4. Florence

Beads of sweat rolled down Florence’s cheek, sliding slowly over her outlined Raven tattoo. She drew breath slowly through her nose, hissing it out between her teeth to keep them from chattering. The room was frigid. Her blood was boiling.

She held a golden canister between her index finger and thumb, blinking at it through the goggles. There was a small mountain of gunpowder at her right, and a half dozen reactive chemicals at her left. She could be blown five ways to eternity with one wrong move.

“Adding mercury…” she breathed, entirely to herself. With deliberate movements she reached for the beaker she knew held the element in question, lifting it precisely to the canister in hand. She watched as the liquid metal flowed into the concoction in the golden tube.

Magic pulsed from under her fingers in uneven bursts. Controlling it was like trying to hold lard with her fingertips. Every time she thought she had a grip, it slithered from her grasp, leaving only remnants. It left her struggling to clasp it again, to find the same weight she’d held it with mere seconds before.

If she messed up now, she’d kill herself and blow out a wing of the Alchemists’ guild hall with her. One wrong move, one improperly measured powder or chemical, one second of too much stabilizing magic, was all it would take. A tiny smirk graced her lips as she eased the beaker back down to the table.

This tension was what she lived for. It was one half of a whole, scales that tipped with her every movement. She spent minutes—hours—creating, only to reap destruction tenfold with her products. It was what had drawn her away from the Ravens guild, the transportation experts of the world, to the Revolvers.

A sharp, metallic scent filled her nose. Smelling chemical reactions taking place was a new sensation. Naturally, large-scale or prominent reactions might be discernible to any chemist. But this was different. Her senses had been changing since she had become a Chimera. Her whole body was adapting to the introduction of Dragon blood. In the two weeks since she had changed, she’d grown half a finger taller. She slept less and ate less, but had far more energy.

As loath as Arianna would be to hear Florence say it, she did see the benefits of being a Chimera—of being a Dragon. It had become easier to understand why the Philosopher’s Box was so sought-after. A perfect Chimera—one that could have all the Dragon organs at once without the magic corrupting their mind, rotting their body, and turning them forsaken? Such a thing would change the world.

But Florence couldn’t make such a box. That skill set rested solely with the woman she had called friend and mentor. And now… now Florence didn’t know what she was to that talented inventor.

She set the canister into its slot on a stand. Her hands had moved through her thoughts. The distraction made them steady and certain rather than clouded by too much focus weighted on a single task.

Arianna had left without a word. They’d fought, she’d been aloof for about a week, and then vanished beyond the clouds above. Everyone seemed to expect Florence to have some insight as to Arianna’s methods, but she had none. She’d never had any. The trappings of the woman’s mind were an enigma Florence had never been fit to unravel.

Florence capped the canister with certainty.

She’d not been entirely honest with the Alchemists. She couldn’t quite fit her suspicions about Arianna’s departure into words, not in a way they’d understand. It was a feeling more than logic. After their last conversation, if all she knew to be true about the woman held fact, then Arianna had left to do what needed to be done. Florence marveled at the notion that it might have been her words that compelled Arianna to do so, but only at night when she waited for sleep.

By day, there was work to do. Arianna was above the clouds with Cvareh, hopefully not killing every Dragon she saw on sight—that would be bad for relations with the rebellion. Florence remained on Loom, helping those same rebels whom she now fancied herself part and parcel of.

She reached for her latest modified revolver. It was heavier than the standard issue due to all the gold she’d used. Along the barrel were etched Alchemical runes. Not more than six months ago, those same runes were nothing more than grooves beneath her fingertips. Now, they tingled across her flesh, begging for magic, whispering back to her of the power she’d stored in them. It was an interesting sort of science that had to be felt as much as it was learned.

Florence grabbed her pea coat and slung it over her shoulders, venturing into the heart of the Alchemists’ Guild.

It was quiet in the early hours of the morning. Most still slept and the golden elevators were silent. She no longer needed the assistance of another to make the lifts move. With a thought, she reached out to the metal magically, forcing it downward. The gears beneath the platform groaned to life. Their teeth slotted into grooves on the wall, clicking down the length of the tower that served as the heart of the most secretive guild in the world.

She ventured out into the Skeleton Forest, as hazy as the impenetrable layer of clouds above Loom. Ghostly wisps wove around trees and obscured shrubs. Magic singed across the back of her neck, alerting her to all the traps the Alchemists had placed to ward off the deadly Endwig. Florence was careful to avoid them; if the traps were mighty enough to slay one of the haunting creatures, they would no doubt render her to a pulp in seconds.

Just beyond the edge of the traps’ territory was where she’d made her range—a decent winding walk from the guild hall. Florence didn’t presume her activities had gone unnoticed. Her detonations weren’t exactly subtle. But she hadn’t expected to find a trike waiting for her.

A man lay out in the seat of the vehicle, his knees draped over the handlebars. His hands were folded behind his head, their obsidian skin nearly blending in with the iron of his hair in the dim light. He wore a loose shirt, barely decent enough to be counted as a dressing for bed, and loose pants that were nearly the same shade of brown as the bronze of his vehicle.

Florence was accustomed now to Derek venturing about in such a lax state of undress, but it had been the cause for much surprise the first early morning they’d worked together.

“I was wondering when you’d show.” He beat her to the first word.

