I’d told them, it would’ve been easier to narrow it down.
“That one,” I said, pointing.
Sable’s eyes followed my hand to the table. Her face hardened. “You’re not from Bannock. None of you are.”
I might have held up the lie a little longer, but there was no sense in it. The jig was up, and I knew it. “Here’s the thing… I may have lied a little.” I sucked in a breath, bracing myself.
Sable grimaced, deflated. She was too fed up with me to be enraged. “First it was your name, then the primitives… and now this. Where do the lies stop, Mulroney? Did Gilfoyle really steal something from your city—wherever that is—or did he steal it from you? Did he even steal anything in the first place? Or was this some elaborate ploy to get us to help you burglarize an innocent man?”
“This is real,” I said. “It’s the truth. Everything about Gilfoyle is exactly like we’ve told you it is. He had a contract with Pyras. We don’t know whether he broke the contract because crime drove him away, or because he’s plotting Pyras’s downfall with one of the city’s leaders. All we know is that Gilfoyle took their gravstone without paying for it, and now he owes them a lot of money.”
Sable’s blue eyes searched mine, looking for a shred of truth. “Before we go any further with this, I think it’s time you told us about Pyras.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. I was thinking about the day I’d threatened to tell everyone in the stream that Pyras existed. Why did I care so much about Pyras’s secrecy now? I should’ve been looking out for myself, taking every opportunity I had to keep myself out of prison.
“I suggest you do, or the deal is off,” said Sable.
“I suggest you do. Deal is off, deal is off,” said Nerimund.
“It’s not my place,” I said. “My friends trusted me to keep it a secret, and I won’t betray them. This may be my fault for opening my big mouth, but I don’t have the right to explain Pyras on their behalf. They should be the ones to do that.”
Sable was still scrutinizing my every word and facial expression. “Those primitives are that important to you,” she said, asking.
I didn’t know the answer to her question. I knew what she wanted to hear, and I knew I didn’t want to piss off anyone else until we were finished with Gilfoyle. “They’ve kept my secret. Why shouldn’t I keep theirs?”
Sable nodded and sent Dennel McMurtry to summon the primies. The three men knew something was wrong as soon as they entered the room, just like I had. Sable was quiet, giving me the opportunity to speak first.
“Fellas,” I said, “I’m sorry. Mr. McMurtry overheard Blaylocke and me talking a few minutes ago. They know we’re not from Bannock, and they want to know about Pyras. I haven’t told them anything because I wanted it to be your choice whether they know or not. The Captain says the deal’s off unless somebody comes clean.”
Blaylocke looked at me, betrayed. Chaz looked to Vilaris for direction. Vilaris just scratched his dark beard, then tugged at the knot in his tieback to let his hair fall down around his face.
“Pyras is our home—not Muller’s,” said Vilaris. “We’d only known Muller for a few weeks before we came aboard the Galeskimmer. He’s not here because he wants to be. We threatened to turn him over to the Civvies if he didn’t come with us. We think Muller’s crimes are responsible for scaring Gilfoyle away.”
“I think it’s a conspiracy between Gilfoyle and Councilor Yingler,” I chimed in.
“All I want to know is whether we’re justified in confronting this Gilfoyle fellow,” said Sable. “There’s a reason you’ve been keeping Pyras a secret. Until I know what it is, why should I believe the rest of your story?”
“Pyras is a grav city,” I said.
Mr. Scofield was dubious. “I’ve mapped every corner of the stream, and I’ve never come across such a place.”
“Pyras isn’t in the stream. It’s in the nearflow.”
Dennel McMurtry gave a loud, callous laugh. Mr. Scofield tittered. Nerimund echoed Scofield.
“That’s not possible,” Sable said. “Nothing survives the nearflow for long, least of all a town or a city. Any floater down there would get torn to shreds in a few days.”
“Turns out surviving the nearflow is easy when you have technology from before the world shattered,” I said, “not to mention gadgeteer gurus like Chester, here.”
Vilaris continued, saying, “We have the ability to shield the city from inorganic matter, and a circuit of locking rods that can be disabled when we want to move. Pyras has remained a secret place for many generations, through a minimal amount of interaction with people in the stream.”
