“How’d you get out?” she asked.
I started to answer, but Wilson shushed me.
“We lost her and found a back door. Things were very…” he paused, nodding to himself. “Very confusing. For everyone, I think.”
“Lost her? You didn’t kill her, did you?”
I shook my head. “Angel’s back,” I said.
Emily raised her eyebrows. “That’s sudden. Thought you said you’d killed it?”
“I killed something. But it was the same guy.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” Wilson said, washing off his hands in a puddle of rain water. “I have some thoughts.”
“Are they warm, happy thoughts?” I asked. “Thoughts that are likely to reassure me as to our own safety?”
“Not completely,” he said. “But they may shed some light on what we’re dealing with here.”
“Then keep them to yourself.” I stretched out on the floor and laced my fingers behind my neck. “I’m limiting myself to good news for a little while.”
“Let’s hear it, Wilson,” Emily said, shooting me a cross look.
“Ever since you talked about killing the Summer Girl, I’ve been churning away at what could have happened there. What happened, exactly, to bring about that specific transformation.”
“I hit her with a hammer,” I said.
“Not… gods, you’re horrible. Not that transformation. The one where this little girl turns into a murdering angel.”
“Ah. Continue.”
“Well, the way that the Summer Girl works, the way all engram singers work, is the maker beetles. That and the queen fetus. The Artificers burn a pattern into the queen, the queen takes up residence in the singer’s internal machinery, and then the beetles burrow their way-”
“What?” Emily almost shrieked. “They burrow into her body?”
“You’ve never seen an engram singer?” I asked.
“No, you filthy noble pig. I grew up watching normal people sing normal songs, that they had memorized or made up or something.”
“Oh, right. I keep forgetting I was born so much better than you.”
“Listen, you little fucking-”
“Okay!” Wilson interjected. “Okay. So the beetles burrow in,” he turned to Emily, “through her machine. There are little tunnels that run through her body. Most of the transformation is facilitated by the machine, but it’s the beetles that do it. The machine is kind of like… like a hive, I suppose. Okay?”
“It’s still weird.”
“The point is, there’s a pattern, held by the queen. Sound familiar?”
“Cogwork,” I said. I suppose I had always known the two practices were similar, I had just never thought about how they were almost identical. “The Wrights have you memorize a pattern, they inject the foetal metal, and the metal makes itself into whatever the pattern dictates.”
“More or less,” Wilson said. “The pattern is also inscribed onto a coin and put in with the foetus. But without the pattern, the foetal metal is nothing. Just hot metal.”
“Where do the patterns come from?” Emily asked.
“The Church,” I answered. “And where do they get them? Who knows. But it’s the foundation of their religion.”
“So the Artificers and the Church, they both make their technology the same way?”
“Let’s make no mistakes, Emily.” Wilson sat up straight. “The Wrights only have what they’ve found. Their holy vessels come down the river, and the Wrights catch them and scrounge out any mysteries they can manage. They’re very good at it, and very good at applying what they find, but it’s not creation, really. More like scavenging.”
“And the Artificers?” I asked. I’d never met anyone willing to talk about the Artificers and their technology. Ever since their Guild had been unofficially disbanded and their role in the city gutted so many years ago, their methods were not a matter of public discourse. If they hadn’t been allowed to continue the minor entertainments like the Summer Girl, most folks wouldn’t even know the Guild had ever existed.
“The Artificers? Oh, well. They do things differently. Let’s leave it at that,” Wilson said. “The point is, there’s a pattern involved. Every piece of cogwork, from the zepliners to the simplest abacist, has at its heart a holy pattern of the Wrights. Including your PilotEngine, Jacob.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe they fucked mine up.”
“Maybe. That’s why I keep trying to get a good read off you, with the beetles. Trying to see the pattern of your heart.”
“Anyway. The Angel?”
“Yes, the Angel. You’re sure it was the same one?”
“Sure as hell,” I said.
“But you killed that one, or one very much like it, yes? On the Heights?”
“Right.”
“And that one, the one you killed on the Heights, the one we saw at the Manor Tomb just today, it’s the same one you saw on the Glory .”
“He jumped off, just before we crashed.”
Wilson stood up and, hunching over, began to pace the room. “Jumped off. Just before you crashed. And Jacob, you found this other fellow, this marine, in the Artificer’s rooms?”
“Wellons. Yeah, but he’d been dead for a while.”
“Do you think the Summer Girl was on the Glory?” he asked.
“No, of course not.”
“Of course not. Do you think Wellons was?”
“I didn’t…” I stopped. “You’re saying the Angel was Wellons?”
“At one point. And then, for whatever reason, it left Wellons and became the Summer Girl.”
“What? How?” Emily asked.
“I don’t have an answer for how.” Wilson stopped pacing and pulled the Cog from his pocket. “But I have an idea about why.”
He set the Cog on the ground near my feet, then crouched over his bag and produced a glass jar that jingled as he moved it. He unscrewed the lid and rummaged through the contents, then set what looked like a coin on the ground next to the Cog.
“What do you see?” he asked.
I sat up. Emily and I leaned closer to the two objects. The Cog I knew. The coin was a flat metal disk, dull, with lines etched into its surface and cog-teeth along a quarter of its perimeter. It looked old.
“Algorithm,” I said, pointing to the coin. “That’s one of the Church’s pattern-coins.”
“For cog, yes. This is what serves as the groundwork for all cogwork. Put one of these in your mouth, inject the foetus, and something grows in you.” He nudged the coin around, examining the pattern. “In this case, a musical instrument that replaces your lungs. Or something. I forget. The point is, it’s the blueprint for cogwork. What else?”
I looked more closely at the coin, then the Cog. “I don’t-”
“Pattern,” Emily said.
Wilson pointed at her. “Pattern. Yes.” He held up the Cog. “This is a very big, very complicated pattern coin.”
“My gods,” Emily said. “For what?”
Wilson shrugged. “I don’t know. But we could find out.”
“I’d rather not,” I said. “So, Marcus and Wellons and whoever else was on that list stole this from the city, and now that angel is chasing them?”
“City?” Emily asked. “Which city.”
“I didn’t tell her,” Wilson said. “Yet.”
“We found a map, at the Tomb place. It shows a city, huge, way downriver.”
“Like another Veridon?”
“Nothing like Veridon. Veridon’s a damn outhouse compared to his place. I don’t know what it is.”
“Okay. One thing at a time.” Wilson pointed to me and shook his head. “I don’t think so, by the way. I don’t think they made it all the way to that city. But I think that’s where they were going. They just ran into some trouble.”
“The Angel?”
“The Angel. Maybe he was a scout, maybe he lived well outside the city. If they’d gotten all the way there, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation. I think there’d be a whole swarm of those things turning Veridon to mulch.”
“Shit,” I said. I meant it, too. Veridon had been tough on me, but it was home. People here I cared about. Streets and buildings I’d known my whole life. “So, what? They found an outlying building, stole the Cog, and then the angel caught them and chased them.”
“Better than that. Or much, much worse. Depends on your point of view. I think they found that angel, killed him, and stole the body. Or at least part of the body.”