Chasm Walkers Read online

  “Its fine work,” I said and meant it. “You have grown in more ways than one since I saw you last.”

  She nodded. “A lot has changed, yes.”

  Relieved that she did not appear to pity me my loss of years, another knot of tension eased in my chest, and I took in her abode with curiosity.

  It was quite packed, actually—floor to ceiling with every manner of scrap metal and spare parts imaginable. A small bed and table lined the furthest corner. Everywhere else sat half-finished contraptions, clicking devices partially assembled, and rolls of schematics piled in baskets.

  “You have an impressive workshop.” I wandered the small room picking up tarnished brass knobs and wiggling my fingers in bowls of random bolts and nuts. She had flowers fashioned from spare parts set in a polished metal vase. The petals tinkled against each other with the wind. I turned to her, smiling. “A true inventor’s lair.”

  “You said I could do it. Believed I could.”

  “And so you have.” I nodded, catching the rise of pink in her cheeks.

  “No one ever told me I was worth anything before you did. I…” she cleared her throat. “It changed a lot for me, meeting you.”

  Not more than fourteen or fifteen when I’d met her, she had grown in my absence. Two years had made a difference, not only in her appearance, but apparently, her knowledge. Nearly my height, her gangly limbs were now strong and tan, her bearing less that of a cowering ragamuffin and more that of a confident young woman. Tinkering tools lined a belt strapped at her waist and she wore a series of mechanical devices that bore a striking similarity to a weapon I’d once shown her how to make. Goggles with intricate lens apparatuses adorned her head.

  “I can see what has kept you busy these past few days.”

  Her face was one of the first friendly ones I had seen after my abduction. She and Lilah freed me from my watery prison, and then Mara simply vanished.

  “I…” she sighed, shuffling her boots. “Dr. Bartlet asked me to give you privacy during your recovery.” A pained expression marred her features and brightened the long scar that ran from beneath her eye to her chin. “You lashed out during your transport to Outer City. The doctor thought it would be safer if…well, if we waited for you to settle.”

  Catching sight of bruising on her neck, my stomach tumbled. I clasped my hands behind me and took a step back.

  “Did I do that to you?”

  A delicate hand fluttered to her neck instinctively.

  “You were delirious with fever,” Mara said quickly as if it was her mistake and not my own that had caused her injury. “Doctor thinks it was from the drugs leaving your body.”

  “I see.” Taking in a steadying breath, I tried to smile. “So that is where you have been. I understand Dr. Bartlet’s concern. She was right to protect you from me.”

  “My pa did worse and no one did one thing to stop him,” she muttered, but the edge in her words had no heat to them. “Besides, I handle myself all right. Have since he died a year back. I take care of myself now and I should have come to visit you.” She crossed her arms, jutting her chin out as if to invite me to say different.

  “Well, I am glad to see you now.”

  Mara tilted her head, peering up at me with curiosity. Her gaze ran along my face, stopping at the devices at my temples.

  The noise from the port sounded over the rotor thrumming. The voices were those doing repairs by torchlight mixed with the jangling crank of the boom gears as they hefted the air ships, the occasional clang of chains on a mast.

  I wondered why she had not gone out there. Surely, she would have heard the panic.

  “Seems you came back to us with unexpected talents.” She smiled and pointed to the goggles atop her head.

  “You saw me.” I peered over my shoulder, out across her open-air counter, to the port beyond. “What I did.”

  That is what kept her from running out to the slips like the others. She was watching me.

  “I don’t think anyone else did.” Mara gave me a serious look. “I won’t tell.”

  “It is a bit late for trying to hide that now,” I muttered. “I did the same thing over at the inn just now.”

  “Oh.” Mara frowned. “Then you must have had reason.”

  “I do not know what I was thinking. It is all a very violent blur. So much so that it seems it was not even me in that room.”

  She tilted her head, considering me for a moment before speaking. “I wish I could say that everyone up here would protect you out of gratitude, but things are just as wild up here as they always were. The sort going in and out of this port lately would sell their mother for a glass of rum. And then there’s the pirates.”

