Warbound (The Grimnoir Chronicles Book 3)

Like most self-proclaimed grand visionaries, Bradford Carr was an imbecile. He filled this office with toadies, flunkies, and bullies. One minute after you put my name on that door I am firing the lot of them. The stated mission of the OCI is to keep America safe in all matters pertaining to magic. That’s noble. That’s something I can stand behind. But Actives are Americans too, and they’ll be treated like Americans. There will be no more flouting the law under my watch, so help me God. The OCI man should respect the Constitution, understand magic for good or ill, and be tough enough to get the job done no matter what. You want to know how I’d run the OCI? The ideal OCI agent is a PhD who can win a bar fight. Bradford Carr made an enemy out of Jake Sullivan. I would have offered that man a job.

—William Donovan,

Closed door confirmation hearings for the

office of the coordinator of information,1933

UBF Traveler

The clear blue sky had gotten darker and darker until it had turned to night.

“Seventy thousand feet,” Barns stated as he carefully adjusted a knob. “And still climbing . . .”

People had never been meant to go this high. Faye stood at the rail, staring out the armored window, marveling at how clearly she could see the curve of the blue world from here. For once, Faye could actually admit she’d found another interesting way to get somewhere other than Traveling.

“Mr. Black, how many contacts?” Captain Southunder asked the man sitting behind the fancy teleradar machine.

“More returns than I can count. They’ve scrambled the entire navy.”

Faye hooked her legs around the rail so she could lean way over. The glass went clear past the catwalk and on down so she could see directly below. Even though she was mostly all bundled up, she really didn’t want to get her forehead stuck to the freezing glass. That would have been embarrassing.

She couldn’t even see the Imperium ships below, but when she checked with her head map, she could pick them out. Engines pumping, magic surging, thousands of soldiers looking for a chance to shoot them down. She knew that they’d already tried, and she could sense the friction and the hot bits of matter as projectiles were futilely lobbed in their direction. There was no use distressing the Marauders with this information, she figured, since the odds of them actually getting hit were about two thousand, five hundred to one. They were a tiny, nearly invisible spot in the sky to the Imperium airships and fighters. Of course, those odds would change the higher the bad guys climbed and the more lead they threw.

Captain Southunder was biting one knuckle. “Engines?”

“Still functioning,” answered one of the crew. The board in front of him had nothing but green lights on it.

“Pressure compensators?”

Faye looked over. That board had several lights flashing yellow and one that was red. “Fifty percent, Captain.” The pirate thumped the panel with his fist a few times and the red one turned yellow. Now that was engineering that Faye could understand. “Back up to seventy.” The light went red. “Hell. Fifty.”

She didn’t know what was going on, except there wasn’t any air up here at all, it was freezing, stuff was starting to break, and if certain specific things broke on the machine that was pumping in heated air, they’d all pass out and choke to death or have their blood boil off before they even had a chance to fall to their deaths. Her head map was feeding her information that even the Captain didn’t know. Barns was Lucky, and he was using his Power hard. The tremble in his hands and the sweat on his face wasn’t from flying the ship, it was from the physical stress of unconsciously burning his Power to manipulate probability in their favor. He was better at it than he knew, and Faye got a little mad at herself when she realized how jealous she was of that particular Power, and just how much better she would be able to put it to use. Meanwhile, a few things had snapped from the cold and the stress deep inside the ship. There had been a spark, and it had immediately ignited the fuel in a machine, but Lady Origami had forced the fire out from here merely by getting stern with the unruly fire.

Faye was impressed. She wondered if the Captain realized just how many times those two Actives had saved his ship. Probably not, since he was so distracted. The man who could control weather was probably feeling extra uncomfortable, since for the first time in his long life, he was in a place that didn’t have weather as he knew it. He was trying not to show it, but Faye could tell. The energy and currents that existed up here for him to manipulate were too alien for him to understand. Poor Captain Southunder.

