Steal the Sky

Chapter 26

After they’d walked long enough for the russet light of the moon to drift near its apex, the sands gave way to grey gravel pock-marked with reddened boulders. Bad climbing ground, but the moon was bright and the way was clear.

Detan picked a likely path and then watched Ripka take it in. It was funny, he’d never noticed the way she looked at things before. He’d only ever given mind to the way she looked at him. Usually with exasperation and a hint of disgust.

When the doppel had been parading her face about, it’d usually wrinkle with amusement at a joke he just wasn’t privy to. Now her lips pressed together and her nostrils flared. She reached out to touch the problem at hand, picked her own likely path and found her handhold. Tested it. Climbed.

Detan followed.

Three heights of a man up the side of the Smokestack Ripka disappeared over a ledge. He dragged himself onward, and nearly lost his hold when her arm reached over the side, hand open wide to grab his. He took it, hoping she couldn’t feel the tremble in his limbs, and allowed himself to be hauled up onto the narrow ledge.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Didn’t expect the help.” He brushed filth from his hands. “Startled me, was all.”

“We’re partners in this.” Even as she spoke she turned her back to him, examining the next leg of their climb. Partners, indeed.

“Used to doing things my own self,” he muttered.

Ripka glanced over her shoulder at him, brows raised. “Don’t you usually work with Tibal?”

“Sure, but Tibs has usually got his own end to handle, you understand.”

In the dark the whites of her eyes flashed as she rolled them and he smirked, pleased with himself. It was one thing getting the goat of Tibs, quite another to rustle the calm of an honest-to-sky woman of the law.

The doppel parading as Ripka had given him a false sense of familiarity with her. He found himself wanting to make remarks she wouldn’t get. Point out things that probably didn’t matter a whit to her. Make cracks about ropes and chairs and rather nice bags. It was difficult, come to think of it, to separate out what was the original article from the interpretation.

As they rested, easing out the soreness in their fingers from the climb, he decided to bridge this gap of knowledge. “You never did tell me why you donned the blues.”

She hesitated, glancing back to judge his expression, and said, “Don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

“Thratia finds me rollicking about with you and I’m a dead man, so I think I at least got a right to know a bit about you. At the very least you owe me just why in the pits Galtro’s death matters so much to you.”

“What makes you think his death is rankling me any more than any other good man’s death would? I got a job to do in this city, Honding, something I’m aware you’re not particularly familiar with but, try to understand, it’s my duty.”

“Easy, captain. You don’t know spit from salt when it comes to me and my own sense of duty, but I’m sure I’ve got my eye in when it comes to yours. Big city like this one has gotta have men of all sort, good and bad, getting murdered on the regular and I don’t see you getting yourself all dressed up like a damned shadow to steal evidence over those. May not have been you in the flesh telling me Galtro was your man for warden, but I know your actress played it true, eh? He mattered to you, whether you care to admit it or not. Wouldn’t be out here risking your sun-slapped ass with me if you didn’t. Your better half said he’d been a mentor, that true?”

She stood with her arms folded, though her hands ended in gnarled fists. “True enough. He got me hired as a watcher. Satisfied?”

“Seems I never am, but that will do for an answer.”

“Oh wonderful. Now maybe we can move on? Sun’s only been down two marks but I’d like to make quick work of this if at all possible. Unless you fancy getting stuck out on the Black Wash come the day?”

“After you, captain.”

By the time they dragged themselves onto the comfortably flattened plateau which housed the Hub, Detan was breathing through his mouth and nose all at once to hide his panting. Ripka crept ahead of him, her chest heaving at an annoyingly calm rate and not but a few strands of hair flown loose from her braid. He was beginning to hate her.

They eased out onto a ledge of rock just behind the squat structure, and side by side they scorpion-crawled to the edge to see over. Below, the Hub was shrouded in night. The feeder pipelines connecting to the central containment chamber lay limp and dormant, lacking the familiar hum of an active selium mine. A few shadowed figures moved in clockwork circles around the building, and though their features were obscured by the dark there was no need to guess at their purpose.

“Not much of a guard,” he said.