“I might have never. I don’t come out here every morning.” Florence continued onward, narrowing the distance between her and the trike positioned right at the start of her makeshift shooting range.

“You come out here every morning you get up early to finish a canister.” He peered at her with one golden eye. It was a dark color, nearly smoldering red. Against the dark ash of his skin, it looked like an ember that remained in wait for the chance to spark fire again.

“I didn’t know you paid that much attention to my work.” Florence rounded the large tires of the vehicle. On the other side was a long stretch of bare forest. Holes of upturned earth marked the spaces that Florence had used as testing grounds for bombs. A tree wider than four of her rested perpendicular to her line of sight. Countless pockmarks pitted its surface from rounds long past. Whole chunks had been reduced to sawdust along the stretch of trunk. Today, if Florence’s round worked as she hoped, there would be another gaping maw in its bark.

“I’ve paid attention to your work from the first time I saw it.”

That wasn’t untrue. Derek had always heeded Florence’s input. But only when it came to the things that were important to him. She’d been all too eager to help the rebellion however she could, and with her connections in Ter.4’s Underground through Will and Helen, and ties in Mercury Town, that meant assisting with getting the Alchemists the necessary supplies the Dragon King had been trying to throttle.

To date, Florence had only very minor successes on that front, and she could tell that it was beginning to grate on the nerves of the powers in the Alchemists’ Guild. Florence opened the hinge on her revolver in frustration. No matter how much she explained otherwise, they saw the tattoo on her cheek—the outline of a raven—before listening to her about where her skills lay. She knew nothing about how long it would take to get supplies across the world. She didn’t understand the nuances of seafaring. And train schedules made her eyes blur over. The Alchemists needed a true Raven to accomplish what they wanted; Florence could make the right introductions, but she was useless beyond that.

“You’re going to break the gun if you keep loading rounds like that.” Derek drew in his feet, sitting upward in the seat of the trike.

“Actually, this is an alpha model. The hinges are more durable than the beta versions, cast in high heat steel.” Florence held up the gun, inspecting it in the light. “I’ve also reinforced the locking mechanism and tightened the springs. It’s meant to hold up under the strain of active combat, so it can take a bit of abuse from canister loading.”

Derek was silent, but she could feel his eyes on her back. There was a certain type of power that came from knowing she had done something to earn stiff-lipped respect. Eventually, she might even get through to him and the rest of them that her value extended far beyond the marking on her cheek.

Let him watch, Florence thought as she pushed small piles of dirt on either side of her feet to assume a wide firing stance. She wanted him to see the fruits of her labor. To respect her ingenuity like she had respected Ari’s for years.

Power surged though her arms. It was leeched from her blood like sweat from pores on a hot day. It oozed through her hands and flowed in a perfect channel to the runes along the barrel. It wrapped around the canister like a constricting serpent.

Her finger curled around the trigger. That was always her favorite moment: the half second when her skin first came in contact with the trigger of a gun. It was a surge of power. Judgment encased in metal, welded together with the ability to change the world with the merest twitch of muscle. In that breath, everything else faded away, and Florence felt like the universe hung on her will.

The last rune along the barrel lit up. The charge was too slow, but she could work on that later. Florence took her aim and pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded in her hand with a rain of shrapnel. She tumbled backward, half in surprise and half from force. A clumsy beam of energy shot forward, radiating outward and carving a ditch into the earth underneath the line of its shot.

She hit the ground ungracefully, bringing a hand up to her stinging face. Bits of metal were lodged into her cheek. The pain was ringing in her ears and the exhaustion from her magic working overtime set in, forming bruises along her legs as it tried to heal the cuts on her face.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” Derek muttered.

Florence hadn’t heard him move, but he was now squatted before her. One hand curled around the more intact side of her face. She blinked away the haze as his other hand began to pick out the bits of metal. Even when he wasn’t trying to be graceful, his movements held a surgical precision. Her eyes settled on the tattoo on his cheek: two solid black triangles, one pointing up, the other down, connected by a line.

“It wasn’t a bad attempt.” It was clear his compliment was nothing more than placating. No, it was a positively miserable attempt. Embarrassment stung the back of her throat, becoming more potent with the taste of blood.

“Then I never want to see a bad attempt of yours.” Derek knew she was lying, his chuckle told her so. But the statement was void of any sting.

Her magic had set her face to knitting at the expense of some burst blood vessels. That was the way of magic. Florence had always known it, but this was the first time she was experiencing it. When magic was overused it turned the organs it lived in—which, in Flor’s case, was her blood—brittle and necrotic. If too much magic was used, the body was pushed beyond repair.

She looked with clarity and a heavy sigh on the broken remnants of her revolver. She’d need another, more gold, more chemicals… She wasn’t looking forward to another trip to the armory.

“Up with you.” Derek took her hands, pulling her to her feet. “Nora wasn’t up late last night. She’ll be awake soon and wondering where we are.”

The man relinquished her fingers and walked back over to the trike. Florence stood in limbo. She felt trapped between the failure of her passions and the weak successes of a duty she’d never wanted.

“Flor?” Derek called from atop the vehicle.

“Coming.” She left the remnants of the gun in the dirt. Failure was a missed shot; quitting was never reloading the gun. She was Florence, student of the White Wraith, and she did not quit.