In the hold, the genius Cogs were using their magic to make sure Buckminster Fuller’s contraption was going to work, and she could see how they were folding and unfolding bits of the Power to grant themselves flashes of extra wisdom. That type of magic was starting to make more sense to her, and, in fact, it even seemed familiar for some reason. Not too far away from them was Mr. Sullivan, all suited up in steel, his body made extra dense to keep out the cold. He was impervious as stone, waiting, thinking . . . About what, she didn’t know, but heaven help anybody who got in Mr. Sullivan’s way after he’d had a chance to think through how to get them.

Now the Captain was addressing her, so Faye had to pull out of her head map and snap back to reality. “Faye, can you reach the Imperium target from here?”

“Yes, Captain,” she answered with what surely seemed like no hesitation to everyone else. In reality, she’d had to think it over hard, for nearly one-eighth of a second. She’d be falling through the air, carrying a thousand pounds of steel and Mr. Sullivan, but even then she’d be able to Travel up to forty times to correct her trajectory and get them in the right place before she built up too much speed and hit the ground and went splat. Once again, it wasn’t the distance, but the view, and if you were going four hundred miles an hour, it sure made landing challenging. “No problem.”

“Seventy thousand, five hundred feet,” Barns said.

“Grab Mr. Sullivan and get down there. The hold will depressurize the second we open the doors, and it won’t do to have you two get sucked outside.”

“That’s mighty thoughtful of you, Captain.”

Something was wrong. Faye tilted her head to the side, like her head map had just made her inner ear feel off balance. Barns had stiffened too, as his Power had just recoiled against something that even he couldn’t help shift the odds on. She checked her head map. One of the Imperium navy ships far below them felt different from the others swarming around it. It was bigger, faster. Moving quickly across the ocean, and the magic that was gathering inside of it was deadly and familiar. “Peace Ray charging up!” Faye warned. Now that was something that would be a whole lot more effective than the explosive shells the Imperium had been lobbing up at them. A Tesla beam could shoot clear out into space if it felt like it.

“Barns, evasive maneuvers.” Southunder ordered.

But Faye knew that would be next to useless. The ray would travel in a perfectly straight line seemingly as fast as the light from the sun. Their altitude was protecting them from everything else in the sky, but that same altitude would just make them a better target for the Peace Ray. They might miss a few times, maybe, but that was it. The Imperium certainly weren’t stupid. Faye had already done the math. “Keep going, Captain. I got this.” She didn’t wait for the inevitable response.

There was a scary white skull face looking down at her with big black eyes in the cargo hold. Mr. Sullivan’s voice seemed odd coming through all that steel plate. “It time?”

She reached down and picked up the bundle of guns and bombs she’d left here. There were a bunch of pistols already holstered on her body. Behind her, the Cogs had fired up their new machine, and it was crackling with magical energy. “Can’t. Peace Ray incoming. Gotta stop it.”

Sullivan may have seemed slow to most folks, but he was anything but, especially when it came down to matters pertaining to them not getting dead. “I’ll catch up.”

Faye checked her head map, picked a spot nearly sixteen miles away, and set off to absolutely wreck a battleship all by herself.

Imperium Warship K3 Auspicious Dragon

Faye quickly realized that the main reason the massive airship hadn’t fired its Peace Ray at the Traveler yet was because the designers hadn’t ever thought they’d ever have to fire it nearly straight up.

She had to hand it to whoever the captain of the Japanese battleship was, because he’d pumped hydrogen forward and swiveled the engines so that the front end of the ship was rising hard and fast. She’d never set foot in an airship which was pointed at this steep of an angle before—well, except for the Tempest while it was crashing, but she’d been in a coma for that. Normally when an airship climbed it was a sort of floating with just a bit of an upward angle inside. They were actually pretty gentle. This, on the other hand, felt rather extreme, and if she’d been anybody other than Sally Faye Vierra, landing on a catwalk at such a sharp angle would have been disconcerting.

To Faye, it merely threw her aim off a bit. Her first bullet hit the Japanese soldier in the shoulder, but that was the beauty of the Suomi Gun. She’d only picked the Finnish gun out of the locker because it had had the prettiest wooden stock, but it was really easy to shoot, so she just adjusted her aim and put the next few in the center of his chest. In her defense, she’d been holding the heavy gun in one hand, and her other hand had been holding the handles on her big sack of guns, which weighed a ton. She dropped the sack with a clatter and used her other hand to grab the magazine.

