Ryke had said he’d inform Badh of where the original text lay. It wasn’t that simple.
He wanted to leave things as they’d been for decades, to leave it all be. The grief of his mother dying had taken a long time to wane. For years he’d been overcome in waves, even if he didn’t show it on the outside. It’d wrecked him seeing her die, being unable to do anything but yell for help. Then he’d watched them all decide it was impossible to rescue her because she’d gone in of her own volition.
He flew the core for hours, helping repair small things, replacing crystals, helping to reset a power cable leading from the core sphere at the bow that’d blown. Mechlings scampered at his feet, bringing supplies, holding things, tying the cable in place while it was fixed.
Memories crammed in. This had been all he’d done once, in his late teens, when he was young and naive.
Badh was here too but he said nothing to him about the book. It didn’t seem the right moment.
He went off to eat by himself, to sit at the edge of the deck above the place in the sea where his mother lay and contemplate whether he was a coward or sensible.
Her body would be nothing but bones by now, sloshing about down there. The book being made of thin metal pages would be mostly intact, maybe corroded a little. Ditto the cable.
The Engine Sea wasn’t waik energy but some sort of associated radiation. It ate flesh if you left it in there long enough. A small dipping rapidly added to your blue. Death closed in fast. Sometimes people fell into the sea and mostly they emerged, though aged by the radiation and maybe wiser.
If a decker jumped and walked the bottom, no one would volunteer to rescue them.
Standing on the cores fixing the crystals gave you tinier doses, but the body took a long time to die from those. It shortened your life, made you a pretty crackled blue, but such was the lot of a decker.
If the book could be recovered, this would put the Followers into a spin from which they might never recover. It might split people into inalienable camps. It might also prove to be a revelation.
Gio and her visions and guesses had made him speculate. Why was all this happening now, when they most needed a solution? It was odd and he doubted he’d ever figure it out.
He tucked away the last of his food into a small backpack, donned the wing harness and stretched his wings to their full span, climbed upon the rail, and dived.
The swoop took him close to the sea and he skimmed it a while, watching the glasslike surface leap, surge, and froth. It was predictable, most days, which led to some of the younger men daring each other as to how close they could go.
Above, his wings flickered through the phases of light – startling blue from the sea, yellow-white from overhead lighting tinting the edges of the filigree. It lent a beauty to the flight he’d never surpassed in his life. Doubted he ever would.
He found Badh at the bow again, walking the damaged core in the cleated shoes they used to cling to the irregular surface. With a small upturn of flight and then a dip, he landed neatly. Then he folded his wings and walked to his brother.
“Hi.” Badh nodded. “We have a lot to do here still. Not sure we will get the crystals to make her better.”
“No. I can see that.” The piece that’d slid and crumbled from this waik sphere had been at least a fifth of its mass. “I have something important to say. Something I perhaps should have said a long time ago but I decided it was best left to the past. It’s about Mother and her book.”
Badh stood open-mouthed, his face gathering darkness like a storm from the outside.
“No. What did you do?”
He couldn’t know but was fairly sure Badh was running through all the worst possibilities. Maybe this, the truth, was the worst one?
“I saw her jump that day. She left the book on the deck. I found it when I ran over. I nearly jumped in after her.” It’d been so tempting. It was obvious she didn’t want to be saved, and so he’d thought on first judgment that it was his fault, that he should’ve done something better, that he should’ve helped her more when she came back from wherever she’d been.
“So you have that damn book? All this time and you keep that to yourself?”
“No.” He shook his head. “No. I tied a cable to it and threw it into the sea on the other side of the core she died beside. Almost threw it in after her but I hated the idea of it sinking down and touching her where she lay dead.” He pulled a rueful face.
“It’s in the sea?”
“Yes.”
“Ryke...” Badh half-turned away and put hands to hips. “You lied for years? To me.” He muttered. “You lied to me. It’ll take a while to get over this.”
He understood. “The book was metal-leaved, maybe the cover too, beneath the hide.”