  I blinked for a moment, and then smiled at her joke, grateful for her attempt to add levity to the dark mood I was in. “Yes, well. It seems there’s a bigger problem afoot.”

  “The Tremblers. They are different,” Mara whispered. “I have noticed.”

  “Really? Riley didn’t seem to.”

  “Well I have been down in the wastelands. That is where I first saw the…the fast ones.” She swallowed hard, her eyes going glassy, remembering. “I was scavenging a toppled Wind Reaper over by Vir-Hio and it was inside. Just standing there, like a dang doll in the corner. It scared me so much I dropped the part in my hand, and the noise just set it off.”

  “Did it get near you?” I gasped. “Were you exposed?”

  “No, no,” Mara waved my concern away. “We…uh, I was at the entrance and beat sand out of there. It never even got close. Regardless, I had on an outlander suit and a breathing mask.”

  “You were alone?”

  She nodded, but something about the way her gaze slid from mine made me suspect there was more to what she was telling me. But I let it go when Ashton’s warning came to mind. He’d said that it was deliberate, the infecting of the passengers. It spread so quickly the room full of injured victims at the inn had turned in hours, not days.

  “You should not venture onto any strange ships for the time being, Mara,” I warned.

  “I hear Dr. Bartlet doesn’t know what went wrong on that galleon on its way over from Europe. How could practically an entire ship turn so quickly?”

  I remembered watching it leave on one of my first nights here. I’d watched it from my perch on the tower platform. “That galleon. It left port for Spain with refugees from the ground.”

  “I think it was stopped, mid-trip, by one of the blockade ships.” Mara shook her head. “But I can’t be sure.”

  “The blockade runners that ferry the refugees, they know how to avoid the ships, at least that is what I heard. So if one of our vessels was stopped, boarded, and infected, then those routes are compromised.” Ashton was right to warn us. “We really cannot let anyone else leave here until we know it is safe again.”

  Mara glanced out her doorway, her face going pale. Her scar blanched white and she turned her head, hiding it. I shifted my stance to give her privacy. Self-conscious of her disfigurement, she rarely ventured out of her workshop from what Lilah told me. My heart ached for her. I knew what it was like to draw stares. To feel like an outcast in this port full of outsiders.

  “If you and the Sheriff had not gotten the survivors off and taken the galleon down, we might not be here.” Mara cleared her throat, pulling my gaze. “How did you do that, anyhow? You…repelled them, somehow.” She pulled a piece of paper from a pile of sketches on the table. It was a rough rendering of the mechanica on my hand. “I think it has something to do with your new parts.”

  “You have been studying them.” I slid the papers over one another, tilting my head as I perused her drawings. “I do not remember you inspecting them.”

  “I took a quick look while we were getting you off of the train. I was worried they were hurting you.”

  “And these sketches are from memory?”

  “As I said, Dr. Bartlet thought it best if I stayed away.” I caught her gaze, the curiosity. “May I?”

/>   Hesitating for a moment, I ran the pad of my thumb over the smooth glass of the device in my hand. I relented, however, nodding my assent as curiosity got the better of me. The truth was, I did not know nor had I ever seen that response to me before. At least not to my memory, of which there were many holes.

  “Lilah is a fine physician,” I began as I slid my sleeve up revealing the devices at my hand and elbow. “But perhaps the answer lies with a mind more suited to machinery rather than flesh.”

  “And you don’t remember anything about them?” Mara leaned in, her tongue peeking out from between her lips as she squinted at my hand.

  “What I know is what I have observed. The silver liquid within, the shocks from the mechanica that seem to control the tremors that used to accompany my affliction.” I glanced out at the plume of black smoke still drifting over the galleon’s site. To the wreckage that had once been a bustling marketplace. “Nothing to explain what just happened.”

  Nodding, Mara gestured for me to sit at the small table. Pulling at a chain around her neck, a monocle slipped out from beneath the collar of her blouse.

