Steamed (9 page)

“The hell I don’t!”

“Hal, this is Octavia Pye. She’s the captain of this . . . er . . .”

“Say it,” Hallie snarled at her brother, her eyes narrowing. “Go on, say it. Drive me over the edge! Drive me over the goddamned fuc—”

“Hal!” Her brother interrupted her with a worried look my way. “I don’t think Octavia appreciates swearing.”

I gave the distraught woman a quelling look. “Indeed.”

“Fine!” Hallie yelled, tossing her hands in the air. “I won’t swear, because it will offend this pretend woman’s delicate sensibilities! Have it your way! I’ll just go quietly insane on my own, then, shall I? Without swearing?”

“Pretend woman?” I asked, eyeing her lest she should try to escape again. We were once again under way, but I worried that in her distraught state she hadn’t taken that fact in.

“Now she thinks this is a delusion,” Jack said quietly to me as his sister paced back and forth across the narrow hallway, her hands gesturing as she mumbled to herself. “She thinks that we somehow ingested some sort of hallucinogenic, and that we’re imagining all of this.”

“I must admit that I find your story just as unlikely as she finds us,” I said, relieved to see Hallie stop muttering as she stopped before one of the portholes that lined the corridor.

Jack gave me an odd look. “You say unlikely, but not impossible.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Does that matter?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s telling. I would think that anyone else would tell me I was out-and-out lying, or delusional. But you just say it’s unlikely.”

“I did say that your story is outrageous,” I pointed out. “And so it is.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Let’s look at the facts,” he answered, holding up his hand to tick items off his fingers.

“Yes, let’s look at the facts. Facts are good. Facts are solid. Facts never, ever spirit one away from one’s normal world and into something of make-believe,” Hallie said quickly, her knuckles white as she gripped the brass porthole frame. “I like facts. Give me facts, Jack.”

“One: earlier today we were in my lab at work. The year was 2010, and I was a nanoelectrical engineer working on a quantum computer project.”

I considered him carefully. His eyes were steady on mine, nothing in them but a slight look of worry. Either he was telling the truth, or he believed that what he said was the truth.

“Indeed,” I said a third time.

“What year is it here?” he asked me.

“It’s 2010.”

“No, I mean what year is it for you? I’m no expert on Victorian fashion, but you appear to be wearing a bustle, and I thought those went out of style before the turn of the century, so I’m assuming that your present is something in the late eighteen hundreds?”

“Today is February 15, 2010, Mr. Fletcher,” I answered.

“But . . .” His gaze dropped to my chest. I had unbuttoned my jacket earlier, in an attempt to keep from sweating profusely. “But you’re wearing that corset you keep mentioning.”

“On the contrary, you are the one who repeatedly brings it up,” I corrected him.

“And long skirts. And a bustle. You can’t deny you have a bustle.”

“Why would I wish to?” I asked, frowning at him. “Truly, Mr. Fletcher, you seem to have an extremely bizarre preoccupation with my undergarments.”

“And button boots,” he said, pointing at my feet. “The kind you have to use a button-hook thing on.”

“Granny boots,” Hallie said suddenly, having turned to stare at my feet. “Mom had a pair of those. My God, Jack, you’re right. She does have granny boots on!”

“I do not have a grandmother, so these boots could hardly have belonged to her,” I corrected Hallie. “And once again I must say that I do not see what my clothing has to do with you both being here on my ship.”

“How come your skirt is so short?” Hallie asked, frowning at my ankles. “I was in a production of
Hello, Dolly!
and all the dresses we wore swept the floor. It was a pain in the ass always having to hoist the skirts to walk up and down the stairs. But your skirt is at your ankles.”

“The uniform of the female members of the Southampton Aerocorps includes skirts that are ankle-length for safety reasons, Miss Norris. It would be impractical to attempt to climb around in the ship’s rigging with skirts that touched the floor.”

“Hrmph.” She went back to looking out of the porthole.

“Point two . . . damn. I forgot what point two was,” Jack said, frowning.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps instead, I might have a word with you?”

“You’re going to talk about me, aren’t you?” Hallie asked, her hands on her hips. “I know you’re going to talk about me.”

“Yes,” I said simply.

“I think I’m going to lie down,” she said in a sudden reversal of attitude, her hand to her forehead. “Maybe if I go back to sleep, the drug will work its way out of my system and I can see normal things again. Er . . . this room looks like someone is living in it.”

“That is my cabin. Since it is unsuitable for you to remain with Mr. Fletcher in his cabin, you will share mine.”

“Unsuitable?” Jack asked, looking as if he wanted to laugh. “She’s my sister.”

“She is an unmarried woman, sir,” I pointed out. “The Aerocorps has standards of conduct upon their ships, and I would be in violation of several of them were I to allow your sister and you to share a cabin.”

“I’m divorced, not unmarried,” Hallie said, sounding somewhat forlorn as she stood in the doorway of my cabin.

“That makes little difference to the Aerocorps. You will share my cabin. The window seat converts into a bunk; you are welcome to use that. We’ll worry about finding you some clothing at a later time.”

She nodded, but said nothing until she entered the cabin, pausing to look over her shoulder at us. “We didn’t eat magic mushrooms, did we, Jack?”

“No, Hal, we didn’t.”

“Those people we saw, they were real?”

“Yes. Octavia is having some food and stuff sent to them. I added my watch and the money I had, in case they could be used, too.”

Her face grew pinched. “It was the explosion in your lab?”

“I think so,” he said, his voice calm, but I sensed an underlying unease. “I think when the liquid helium that you spilled hit the quantum circuits . . . well, I don’t know exactly what happened except it knocked us unconscious, and out of our reality and into this one.”

