“Can’t risk that,” she said. “Some things can’t be put into play.”
We went up.
“Who’s doing this, Angela? You said someone in the Council was pushing the Badge around. Who is it?” I imagined these things happening at the Manor Burn, my family hiding in the walls, my father arming the manservants and bolting the doors. “This is practically war.”
“It does seem a bit much,” Angela said. We were moving quickly up a tight spiral staircase. We passed through another hidden door and were again in the common hallways of the house. The floors here were dusty, but there were windows and sunlight. The fighting below had quieted, but there were still Badge outside. “I may press a formal complaint in the Chamber.”
She led us to another stairway, another spiral that went up, this one hung in tapestries. We were running now. There was no question of making a stand. We were just trying to find a place to hide. We ended up on a balcony, a tiny cupola that overlooked the estate grounds. Badge were crawling over the grounds, tramping through gardens and kicking in doors. Angela motioned us down behind the railing. Wilson peeked his head over, as though measuring distances and heights.
“If we’re quiet, and lucky, we’ll escape notice. This is a unilateral action, Jacob, what the Badge is doing. Someone is acting without orders, or with secret orders. I don’t know who, exactly. But it’s only a matter of time before the actual authority reasserts itself, and they pull back. We’ve just got to-”
A bullet whizzed off the stone rail by Angela’s head. On another cupola, lower, an officer stood with a rifle. He was pointing at us and yelling to the courtyard below. There were already feet on the stairs behind us, hammering closer.
“I don’t think quiet’s going to be enough, Angela. We’re going to need to secure the door and-”
A loud shot, and fire filled my chest. I looked down to see my shirt blackened with powder. The blood started, hot across my ribs.
Angela turned her pistol to Wilson, holding it steadily at his head. “I’m sorry, Jacob. I can’t let them have it all. If not us, if not the Founders; well, then no one.”
“Yeah,” I choked. I could feel the bullet, grinding against the machine of my PilotEngine. Or whatever it was, whatever secret thing lived in my chest. She probably expected to kill me with that shot. It’s what I expected. “Yeah, sorry.”
I slapped the pistol aside and punched her. She fell in a heap, the Cog falling and rolling to my boot. I picked it up. Darkness was filling my head, an icy void that reached up from my chest to my eyes. I stumbled. Wilson put a hand under my arm. He was clearly torn between holding me up and slitting Angela’s throat.
Blood and the cycle of my heart pounded through my skull. I put one hand on the railing and pulled myself up. In the courtyard below, the little gray officers of the Badge had slowed down. The one with the rifle was still in his cupola, still looking at me. He was shouting, but the noise came through as a soft roar. I remembered the feet on the stairs and lurched to close the door. The lock was simple, but it took my clumsy hands long heartbeats to secure it. I leaned against the old wood. The Cog had slipped from my hand. I bent down to get it again and when I stood a shadow was passing over me.
The Angel. Twenty, thirty feet from the balcony, flying in lazy circles. Wilson was staring at him, his long face slack with shock. I raised my pistol and fired. The bullet went into him, drawing a contemptuous scowl. I fired again, again, the heat going out of my hand, my arm turning into river clay. He watched me, waiting. The hammer fell on an empty chamber. I leaned against the railing and looked down. Long way down. Wilson was standing between us, both knives out. I put a tired knee on the railing and started to lift myself over.
The door behind me opened, the lock popping with barely a fight. Badgemen, their shortrifles glossy black in the sun. They looked at Angela, blood leaking from her lips, then at me. I made ready to jump. Wilson was a clever climber, right? He’d make sure I got down safely. Right?
The Angel hit me, hard, screaming. Bullets ripped past me as the Badgemen fired in blind panic. Hot lines traced across my chest, then I rolled to my feet. Wilson was dragging at my sleeve, blood across his face, one knife sheathed and the other dripping metal blood. The Badge had fallen on the Angel. He stood and shrugged them off in bloody majesty. Wilson and I jumped for the door and stumbled down the stairs in a dizzying array of thin arms and fainting legs. He followed, awkwardly, his wings tearing at the tight walls.
I followed our path back, found the secret door Angela had brought us through. My head was hammering with the grinding tear of my heart. Blood was leaking from my chest, mixed with the oily gunk of my secondary blood. I started coughing and couldn’t stop. Wilson put an arm around me, carried me down. I stumbled to the floor of the secret passage and vomited while Wilson paced nervously around me. He was talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Eventually I stood up and continued on. I smelled more smoke, but that might have been me. My mouth tasted like ash. Wilson kept looking at me nervously, moving ahead of me down the corridor, then coming back to make sure I was still moving. Twice we passed dead bodies, Badgemen who had been cut by Wilson’s knife. I no longer heard the angel behind us.
Wilson stopped us at the corridor where Angela had paused. He propped me against the wall and bent to my chest, poking and frowning. Actual smoke was coming up out of the metal of my heart, leaking in oily plumes out of my mouth.
“You’re looking bad, son.”
“Yeah. Feel it.”
“We can’t go much further. That dining room is clogged with Housies. Looks like that Harold guy got his balls together.”
“About time.” I held up the Cog and pushed it against Wilson’s chest. “Get out, bug. Figure out what this is, what they want with it.”
He took the Cog, looked down at it. His eyes looked like a child’s eyes, so full of awe and wonder. Finally, Wilson shook his head and slid the Cog back into my pocket.
“Not yet.” He nodded down the stairs. “What’s that way?”
“The old guy,” I said.
“Seems like a hell of a place to keep your senior citizens.”
“He’s a hell of a senior citizen.” I was feeling a little more stable. The smoke had cut back. I didn’t like that. I don’t remember smoking before. I spat and stood up. “Come on. Maybe there’s another way back here.”
“There’s not,” Wilson said. He took my arm and pulled me towards the stairs. “This is the only way.”
“Well, then. We go this way.”
We took the downward stairs. I could hear the angel behind us, distantly, smashing vases and tearing furniture. He was looking for the entrance to the secret passage. Wilson pulled faster, and we hurried down.
The stairs here were ancient, maybe older than the house itself. They were rock, but smoothly joined as solid stone, as if they had been grown in this form. The air was quiet and wet. The sounds of fighting passed, and I slowed down. Wilson stayed at my side. My legs were heavy lead, and my lungs felt as though they were full of broken glass. I kept one hand, revolver and all, over the hole in my chest, and the other clutched tightly around the Cog. Angela shot me, I thought. She shot me.
We came to a door. It was old and heavy, the hinges gummy with rust. I fell against it while Wilson ran his hands over the surface, looking for an opening mechanism. It was warm, and as I lay against it, the iron seemed to beat like an ancient heart. I was just summoning the strength to stand and try to give Wilson a hand when the door opened. I fell inside, and the door shut behind me. Wilson rushed to support me. He got in just before the heavy iron slammed shut with a tortured grind.
The room was like a bowl, terraced circles leading down to a pit at the center, a stage of dark, polished wood. On each level there was crowded refuse, like a scrap heap, machines that hissed and gurgled and twitched in the bare light. Stairs led down through this mess. There were frictionlamps at regular intervals. They spun up as we came into the room, covering everything in soft, warm light. There was a lot of brass, and a lot of deep, brown leather. The air smelled like a furnace that was about to blow. There was something at the bottom of the pit, something on the stage. It was swollen and alive, like an abscess of the architecture ready to burst. Light shone off metal and coils quivered. Something was breathing with the cold metal regularity of an engine and valve.