Ripka shrugged. “What’d you expect? She’s confident, and she’s got the ferry shut down. Who would bother crossing the sands out here for nothing, anyway? There’s no work to be done. Look at the lines, they’re flat as man’s chest.”

“Never seen a man gifted in the bosom?”

She cast him a sideways smile. “I’ve endeavored not to make that particular moment part of my daily vernacular.”

“Wise.” He gave her the sagest nod he could muster.

“Indeed. You see a way in?”

“There are only two guards.”

He heard her inhale, harsh and through the teeth. “I’d rather not harm anyone, even Thratia’s brutes.”

“Well good, because my proposed means of ingress is entirely peaceable. I can’t imagine what you were thinking my intentions were, but I assure you that in pointing out the paucity of guards I only meant to illustrate that it would be simpler for us to gain entry unnoticed.”

“Will you get on with it?”

“Fine.” He sighed. “Follow me.”

The way down the small ridge was treacherous, but they made it without any misstep too loud or too injurious. Twice Ripka needled him for information regarding his knowledge of the working of a standard Hub layout, and twice he brushed it aside as knowledge most ex-sel workers were slow in forgetting. He was beginning to grow weary of having to lie to her, which was a first.

Alongside the limp arm of one of the feeder pipelines, he halted her with an extended hand and crouched to indicate she should follow suit. Hunkered down beside the deflated sheath of leather, he watched the second guardsman wander by little more than one flying leap away.

Detan grinned like an idiot at his own good luck and solid memory. When the guard moved out of sight, he grabbed her wrist and dragged her after him as he dashed for a portal so well shrouded in the curve of the building that he couldn’t even see it until he was upon it, though he knew what to look for.

He shoved his hand in the handle cubby and felt for the four depressions in which his fingers would fit. Saying a little prayer to the skies and the pits, he pressed down the clockworked buttons in the pattern that would have gained him admittance to the same door at a different Hub back home. The cubby shivered as the mechanism released, and with a gentle nudge the door swung inward. They rushed after it and closed it tight behind. Detan lay for a moment with his back against the door, blessing the Valathean Empire for exchanging security for ease of production.

“How’d you know the code?” she demanded.

“Easy, that. The empire makes all Hubs everywhere the same. Cheapens production, and they don’t worry about security too much because the kind of person who would have the tapcode for one Hub shouldn’t have any reason to be denied the tapcode for another. Simple.”

She pressed her lips together and placed her hands on her hips. “How’d you come to know it?”

“You already forgetting I worked the line once?”

Even in the faint light of stars filtering into the hallway, he could make out the flush on her cheeks. “I heard you went to the line when your skills as a diviner failed, and then again you shirked the line when your sel-sense dried up altogether.”

“I didn’t shirk a damned thing.”

He turned from her before he could see her face and stared straight down the hall, into the heart of the Hub. The cloth of her shirt rustled as she shifted, and her long hair hissed over the smooth material. The sound made him grind his teeth and revise his earlier opinion of her competence as a footpad. Didn’t she know smooth material had a sheen that stood out? Didn’t she know leather creaked and hair got in your eyes right when you didn’t want it to?

Didn’t she know he didn’t shirk anything at all?

“Which way?” she whispered and he blinked, wondering just how long he’d been standing there glaring down the empty dark.

“You want the records room, lady, it’s straight on down this hall and should be the second door on the left.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I’m coming. I’m just making sure this is still what you want. You get caught in there, you’re caught with your hands in it. Understand?”

She nodded, and he noted the lines about her eyes and the sharp bow of her lips. Not so soft after all, was she? He breathed out so hard his shoulders slumped and took the lead. He’d gotten his hands in this mess up to the elbows, and whether she pissed him off or not he had to see it through. Ripka might be inexperienced in shadow dealings, but she was no stranger to determination, or hard work.

So far as he could tell, there wasn’t a soul alive save the two of them in the whole of the Hub. It was so damnably quiet his own heartbeat deafened him and Ripka’s steps clodded his concentration into mush. She might be light as a feather over sand, but the girl just wasn’t used to walking on steel.