  “When we first found you in that tank there were wires attached to all of the devices. Disconnecting you sent your body into a fit of some sort. Dr. Bartlet noted that the devices seemed to be positioned to affect major muscles.” Mara stood over me, her voice full of excitement as she inspected the one at the base of my neck.

  “Hands, arms, legs, spine,” I ticked off the positions of the mechanica. My fingers found the ones at my temples. “But what of these?”

  “Or this one?” Mara tapped it with the monocle, sending a quaver of static down my spine. “Fused to the very top of your bony spine makes it dangerous from what I have gathered from the medical journals.”

  I looked at her quizzically, and she walked over to a pile of books stacked near her bed. Picking one up, she flipped through it, her lips moving as she skimmed the pages.

  “You have been busy.” Rubbing at my eyes, I tried to ignore the throbbing behind them. I picked up a wind-up contraption, twisted the key, and set it down. The metal-work butterfly fluttered its wings, vibrating against the table top. “Everyone has, it seems.”

  She looked up, her lips forming a frown. “I am sorry. So many things happened while you were gone and no one is bothering to tell you about them.”

  “No, they are not,” I said, recalling Riley’s hesitation earlier. “The Sheriff mentioned that odd things occurred around the time I was…while I was gone.”

  “They are only worried for your state of mind. No one knows what they did to you. Not even you.” Mara said so plainly, so truthfully, what others avoided.

  I nodded quietly. “I want to understand what has changed. What became of my world after the Reapers attacked the city-states. I know that some Tesla domes held while others failed. Did all the territories fall…did some fight off the hordes?” The questions tumbled out of me. “Did the citizens on the ground survive the wasteland storms? What of the Ashen Croup? I see no sign of the many sick children that were here last—”

  “We’ve been working on improved filters for the buildings, better masks. Percy keeps us away from the blood blizzard paths, tracks them so much better now.”

  “Blood blizzards,” I repeated, remembering the storm winds thick with red ash from the wastelands. The tainted rain washed everything in crimson. “You can predict them now? How is that possible?”

  “Charlie,” Mara cut across me. “Slow down a bit.” She sighed, shaking her head. “One thing at a time.”

  I rose and, walking over to her, I paused at a series of hand-written names tacked to the wall opposite her small table. I had seen it earlier. “What is this?”

  She bit her lip. “There were many lost in the aftermath of the Reaper invasion. Both on the ground and up here in the sky city.”

  “I do not understand.” I took one of the papers in my fingers, the rough edges and faded ink spoke of months of wear. “The Wind Reapers trampled the city-states, yes, but this was a haven for the injured. I…saw them being rescued.”

  “For a time, yes.” Mara sat on her bed, book open on her lap. She stared at it but did not seem to be seeing it. “And then I noticed…well, I noticed some of us were just…gone.”

  “The nature of disaster is chaotic,” I offered. “People who sought refuge up here must have moved on to other places. Like the refugees headed for refuge in Europe.”

  “Yes, but these names,” Mara rose, brushing her fingertips along a row of them. “They are all young people. Not one baby, or child, or adult. They are all like me.”

  I blinked, not quite understanding. My gaze moved over the pieces of paper. At few dozen fluttered in the breeze blowing in from outside.

  “There must be thirty here.”

  “Forty-two,” Mara corrected.

  “What of their parents? Their families?”

  “Orphans. Of the Great Calamity. Of the Reaper Invasion.” Mara shook her head. “We lost entire families to the Ashen Croup before, remember? My own father died of the Trembling Sickness before it…” Her voice trailed off, and her face paled.

  “What is it, Mara?”

  “Something is happening, Charlie,” she whispered. “The affliction takes them so fast now. What used to be days, weeks even, has become hours,” her voice broke. “They moved wrong, those Tremblers down on the sands. Just like the ones on the galleon just now. I saw it.”

  “I did too.” The speed and purposefulness of their behavior on that galleon flashed in my mind. “Something has made it worse.”

