Skies of Steel: The Ether Chronicles (8 page)

Picked him apart.

He saw what she did. A scattered man. Who moved restlessly from one diversion to the other, without any real sense of purpose.

He’d had purpose once. And threw it away. Because of a moment of temptation offered to him by someone he’d thought a friend, an ally. No, more than a friend and ally—a brother. Who should he hate more—the one who tempted him, or himself, for giving in? It seemed he had enough hatred for both.

“You handled yourself well enough,” he said. “Didn’t scream or faint.”

“But I
did
almost fall overboard.”

Despite her dismissal, he’d spoken honestly. For someone who’d never been in the middle of an airship battle, she’d kept her wits. Fear hadn’t paralyzed her. A surprise. But then, she’d also walked into one of Palermo’s most dangerous taverns to find him. And she was heading right into the teeth of peril in order to help her parents. Not precisely a sheltered academic, this Daphne Carlisle. Not precisely anything he could easily define.

And that interested him.

“Still getting your air legs,” he said.

She smiled at that, a little curl of a smile. “
Air legs.
It’s a new world up here. With its own customs and language.”

“So long as you only record it up here.” He tapped his temple.

Folding her arms across her chest, she leaned against the table. “You seem awfully concerned about that.”

“Secrecy is a rogue Man O’ War’s best weapon.”

“Here I thought a Man O’ War was himself a weapon and needed nothing else. Or,” she added, tilting her head and studying him, “your insistence on secrecy hides something else. Such as the reason why you went rogue. Why there are no photographs of family members or loved ones in your stateroom. Unless you keep them hidden somewhere. In a locked drawer, perhaps.”

He poured himself another drink and swallowed it down. Maybe this was why he seldom interacted with women of exceptional intelligence.

Like a needle she was, Daphne Carlisle, digging and jabbing, searching out the splinters beneath his skin, but leaving him raw and bleeding in the process.

He was a Man O’ War. Metal and flesh. Science at its most advanced. It took far more than one intriguing woman’s questions to wound him.

Easy enough to show her how little she or her speculation could affect him.

From the bookshelf, he plucked out one volume.
A Statistical Inquiry Into the Irrigated Horticultural Practices of the Eastern Iberian Peninsula.
He handed her the book.

She read the title, frowning slightly. Then opened it, and her frown cleared.

The inside of the book had been hollowed out.

She pulled the small photograph from the compartment within the book. Walked it over to the quartz lamp and stared at the image in her hand.

He didn’t need to see it. Every one of the people in the photograph, all of their faces, the way they posed formally in front of the photography studio’s provided backdrop of a forest scene—all of it had been branded into the soft flesh of his brain, his eyes, his heart.

“You have a large family,” she murmured.

“
Had
,” he corrected. Four brothers, three sisters. For a time, his grandmother lived with them, but she wasn’t in the photograph. His parents were, however. His father sat on a velvet-covered chair, impressive in his full beard and fierce eyebrows. Surrounding him were his children and wife, like planets around the sun, Mikhail amongst them, skinny and smug in his naval cadet uniform. He hadn’t become a man yet, let alone a Man O’ War. “
Had
a large family.”

Her wide eyes met his. “They’re dead? All of them?”

“I’m the one who died.”

Photographs were strange things, turning living people into wax mannequins, or stopped automatons. One could never guess by looking at the picture that his mother loved practical jokes, or that his youngest brother Yuri drove them all mad by insisting on singing rather than speaking. Or that his sister Irina had to be bodily dragged from her study to eat. Even then, she’d take a book with her to the supper table. She’d looked up, though, when Mikhail had brought home a friend from the naval academy. Had Mikhail known what the result of that would be, he’d have locked Irina in the study. He’d also have plunged the carving knife into his friend’s chest. But no one had known what betrayal lay ahead, least of all Mikhail.

One would never know from the photograph, either, that his father had bragged to the neighbors for months when Mikhail had been selected to become a Man O’ War. A proud day that had been, when Mikhail had come home with the news.

