Tim Akers - Heart of Veridon

“I need more than optimism,” he hissed, his face really close to my ear. “I need to know what you’re planning.”

“You think they’re watching us, Wilson? You think they have people watching out for us?”

He stopped again, falling behind. When he came back he was lurking, one of the Badge’s stolen shortrifles in hand.

“Cuz I think they’re watching us,” I said, when he was behind me again. “So that’s why I haven’t told you.”

We were getting close to the base. Its bulk loomed up against the sky, eclipsing the storm for a second. Wind whipped around the stone walls. There were lights inside, bright eyes in the night. There were a couple of guard houses and a bridge that zig-zagged from the main path, each bend passing through a tower’s watchful gate.

I hopped up onto the railing of the first bridge. It was iron and stone, and the rain had made it slick. Wilson followed nervously. I swung my leg over the edge, then tucked the ammunition into various pockets of my coat. I got the shotgun over one shoulder then turned to Wilson.

“Follow close.”

I inched farther out onto the bridge’s structure, keeping three points secure all the way out. The supports blossomed out into the open air, running to the towers and the other two bridges beyond.

“This is the plan? We’re going to climb in?”

“They’re watching every door, Wilson,” I grunted, then crawled a little bit further. “Every window. Just stay close.”

He had no trouble keeping up, obviously. He kept a couple protective spider arms hovering behind my back, another over my head. Halfway across the wind picked up, and the storm hit us. We were out of the Academy’s lee, and I cursed and hunched close to the bridge. The iron was slick. Below us the Dunje was a foggy smear, the tiny lights of barges winking up at us like reflected stars. I paused to secure myself.

“Jacob, I’m not sure-” Wilson said, then I fell.

My lead foot skittered off the metal and I stepped into open air. Wilson’s arms wrapped around me, too quickly, and I overbalanced and slammed against the structure of the bridge. My hands fell off their holds. I slapped at the bars, missed, slapped and ended up on Wilson. He swore in the tearing, shrieking language of the anansi. The wind pulled at us. I was kicking at the bridge, trying to find purchase. Wilson’s arm came free, then his foot. I sagged against his body, completely away from the bridge now. Both his lapels in my fists, I dropped, he dropped, and the wind took us. Screaming, we cartwheeled out into sky, into the storm, and we were falling.

The rope caught about ten feet down. I thought it was going to tear me in half. I barely held on to Wilson and his clambering arms. The rope snapped taut, the movement of our fall arcing us back down under the bridge. I slapped at the dry understructure, felt it slip out from under my fingers. Wilson grabbed on and dragged me in. We climbed on to one of the supports, nestled against the stone and lay there, panting and breathing and staring at the rain.

“Think they were watching?” I asked.

“You fuck. You could have fucking told me.”

“I wanted your reaction to be authentic.” I held the rope up and pulled a section of it tight. “Cut me off this thing, will you?”

He squinted angrily at me, then worked his knife free of his belt and sliced through the rope.

“That’s not even climbing rope,” he said. “It’s just a fucking rope.”

“All I could get.”

“We could have died.”

“Yeah, well. If I kept track of all the times I could have died the last couple weeks, Wilson, I’d get bored.”

He shook his head, then leaned back and rested against the stone.

“Is there some kind of secret entrance under here?” He craned his neck around to look at the craggy stone. “A hidden door that leads to the wine cellar or something?”

“Nah. We’re going to have to climb.”

“That’s what I figured you’d say.” He ran a wide, thin hand over the stone, picking at the cracks with his sharp little talons. “Could we at least look for a secret entrance, please?”

“There’s no secret entrance, Wilson. Stop being such a whiner.”

There were feet on the bridge above us, and soon rifles were poking down over the railing. Voices yelled all up and down the road. I pointed, then led Wilson around the edge of the tower’s wall to the next bridge. Not long after we made the second bridge the guards were hooking up climbing harnesses and throwing down belay lines.

“They’re going to find your rope,” Wilson whispered.

“Then we better get moving,” I said, and clambered off into the rain.

The guards were slow and careful, and the climbing harnesses were difficult to use in the rain. We were almost to the Academy before they found the rope. We were inside before they figured out what had happened.

We ended up in the wine cellar, as Wilson had hoped. There was a service winch with corresponding iron door. The lock had rusted away years ago. I wrenched it open then collapsed inside. Wilson crawled over to the near wall and started poking around behind the casks. Looking for his damn secret passage.

“Stop fucking around, Wilson.”

“Just hoping. I was going to laugh if I found it.”

“You’re not going to find it,” I said. I lay the shotgun and pistol out on the ground, then took off my coat and shook it off. Water sheeted out onto the floor. Once it was as dry as it was going to get, I put it back on and rearranged my arsenal. “Can we get on with this?”

We pulled the service door closed and secured it as well as could be expected. There was food by the door, I saw, and a dozen cigarette butts. There had been a guard here, probably pulled away to conduct the search up on the bridge. We had to get moving.

“They’re going to be putting people on every door and window again,” Wilson said, nodding to the guard’s leavings. “We’d do well to get to the girl.”

“Not yet. They’ll see we were here. We left water everywhere, and the door’s obviously been forced.” I hurried up the narrow stairwell to the kitchens. Those clean white rooms were empty. “Once they figure that out, they’re going to post guards around the girl. Probably already have.”

“So let’s get there. Hit ‘em before they’re ready.”

“They’re ready, Wilson. They’ve been waiting. We need to go somewhere they don’t expect.”

We left the kitchens and moved horizontally. The locked hallways where I expected to find Emily were on the south end of the base, near the center of the civilian part of the Torchlight District. We went north and up, gaining levels, going away from the buried, secret chambers of the Council’s hidden experiments.

We heard guards patrolling in hallways beneath us, chasing the routes they expected us to take. I wondered how much they knew we knew, if they had planted the seed of the Council’s laboratories in my father’s ear, confident that he would pass that on to me? They had overplayed their hand, then. I knew I couldn’t trust anyone, except maybe Wilson, though I trusted him more to act in Emily’s interests than in mine or his own. I was comfortable with that.

Wilson and I busied ourselves with mischief. We set a fire in the barracks, tripped auto-alarms in the weapon guildhall. We avoided the zep docks. I had them in mind for our escape.

“Are we just having fun?” Wilson asked. We were destroying the escapements in all the frictionlamps we passed, ruining them in a sudden flash of illumination. It was slow work, and taking us no closer to Emily.

“We couldn’t get to her before they closed their noose,” I said. “We can’t get to her now. Too many guards in too small an area. We could try, but that would just be shooting and heroism, and then we’d both be dead.”