“Monteroy, you’re wrong as usual. Endings, they are just beginnings. And until the great engines of the universe run down, it will always be so. And who's to say what will happen after that greatest ending of all? No, Monteroy, there are no endings. Not even the cage of our flesh can make it so.”
THE UNDERGROUND
It had been Grappel's idea to set up the floodlights in the snow: sweating beacons aimed into the sky.
“We've no reason to hide now,” he'd said to Medicine from his cot in the infirmary. “Let those who remain find us. The more bodies we have the better.”
It was sometimes hard to believe that the world had suddenly changed so much. Here in the Underground it was still all business, all struggle, but it had been that way for years. Though the urgency was gone from it, and the fear. The Engine had turned, the worst had come, and they were still alive.
Beyond the great iron gates the old world was gone. Sometimes, in the day-to-day business of the Underground it was a struggle to remember that. Thousands upon thousands had died, but it was still all so abstract. And when Medicine tried to bring it in, frame it with faces and friendships he had had, it became too painful. David was gone, and Agatha. There’d been no word from Hardacre, so they had to assume the worse there.
Better to focus on what lay ahead, on the many tasks that had to find resolution, so that many thousands more wouldn't die as well. But sometimes he took himself out to the lights. To remember and honour what had happened. Most nights there was a crowd at the outer wall, standing, craning their heads to watch the coruscating tubes, and wait to see just what might come out of the darkness.
Because, nearly every day, since the lights had been activated, things came.
Medicine lifted his head towards the dim sputtering and the sharp fingers of light caressing the horizon. An airship. The third that day. And this ship he recognised.
“It's them,” he said. “It's the Collard Green.” And he knew that they would be on it.
The Collard Green landed, in an ice field aswarm with airships at mooring masts. Medicine did not know how long the ships could last without hangars, and there was no way that they could broaden the cavern mouth to the Underground- facilitating flight had never been part of the idea behind it. They were doing their best to construct covers, but the weather was horrible, even now, some days after the Engine's activation. Though the mooring masts were made of reinforced steel, one of the ships had already been taken away by the wind.
He knew he would have to negotiate with Drift — word had just reached them that there were survivors in that city, too — or they might as well let the ships rot. One thing he did know with absolute certainty was these airships would be the last of their generation. There simply wasn't enough cow gut to make the gold-beater's skin. There'd soon enough be pilots and airfolk with no ships to work.
Medicine thought of all that pent-up energy, all those pilots's egos. Yet another administrative nightmare to add to the menagerie.
But before then, once the worst of the storms had passed, the ships would be sent out. To Mirrlees and Hardacre to Eltham, and all the other townships, searching for survivors or at the very least, bearing witness to what had happened.
David clambered out of the airship, shivering as the cold air struck him; his face stung. Twice the wound had grown so horribly infected that Whig had had to drain the pus from it with a syringe. Kara had held his hand through that ordeal.
The flight had been awful; several times he'd thought they were going to die, despite Watson’s assurances that he could survive anything. Indeed, the look of horror on Watson's face (and echoed in Kara's) was enough to make such assurances null and void. What's more, the ship had constantly required clearing of ice, around the clock, done in shifts that even David had been unable to avoid.
And all the while he had suffered the pangs of Carnival withdrawal. The screaming aches, the nightmares, more savage and cruel than he could imagine. Once on the ropes he'd actually let go, only to be grabbed by Kara and bundled back inside.
“You're not dying on me,” she said. “No one dies on me. Not now.”
And still, when his time came around again, he staggered out and worked on the ice. The hard work ground away his thoughts. The wind cut through them all with a dreadful indifference. And Kara — finding him as some sort of project — found relief from her thoughts, too.
Margaret alone had stayed in bed. Sometimes she would speak, but no one was ever entirely sure that she was speaking to them. Once she demanded her guns, another time her mother. Kara looked after her, too. With a kindness and a sensitivity that David found surprising and utterly wonderful.
No one dies on me.
And no one had.
And now, after that, here were so many people, unfamiliar faces one and all, until he came to Medicine. David nodded towards him and tried to smile. The former leader of the Confluent party looked at him and David thought he was going to cry. There was a hesitation there, perhaps a guilt, but not fear. “You're safe,” Medicine said.
David nodded. “I'm safe.” He moved slowly, every part of his body ached, his face burned. “But Margaret…”
“Your friend?”
Two of Buchan and Whig's men were carrying Margaret out on a stretcher. Solemn and slow.
Medicine looked at the woman. “Infirmary, now,” he said, and sent a man to lead them there. David made to follow, except Aunt Veronica was hugging him, squeezing him so tight he thought he might break a rib. She stepped back and grimaced.
“David, David! You look terrible,” Veronica said.
“Would people stop telling me that?” he said.
“I mean it. You look terrible, and if I can't tell you that, who can?” David put an arm around her, let her bear his weight. “You don't look so good yourself.”
Veronica huffed. “Look a damn sight better than you do! Though a scar is good on a man, and that will be a good scar.”
David touched his jaw, the wound still burned.
“I'm so sorry,” Medicine said. “This didn't turn out how I expected. Cadell was never meant to…”
“You did what you thought was right,” David said. “I'm here. I'm here now.”
“But if I hadn't…”
“If you hadn't, I’d be dead.”
“Time to get inside,” Kara said from behind him. “And not another moment on that bloody ship.”
His aunt looked from David to the pilot and back again, and gave him an enquiring look. He shook his head. Still, she raised an eyebrow.
“I've heard a lot about you,” Veronica said. “Raven Skye's sister, and just as wild.”
Kara stared at her blankly. “We're here,” she said. “We’ve made it.”
“Home for now,” Veronica said, and she didn't ask about Kara's Aerokin. David loved her for that.
“So are you letting us in?” Buchan boomed. “I'm tired and hungry and have spent far too many hours in the air. Let us in and be done with it.”
“Of course,” Medicine said.
They moved onto the gantry and David stopped, and his breath stopped in his throat.
“Here it is,” Medicine said. “I bet you never expected to see it.”
“No,” David said. “But I think we all expected things to end badly. And who could say that it hasn't? The Roil was coming, whether we did anything or not. All the denial in the world could not stop it.”
“A lot of people made it here, David. Because Stade had constructed this place, more people survived then we had a right to expect. Whatever I think of the cruel bastard, I have to give him that.” Medicine regarded David a little more closely, though David wasn't sure how the man felt about what he saw. “You look different, and not just that scar.”
“I feel different.” He looked down at the ring on his finger. It was just a ring now, its mechanisms worn out, soldered together by the final engagement of the Engine of the World. “It's the Carnival, I guess. I stopped taking the Carnival.”