Not just a Gimmel or a Bet
, his father had kept repeating to whoever would listen.
An Aleph. The highest
aurora vires
ranking there is.

None of them knew what lay ahead. If they had known, there would have been far less boasting, and more worry.

“See,” he said, forcing his voice into a tone of lightness. “Nothing to hide. You wondered if I had any pictures of my family. There they are. As ordinary as bread.”

“You don’t look much like your father.”

“I take after my mother’s side. Some Tartar blood in there.”

She glanced up at him. “I can see that. Here, in your cheekbones, and here, in the shape of your eyes.” As she said this, she lightly skimmed her fingertip across the features in question.

Silver heat spread through him. He wanted to lean into her touch—he wanted to shy away from it. Instead, he held himself still, as if unaffected.

“How old were you when this was taken?” she asked, looking back at the picture.

“Seventeen, eighteen. After that, I wasn’t home long enough for us to get everyone to the photographer’s studio.”

Why did he continue to talk of this? When every word spoken felt like spikes of ice driven into his chest. But no; he kept speaking, as if to prove to not just her but himself that he was every bit as impervious as he claimed.

“You’re the first Man O’ War I’ve ever met,” she murmured, “yet it seems odd to think that you have a father and mother, and a whole passel of siblings.”

“Only part of me was made in a surgical theater.” He nodded down at the implants. “I’ve got parents, just like anyone else.”

She studied him for a moment, her gaze as uncomfortably precise as always. “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen them, hasn’t it?”

He snatched the photo from her. Tucking the picture back into its hiding place within the book, he growled, “You don’t know a damned thing.”

“My research revealed that you went rogue two years ago. Unless you’ve made secret trips back to Russia, or arranged meetings with them in relatively safe places, it’s reasonable to assume you haven’t seen them.”

“The learned
professorsha
is right again.” He stalked over to the vodka and drank directly from the bottle. It was getting too warm—the only way to truly drink it was cold as winter—but he didn’t care for nuance. He only wanted a dulling of this unexpected pain. But the trouble with being a Man O’ War was that it now took far more alcohol to achieve any kind of intoxication. A good, solid drunk required a case of vodka, not one paltry bottle.

In three long swallows, the bottle was empty, yet he couldn’t feel it. “All my telegrams go unanswered.”

“Maybe,” she said gently, “they never received them.”

She
was the one who’d needed steadying after the airship battle, yet here she was, attempting to comfort
him
.

“Oh, they have,” he answered. “Got some secret information channels that confirmed it. My parents are still in Tsaritsyn, same house they’ve been in my whole life. And the telegrams were delivered. But I never got a reply. Not to any of them.”

“They could be protecting you,” she offered. “In case the telegrams might be traced.”

The sound he made was more of a rasp than a laugh. “Assigning my family such caution is admirable,
professorsha
, but unnecessary. I know the reason for their silence.” He stared at her, feeling the twist of his mouth and hard knot in his belly. “They’re ashamed. Of me. And they have every reason to be. I didn’t just betray my country, I betrayed my family.”

He waited for the disgust or disapproval in her gaze. She’d had a bit to drink, so it might take her a moment to fully understand what he’d just revealed. But when she did understand, she’d turn away from him. As she should.

But he didn’t realize until that moment how much her condemnation would wound him. This woman who, moments earlier, had defended him despite knowing he was nothing but a mercenary. She insisted that there could be something good within him. But there wasn’t. Now she knew it. So he—who as a Man O’ War could endure injury far greater than a normal man, and trained himself to feel as little as possible—braced himself for pain.

O
F ALL THE
things she’d witnessed this evening—the battle between Russian and British airships, the pursuit by a Russian ship, the technologically induced storm—seeing the wariness and raw hurt in Denisov’s eyes shook Daphne the most.

He played his part well. The braggadocio, the raffishness. The continued assertion that his only concern was profit. A ruthless mercenary. He claimed to be heartless, but no one without a heart could speak so painfully about the loss of his family.