Funny that, how when there’s nothing worth hearing you hear every cursed little thing. If there were a dozen guards rushing down on him he wouldn’t hear them above his own arterial flutter.

The records room door was ajar, Thratia’s hubris showing through bright and clear. Clever commodore she was, but sometimes the head couldn’t see the feet for how fat its middle had gotten. Or something like that. He’d have to ask Tibs how that phrase went to get it straight again.

He nudged the door open just a bit more and peeked inside. The reek of the dead assaulted his nostrils, pungent and cloying. The battlefield stench of spilt bowel and coppery blood congealed with the altogether too mundane scent of moldering paper and wet wood. Lucky for them both, someone had had the decency to haul the bodies off, so the scent was fading. Still, the records room was tucked in the heart of the Hub and there wasn’t a window in sight. It would be a good long while before the scent worked its way clean. Sometimes it never did.

He took a pathetic, guttering candle from the hallway sconce and went in. The bodies may have been cleared out, but the stains they left told the tale clear enough. One black puddle up toward the door, another further down by the shelving, and a deeper smear between the floor and the wall where a man had sat down to become a corpse. Whatever weapons had been scattered about had been taken with the bodies. By laying Ripka’s description of the scene over what he saw, he could work out well enough what had gone on. And there were the miner’s boot prints, looking like a ghost had traipsed right through the whole mess and out into the hall beyond.

He licked his lips, wondering where the doppel was now. Wondering what she had in store for the city – for him. He was tangled up real tight with that creature’s fate, whether he liked it or not. Detan frowned hard, digging through memory to try and see around her easy charm and pained eyes, trying to find the core of a woman who could have wrought such slaughter.

It wasn’t there. All he saw was the doppel’s imitation of Ripka, all quick smiles and swaying hips. Not like the real thing at all.

Once he was sure the place was empty, he stepped aside to let Ripka through. She shut the door behind them; not hard, leaving it just the tiniest bit ajar in the manner they had found it. He nodded. Good, she was a quick learner. In the unsteady candlelight he watched her eyes roam, making an account of what she saw now versus what she’d seen in the afternoon. She nodded once, tight and sharp. Her eyes only snagged on the stain against the wall a breath or two.

“The files were back here.” Her voice was calm, sure.

He followed her guidance into the stacks, both of them careful to step over the sticky puddles. Blood had a way of taking a while to lose its wetness. It clung to life, clotted and damp, even after the corpses had been carted away.

While she found her place in the file boxes he stood an awkward kind of guard, keeping his eyes and ears fixed on the ajar door. One hand held the candle out for her to see by while the other cradled the handle of the knife tucked into his belt. It was a meat knife, but he figured it didn’t matter much to the man getting poked by it what its intended use was.

Ripka flicked through the box with the exacting eye of a woman who worked in government. She pulled out a folder that looked like all the rest to him and laid it open over the top of the wooden crate, fanning the papers. With an irritated grunt she set them aside and went back to her rummaging.

He sidled over, peering down at the discarded stack. A loading slip for a Valathean trader stared up at him, the ink already turning brown from time. A very small team had loaded the trader with just a few crates of local foodstuffs, and then off-loaded a single pallet of some local liqueur. Detan frowned, set down his knife and picked up the slip. Why bother sending a fully outfitted trader all the way out here for a couple of measly desert snacks? There was no way the mercer house involved made a profit on such a transaction.

He searched for the mercer house’s name, and found Thratia’s bold signature instead.

“Ripka…” he said, rereading the document to be sure.

“What is it?” Her voice sounded strained. A pile of discarded files had grown on the floor to her left, her fingers moving faster as she flicked through the folders. Another, smaller pile had sprouted under her arm, the sheets jammed hastily between her tricep and side.

“I think I’ve got it.” He thrust the sheet toward her. “Look here, Thratia signed off on this cargo – and there’s no way anyone involved made a profit with the quantities listed. This is proof of Thratia making shady deals with the empire! Nothing’s spelled out, of course, but with this I bet you could–”

She wasn’t listening. Ripka spared the sheet a momentary glance and then went back to digging, her motions growing in agitation, her lips pressed tighter and tighter.