“So.” Badh turned back slowly. “Maybe we can recover it?”
“Exactly, and with what Gio has said and found out lately, I figured it was worth a try.”
Badh’s stare was intense. “Yes. I’ll organize this. You fuck off so I don’t punch you.”
He snorted. “Don’t think you’d land that but I get it. I get why you’re angry. Just...consider why I did this. I watched her kill herself.” Even now the ugliness of that memory tore him up inside, twisted his guts. “It’s killing me to tell you. Dragging this up from the past...” He shrugged. “I’ll leave you to it. Also, be careful. Please! I don’t want to find out you or anyone else died getting it out of the sea.” He moved to leave, unfolded his wings then halted.
“What now?”
“How do you plan to do this?”
“Metal cable and book? I’ll lower one of our big magnets. Shut off power drain and that’ll calm the sea a bit. The hull coating down there renders the hull inert but the cable at least should be big enough to be attracted. Simple, as long as the metal is the right sort. Cable should be. Book, I’m not sure.”
“I don’t know what it was.”
“I know. I figured that. Hey.” He ducked his head for a moment then looked up. “I already forgive you. Okay?”
“Thanks.” Ryke nodded. “That means a lot to me. I’ll get back to Gio.” He should say more, but didn’t know what those words should be.
The flight back calmed him. He hated this shit, and so he filed away his emotions under Done as he walked through the crop, shrugging on his coat, and continuing down an aisle between plants.
She was near one of the windows beside the crop area, staring down at something.
When he arrived, he saw the reason for her blank expression.
A row of dismembered and obviously dead mechlings waved their bits and pieces at the air, stuck in unnatural poses. As if they were plants about to grow. Little legs, a few antennae, the shells. He went to his knee and dragged one body loose, dirt spilling. Then he turned it upside down and around, looking for damage. A large curled-metal hole led into the brain region. His coat lapel light shone inside the cavity.
“What’s caused this?” Gio asked.
Nothing remained of what should’ve been brain, a few shreds at most. The power cell had also been removed. He dropped it and rose. It was not at all easy to get inside a mechling. The Scavs never managed it.
She grimaced, gestured at the dirt. “Scary? I mean they’re only mechlings, but what could do this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe something has been happening Badh didn’t mention?”
“He said he was losing or missing mechlings?”
“True.” He stared over her head toward the residence. “You get back inside. I have to go inform Badh. I doubt he does know this. It could be –”
No, he shouldn’t say a sun-mad mechling. The topic was off-limits for slaves. A frightening thought arrived and he looked to Aunt M. Locking Gio inside with this might be a mistake.
“Wait. How are you functioning? Well?”
“I am fine, sir. Shall I watch the lady for you? Though whatever causes this, it appears to only attack mechlings.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“If you worry that I have been compromised in the way some mechlings are, I assure you I will not suffer that ailment.”
“Why is that?”
“My brain is different, sir. It only contains a small amount of the same material as mechlings.
And it was too coherent to be sun-mad.
“Yes. You watch Gio. Do that. Go. Now.”
Though it used up several minutes, and his brain was poking at him to move, he escorted her to the door of the residence and waited for the door to close and lock before he turned and jogged for the nearest gap in the deck. He dropped his coat and boots, switched to core-flyer shoes, and dropped over the edge with his wings still unfolding. They snapped out and he zoomed onward, sticking to a fair height above the restless sea. Something made him believe urgency was required.
What was with all these suppositions and intuitions? Even he was suffering from them.
There was something wrong. Or soon would be.
That woman seemed to attract trouble.
He expected to have to go all the way to the bow but instead he found a small party of deckers working from the waik sphere beside the sea, exactly where the book should be. They already had a magnet lowering into the sea. Badh was rushing this.
He swooped around the cable connecting the magnet to a small crane above on the deck, and landed on the sphere. Crystal sparked under his shoes as he picked his way over its surface. A dark, brooding man stared down at the sea where the magnet’s cable entered – his brother.