  “And now,” Mara pointed to an aethergraph on her shelf. “We are hearing reports of men that cannot be stopped. That do not feel pain. They are monsters in their own right.”

  “What?” Cold dread raced down my spine. “What did you say?”

  “I have heard from merchants and pirates alike of clashes with groups of these, well I suppose they are soldiers by what has been said of their appearance, but no one knows who they are.”

  Arecibo’s face in front of mine flickered in the back of my head. A faded memory I could not quite see.

  Unstoppable…

  I struggled to catch the moment, but it was gone.

  Mara continued, her description of the encounters bizarre.

  “…out of nowhere. Both in the wastelands and the inner parts of the city-state’s ruins as if…”

  Her words were muffled as my gaze traveled along the unmarked keys and patched together design of the machine. It was not a real aethergraph. Not the kind one had in their home. And yet, I had seen this before. Hand to the brass levers and electric tracing rods, my throat constricted with an ache so hurtful I could scarcely draw breath. “T-This is Tesla’s.”

  “Yes.” Mara moved next to me. “I found it on a scavenging run and had to repair it, but look.” She held up an aether message. “I have sent out queries. Messages to the survivors. There are answers out there, Charlie. I will get them for you.”

  “How did you find it? This was on a downed Wind Reaper. The one that trampled Vir-Hio.”

  “Ajala’s ship, I know.”

  “Is that why you went there?” A row of tools rested on a rolled-out cloth. Tesla’s tools, ones he’d fashioned himself to work on the Wind Reaper’s ventilation. “How did you rescue all of this?”

  She licked her lips, gaze snapping to the doorway, before leaning in. “I have a friend that has been helping me since the invasion,” she whispered. “The Ferryman.”

  “You do not have his real name?”

  “No, just the code name he used on the first aether missive.”

  Something about the name tickled the corner of my consciousness. “What sort of help has this Ferryman been giving you? Have you ever met?”

  “Well, at first it was strange.” She bit her lip, thinking back. “I was sending out missives via one of the hotels over in Port Rodale. Looking for my father. Asking for news from the city-states on the ground. The News Bureau
is patchy since the invasion. With many of the domes taken over or simply down…well, we were all desperate for word of what was happening to the Peaceful Union.”

  “A lot of death, I hear,” I said, urging her on. “Many missing.”

  “And so many needs we were struggling to meet up here. The Sheriff, he said to put the word out to our contacts in other ports, vessels, etc. We needed medical supplies, food…everything, really. So many people fled up here.”

  “So you sent out just general distress messages?”

  “Yes, and one came back after just a few days. The Ferryman gave me the location of a downed Peaceful Union Agri-Ship. I told the Sheriff and he got a party together. The missive was right. So accurate that it seemed a miracle. We were able to salvage enough food to last months from that one bit of information.”

  “So you kept up communications with this mysterious helper.” Something about her furtive glances to her shelving made me wonder if there was evidence of more than mere missives. “You never met?”

  “No, but I believe he travels.” She walked to a pile of missives on the counter nearest the aethergraph, grabbed them, and brought them over. “You see his missive tells us of a blockade run happening along this latitude. Again, his information saved lives. I…we can trust him, Charlie.”

  I squinted at the roll of paper, noting the degrees and time of the patrol’s path. “He knows the routes of the blockade. Has access to ship locations. Has he asked for anything in return? Names of people up here in Outer City, perhaps? Information on Riley’s movements?”

  “No, nothing like that,” she said shaking her head. “He only asks that I keep his involvement a secret.”

  “How did you explain your information to Riley?” This Ferryman seemed dangerous, but I could not quite surmise why.

  “I told him I received an anonymous message from the ground.” She put her hand up, stopping my protest. “Which is not really a lie. I do not actually know who The Ferryman is.”

  Voices rose from just outside the door, and I tensed.

  Mara chanced a peek out of her front window. “It is just the meeting breaking up,” she said.

  The Weather Master’s words came to mind, and I glanced at her bookshelves full of engineering and mechanical tomes.