Jacaranda (The Clockwork Century 6)

He fell into step beside the small woman.

She led the way. He led the questions.

“I must ask, you understand: How did you learn of me?”

“Rumors, mostly.” She, too, eschewed the elevator, in favor of the stairs. “You see things, you hear things. You know how it goes.”

“I do,” he murmured. He stood aside, and allowed her to proceed first.

Her voice carried up behind her, along with the barest hint of footsteps. “Stories travel faster than the telegraph codes, faster than magic if the stories are good enough. And yours are very good.”

“You’re too kind. Or too trusting of your sources,” he demurred.

“Neither one, I assure you. I first heard of your adventures in Juarez, through a young woman who survived the outbreak there.” She emerged on the first floor, and he joined her, stepping into the light that streamed in through the lobby windows. It was going pink—a coastal sunset the color of a shell’s belly. “She said that you saved her. She said you saved them all.”

“My role in that matter might have been overstated.”

“It might have been. But then I heard of your encounter at the hospital in Albuquerque. And the incident at Rose Hill, late last year.”

“Three isolated coincidences.”

“Or a pattern,” she countered. “One I’d be foolish to ignore, despite your objections. Particularly once I heard how you handled the rancher at Four Chairs.” She lowered her voice. “They found parts of the creature on both sides of the West Texas line. It was a masterful handling.”

“It was…a tricky affair, but it was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Though I cannot guess exactly what you heard; I know how details are distorted in the retelling.”

She stopped in the center of the lobby, between the staircase landings. Her small feet were planted at the edge of the large tile mosaic that decorated the floor there. The padre only just then realized that it was a swirling, blossoming pattern. It was less like a jacaranda flower, and more like a sunflower. No, that wasn’t quite right either. This was something else, then. A design for the sake of design, and not a depiction of anything at all.

No. That was also wrong.

The nun watched him keenly, as he watched the patterns on the floor. “Guess whatever you want,” she said. “I know what you are, and I know what you can do. I know this place needs someone like you, because God knows the Texans don’t have the first idea how to handle what’s happened here.”

“Texans? I thought they were Texians, by their own preference.”

“They were Texians when they were a nation. Now they’re merely Texans.” She lowered her voice, and winked as though there were some conspiracy in the matter. “But don’t call them that, not to their faces. They don’t like the reminder.”

He tried to keep from smiling, and succeeded only in hiding his teeth. “I expect they don’t. But it’s far from the worst they might be called.”

Sister Eileen relaxed her smile until it faded away. “I know. I know there’s been so much tension between your nations. But you’ve come here to help, despite it all. I knew you would.”

“My nation remains in doubt. No one can agree where the Mexico line was drawn in the first place, where it wandered over the century, or where it is located right this moment. I trust that one day, everyone will come to some agreement. Until then, I keep both sets of papers.” It was a question he tired of answering. “Besides, there are more important things than borders. More dangerous things than armies and mapmakers.”

She murmured some soft assent. “Indeed, and beneath our feet, even as we stand here admiring the trappings of a rich man’s whims…there waits something much more awful than war.” She paused. “Everything is large here in Texas, they take great pride in it. Well, they’re right about the haint that makes this place its home, and they shouldn’t be proud in the slightest. It should fill them all with horror.”

He could hear it again, even though he wasn’t really listening—or he surely didn’t mean to. It throbbed below the floors, something huge, heavy, and slow. A pulse like the heartbeat of something so enormous, so great, that it must be the size of the great round Gulf itself. “If they had any sense, they’d burn this place to the ground and salt the earth, never to return.”

The nun said something in reply, but he didn’t catch it.

He begged her pardon.

She nodded, but her eyes were worried. “I said, they’ll never do any such thing. Not while they think there’s money to be made. It?

??s the way of the world.” She sighed. “Greed isn’t quite the original sin, but I’d call it a younger sibling.”

“That’s perilously close to blasphemy, Sister…”

The worry drained from her eyes, to be replaced with something harder. “I’ve danced nearer to blasphemy before, and so have you. Something tells me, you’re no more entitled to your vestments than I am mine.”

Again he begged her pardon. “My apologies. It was a weak attempt at humor. I should have restrained myself.”