Of course her gunshots had gotten the attention of everyone else in the room. They looked up in surprise. She wasn’t even sure what this room did, but it had a lot of energy flowing through it, so she figured it must be important, and everybody inside looked like mechanics, so killing them might help.

Mashing the trigger, Faye worked the muzzle back and forth. The compensator on the end kept the gun from rising too much. The rest of the thirty rounds was gone in one long, angry burst. Most of the men had been struck. Bodies hit the deck. Some still shouting, a few crawling, others still. Steam was squirting from a pipe. A few had run for it, and a couple of them had even escaped, not yet aware that there were bullets stuck in them. She’d deal with them later, but right now she could still feel the energy building in the Peace Ray. She dropped the Suomi and reached for the sack of guns. Last time she’d done this she’d realized that stopping to reload took up precious seconds which could be better spent murdering Imperium. The ship was at such a crazy angle that the bag had slid down the floor until it hit a wall.

That reminded her that the captain had to be pretty clever to steer his battleship like this, so she’d deal with him next. Her hand landed on a Browning Auto Five shotgun. It was one of her all-time favorites.

It was easy to pick out the bridge. It had lots of equipment, big chairs, and electricity flowing up to the various devices and displays. Faye landed on top of one of those banks of instruments. The man operating it looked up at her in confusion. She kicked him in the teeth and he spilled from his chair.

There were lots of Imperium in this room, but the Captain had to be the one with the fanciest hat, so she blew his head clean off.

There was an Iron Guard on the bridge. If she hadn’t been able to tell by all the extra magic bonded to him through the ritual kanji scars, she would have been tipped off by the way he quickly drew a sidearm and started shooting at her. She disappeared as the bullets perforated the console.

Iron Guards were tricky, and she’d found that they sometimes they could get lucky and predict where a Traveler might reappear, so Faye played it smart. There was a big air-conditioning conduit that ran under the floor. She put herself in it, right under the grating beneath the Iron Guard’s feet. She couldn’t lift the shotgun, but she got one of her .45s out and popped eight rounds up through the grate, shredding the Iron Guard’s feet and legs. The way he just grimaced and stayed standing told Faye he was a Brute.

The Imperium Marines were pretty sharp, and they figured out where she was shooting from right quick, but it didn’t matter, since she was on the opposite end of the ship before their first bullets punctured the grate in response. She’d pulled the pin on a grenade and left it under the bridge for them as a present. She was far enough away she didn’t hear the explosion, but she clearly felt the Spellbound curse stealing the magical connection of the Iron Guard and several of the marines after the grenade shrapnel killed them.

The Peace Ray fired.

It didn’t make much noise. There wasn’t much outward show as the particles were magically accelerated and hurled into the distance. Just a sort of snap and a flickering of the lights.

No!

She checked. The Traveler was still there. They’d missed. If they’d been hit then the Traveler would have simply been swept away. They would adjust and fire again. She scanned her head map. This ship was over a thousand feet long and packed with life. Who looked busiest?

That room was busy! Surely somebody in there was involved in shooting the Peace Ray. She arrived unseen. Since nobody even noticed little old her, she stuffed another mag into her pistol, stuck it back in the holster and lifted the shotgun, but then thought better of it. A man in coveralls was working next to a big machine with giant gears grinding together. That machine looked super important and worth stopping, so she walked over, thumped the man over the head with the shotgun butt, and knocked him into the gears. Sadly, he didn’t so much as slow the big gears as they mulched him to pieces, but he sure did scream a lot, which got everybody’s attention.

So she lifted the shotgun and went to work, dropping Imperium left and right. The Auto Five kicked really hard, but it ran fast. Like her. Everyone scrambled. Some rushed her, screaming, brave, not even armed, while others ran for help, but to the Imperium’s credit, nobody stood there stupidly. They all did something. Not that it did them any good, since ten seconds later the entire engine room had been depopulated.

