost. Now, will you focus for a second and listen. What are you doing these days?”
“Why do you want to know?” he asked.
“There’s someone I need to find. A marine by the name of Wellons. Need to know his last assignment, maybe where he is.”
“Not a lot to go on. But,” he stood up, finished the bottle and tossed it on his bed, then started looking for some pants. “I know where to look. What do you know about him?”
I produced the ID card. He peered at it, frowned, then distractedly put on his pants with one hand while holding the card up to his face with the other.
“This should say, shouldn’t it? How’d you get his ID if you’re looking for him? What’d he do, lose it?”
“Left it behind,” I said. “At a girl’s house. And now the father wants a word, you understand.”
“Oh, well then, I don’t think I could help you, Jacob. Got to protect my brothers from the angry fathers of the world.”
“Just put on your pants, Cal. You can help me find him?”
“If he’s on assignment, sure. I’m in the Registers now. Signing checks, balancing books.”
“You know a guy named Prescott?” I asked.
“He’s a twat.”
“Well.” I looked uncomfortably around the room. “He couldn’t have been that bad.”
“Says you. Now come on.”
We went out his hall and down the road a bit. The Registers office was a diminutive brick building with uneven walls and tiny windows. Everyone seemed surprised to see Calvin so early. We went back to his tiny office and huddled around the desk while he flipped through ledgers and frowned nervously at balance sheets. Eventually, he pulled out a sheaf of loose assignment rosters and began shuffling through them.
“You know, Jacob, I think it’s very odd that you’re doing this sort of thing. Was she a friend of yours?”
“Who?”
“The girl. Wellons’s little honey.”