THE BUTCHER
CHAPTER ONE
COVENANT, TRINITY (YEAR 2120)
“AND WHEN IT WAS FINISHED, THE HERALDS SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD AND UNITED THEIR DIVINE ENERGIES DEEP IN THE HEART OF THE WORLD TO GIVE IT LIFE.”
—THE SACRED LAW OF THE HERALDS
There are two things people kill for on Trinity: cash and water.
Tonight, I’m killing for both.
I sit inside the belly of an airship, boots dangling over the edge of the open cargo hold doors. Harsh, hot winds smack against my legs, gusting into the airship’s interior. Beads of sweat trickle down my back underneath the layers of my kit that cover me head to toe.
Automatically, I reach for the compact canteen strapped to my thigh, unscrewing the top and pulling up the bottom of my full-face mask so I can carefully tip a small amount of water intomy mouth. Just enough to wet my tongue. Water rations are going to be the first thing I buy once I get paid for this job.
“Got ’em,” Dani calls back from the steerage deck, her hands steady on the ship’s wheel as she eases us through skies crowded with nimble little airships, ornate dirigibles, and massive homesteads—town-size islands of gold and polished metal that hover in midair. “There you are, you doomed beauty. Hiding underneath a homestead. Very clever.”
I go still, one hand hovering over the knives tucked against my body. I’m honestly impressed she found the airship I’ve been hired to infiltrate so quickly amid all the traffic up here. Not that I’d ever tell her that. Wouldn’t want it to go to her head. “Is that my cue? Or are you just congratulating yourself?”
“Oh my god, Val, was that a joke? It’s hard to tell with that monotone voice of yours, but it almost sounded like a joke.”
I raise an eyebrow, swinging my feet back and forth in the open air. “I would never expect you to appreciate the subtle nuances of my humor.”
Dani laughs, loud enough that I can hear it above the wind, and that’s another thing I’ll never tell her. How I really like to make her laugh. How the deep, full-throated sound of it blunts my sharp edges, even just for a moment.
“Subtledefinitely is the word for it,” she says. “Hold tight, ghoulie. No rash actions before I give you the go-ahead.”
Anticipation crawls along my skin, kicking up my heart rate, and I hear it—a delicate, haunting melody, crooning in my head. It’s always there, thrumming in the background, sometimes no more than a murmur, other times—like now—loud and insistent. A wordless chorus of voices that slides in arcs from deep, husky,resonant notes to high, clear ones that pierce your chest, like the ballads street performers will play on their tin whistles. But no one is singing to me; it isn’t made by a person and no one else can hear it. It comes from the world far below me. The song of Trinity itself.
I’ve been hearing it all my life.
Wrapping my fingers around the edge of the cargo hold, I fold forward, leaning so very precariously out over the open air. Reveling in that feeling of the world tipping and swaying hundreds of feet below me. It’s reckless, but it’s the kind of reckless I like best.
The hot wind snatches at my face, ripples over my skin. I fill my lungs with it. It smells like sunlight and excess and the exhaust from naphtha engines powering the airships. We spin past a dirigible lined with gold and stained glass, skimming so close I could lean out and drag my fingertips over its sun-warmed gaudiness.
Hundreds of feet below me, the city of Covenant sprawls in a tangle of copper buildings, chapel steeples of whitewashed metal, and old airship docks.
From up here, even I can’t argue that this world—Trinity—is something to see. Unfathomably big continents of bronze-colored metal alloy created by the Twelve Heralds thousands of years ago. They’re arranged like slightly mismatched puzzle pieces, separated from one another by black bottomless chasms called the Elysian Depths. Miles of covered aqueducts weave like a glowing net over the surface, carrying water and naphtha to every city, borough, and township.
“How close do you want me to get?” Dani calls back over her shoulder, her hands light on the wheel of the helm. “Becausewe’re quickly approaching the point where they might catch sight of me and what I’m doing.”
I sit up and swing my legs inside, lying down on my stomach. “Just give me line of sight like usual. I’ll do the rest.” I drop the upper half of my body out of the cargo hold to get a visual on the situation, hanging upside down over Covenant, my arms dangling below me.
I can see it ahead, just off the curved bow of the airship Dani rented, tucked underneath a giant homestead. The little airship itself is not much to look at—battered and rust-spotted, with simple ornamentation and no identifying markings smelted into its tail fins. The kind of ride people pick when they don’t want to attract a lot of notice. People who, maybe, just want to get their travel clearance and make a break for another borough as quickly as possible.
According to Dani, that’s what Bloody Bill Kilpatrick, the head of the Gold Town Gang, says the handful of people on board are planning. Gold Town defectors who swiped a load of extremely valuable containers of water from him and now are trying to make a run for a big payday.
He’s paying me a lot of paper to get his cargo back and, most importantly, to teach the defectors what happens to people who try to screw over the boss of the Gold Town Gang.
Pushing myself back inside, I grab my goggles from the floor, secure them over my eyes, and then check the knives strapped to my body. Wrath—a hooked, serrated knife—is tucked in a sheath across my chest. Reason sits on my hip, a half-moon blade that arcs over my knuckles. Mercy—the triangular push dagger with a curved, T-shaped handle—is on my other hip. And then there’sToothpick—the retractable arm blade hidden up my sleeve that Dani gave me as a gift just a few months ago. As I touch the hilt of each one, I fold up everything that makes me Val and tuck it deep inside my chest. Val is no use to me right now; I need to become something else.
“Hey, Bruinn.”
I pause, tilting my head, and see Dani half draped over the ship’s wheel as she looks back at me. Her straight deep-purple hair swings above her shoulders, only an inch or two longer than the rounded line of her jaw, and her warm, light-brown skin practically glows, even against the dark gray of her shirt and vest. My eyes catch on the soft curve of her lips as she grins. “Remember to watch your ass out there.”
Reason sings as I take it from its sheath. “I always do.”