Was she grasping at straws? Hoping to find some seed of honor and integrity in him, buried beneath telumium armor? Yet she knew that in everyone, including herself, there were moral ambiguities that made a person neither wholly good nor wholly bad. That there was always the possibility of error and forgiveness.

She returned the hollowed-out book to its place on the shelf, then crossed the stateroom to where he stood. His chary gaze never left her.

“You cut your hair after you went rogue,” she guessed.

He looked briefly surprised at the abrupt change of topic. Had he been expecting a reaction from her at his revelation? It was as if … he feared her response. But that made no sense. To him, she was nothing, a paid assignment. Or so she’d thought. Since they’d gone into the privacy of his stateroom, it seemed as though layers of identity and persona had fallen away. Leaving them more exposed, more real.

He ran his broad hand over the crest of his hair. “Not standard issue for the Russian Imperial Aerial Navy.”

“Reminds me of the Mohawk Indians. The Pawnee, too.”

“Ukrainian Cossacks wear a
khokhol
. Similar, but not the same.” The face he made clearly evinced that he wasn’t patterning himself after those Cossacks.

“I wasn’t aware that Russian Man O’ Wars crossed paths with American Indians.”

He shook his head. “Saw a handful of them once, in Paris. An Indian delegation trying to get French aid. They were on the city street, out of place, but damned proud. Wanted that for myself. That defiance. They wouldn’t change how they looked to make anyone more comfortable.”

His gaze fixed on the quartz lamp. “The rules for how they wanted us to look in the navy were strict.” He snorted. “Uniformity. The tsar’s
naval representatives
. We were not ourselves but Russia. Our hair could only be so long, combed in just such a way.”

“Going rogue, you gave the navy the tonsorial equivalent of this.” She made a rude hand gesture.

His laugh was low, but genuine. “Just so.” Yet it faded all too soon. “Their lands were being taken away, the Indians. The American government made promises. Worthless promises.”

“Did the ones you saw get the help they sought?”

“No idea. Doubt it, though,” he added with a shrug. “The Americans might not have telumium, but they do have soya fields.”

“Which means they have tetrol fuel.”

“France won’t risk breaking its trade alliance with the United States for the Indians’ sake.”

Her mouth tightened. “A common story,” she muttered bitterly. “Progress and politics mercilessly move onward. And the price? Whole civilizations and cultures are being destroyed. Wiped clean from the slate of history.”

“That makes you angry.”

“Not angry—sad.” She paused. “No, I’m angry, too. That any one culture decides it’s more valuable than another, or that any human being considers itself superior to someone else. Think of everything that’s being lost because of it!” She paced. “Vehicles that choke the air with smoke, and flying machines engineered strictly for war and destruction. How’s any of that made the world a better place?”

Too late she realized how utterly insensitive her words must sound to him, the man who powered the flying machine.

She whirled to face him. “Oh, God, I didn’t mean—”

“You meant it.” He walked slowly toward her, the quartz light carving him into severe angles.

“I suppose I did.” She lifted her chin to meet his gaze. “I
do
mean it. Sometimes I feel that technology ennobles humanity, and other times … most times, I feel it strips away the best part of us.” She looked away, then back to him. “I imagine that must lower your opinion of me.”

“Here I believed you didn’t care what I thought of you.” Humor tinged his voice. “If it helps you at all, I think you’re right.”

She gaped at him. “You do?”

“
Partially
right. Won’t say what part, though. Can’t make it easy on you.” Reaching out, he playfully tugged on the end of her braid.

Just a quick, casual movement, that little tug, yet it made her heart beat a bit faster. It spoke of a growing intimacy, one she feared. And wanted.

“Have faith, Captain Denisov, that I am never at ease around you.” Indeed, the more they spoke, talking of family, of beliefs, the more uncomfortable she became. Her awareness of him as a man only increased, as did a nascent, gleaming attraction. His outsized masculine appeal couldn’t be denied, and there was something dreadfully alluring about a scoundrel that called to a usually well-behaved academic such as she. Made her wonder what kind of wildness within herself she could discover—with his expert assistance.

Worse, she was coming to know more of the man behind the telumium. She rather liked him.