“Ripka,” he repeated, setting the sheet back down. She didn’t even blink. “What are you doing?”

She waved a hand through the air distractedly, the other still pawing through reports. “You know. Looking for evidence, of course.” A curl of hair worked its way free of her braid, falling across her cheek.

It shimmered.

Anger boiled within his chest so quickly he feared he’d release it upon the sel coating Ripka’s face. No. Not Ripka. He should have known – should have realized Ripka would never knock a guard out and leave him to the elements. Never go slinking about in the dark, breaking into houses and recruiting the aid of a known criminal. He’d been so blinded by the woman – this woman’s – control of her anger that he’d mistaken it for Ripka’s hard-wrought nature. Had seen discipline in her rage. Had let himself be wrapped around her spindly fingers.

“You,” he hissed.

She froze mid-shuffle, gaze sliding sideways to meet his, her body gone rigid with anticipation.

“Yes?” she said, forcing her tone light.

Without thinking, he snapped a hand out and grabbed the wrist nearest him, twisted. She let out a startled yelp, turning with his twist, her ankles tangling as the papers spilled from beneath her arm. He stepped into her, shoving her back against the shelf hard enough to make the structure creak.

She grunted, breath that smelled of iron wafting against his cheeks – had she bitten her tongue? The warm tinge of her haval spice perfume surrounded him, the scent faint, as if she had tried to scrub it away. No wonder. Ripka had worn cactus flower – the same his aunt favored. He’d never forget it.

“Why hello, Honding,” she drawled, an irritatingly bemused smile turning up lips that suddenly appeared too plush to have ever been Ripka’s.

“I touched your face,” he growled, pressing her tighter against the shelf though she did not squirm. “Nothing. There was no sign, I’m sure of it. How did you…?”

She rolled a shoulder. “I’m afraid to tell you your actions have become predictable. Unlike my hair.” The doppel looked up and puffed out a breath, blowing away the betraying tendril. It settled right back against her cheek. This time, not so much as a flicker. The blasted woman was showing off.

“We signaled for you. We had the ship! Why all of this subterfuge? Why waste time dragging me all the way to this rusted hole? Do you have any idea what’s waiting for you, if you’re captured? Walking the Black would be a damned holiday compared to what they’ll do to you. Do you have any sands-cursed fucking clue what I’ve risked for you?”

“I wasn’t finished yet.” Her voice strained, her chin jutted upwards. Stubborn, stupid woman.

“It’s over. I don’t know what’s kept you here. I don’t know why you’ve gone after Aransa like you have. But–”

She twisted in his grip and panic shot through him, paralyzed him. Had she lured him out here to put a spike in his gut, too? Was it a belly full of selium for him? If he cried out he’d only draw Thratia’s thugs down on them, and then they’d both be sold out. Hog-tied and dragged off to that blisteringly white tower with its knives and its drugs and its impassive, bored faces making notes while he screamed his throat bloody.

But he’d escaped that tower before. Harder thing to do, escaping a knife in the gut.

Detan opened his mouth to scream, and she shoved a wad of paper in it.

He staggered back a step, arms windmilling, and coughed the spittle-laden ball out into his hand.

“Read it,” she ordered, then crouched down and began to gather her fallen collection of papers.

Straightening his twisted lapels to recover some sense of dignity, Detan spread the crumpled sheet flat against his thigh and rubbed it smooth. A few of the marks were smeared, his own spit spreading the ink around, but he’d seen plenty of accident reports before to know what he was looking at. Seen plenty of ones where people had died.

But the one he held had been doctored, made up. Every real report he’d seen before had been scribbled all over, bits crossed out and rewritten when the reporters finally got the story straight. This one was nice and neat, no corrections necessary. He’d only seen a report like it once before. Just once. When the empire had stepped in and provided their own explanation for what had happened to him.

“It’s faked.”

“Part of it.” She kept on collecting her fallen slips, not bothering to look his way. Probably not wanting to.

