“I’ve seen worse,” he said, “but not in people who were talking.” He turned back to me, holding something that looked like a prehensile corkscrew. I saw the other signs of his type, the tiny sharp teeth, the hooked talon fingernails. He smiled. “You should hold still.”
I did. The next bit hurt a lot, and I probably passed out for the bloodier parts. Next clear thought I had was hunger, and I was sitting up in some kind of stiff chair. Wilson was looking at me curiously, like he wasn’t sure what I was. I nodded to him.
“Thanks for taking care of me. Kind.” I found it hard to talk, like I was short of breath from running. Wilson smiled that tiny teeth smile again.
“It’s the sort of kindness money can buy, Mr. Burn. Money and curiosity. You really should be dead.”
“PilotEngine.” I waved at my chest. “Keeps the meat going so the zep doesn’t flip out in case the Pilot gets hurt in bad weather or war. In some ways, a Pilot is the only important person on a ship.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He was wearing city clothes now, a tight vest and dress shirt. The hunch was more pronounced. It shifted while he talked. “You’re no Pilot, Jacob Burn.”
“Fuck you, okay. I know my history, I know what happened. I remember. I don’t need people telling me.”
“Excuse me.” Wilson folded his arms. “Let me step in. I don’t know anything about you. Okay? Maybe you’re some kind of crime world celebrity or something, but I don’t fucking know. I find your reaction amusingly self-important, but you need to just listen to me. You’re not a Pilot.”
I stared at him. I didn’t know what to say.
“Not a Pilot. But, the Academy?”
“Oh, you might have trained to be a Pilot. But that,” he pointed one long, sharp finger at my chest. “That has nothing to do with piloting. Not in the immediate sense, at least. How much do you know about biotics?”
“Biotics. Like the Artificers Guild?” Like the Summer Girl, I thought.
“Right. Specifically, in how it relates to cogwork. Their relationship.”
“It doesn’t. I mean, they’re separate sciences,” I said.
“Separate sciences that do similar things.” He walked slowly around the room, and for the first time I became solidly aware of the space I was in. It looked like an operating theater, the surrounding tiers of seats dusty and abandoned, disappearing up into the unlit heights of the room. The ground level operating room had been strewn with the stuff of a house: a desk, two chairs, random narrow tables that held all manner of devices, even a bed shoved up against the circular wall. The tiled floor was grimy with mildew, and a few thin rugs had been set down around the perimeter. Wilson stopped by one of the tables and picked up a tiny jar. He began to unscrew the stopper. “Not so separate, once. The Academy, as you say, trains Pilots. But once it served a more civilian purpose. Do you know what this is?”
He held the jar out in front of me. It smelled, a sharp stink of decay and dry vomit. I wrinkled my nose and glanced inside. There was a blanket of crushed leaf, and a shiny beetle rooting around inside. Wilson plucked it out with two sharp fingers.
“Engram beetle,” I said.
“Yes. An engram beetle.” He held it in his palm and presented it to me. The beetle’s back was smooth. It hadn’t been imprinted yet. “One of the few remaining practices from the old Academy. Left over from a time when the institute was committed to learning, to exploring the world around us. But now all that’s left is the Artificer’s Guild, and their little entertainments.”
“I wouldn’t call them little. The engrams are pretty incredible.”
“Nothing compared to what they could be. What they were before you were born, before the Church… nevermind. Bitterness clouds my argument.” Wilson held up his hand. The beetle was crawling around his knuckles, eventually climbed its way to the top of his finger, clinging to the talon. “Biotics is the study of the living form. What it can do, and what it can be. The patterns found inside, and how those patterns can be used to change the form.”
“Sounds like the Church.”
“The Church is interested in the pattern without. The Algorithm of the Unseen, as their Wrights are fond of saying. They try to divine a pattern from the cogwork they dredge up from the river, the scraps that come downstream, and they seek to impose that pattern on the world.” He flourished the beetle, waving it at my face in slow circles. “But there is already a pattern. Here,” holding up the beetle, and then waving at me, then at himself, “And here, and here.”
“Still sounds like the Church to me,” I grumbled. “Is this going somewhere?”
“It is,” he said and smiled. “Your engine, supposedly designed to allow you to impose your will on the mighty zepliner, is something else. All cogwork derives from the patterns of the Church, and yet this is something different. Something I have never seen, and I have seen a great many things. It is a pattern.” His smile was uncomfortably bright. He presented the beetle, “That I wish to understand.”
“The Academy installed it. Ask them.”
“They are not here. Beetling is nothing to be afraid of, Jacob Burn.”
I looked around the room, desperately. My chest hurt like hell, and Wilson’s eyes were exceptionally bright, his teeth exceptionally sharp. “Where’s Emily?”
“She’s not here either. Take the beetle. I only want to imprint the pattern of your heart, to see what has been done to you.”
“I told you, it’s a PilotEngine, the Academy installed it.”
“They may have, but I assure you.” He leaned into me, close. His breath smelled like old linen stored too long. “That is no Pilot’s Engine. If it were, you would be dead. The Engine can do many things, and yes, it is designed to provide the Pilot with a great deal of resiliency. But nothing the Church can produce would have saved your life today. So.” He took my chin in his hand and forced my jaw open. He placed the beetle delicately on my teeth. I struggled, I put my hand on his wrist but in my weakened state his muscles were like iron bands. The beetle scurried forward, clicked against my back teeth as I gagged to keep it away, and then it was down, it was forcing its way down my throat until all I could feel was a dry scuttling in my lungs and heart.
I fell back against the table, the light leaving my eyes, the darkened ceiling of the theater swelling down to fill my head and I was gone.
Chapter Six
Emily was leaning across me, her breasts smashed against my ribs. I tried to make a joke and coughed instead. It sounded like a rusty winch, that cough. She sat up suddenly and put her palm in the middle of my chest.
“You look horrible,” she said.
“Feel it.” My throat was sandy-dry. I put a hand to my mouth and felt sticky blood on my lips. “Nice friends you got.”
Emily shrugged. “Wilson does his things, and he does them well. You should feel lucky that he owes me. His services are expensive.”
“My debt.” I tried to sit up, but the pain in my chest was too much. “Where is he?”
“Out. Some things he needed. He wanted to wait until I was back. Didn’t want to leave you unattended.”
“And you? Where were you, while your expensive friend was stuffing bugs down my throat?”
“Some errands.” She leaned away from me and looked around the theater. The room looked brighter, but that might have just been my tired eyes. “Strange things going on, and I have interests to protect.”
I coughed. My throat was a little better, but not well. Felt like I was breathing glass. “You want to errand me up some water?”
Emily stood up and got me a glass, poured from a tap in the grimy wall. She sat next to me on the bed while I drank. The water was warm and cloudy. It tasted like blood. That might have just been me.