Faye went back to the slowly turning gears. They looked too important not to break, so she jammed the empty Auto Five between them. The big machine shrieked and ground to a halt. The whole airship shuddered, so that was more like it. That had broken something, and fire came shooting out a pipe in the wall. Faye couldn’t read the weird Japanese letters, but luckily a nearby drum had a flame drawn on it. She hoped that meant it was flammable, so she lifted her .45 and poked a hole in the tank before Traveling away.

Sure enough, the contents of that tank weren’t just flammable. They were explosive. She sure heard that one, even felt it through the soles of her feet as the floor vibrated, but she was already four hundred feet away and three floors up, to pick up something new from her big sack of guns. Two of the crew had approached the abandoned bag cautiously, poking at it with their toes, so she simply shot each one once in the back of the head. The airship was still pointing up drastically, so that told Faye she needed to hurry up and use one of the biggest guns. She picked the bazooka. It had gotten brains on it. Icky.

Lance had told her bazooka wasn’t its real name, just something they called it for short. It was really the something-something-mark-something-or-other launcher, but she preferred the slang term bazooka, and she figured it would do a real number to the delicate membranes inside the giant hydrogen cells. Lance had been fond of the bazooka, so she figured this was for him.

There was a great spot on the swaying platform suspended between the hulls. This place wasn’t so armored as the outside, because, come on, how was a bomb going to end up in here? There were ten men on the platform, one of whom was an armed Imperium marine, so she made sure to land right behind him. He had his back to her. Faye took a knee and shouldered the big tube. Lance had always warned her about the dangerous hot gases that came shooting out the back of the bazooka when you fired, but she figured it wouldn’t hurt if she hit an Imperium man with it. She didn’t even really have to aim, since pretty much everything in the wide-open red space was vulnerable. She pulled the trigger and was rewarded with a terrific BOOM.

It made all of the Imperium men jump or hit the deck, except for the marine who had been standing behind her, of course. He never knew what hit him. The bazooka’s back blast had knocked him right over the railing. He was falling toward the lower hull, burning and screaming. Faye found that amusing for some reason. She turned back in time to see the explosive shell’s impact. There was a great shower of sparks and smoke as the big round tore through multiple cell walls. There was a blue flash as gas ignited.

The Torches on the damage-control team were easy to pick out. They were the ones not coming to kill her. They were concentrating on the explosion, trying to keep the fire in check while the other armored cells sealed themselves off. Everybody else was charging at her, but you can’t hardly tackle a Traveler. Faye simply dropped the empty bazooka, stepped through space, and let all those tough guys dogpile each other. Then she lifted her .45, shot one Torch in the throat, turned and shot the other right between the shoulder blades. Then she Traveled back to her bag of guns, because the oncoming wall of fire would take care of the rest.

An alarm began to sound. Why had it taken them so darn long? But then she realized that she’d only been aboard for one minute and fifteen seconds. She could sense the Peace Ray recharging, but the ship was listing a bit to the side. She’d certainly upset their aim, but they could still get themselves corrected, and that simply wouldn’t do. She had to take this big battleship down. There would be other Torches on a ship this big, and they’d all be concentrating on controlling the fires she had started, which meant it was time to switch tactics. She had to find other things to blow up.

She went back to her bag and pulled out the two really big Russian stick grenades. She could barely lift them and couldn’t imagine how some poor sucker was expected to throw these further than the blast radius. Lance had said these things could blow up a tank!

Her boots landed on a narrow catwalk. She was out in the open. The blue ocean was visible through the grating. The hangar was filled with biplanes. They were suspended by hooks and chains, dangling over the open floor. Airplanes were filled with gas, but more importantly, they could be loaded with bombs, and if she was a bomb, where would she be kept?

There.

There was a big armored door in the side of the hangar. The bombs were fed down a mechanized chute. She followed the chute up with her head map . . . And landed in an armored room absolutely filled with deadly steel ovals, thousands of them, each one weighing hundreds of pounds. Faye grinned. This was perfect. The armor was supposed to keep explosions out, but it was going to have a heck of a time holding this one in . . . She struggled to pull the massive cotter pin out of the Russian grenade, but she managed. Then she dropped it and hurried out of there. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing when it went off.

