Ganymede (The Clockwork Century 3)

“What’s the Queen got to do with the dead things? You said she controls them? Maybe they aren’t the same problem we’ve got. Ours don’t answer to anybody,” he replied, but he didn’t sound certain. Suddenly he added, “Come to think of it, I’ve seen them answer to a machine. My buddy Jerry, he has this gun he calls Daisy—and it shoots a big gong of sound. It stuns them into holding still, but only for a few minutes. ”

Josephine remembered watching Marie Laveau clang her cane against the lamppost. That was the same thing in its way, wasn’t it? A big gong of sound? She did not believe in coincidences, so she filed this information away. “I need you to tell me about them, Andan. Tell me everything you know. ”

He did.

It came out haltingly, as he fumbled around the conversation—trying to spare her the things she already knew, and pass along only what was helpful. Much of what he told her was truly revolutionary, particularly one important point confirming what the Ranger had told her: One way or another, the zombis, or rotters, or whatever they were … they originated in the walled-up, poisoned city.

Seattle was the source. Seattle was the problem.

“No,” he corrected her when she said as much aloud. “People like me, we’re the problem. We moved the gas out, so the chemists could turn it into sap. We spread the poison around because we’ve been paid well to do so, but that shouldn’t have mattered. We shouldn’t have done it. ”

“You’re being too hard on yourself. All of us, everywhere, everything we do … it hurts someone, someplace. I’m convinced of it. ”

“That’s a god-awful philosophy, Josie. ”

“It’s not a philosophy; it’s an observation. ”

But privately she could only agree. She also understood that his desire to settle down and do something else had as much to do with someone named Briar up in the Washington Territories as it did with his own guilt.

She briefly considered bringing up this Briar person, then felt silly for the impulse. It didn’t matter. When this was over, and Ganymede was in the appropriate hands, she and Cly would go their separate ways on the same grand scale as before, and that would be the end of it.

Sentimentality would do neither of them any good. She fought it hard, and turned it off, and walked beside him without thinking about how much she’d once enjoyed doing so.

She did not think about how much it’d warmed her, and been an odd source of pride, to roam with the giant pirate whom no one ever stopped or bothered, or assaulted or robbed, or even questioned—no matter how softly he spoke or how friendly his words. She did not recall how she’d appreciated his strength, even seeing it used against others when he’d fight for money in the ring, and she refused to consider for even a moment how she’d lengthened the bed they’d so often shared in order to make him more comfortable.

She worked hard to keep from considering the way things could have been, and might have been, but were not. Things had gone another way, and this other way had been best for them both. Or so she was forced to assume, not knowing what might have happened if she’d bundled up and headed north, and west … or if he’d taken off his coat and parked his dirigible in the delta.

Before he could mention that she’d grown uncharacteristically silent, she made some excuse to be done. “Tell your engineer I said thank you, and that it was a pleasure to meet him. And it’s been … it’s been good to talk to you again. I’m glad to see you’re still doing well, and thinking of ways to do better. ”

Then she left him there, still standing by the river, his hands in his pockets, wondering whatever things he was wondering, but not following her.

She hitched a ride back to the Metairie station, sitting beside a sharecropping woman and her oversized, dull-faced son with sloping shoulders and enormous hands. At the station she waited for the correct street rail car and took it to Rue Canal, opting to walk from the final stop rather than hail a cab. It was only a few blocks back to the Garden Court, and she felt restless for reasons she could not explain—or chose not to.

She looked up from her reverie to note that the sky was going gray. At first she thought it was because the hour was swiftly growing late and the curfew coming soon, then realized that the sky must be shuttered with clouds, and not quite so far toward evening as it felt at first. The river smelled like summer coming in, and dead fish and waterlogged vegetation, and the air that carried those scents from bank to bank and beyond was dragged along the ground by those same dark clouds that blackened like spilling ink up from the south. She regarded the sky and said, to no one but herself, “A storm’s coming. ”

Her parasol wouldn’t help her if the bottom dropped out. But she’d been wet before, and she’d be wet again before she died, and it’d never been a catastrophe yet. So onward she went, deeper into the Vieux Carré.

She walked briskly past people who were opening windows to catch the breeze that would billow through before the rain came up behind it. They were tying back curtains and inviting the air to sweep on through, push out the odors of cayenne and Tabasco, crawfish and rum, red beans and rice, and cigars and cheap tobacco. The Quarter exhaled paraffin and charcoal, incense and manure. It breathed diesel and industrial lubricant, barbecue and salt.

It whispered.

Josephine stopped, unsure of what that sound had been—uncertain if it meant anything, or if it’d only been her imagination. A tumbleweed of newspaper went skipping across her path, rolling into the street and stopping in a puddle, where it unfurled to reveal the headline. The first words were blurred, but the remainder of them read, AT THE ST. LOUIS CATHEDRAL. As she stared, dirty water soaked through, obscuring even that scant message, but somehow revealing another, farther down the page—before the whole thing disappeared into soaked, illegible pulp.

GARDEN

She looked away from the sopping paper. It meant nothing, after all. She found herself casually surprised that she’d bothered to stop for it, and wondered why it’d seemed—even for a moment—like something worth examining.

She resumed her pace. Her feet clapped against the hollow sidewalks with their planed slats, and her skirts skimmed the splinters. Still, she felt odd, as if she’d heard something but failed to understand it. As if she should’ve listened harder. Like she was being chastised at a distance, by a mother or grandmother whose voice she couldn’t quite pick out of a crowd.

The creak of a sign hanging on a chain tickled at her ears. She spied it up ahead, and, catching its text from the corner of her eye, she drew up short again. She could’ve sworn—would’ve sworn, and at great length—that it’d said, TOO LATE TO WAIT. But it read only, TULANE WAITMAN, advertising a minister’s office.

She stared intently at the sign as she passed beneath it. It performed no further tricks; it only swung squeakily in the shifting air ahead of the incoming storm.

Where was she again? Oh, yes. Rue Galvez, just past Esplanade. Funny how she felt so turned around.

She took the next turn and proceeded via dead reckoning, the kind that was engraved in her blood. She’d lived in the Quarter all her life, and she knew it like the corridors of the Garden Court. She could have navigated it blindfolded, in the fog, at midnight. Even so, her heart pounded, and she did not know why. She knew only that she had to keep moving. “Because of the curfew,” she muttered to herself, but did not believe a word of it.

The streets were nearly empty, and this, too, was strange. True, the businesses were closing up shop against the storm, against the limits imposed by the Texians, but there was also … something else? It was a ridiculous thing to think, but Josephine thought it anyway, and she kept walking, and faster. Just short of a run.