“Why are you rushing this?” He stopped beside Badh. The book would be on the very bottom and the magnet had yet to stop moving. Going deep, the cable unwound slowly.
“I think it’s important, that’s why. We’re already decades late.”
A grim tone. Accusing him maybe. He supposed they were late.
The cable stopped and began to reverse, and two deckers went lower to where the sea lapped the sphere. They guided the cable, drawing it closer to the sphere, feeding it through their gloved hands. Badh cautiously walked down the curve also, to stand slightly above.
The magnet itself emerged, cascading glassy plumes of the sea that smoked then smoothed into the surface. The cable glued to the bottom of the magnet...he recognized it.
“That’s it. You have it.”
“Wasn’t hard to find the site from your description. If the metal is weak, it could snap.” Badh also pulled on gloves.
More cable appeared. How many yards had there been? It’d been so long and he wasn’t certain. He crept closer.
“Stay back,” Badh muttered. “You’re out of practice.”
“I’ve less blue than any of you. Let me. Fuck. I deserve this.”
“The blue? Or the honor?”
It would be an honor, in Badh’s eyes. Maybe he should stand away. As he backed a little, the book was drawn from the sea. The little package sent a pang into his chest. The smallest shred of metal linked it to the cable, and so he remembered what he’d done – his mother had the book fastened shut with a locked thin cable in an X shape around the book, and he’d clipped the bigger cable to that.
It would break. He could see the weight of gravity pluck thread from thread of that fine cable, unwinding it.
The two deckers grabbed for the book as it tipped and began to fall back into the sea. Badh lunged. A man toppled in then the other. Neither had the book, but Badh snatched in from the air then plunged face first toward the sea. His arm speared in, the book held high in the other.
And Ryke snagged the back of his coat, stumbled forward a step, but he braked and held position, his legs straining. The two other men pulled themselves ashore while he backed up and hauled Badh fully onto the sphere.
The book was still clutched in his gloved hand.
Panting, he looked fully into his brother’s eyes. “I would rather lose the book than lose you.”
Badh clawed himself to his feet, also breathing hard, using Ryke’s leg and shirt, then his arm. He swayed. “Well, I’d rather have this.” He waved his trophy. “Thanks.”
The book... The cover looked almost as perfect as it had the day he’d thrown it in. His mother’s words. Wonder and dread vied for supremacy.
“It looks okay.” And he could’ve lost Badh. Whether he’d done this the right or wrong way, losing Badh...he couldn’t have handled that at all well.
“Yeah. I guess I’ll let the Followers open it up?” He turned to his two men. “How’d you fare?”
Both were young men but one now had blue writhing across his arm and face. The other seemed no worse, but beneath his clothes the picture might be different.
They shrugged.
“Okay. I’ve got years left in me.”
“It was worth it, sir.”
“You’re good men, good deckers.” Badh examined the arm he’d plunged into the sea. It too had added blue. “I agree. It was. Damn, it was.”
As he watched Badh and his men climb the retractable ladder to the deck, Ryke fell into thought. He’d saved his brother from worse harm, but suffered none himself. It hardly seemed fair.
They said for every ten new inches of blue on your skin you lost a year, and Badh must have at least thirty more. He’d almost seen him die.
And yet...whatever might happen next, he felt good. He couldn’t recall feeling like this since forever, since she died. Maybe over all these decades, he’d been drowning anyway. He’d smothered himself, trained himself to not care.
Maybe.
And he’d not told Badh about the buried mechlings. It could wait.
This, what had happened at the waik core, was why he’d had that urge to run. No one was closer to him than Badh...it had been like seeing a spear being thrown and not knowing if he had time to do anything except scream.
A picture of Gio flashed into his thoughts, her in the shower, bending over, and him kissing her, biting her ass, fucking her.
She too was invading his soul, bit by bit. Like a fucking disease. Obsession was not pretty.
And she’d never surpass what he felt for his brother. That he’d kept intact, even when he’d cut all else away.