“Would you have this one stay?” she asked. “Or is her passing acceptable to you?”
“Acceptable? No, not really.”
The girl twitched, the wisps of her wings rising and falling. “There is a pipe. That one. Take it in your hand.”
“What?” I asked. She indicated a pipe near my head, maybe an inch thick. I wrapped my fingers around it. The metal was briefly cold, then seemed to melt in my hand. Slick gray liquid began to leak out from around my grip. The drops sizzled when they hit the floor.
“She is dying,” the girl said. “You should hurry.”
“What is it?”
“The tithe of my servants. It keeps me here, living, available. Put it against the wound.”
The pipe came free in my hand, slippery and flexible as rubber. A gout of metal splashed across the floor. The scattered pool resolved into tiny snowflake-sized cogs, clattering over the frost like spilled coins. I pulled the loose bandages off Emily’s chest and pushed the pipe against the bullet hole.
“What will this-”
Emily gasped; her eyes open wide and full of fear. She breathed in, struggling, her hands clawing against the old wood of the chair. She looked at me and I flinched back. She tried to scream and burbled instead. Viscous gray liquid bubbled out of her throat and ran like syrup over her teeth and down her chin. Frantically, I pulled at the pipe but it wouldn’t budge. It felt hooked to her ribs. When it tore free a thin line of sandy metal streamed out and then stopped, resting against her chest. Emily spasmed and fell to the floor.
“What the fuck did you do?” I shouted.
“Unkilled her, child. She’ll be fine.”
I pulled Emily up off the ground. Her skin and clothes stuck to the icy floor. The liquid that boiled out of her mouth had hardened into a scab of clockwork pieces that tore free and clattered to the ground. She was stiff, but I set her on the chair and shook her. She was breathing, but unconscious. Her teeth were lined in pewter and blood.
“What’s wrong with her?” I whirled on the cage and wished I had my sad little pistol. “What the fuck’s wrong with her!”
“The foetus is setting.” She sighed and slumped against the bars of her cage. “So excitable, people. This one is not going to die today. Is that acceptable?”
“I… I suppose.” I looked back at Emily. She was breathing. “Better than I could do for her.”
The girl was quiet. I stepped closer to her.
“Are you…” I started. I didn’t know how to talk to a myth. “How did you come to be here?”
“Has the world forgotten me, then? Different days. I was a miracle once. A goddess, tightly held.”
“So you’re Camilla. You’re really her.”
“A man gave me that name, once. The only man I trusted, honestly.” She shifted in her bonds, the flexible piping grinding together like stones. “I had another name. I think that part of me must have been taken.” She looked down, her eyes unfocused, like a child trying to recall her sums. “Yes, it must have been taken away. I don’t forget things.”
I sat back on my heels. My mind was whirling, a slippery storm brewing between Emily’s injuries and the shock of meeting the closest thing Veridon had to actual divinity.
“You have the codex within, yes? I can taste it, on your blood.”
“What do you mean, codex?”
“Your engine. You are one of those children, the bleeders. The ones who fly, in their awkward way. They bring them to me, sometimes, when they are to die. So that the spirit in their blood does not go to waste.” She stretched closer, the frailty of her ribs straining against their bonds. Her eyes were warm and light. “Is that why you are here, Pilot child? Are you about to die, to feed me?”
“That wasn’t my plan, no.”
“Ah.” She settled back. “Well, then. Did you come that I might save the girl?”
“That wasn’t my plan either. But I thank you for that.”
“Of course.”
“That was foetal metal. Pure,” I said. I nudged the handful of fresh cogs with my toe. “It could have killed her.”
“Perhaps.” She shrugged, and the wisps of her ravaged wings twitched. “I didn’t think it likely.”
“Well. I’d have liked to know her life was in danger.”
“Her life is in danger,” she said. “Yours as well.”
“What?”
“Being here, talking to me. The Wrights will want you both dead.”
“Well, yeah. That doesn’t surprise me. Why are they keeping you here?”
She wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her eyes were focused at a distance greater than that allowed by the room. When she didn’t answer I tried a more direct question.
“At the top of this pillar, high in the Church above.” I nodded to the whirring spindle that emerged from her back, jointed to give her some range of movement. “There is a peculiar Cog. What is it?”
She looked at me as though she had only just noticed I was there. Something was moving behind her eyes; comprehension, or horror. She kept her voice even.
“What business is it of yours? What have you come here to do?”
“Like I said. I’m here by accident. I came through… I came from up above.” As horrific as her situation seemed to be, she had called the Wrights her servants. And they were keeping her alive. I didn’t want to anger her with their deaths, until I knew her position in all this.
“No one is here by accident. There are always patterns to this life, codex. Whether we see them or not depends on our eyes. And my eyes tell me things that make your presence very non-accidental.”
I backed away from the cage, laying my hand on my belt. The holster was empty, of course. “What things?”
She leaned closer to me, until the fragments of her porcelain-perfect face were inches from the steaming bars of the coolant cage. There was hunger in her voice.
“It has been a long while, here in this place. I have a wide eye, but it is weak, like peering through fog. These people, these Wrights crawl through my bones, they siphon off my blood and feed it back to me, they scry the dissected bits of my soul and look for some star-damned mystery in the spatter of my gore. What do I see, you ask! What do I sense! I taste the blood of the Wrights, near my heart. I hear the scurrying of the Elder’s servants across my skin, as yet unaware of your location. Unaware because I have not told them, unaware because I will it to be so.” She shuddered with a long, terrible sigh. “So, child. Let us begin again. I sense something about you, and you are asking very difficult questions. Why are you here? What do you know about that peculiar Cog, as you say?”
I saw no reason to not believe her. If she said she could warn the Wrights, I wanted to avoid that.
“I have seen another, here in the city.”
“Another?” She sat up, leaning closer to me with unnatural energy. “There is another heart in the city.”
“I have held it in my hands. I know where it is.”
“And its owner?” she asked. Her eyes were scared and hopeful, all at once. “What of the owner?”
“He is in the city as well. Killing people; chasing me.”
Her face fluttered between shock and rage.
“It is an ugly thing you have done, Pilot. You people… you take everything we give you and make such a mockery of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This!” she yelled, twitching in her cage, “This place, the heart! Gods, that you would follow the path laid out and at its end return to me with such a foul offering.” She tensed, her fingers curled into claws, her hair slowly rising until it swirled and snapped in whipcord tension. “You are a people of filth and discord. This place should be wiped clean. Gods, that I had the power.”
I paused. It was the first time I’d heard a deity swearing in the name of other gods.
“Let’s try this again, lady. I think I know what that Cog is, the heart you keep talking about. And I’m not the one who fetched it. I’m just the unlucky fuck who ended up with it, and all the damn trouble that follows. I’m just trying to get out of this thing without getting killed.”
