Tim Akers - Heart of Veridon

I snapped the cylinder closed and fired hurriedly. Luck put the bullet into one of the Badgemen, into the meat of his arm. He fell and the others crouched and started firing. I scrambled out and ran down the street. I wasn’t sure how many shots I’d loaded. Not a full cylinder, surely, and one fewer now. I looked for a place to pull off and finish the load.

I darted around a corner and dragged to a stop. There was an iron carriage, the shutters riveted shut, parked across the avenue. It was cold, the chill washing off it in sheets, breathtaking in the day’s freakish heat. I had never seen such a thing. I was cold just standing here. There were Badges all around it, leaning against walls or talking quietly among themselves. They were dressed in winter gear, heavy gloves on their hands. Their skin was pale and their faces were puffy, like they hadn’t been sleeping well. They looked up.

I shot the closest one, stepped forward and put my shoulder into his chest as he staggered, knocking him into one of his boys. The rest started to draw, but I kept my gun low and shooting. I fired three times before I heard that horrible dry snap of an empty chamber. The Badges were down, either bleeding or behind cover. There had been other shots, I slowly realized, and my chest and leg were hot. I looked down, saw that I was on one knee, saw red, red blood running down my shirt.

I stood up, staggered, stumbled past the carriage. Someone was yelling and I turned. The street was incredibly close, a tunnel of buildings and a burning sky pressed down. The Badges were hidden behind the iron box of the carriage. I waved my pistol at them, shuffling backward. My chest was tearing itself apart.

Another carriage rolled up, pulling between me and the iron box. Its engine clattered like shuffling plates as it idled. I put my hand on the side. There was a lace of blood between my fingers, and I winced as the door opened. It was Emily, and she was waving that wicked little shotgun at the Badges.

“You’re making a lot of noise, Jacob.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. My voice sounded flat in my head. “We’re having a little party, me and the Badge.” I coughed and pain lanced through my lungs. “You joining us?”

“No, no, I think we’ll be going now. Get in.”

“Not sure I should. Where you been, Em?”

She grimaced. “Get in or get fucked, Burn.”

“I gotta choose? Any way we could arrange both?”

Emily cuffed me and jerked my collar. I rolled into the carriage and lay down. Emily closed the door and, with one last look down the street at the iron carriage and its lurking guard, drove away.

I woke up with most of my ribs broken and some guy’s bloody hands fiddling with the damage. He was a tall guy, thin, his skin paper smooth and his face long and narrow. He was formally dressed, the cuffs of his sleeves neatly folded back and pinned in place. His arms were all bone, like the meat had been sucked away. I didn’t know him, so I tried to sit up. The pain knocked me down before I’d gotten very far into it. It felt like my lungs were stapled to the table. I moaned and rolled my head to one side. Emily was there, her hands folded in her lap. She smiled a little.

“Who’s the guy?” I asked. My voice sounded ragged, and the pain in my chest bundled up again.

“Wilson. He’s a friend of mine, Jacob.”

“Wilson,” I grunted. “Wilson. You were part of that group of blockade runners, during the Waterday riots. That Wilson?”

“Different guy,” he said.

I started to pull myself up. “All respect, Emily. I don’t get cut by someone I don’t…”

“Stop being stubborn,” she said, pushing me down. I told myself I was struggling, but honestly I just collapsed. “You’re in pretty awful shape.”

“You’re in dead shape, son.” Wilson smiled and shrugged. It was a complicated shrug, like he had a collection of shoulders under his white smock. He turned away and I saw a hunch that covered both shoulders and traveled down his back. Anansi then, trying to fit in with the regular folks. The anansi were a spider-like people who had populated the cliffs around Veridon for years before humans had found their way to the delta. They resisted when we moved in. There weren’t many left, and most of those were in positions of virtual slavery to various academic and governmental organizations. Anansi had an uncanny knack for technology, for all that they lived in caves and ate their meat raw.

“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.”