She landed on the far end of the ship, and good thing she did, because the bottom middle section came apart five seconds later. Not counting Tesla devices, it was the biggest explosion Faye had ever seen. Debris, people, even whole airplanes got launched out by the blast and went spinning toward the ocean. Her head map told her it was actually hundreds of smaller blasts all piled on top of each other, but nobody else would be able to tell that.

The bottom hull’s hydrogen was burning. The explosion must have killed several of their damage-control Torches, because they weren’t doing nearly as good a job stopping this fire.

Somebody must have had the good sense to try to steer this thing. Faye had to hand it to the Imperium Navy, they were very steady under pressure. They’d realized they were crashing, and they were going to try and put it down soft. Faye didn’t think so. Her head map told her which engines were being used to power the compressors on the remaining bags which would enable them to control their descent, and she still had one of the big stick grenades left.

This room was filled with roaring turbines, big as trucks, and pumping pistons as big around as trees. The alarm was blaring. The lights were flashing. Men were scrambling. They’d all been rocked by the big explosion and they were scared.

Faye grabbed hold of the pin, but it didn’t want to budge. She pulled, straining, hard as she could. The darn thing was stuck.

There was an Iron Guard in this room. A big, terrifying man, and Faye could sense the magic roiling off of him. He was moving quickly, bounding between the machines. She could tell what he was because he had made himself so very light. He was a Heavy, like Mr. Sullivan. And he’d been pursuing her futilely through the ship. She could respect the effort, but she wasn’t planning on sticking around.

The grenade’s pin wouldn’t come out. As long as this Kaga was in the air, then the Traveler was in danger. Faye tugged and pulled, but the pin was stuck, and she had cow-milking hands, so it wasn’t like she was weak. Stupid Soviet junk!

Gravity intensified. She could feel it building on top of her. The Heavy was hurling Imperium engineers out of his way. He drew his sword. Her head map screamed as the weight of ten worlds tried to squish her flat.

This stupid bomb was stuck and she wasn’t strong enough to free it. Her body wasn’t strong enough to shrug off all the extra gravity, and in a couple of seconds, some of her internal organs were going to pop. She needed to be stronger.

The Heavy roared a battle cry and threw himself at her.

She’d met the Chairman briefly. She’d seen how he’d changed his Powers back and forth, tapping whatever part of the Power he needed to. Faye hadn’t understood it then, heck, she barely understood it now, but the Power wasn’t that much different than Lady Origami’s folded animals. Every type of magic had a shape, and that shape touched other shapes, and all those shapes together made up the world. Your type of magic just determined which part of the world you could tweak. If you reshaped your own connection, you could steer it to a different part of the Power and call on a whole new form of magic.

She’d changed this before, instinctually calling on Whisper’s fire magic while inside the belly of the God of Demons. Faye felt for the connection to the Power she’d just stolen from the Brute on the bridge, found it, studied the complex geometry . . .

And in the half a second it took for the Heavy to cover the distance, Faye figured out how to make herself strong.

Faye easily shrugged off all of the extra gravity like it wasn’t even there. The pin came right out of the grenade. The Heavy’s sword was coming right for her head, but it seemed so slow. Faye simply moved her body out of the way.

The grenade and the Heavy hit the floor at the same time. So this must be how Delilah felt. The Heavy swung the sword at her ankles, but she just hopped over it like she was playing jump rope. She kicked him in the ribs, and the big man flew back and crashed hard into a pylon. That big old razor sword could come in handy. She crossed the distance in a blur, reached down, grabbed him by the arm, not even that hard, mind you, and his bones snapped like brittle twigs. Faye had surprised herself. The Heavy bellowed.

Fun as that was, that big Russian grenade was about to go off, so Faye focused, realized that she couldn’t Travel because she was currently a Brute, let her Power spring back to its comfortable state, and stepped outside.

She was whistling through the sky. The Pacific Ocean was bright blue and pretty. It was a beautiful day.

Faye realized she still had the Heavy by the arm. He began screaming his head off as he realized where they were, so Faye just let go of him and he went flailing off to the side. That fancy Iron Guard sword of his was flipping through the air, so Faye timed it just right, reached out, and snagged it by the handle. From what she’d seen, those things were so darned sharp that if she’d missed she probably would’ve left fingers behind.

