Wyatt nodded, lips pressed into a hard white line as he stared into the middle distance. “It was Samuel’s design initially, and he forced me to upgrade it. But yes, it works.”
The hoarse confession made Ezra briefly close his eyes. Melvin reached out and settled a hand on his husband’s lower back. “What does it do?”
The bleakness in Ezra’s voice was a tone Melvin had never heard before. “It transmutes the dead into revenants in far less time than spores ever could on their own.”
Melvin’s stomach sank low and fast, nausea settling in his gut. “What?”
Ezra never took his attention off the blueprint and the schematics copied on the paper, notes and numbers meaningless to Melvin but not to his husband. When it came to the intricacies of clockwork gears and engines, to say nothing of clarion crystals, Ezra was the expert in their relationship.
Ezra straightened up and turned to face Wyatt. “You saw it work?”
Before Wyatt could respond, Sabine spoke up. “Heusedit. Conducted experiments on debt slaves.”
Wyatt flinched with his entire body, but he didn’t deny it.
“If he’s been part of this—thisatrocity, how can we trust him?” Melvin asked.
Sabine sighed tiredly and rubbed at her forehead. “Because I saw in his mind that he didn’t want to have any part of what is happening in Bellingham. He wasn’t lying when he stated Samuel forced his hand. Wyatt’s desire to escape and pass on the information doesn’t absolve him, I know that, but we need him.”
“The information we need, yes. I’m not so sure about the messenger,” Ezra said.
Sabine shrugged tightly. “He’s built and upgraded portions of the death-defying machine. He knows how it works. Fulcrum will want that.”
She was right, damn her, and Melvin knew it. That didn’t make it any easier to stomach. “There’s a Clementine Trading Company train scheduled to depart for Foxborough in the morning at dawn. We’ll get Wyatt and the cog who will act as escort smuggled into the rail yard tonight. It’s a freight train, and not ticketed. Its final destination is Amari.”
“The cog who will be going with him has familiarity with such escorts. She’ll keep him safe as much as possible, but a veil would be helpful.”
“We’ll pass one along,” Melvin said, mind already spinning through the massive task ahead of smuggling a highly wanted man carrying critical information out of Daijal and into Ashion.
There was no room for error, not with this. Error meant too many people would die, and enough already had if Sabine’s and Ezra’s reactions were anything to go by.
Melvin glanced down at the carefully copied blueprints depicting the inner workings of a machine that was anathema to every country’s law when it came to the dead. “May the stars guide us through the night.”
Two
CARIS
Caris held her head high as she made her way through the crowd of graduates to where she knew her parents, Nathaniel, and Meleri would be waiting. She clutched the smooth leather folio that held her newly given engineering degree to her chest, giddy with the knowledge she was now a graduate of Amari’s Aether School of Engineering.
Four years of hard work had paid off, so much so that she’d added to her family’s patents during her schooling. She’d received several job offers in the last few weeks from businesses who either weren’t aware she was tapped to take over Six Point Mechanics Company or didn’t care.
She discreetly wiped sweat off her brow as she walked. The graduation gown she wore over her tailored trousers and day jacket was stifling in the heat of Seventh Month. Caris eventually reached the staircase that would lead to the temporarily erected mezzanine for VIP guests. The usher guarding the staircase let her pass after a quick conversation. Caris clambered up the spiral metal steps and cleared the top moments later, searching for her family in the groups of people before her.
“Caris!” her mother cried out, leaving good manners by the wayside in the heat of the moment as she bustled forward. “Oh, I’m so proud of you.”
Caris caught her mother up in a hug, still a little surprised at the fact she was a full head taller than Portia now. As an educated young woman of twenty, Caris had grown so much in the last four years, and seen her parents so little, that she’d been stunned at the difference when they arrived last week.
Portia stepped back to hold Caris at arm’s length, tears in her eyes but a smile on her face. “Look at you. My darling little girl. You’re an engineer now.”
“Just like you and Papa,” Caris said, beaming.
“Ready to take over the family business, then?” Emmitt teased with a smile.
Caris went to him for a hug, breathing in the familiar scent of his cologne and the hint of tabac he smoked in his pipes. “Certainly someday.”
She caught Meleri’s eye over her father’s shoulder, sharing a look with the woman who had been her teacher, confidant, and a motherly figure ever since Caris had become her ward. Caris had learned a lot about being an engineer at the Aether School of Engineering. She’d learned secrecy, politics, and quiet rebellion from the duchess and the Clockwork Brigade the spymaster oversaw.
Truly, it had been a shock one year into her stay when Meleri had sat her down and opened her eyes to aspects of the world Caris hadn’t known about. For all that the Auclairs had shared with her their life’s work in upholding Ashion values in the face of Daijal encroachment, Caris hadn’t been as forthcoming.