“Why don’t you look more disturbed by all this?” she suddenly wailed, her hands wringing themselves before she gestured toward Jack Fletcher. “Why aren’t you upset about her? About all of this? Why aren’t you insane with anxiety over this whole thing?”

Oddly enough, I was wondering much the same thing. After his initial confusion and disbelief, he’d settled down into a sort of excited anticipation that I had a hard time explaining.

He took one of his sister’s hands in his. “This is the chance of a lifetime, Hal. Don’t you see it? We’ve done something remarkable, something miraculous. We’re not in our world anymore—somehow, something changed on an atomic level. I don’t know how or why, but I do know this—we’re explorers in a strange new territory. The ramifications of what happened to us are mind-boggling. Just think of the research we can do! Just think of the knowledge we can gain from our experiences. I really wish I had my laptop to take notes on.”

Hallie was silent for a moment, her expression unchanged. “Can we get back?”

The excitement in Jack’s face faded as he stared at her, the question hanging heavily in the air.

She nodded again, just as if his silence had answered her question, and went into the cabin, closing the door softly behind her.

I was a bit taken aback by her sudden acceptance of, or at least resignation to, her presence on the airship. “She will not do herself any harm, will she?” I asked Jack.

“Hallie? No,” he said, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t believe it from her little freak-out, but she’s really a very levelheaded person. Feet on the ground and all that. It’s just that . . . well, you have to admit, this whole thing is really bizarre.”

“It is very trying for everyone. I feel in the need for a strong cup of tea,” I answered. “Just as soon as you’ve changed your garments, we will indulge ourselves, and have a discussion about the situation.”

“Why do I need to change my clothes?” he asked, looking down at himself.

I stopped outside of the storage cabin that Mr. Piper had emptied in order to convert it to what was either a brig or a passenger cabin, depending on your point of view. “Mr. Fletcher, you may not be bothered by the sign on your back proclaiming you to be an airship pirate, but I assure you that the Aerocorps takes a very hard view of such people. Mr. Piper has found some suitable clothing for you to wear. I trust they will fit well enough for you to don them.”

He chuckled, outright chuckled, as if what I said was too amusing. “You know, I’d be tempted to freak out right along with Hallie, except for one thing.”

“What is that?” I asked as he opened the door and stepped inside.

“You,” he said, a twinkle in his mismatched eyes as he closed the door.

My heart did an odd sort of flip-flop in my chest.

“I am
not
going to be charmed by that rogue,” I muttered to myself as I stalked down the hallway toward the galley. “He could be deranged. He could be lying. Or he could be up to something nefarious. And besides, three rogues in my life were quite enough! There is not room for one more!”

 

R
obert Anstruther once told me that it was funny how fate chose certain moments to listen in to one’s thoughts. It had certainly done so to mine—a wish to escape an unhappy childhood with an alcoholic mother had led me to places I had never in my dreams imagined. And at that moment, as I walked down the passageway toward the mess, I had an uncomfortably itchy feeling that fate had once again chosen the present to poke its head into my business.

“Captain!”

“Mr. Llama?” I winced when I spoke. Addressing the second engineer always left me with the regrettable feeling I was speaking to a child’s toy. I had a suspicion that the man in question wasn’t born with the dubious name he had given the Aerocorps, but it was not for me to insist he adopt something less eccentric.

“There is a rumor floating around that spies have come on board,” the slight, dark-haired man said as he closed the door of the mess. Mr. Llama—I sighed to myself as I even thought of his absurd name—often entered a room in such a manner, or so I had noticed during my four days on the
Tesla
. He had a long face, black eyes, and a manner of keeping himself to himself. He also had an uncanny knack of popping up behind me without me being aware, startling me to the extreme.

“We have some unexpected guests, yes, but I have no cause to believe they are spies,” I said carefully, watching him closely. I had yet to actually catch Mr. Llama in the process of entering or leaving a room; he just seemed to appear or disappear as if he were made of smoke.

“If you would like a hand at . . .
interrogation
. . . I am at your assistance,” he said, making a little bow. “I have some knowledge of methods of ascertaining if someone is speaking the truth or not.”

“Really?” I asked, setting down the pen I had been using to write in the ship’s log. “That’s a rather odd skill for an engineer, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t
always
been an engineer,” he said, sliding a glance to the side, his body stiffening as if something he saw shocked him. I looked to see what it was, but there was nothing else in the mess but Dooley, at the far end of the table, whistling to himself as he performed his chores.

“I’m sure you haven’t, but—” The words stopped when I looked back to find that Mr. Llama had disappeared. “Damnation. He did it again.”

“Who did what?” Dooley asked, looking up from a boot he was blacking.

“Mr. Llama. Did you see him leave the room?” Dooley scratched his head, leaving a smear of boot blacking on his forehead. “I didn’t know he was here.”

“He was. How very odd.”

“Aye, that he is. Mr. Francisco says he doesn’t sleep at night.”

“He doesn’t?” I asked, confused. “Who doesn’t?”

“Mr. Llama.” Dooley leaned toward me with the air of one sharing a confidence. “Mr. Francisco says that Mr. Llama slips out of their cabin at night, and never sleeps in his bunk. Never! Not once has he seen him there! Isn’t that strange? Mr. Francisco says that Mr. Llama learned strange Oriental skills when he was fighting the Moghuls, and that he knows thirty-seven ways to kill a man with naught but a bit of string and a pair of tweezers.”

I looked at the door with speculation, wondering what the mysterious Mr. Llama did at night, and made a resolution to keep a closer eye on the crew.

When the door opened again, my heart jumped into my throat.