As she fell toward Earth, another giant explosion rocked the battleship. Her grenade had ignited something else vital. The entire left side of the ship came apart. The bags were consumed in three rapid fireballs, and then the entire sky above her was one big spreading cloud of red and black as one of the most advanced warships in history was blown to kingdom come. Hundreds died instantly and a thousand more would ride the flaming wreckage into the ocean.

Faye had been on board the Imperium battleship a grand total of three minutes and forty-seven seconds.

UBF Traveler

“Captain says we’re almost ready to open the cargo bay!” Chris Schirmer shouted from across the hold. The Cogs were still scrambling, banging away on the delicate machine with desperation achievable only by men who knew they only had one shot at getting something right and lives were on the line.

Sullivan waited next to the ramp, still as a statue, every inch of him clad in bulletproof steel. Browning’s enchanted BAR was lashed to his back, and there were magazine pouches all over his body. The magical .45 was on his hip. He had grenades, knives, and no doubt that his metal fist to the mouth would ruin just about anybody’s day. The weight on his shoulders and the narrowed field of view through the helmet felt familiar. Trade the fancy new suit for a rusted-out pot-metal piece of shit and the bullpup BAR for an old Lewis and it would almost feel like being back in the Great War, waiting for the whistle to sound so he could launch himself out of the trenches.

Almost . . . He flexed his Power, testing it ever so gently. It felt like there was enough filling his chest to crush the whole world flat.

Yeah. This was just like the trenches. Take the ground. Hold that ground. Kill anybody who gets in your fucking way. That’s what Faye was probably doing right now. He’d be doing the same in a few minutes. The only added complication this time was that he was going to talk to the enemy first. Then he’d kill them.

Schirmer was the most practical of the geniuses in the hold. “Get those helmets on and make sure the seals are tight.” It was a good thing he did, because it wouldn’t have been surprising if a few of them had been too distracted working on their machine and ended up forgetting. “Check your hoses and make sure the oxygen flow is good. Then everyone check your buddy. Fuller, go make sure Sullivan’s sealed up.”

He’d stayed out of the Cog’s way. The plan depended on the device doing what it was supposed to. Sullivan was a distraction. He was the sideshow. This device was the key. But he was still glad when Buckminster Fuller came over to check his oxygen tank.

The pressure suits had come from United Blimp and Freight’s testing division. The Cog was wearing a big, clear glass bubble on his head. The neck of the leather and rubber suit he was wearing was threaded for the fishbowl to screw on. Fuller’s voice came out funny, emanating from a brass box with holes in it mounted on his neck. He took a moment to check Sullivan’s air tank. “Considering your protective system’s respiration mechanisms were designed in anticipation of surviving poison gas rather than high altitude operations—”

“Is it good?”

“Yes. It’s good . . . I must say, Mr. Sullivan, I am worried about you and the young Ms. Vierra.”

“Faye will be fine,” he assured Fuller. She’d better be, or else they’d all be getting vaporized by a Peace Ray any second now, so no use dwelling on it.

“Of course. She is very forceful for a Cog. I would say—”

“Hold on . . .” For a second Sullivan thought that Fuller’s voice box machine had malfunctioned. “Faye’s not a Cog.”

Fuller tried to shake his head, but it turned out that was impossible inside the neck gasket of the bubble helmet. He gave up. “No. I could see it rather clearly. As you are aware, my own Power enables me to see magical connections. She is perhaps the most complicated and capable specimen I’ve yet encountered, and I so wish I had not been so occupied with this current project, because I simply must speak with her. Ms. Vierra is very clearly a Cog, and a potent one at that.”

“Faye’s a Traveler. You sure you’re not seeing that Spellbound curse that’s on her?”

“Oh no, of course not. I can make that out rather clearly. It is vast, terrible, and thus completely unmistakable. She was clearly born a Cog. That connection was there first. The exceedingly complex magical construct which is bound to her is in addition to that.”

The idea clicked. Sullivan whistled and it made an odd echo inside the helmet. “Can you tell what kind of Cog somebody is by looking at their Power? Like Browning makes weapons, or Ira’s medical stuff, or you and your . . . domes.”

