Crucible Zero

  “That would be suicide.”

  “Because they’re galvanized?”

  “Because they are here to collect on that price on your head,” he said.

  “Abraham said he came to warn us that there was a price on our heads.”

  The crease between his lowered eyebrows deepened. “They’re mercenaries, Matilda. All galvanized are mercenaries. Guns for hire. No loyalties to anything other than money. No loyalties to Houses, people, or each other. It’s what they do.”

  Oh.

  “Well, that’s not what they’re going to do here. We should at least get as much information out of them as we can, don’t you think?”

  “There’s nothing they know that I want or will pay for,” he said flatly. “I do not do business with galvanized.”

  “Well, I do.” I hopped down off the water barrel, my boots landing with a crunchy thud in the dirt and gravel. I dusted my hands.

  “They came to our farm looking for me and for you,” I said. “I’m not the only one someone wants dead. We don’t know why someone wants me dead, since no one should know I’m alive. But from the way you’re acting all nervous and hair-pully, I think you know exactly why your head is worth hunting.”

  “It’s a mistake,” he scoffed.

  “No, I don’t think it is. What did you do that has made someone want to kill you, Quinten?”

  He pulled his shoulders back and tipped his head up, as if I’d just punched him in the chest. It took him a moment or two before he answered.

  “You are not at all like Evelyn,” he said slowly. “Do you know that? She was kind. Trusting. She was the sweetest girl I’d ever known. And she would never have accused me of doing something worth being killed over.”

  His words stung. Quinten and I had been close. Hell, I practically worshiped the ground his boots trod upon. It hurt to hear him tell me I wasn’t as good as the sister he loved more than me. A girl I could never live up to. A girl I could never be.

  But I knew him. He had a habit of striking out when people got too close to the things he didn’t want to talk about. I refused to back down on this.

  I lifted my chin and stared him in the eyes. “I’m sorry I’m not her. Really, I am. I’m sorry you’ve lost her. I’m sorry she’s gone. But you haven’t answered the question I asked,” I said calmly. “Tell me what you did, Quinten. If I don’t know why someone wants to kill you, I can’t help you stay alive.”

  “No.”

  It was my turn to study him, looking for clues. His body language said he wasn’t going to budge on his silence. His eyes had gone all sharp and judgy. Closed off.

  Fine. He wasn’t the only person on the property who had information.

  There were three mercenaries at my kitchen table. They must know who had put the hit out on us. Someone had to be paying them. Maybe they’d have a clue as to why we had suddenly become such hot property.

  “I may not be as sweet as Evelyn,” I said, unable to be angry at him. “But you, brother, haven’t changed a bit. You are just as stubborn, smart, and insufferably righteous as you’ve always been. And I wouldn’t want you any other way.” I took a few steps and dropped a quick kiss on his cheek. “I missed you.” I patted his arm. “But you’re being an idiot.”

  I strode off toward the corner of the house, and the kitchen door beyond.

  * * *

  The twisting sensation of an elevator suddenly plunging down flights of a building hit me. I stumbled, but caught myself before I fell. The sharp scent of roses filled my nose and mouth as I gasped, and my ears rang with the distance echo of a bell.

  My vision blurred, and I blinked hard to clear it. The house in front of me dissolved into nothing but a pile of rubble, as if an explosion had reduced it to smoldering dirt and timbers. Men in black uniforms milled around it.

  My heart raced. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. I looked behind me, and Quinten was no longer there. But it wasn’t just Quinten that was missing. This world had changed.

  No. The world had shifted. This world, this property with the broken, burning house, was the property and world from my original time.

  But I didn’t want to be in my time. In my time, my brother was dead.

  I must have made a sound.

  One of the men looked over at me. “Hey. What are you doing? This location is under House Black lockdown. There’s been an explosion. It isn’t safe to be here.”

  I heard him—honestly I did. But all I could see was the destroyed farmhouse on the very familiar land where I had grown up. All of it exactly as I remembered, and not the different world I’d woken up in recently.

  If this was the time I remembered and had grown up in, that meant my brother was currently dead, buried under that pile of rubble that used to be our home.

  “Matilda?”

  I turned to that familiar voice. John Black, head of House Black, wore a black uniform like the other men, but carried himself with a manner of authority and bulldog strength. He had just come around the corner of the rubble field and looked as startled as I felt.

  “Were you in the explosion?” he asked striding my way. “Were there any other survivors? Welton Yellow, or your brother, Quinten? Have you seen Abraham?”