He read it again. It’d been a simple landslide, or so the report claimed. A small group of men working on repairs for a damaged line had been crushed by those rocks. He scanned the list, absorbing every last syllable. More than likely that little list of names was the only true thing about the whole report. Names that matched the list of young sel workers who’d handled Thratia’s profitless transaction.

“Which one’s yours?” he asked.

“Kel.”

“Brother? Lover?”

Paper crinkled between her fingers. “My son.”

Detan let out a slow breath through his teeth. “I can’t possibly understand your pain. But what you’ve started here – it’s over. Thratia’s itching to sell you to the highest bidder so she can go about getting her new little fiefdom tucked tight under her thumb.”

“Let her try.”

“No.” He crouched across from her, rested his wrists against his knees and tried to make his voice gentle. Cajoling he could do – but kind, compassionate? All he could offer her was a slightly softer shade of himself. “What is all this, anyway? What’d you even need out here – and why drag me along for it? Can’t be anything here worth getting caught over.”

“I knew Thratia’d lock it up. I needed you for the punchcode.”

He rocked back on his heels and squinted at her. “You musta worked here, once, knowing your way around the files like you do. They haven’t changed that code since I was a babe – why don’t you know it?”

“I knew it once. Then they changed it.”

“But–”

She snapped her head up, scowling. “I’m older than you’d think, Honding. Now help me get these together.”

“This is worth your life? We’ve got the Larkspur, you’ve got your revenge, and now we’ve got to go.” He snatched a paper from her hand. She lunged at him, her swipe going wide, and he popped back to his feet, skittering away a few steps as he scanned the information she risked her freedom for.

It was a personnel file. The name meant nothing to him, but the man’s profession was clear enough: a regular deckhand on Valathean traders. He stared, bewildered, as realization crept slow as a summer rain into his mind.

She’d said she wasn’t finished yet, he just hadn’t understood her meaning.

“You can’t.” He crumpled the paper and shoved it into his pocket, then kicked the scattered sheets nearest her away. “These people, they had no hand in your son’s harm!”

“How can you be so sure?”

She stretched to snatch up the papers he’d kicked and he grabbed her arm without thinking, lurching her to her feet. With a hiss she twisted, slithering away from his grasp. He snapped a hand out to steal away the papers she held but she danced back, deeper into the shelving.

“Leave me to my work,” she growled, her tone low and rumbling.

“This is murder.” He thrust a finger toward the sticky stain she’d said was Galtro’s. “Folk like that – those with real knowledge of what was happening – I’ll grant you may have deserved what you brought them. But deckhands?” He peered at one of the papers fallen to the floor. “Stewards? They don’t deserve your hate, any more than Kel deserved Thratia’s.”

She reared back like a cobra bracing to strike. “You dustswallowing–”

Footsteps thundered down the hall. A voice called out, “You hear that?”

Someone else answered, “Probably a rat.”

“Big fucking rat. Come on, we’d better do a sweep to be sure. Boss’ll skin us if we botch this.”

“Time’s up,” Detan hissed and grabbed the doppel’s arm. She stumbled behind him as he hustled toward the door, careful not to disturb the thickening pools of blood. Keeping his grip tight so she wouldn’t go and gather up more personnel files, he pressed his ear against the cold door.

Footsteps echoed toward him, softer than before, as their owner crept down the hall.

He swore under his breath and pulled away.

“How many?” she asked, all the anger gone from her eyes, her expression drawn and focused. Their argument forgotten, for now.

“Just one coming this way. We have to count on at least one more being within shouting range. I don’t suppose Aransa took to installing back exits or sneaky escape tunnels in their records room, eh?”

She snorted. “The back wall is up against the central containment and is reinforced with steel, bolted to the bedrock to keep the whole Hub from floating away. But by all means, try to break through.”

“Real helpful.” He glanced around the darkened room, looking for anything at all he could put to use. The lone candle guttered on the shelf he’d left it on, the wick growing clogged by the deep pool of wax yet to spill over its side.

“Huh,” he said.

The doppel scowled at him. “What?”

“I think I have an idea.”

“Really, and what would that be?”

“Stay put. I’m going to put out the lights.”