“Partly. I hesitate to form a hypothesis, but my considerable instinct in this manner would point toward her adaptive magical genius being related to physics, spatial matters, and relativity.”

“So she’s a genius about how stuff works? How the world fits together?”

“Fundamentally, yes . . . I was not aware that this was a new fact to you. I would have assumed that anyone could very clearly see that Ms. Vierra is a Cog.”

And all this time they’d just thought she was odd because she was a Traveler . . .

That was why the Power had picked Faye to be the Spellbound when Sivaram died! She’d been born brilliant, all Cogs were, and her specific genius just happened to fall into the area most useful for battling the Enemy. She became a Traveler because Sivaram had been a Traveler. It had dragged his magic along with the curse. Of course, she was absurdly capable as a Traveler, but it wasn’t because of how much Power she had, but rather because of how damned scary fast her brain worked.

“Holy shit, the Power is smarter than we gave it credit for.” Sullivan patted Fuller on the shoulder, and the steel gauntlet nearly knocked the man over. “Thanks, Doc. You better get back to your gizmo. It’s almost show time.”

“We will make it work, Mr. Sullivan. No matter what.”

“You’re starting to sound like a Grimnoir knight there, Fuller.”

The bubble helmet bobbed back and forth as Fuller tried to nod. “I would not have thought that was such a compliment before embarking on this journey. Now however? Thank you.” Then the Cog scurried back to his device.

Schirmer was watching the instrumentation on the machine. “Congratulations, we have now achieved a greater altitude than any other men in history.” The UBF Cogs cheered. “Now, make sure your suit is tethered to the safety line.” Good idea. It wouldn’t do to suck their Cogs out the door.

Sullivan didn’t strap in. He couldn’t afford to wait for Faye. He was so engrossed in thinking about this new revelation into the world’s most powerful wizard and staring at the waiting ramp that he hadn’t heard her approach. There was a hard metallic thump on his arm. He wouldn’t have felt anything less. He turned the helmet to see Lady Origami there, wearing one of the UBF suits and clear fishbowl helmets. Safety ropes had been run through the harness she was wearing. She put the wrench she’d used to hit him back into a pouch on her belt.

“Akane? What’re you doing here?” And he immediately regretted that, because it sounded accusatory. “I’m glad to see you.”

“Captain said I could see you off. I can put out fires anywhere.” She reached up and tapped the helmet. “I would give a kiss for luck, but . . .”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t want you to get your lips ripped off . . . In case you can’t tell, I was smiling when I said that. That was a joke . . . I like your lips just fine.”

“I am aware, Sullivan. You talk more when you are nervous. It is funny talking to a woman makes you more nervous than war.”

The huge armored shoulders could still manage a shrug. “I’m good at war.”

She opened one glove and revealed another delicate paper animal. This one was a duck. “For luck again.” She shoved it into one of the magazine pouches on his chest. “Probably it will not make it. So you better come back so I can make you another.”

“Deal.” He put one gauntlet alongside her bubble helmet, gently as possible. She put her hand on top of his.

“We’re on in sixty seconds!” Schirmer shouted. “Sullivan? How come you aren’t strapped in?”

Sullivan just waved. “I’m taking the quick way down.” After all, that had been the plan before they’d known Faye was alive. He went back to Akane. “You’d best stand back.”

She took up the rope so she wouldn’t trip over it and made her way back to the interior. When she reached one of the pylons next to the machine, she tied another safety line to that with an expert sailor’s knot.

The red lights started blinking. The buzzer sounded. The hydraulics activated.

Sullivan took a deep breath. He turned the skull-faced helmet toward Akane. She was watching him. She seemed a little afraid, maybe excited, but mostly she seemed proud, defiant. “Beat them, Sullivan. Every last one!”

“Every last one.”

The door began opening. The air screamed past.

It was dark as night. The grey and white patch of straight lines so incredibly far below was Shanghai. The Cogs were already wrestling their machine along the tracks and chains toward the opening.

He took one last look at Akane. “Show me a smile on that pretty face.”

She did.

Sullivan stepped off the ramp into space.

Art to come

Sullivan in armor