  I shook my head and pressed my hand over my mouth, words stuck somewhere in the clot of panicked silence filling my brain.

  He stopped in front of me. “You’re shaking,” he said, not unkindly for a man who had been sent to bring me in as a fugitive accused of murder. “Matilda, tell me what happened here.”

  And then the world twisted again, filling with that dizzy rose scent. John Black reached out for me. I reached back. I felt the warm pressure of his fingers on my wrist, and then he was gone—whisked away as if he were a curtain that had been pushed aside to show the open window behind it.

  * * *

  I was holding my breath, my hand cupped over my mouth.

  The house was standing in front of me, whole. The day was quiet and still. In the distance, I heard a bird warble, and a sleepy lizard answer with a rumble.

  “Ev— Matilda?” Quinten said from behind me.

  Relief washed over me, and I finally exhaled. He was alive. Quinten was alive, and I was back in the time where I belonged.

  I turned and dropped my hand from my mouth. The faint ringing in my ears was gone, the flower scent faded.

  A very alive Quinten strode my way, wearing flannel, jeans, and boots, an irritated scowl on his face. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Did you feel that?” I asked. “Just now, did you get dizzy or smell roses or see . . . anything?”

  He paused and gave me a look. “No. Why, did you?”

  I took in the scenery behind him. This was still the property I’d always known, but the familiar pear orchard wasn’t in sight, and a flock of six pocket-sized sheep of various pastel shades shambled along a fence line, stopping to nibble on weeds there.

  We had only three pocket-sized sheep in the time I was from.

  I must have been back to the time where Evelyn had grown up.

  “I felt something. I . . . saw someone,” I said. “Do you know John Black?”

  He shook his head. “Matilda . . .”

  “He must have been an echo,” I said. “No, it was more than that. I saw what this place used to be. What I knew it as. He was real. He felt real.”

  “You’re telling me you saw something from your own time?”

  “Or I somehow stepped into my time. Is that possible? Did I just disappear and reappear?”

  He camped back on one foot and stuck his hands in his pockets. “No. You were walking toward the house, and I was walking after you.”

  “Maybe it was just a second for you, but longer for me. Why would that happen? What would make that happen?”

  “Don’t look at me,??
? he said. “Until today, I would have told you time travel—of any kind—was impossible, and now you’re telling me you’ve experienced it twice. Maybe you’re just tired, and your brain can’t sort through what’s happened. Maybe it’s old memories surfacing. Some glitch in the switch between what Evelyn knew and remembered and what you know and remember.”

  It wasn’t a hallucination. That had been John Black. That had been his touch. And that had been our demolished house. I was sure of it. But I had no way to prove it to Quinten.

  “Okay.” I swallowed and nodded. “Okay. Maybe it’s just a onetime thing. I can deal with that.” I set my shoulders and turned back toward the house. Sometimes experiments had unintended consequences. Maybe seeing into my old time stream was that consequence.

  Or maybe it was a fluke of the Wings of Mercury mending time. A wrinkle that hadn’t been ironed out yet.

  Whatever it was, I would handle it if it came up again. Right now, here in this time—the real time—I needed to save our lives.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To get the information I need to save both our heads.”

  I heard the sound of his boots as he did a short jog to catch up with me. “Does no mean something else in your time?” he asked.

  “No.”

  That, finally, got a chuckle out of him. “Just— Please. Listen to me on this. Trust me on this. I know the way the world works, with or without time travel.”

  “I am listening. I am also going to get us some information.”

  “We do not do business with mercenaries.”

  “Is that the family motto?”

  “It is now.”

  “Well, I’m still following the other family motto: do whatever necessary to keep the people you love alive.”

  Quinten swore softly.

  We’d rounded the house. The big barn was behind us now, a worn wooden structure two stories high with odd creatures slipping or winging in and out of the windows, doors, and other cracks of it. I hadn’t had time to get acquainted with the stitched beasties my brother was keeping, but from the glimpses I’d caught, Quinten had a full-blown menagerie here.

  However, I had not missed the half-dozen winged lizards of various impressive sizes that skulked a little farther out by the trees and filled up the dirt road, belly-flat soaking up the sun.

  “Sure are a lot of dragons around the place,” I noted.

  “Lizards,” he automatically corrected me, just like I corrected everyone else who had met our single stitched, winged monstrosity back in my time.

  “Do you use them for scale jelly?”

