Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

The very ease of it made her nervous. She had expected some sort of difficulty to arise by now. For a good two minutes after freeing herself from the harness and tethering the airship, she crouched with a hand on her pistol butt, waiting for somebody to spring at her from some dark corner of the rooftop.

Nobody sprang, however. Once the slight panic had passed, Charlotte straightened up and headed for the base of the statue of Harmony.

She glanced around once more to be certain before reaching to the back of the main figure’s robe where the hem nearly reached the pedestal. The gold-painted bronze fell in folds, and Charlotte said a silent prayer as she gripped a particular one of those folds as tightly as possible and pulled down on it with all her might.

At first there was nothing, no response, and her heart leaped to her throat before she heard a subtle click and felt the piece move under her hand just as Reginald had once described. Bronze squeaked against bronze, but the old mechanism still worked. The piece swung out and down, and she had only to twist it to the horizontal to reveal the little nook in which a switch waited. She flipped it before proceeding along the edge of the roof, counting stones in the low parapet.

First course, third from the corner, not the discolored brick but the one next to it . She pressed on it hard, twice to the top right corner of the stone, thrice to the lower left, once to the top left . . . and it sprang back against her fingers, swinging open with hardly a whisper. No changed codes, no tricks or traps with the mechanisms. The gears were a bit rusty, but a thick coating of grease had kept them functional.

And there it was. Small, innocuous, a nearly flat bundle of oiled leather secured with a strap. The buckle was green with slime, the leather mildewed, but other than that it was none the worse for its years in hiding.

A prickling on the back of her neck made Charlotte wheel around again, scanning the rooftop frantically. Nothing. Still, her heart was thumping again. The fear and the physical exhaustion were starting to overwhelm her. As quickly as she could, she restored the stone and the statue to rights and made sure she’d left no other trace of her visit behind.

The statue’s brightly illuminated front meant the back was in deep shadow, so Charlotte knelt for a final check of her bearings, trusting that her pocket torch would not be spotted. Then, with her next destination firmly mapped in her mind, she swung her body into the harness, buckled in and released the mooring loop from the vent where she’d hooked it.

All that worry, and it was so easy in the end , she laughed at herself.

Her foot kicked off from the roof at the moment the access door slammed open and a dark-clad, stocking-capped man burst through with an evil-looking weapon in his hands. He cursed in a torrent of foul French as he ran toward Charlotte, one hand outstretched, barely missing her toe as she snatched it up into the harness.

As Charlotte frantically turned the gas higher to gain altitude, she realized the object in the man’s hands wasn’t a weapon. It was a bull cutter. The chain and padlock on the roof access door must have defeated him too.

Straight up she flew until her ears had chimed at her twice, until she could no longer make out the tiny figure or the roof he stood on. Still she waited for a shot to rip through her from out of the darkness, and she wondered if she would even have time to hear the bang before she fell.

The shot finally came, a slam of noise that followed over a full second after an impact against her hip sent her swaying in the airship’s harness. Charlotte yelped and cruised higher still, waiting for pain to take the place of shock. It never did.

Fumbling with one hand, she reached for her hip and realized the bullet had buried itself in the box Dexter had secured to the rigging before she took off. The telegraph transmitter was no doubt ruined, but she herself was unharmed aside from the sharpening ache on her hipbone that presaged a bruise. As the knowledge that she’d escaped sank in, her heart quieted, but her body began to tremble as the massive influx of adrenaline seeped away.

He’d been . . . stupid. A stupid operative. Martin was in Nancy, he had probably seen her take off and surely notified his men here, yet this man hadn’t managed in all the interim to reach the roof of the Palais Garnier. Who knew how much time he’d wasted attempting to pick his way through that lock, how much longer it had taken him to find the cutters after he’d abandoned the effort?

He must not be much of a second-story man , she thought, and laughed aloud with a sudden burst of ecstatic wonder at her escape by a hairsbreadth. The operative had waited too long to fire his weapon, and then he’d shot straight up into the night sky. He’d been lucky the bullet hadn’t careened back down to hit him. Charlotte laughed again at the idea of the fellow standing there, staring up into the darkness, never expecting the bullet that felled him to be one from his own gun. She sobered quickly, however, thinking of how different the outcome might have been, had Coeur de Fer been the man set to catch her on that rooftop . . . or if the incompetent lackey’s bullet had struck a few inches to either side.

No matter now. It was done. Done , she told herself, trying to generate more of that brief, giddy enthusiasm to sustain her for the last sprint of the night. She would land in the predetermined location on the roof of one of Murcheson’s nearby factory buildings, and if all went according to plan she could review the documents with him on the spot. Perhaps after a meal and a shot of something stiff, for nerves.

Then she’d have a well-deserved rest, another midnight flight across the French countryside, and she would be back in Dexter’s arms.

That prospect at last gave her some energy to go on with. Something to strive for. Half an hour later, her first glimpse of the factory’s smokestacks gave her a true second wind as relief flooded through her. She tacked toward the landmark, calculating the distance as less than a mile.

She was more than close enough to be half-deafened by the blast that came from nowhere and everywhere, to be seared by the wave of heat that flooded the air in the wake of that horrifying sound.

Not from nowhere , Charlotte realized when her ears stopped ringing enough for her to gather her wits. From the factory . . .

It burned as she floated closer, unable to grasp what she was seeing. Huge gouts of flame soared into the sky from the ruined smokestack, nearly as high as she flew. She lingered too long, wasting precious fuel and darkness, until she could no longer lie to herself about the source or the cause of the explosion. Factories were dangerous places, but the coincidence of the timing was too great. Murcheson had been compromised, and she could only hope he’d had enough warning to escape the horrific act of sabotage.

Though Charlotte knew she was too far away to be burned, she trembled anyway to think of it. To think of all the people who might have been trapped in the explosion or the subsequent blaze that was even now beginning to spread to nearby rooftops.

Tears soaked her helmet lining by the time she turned her tiny craft north and began searching for another place to land and hide for the coming day.

“IT NOT ONLY can be done, it has been done. Not this application, precise, of course,” Arsenault clarified, tapping on the sketch that Dexter had brought along. It showed a round or spherical central object, surrounded by eight slender radiating lines. At the end of each line was a symbol, and at one corner of the sketch was a key indicating that the symbol represented a lamp. “Medicinal? Medical, oui , they use the glass tube to bring the light.” He gestured to his midsection. “ Içi , here, inside the body. For the doctors to see when they do the operations.”