Sable was beginning to understand. “You’ve been isolated down there since before the shattering?”
“Just after it, actually. It was only a village back then; a few families seeking refuge from the techsouls who had vowed to cleanse the world of primitives. They stayed, and now there are thousands of us.”
“You’re all… primitives…”
Vilaris nodded.
“How can you possibly keep that a secret?”
“It’s gotten out from time to time. But of course, everyone who hears it dismisses it as a legend. Of those who do believe it, not many are willing to venture into the nearflow to look for us. And of the ones who do come looking, no one’s ever developed the technology to break through our cloaking systems. We’ve never been found.”
Sable flopped into her chair. “I don’t believe it.”
I smirked. “That’s what I said.”
“All this time, this has been about saving a city full of primitives?”
“We can survive without the money from the gravstone. But we can’t survive forever without trade. There’s only so much gravstone in the substrata of our floater, and we can only sell it until the surplus runs out. We lose a lot of good years if we let a delivery this big go unpaid-for.”
“Well, I can’t blame you for wanting your privacy,” said Sable. “The few primitives I know who live in the stream have hard lives. Most of them are poor, and they deal with prejudice on a daily basis. Please realize that I don’t hate you just because you’re primitives. I’m not morally opposed to helping your kind; it’s just dangerous keeping company with you.”
“So you’re still in?” asked Vilaris.
Sable glanced at her boatswain and her quartermaster. They each gave her their approval in turn. “Our arrangement stands. We help you retrieve what belongs to you, and you help us get Uncle Angus back.”
“Uncle Angus-back,” said Nerimund.
“That’s right, Neri,” said Sable.
“Tonight, then,” I said. “It happens tonight.”
We spent the rest of the day finishing the last of our preparations. By mid-afternoon, the sun was hidden behind lifeless gray clouds, and a light drizzle had started. The crew was stricken with an incurable restlessness. They kept coming to me with questions about what they were supposed to do. I was losing hope that this was going to go down without something very bad happening. The fog that had cleared up by noon was returning—not as thick this time, but still a nuisance, given what my three primitive companions and I were about to do.
“I think it’s time, fellas,” I said, when the sun had set to a dim yellow speck, blurry behind a field of low-lying clouds. “Chaz, let’s see what you’ve got for us.”
Chaz stretched, cracked his back and neck, took off his goggles. Sweat stains darkened the chest of his shirt and the insides of his shoulders, his tied-back hair damp and oily. “They’re done,” he said. “Without further ado, may I present to you… the apex ingots.”
He whipped a dirty rag away from the molds beside the ship’s furnace. Eight round beads shone brightly within; four the size of flattened tennis balls, the other four no larger than lemons. He handed us each a set, one large and one small, and took the last pair for himself. They were smooth to the touch, their depths shot through with gleaming red-orange veins. They were perfect. Just what I’d asked him
for, and just the right size—I hoped.
They were ingots of pure driftmetal.
9
I opened the Galeskimmer’s gate and stepped to the edge of the deck, my toes hanging out over empty sky. The boat was slowing, Mr. Scofield guiding her to a halt and checking his coordinates to be sure we were in the right place. The crew was gathered on the deck, sails battened down and guns in place. I clutched the center of my chest with both hands and felt the driftmetal ingots, heavy as any normal rocks in the pouch Eliza Kinally had sewn.
“Head to Platform 22 and wait for our signal,” I said.
Mr. Scofield frowned at the prospect of taking orders from me, but nodded his understanding.
I flicked him an apathetic salute.
“Still sure you want to do it this way?” Vilaris asked me.
“We have to. I don’t know whether Gilfoyle keeps bodyguards at his personal residence, but they’d spot the Galeskimmer before we got close enough to surprise them. This is the only way. We’re getting your contract fulfilled, or we’re taking the gravstone. There’s no third scenario.”
“Be careful,” Vilaris said.
“It’s not me you should be worried about. It’s you and those weak primitive bones of yours. Better hope Chaz did the math right when he made these things.”
When I looked at Chaz, the pouch strapped to his chest, and the two oddly-shaped lumps bulging out below his clavicle, I had a startling epiphany. I trusted him. That was the reason I cared about Pyras. The reason I was going to go through with