  “Of course. Other than stitching, it’s the jelly that keeps this place running,” he said. “But mostly the lizards patrol the property and make sure the things and people we don’t want here never make it to the house.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  I shot him a grin. “We had only one. Big as a barn.”

  “Still do,” he said. “And, well, a lot of others, the size of other buildings.”

  “As soon as I get the three killers in our kitchen sorted away, I want to see all the critters. We had a unicorn. Well, sort of a unicorn.”

  Quinten picked up the pace enough that he reached the door at the same time I did. He straight-armed it, his palm smacking flat in the middle of the wood. “Listen to me, Matilda.”

  I stopped, folded my arms over my chest. Waited.

  His face was a little sweaty from the jog, but also pale. “We are not on their side. They are not on ours. They want us dead, and they plan to make a profit on our deaths. Anything they say, any information they give us, is suspect.”

  “I don’t see that we have a choice,” I said. “Good idea, bad idea—doesn’t matter. We need to know who wants us dead and why. They can tell us.”

  The door opened, swinging inward.

  Quinten moved back and took hold of one of the guns under his overshirt so quick, you’d think he was on fire.

  I stood my ground but didn’t draw the gun strapped to my thigh.

  In that doorway, filling most of it with all six foot six of his height and muscle, was the galvanized Abraham Seventh. The man I’d loved.

  In a different world.

  In a time that I didn’t think existed.

  The man who was now a stranger to me.

  2

  The only problem with dying is it takes so damn long. Of course, the same could be said of living.

  —W.Y.

  Abraham was powerfully built in my time. But here everything about him was harder, carved, chiseled, as if there had never been a day of easy living to soften him. His hair was long, pulled back off his tanned face with a band, revealing grim scars on his face and thick black threads tacking a line down one cheek to the edge of his mouth. Another row of stitches slashed up away from the opposite eyebrow to his hairline.

  His eyes were still his: hazel flecked with red. The red was a result of him either being angry or in pain, though all galvanized were numb to physical sensation, including pain.

  And he was handsome—gods, he was good-looking.

  His wide forehead, lined with too much worry, held eyebrows that were darker than his brown hair. His nose was arrow straight, giving his angled cheeks a hard edge, even though scruff covered cheeks and jaw.

  I knew that face was capable of great joy and laughter. I’d seen him laugh so hard, his entire body radiated joy. I knew his eyes softened with kindness, compassion, and human goodness.

  Or, at least, those were the things he had been. Now he was all edges and intensity.

  A hammer looking for an anvil to strike.

  I couldn’t see the muscles under his layers of clothing, but his movements had a tension and fluidity that made it clear he had often, and would at any moment, fight.

  My stomach tightened with electric tingles that made it hard to keep a needful gasp from escaping my mouth. I wanted him to be mine again.

  I had loved him. I still loved him.

  I searched for some recognition of that connection in his stern expression.

  Nothing.

  “Decided to kill us yet?” he asked, his voice low.

  “We’re keeping our options open,” I said.

  He didn’t smile. I guess he hadn’t been joking.

  Abraham wore sturdy, loose leather pants, a layering of cotton and wool shirts under his jacket, and an arsenal of weapons. Over his shoulder jutted the butt of a long gun and an ax. A bandolier of bullets crossed his chest, giving me just a hint on the hard muscles beneath his shirts and making me wish I could see more. Handguns were holstered at both hips.

  That was a lot of weapons for a galvanized to carry, considering he didn’t need weapons to kill a man dead. A galvanized is so strong, all we need is our bare hands to end a life, bloody and quick.

  And while Quinten and Abraham hadn’t drawn weapons on each other, they were doing that man thing: squared off and glaring, just waiting for an excuse to start a fight.

  So I stepped up between them to make it clear that neither of them had time for this.

  “Back it up, stud,” I said, pointing toward the kitchen behind Abraham.

  Quinten choked on the inhale of whatever he’d been about to say.

  Abraham’s mouth twitched upward on the unstitched side for a second, and that familiar flash of wicked humor flickered in his eyes, then was gone.

  “Stud?” he repeated, tipping his head down and narrowing his gaze.

  I stepped toward him, as if I were going to walk right through him. “You heard me. Move it back, good-looking.”

  Abraham paced backward, still squared off to me as I strolled into my kitchen, the look on his face a mix of curiosity and caution.

  It was like a dance, his movements and mine, and
we were in perfect sync. Memories, hot and suddenly intense, flashed through me. My body tingled with the sensation of his wide hands against my skin, his mouth pressed to mine, his tongue exploring me.

  We had been good together.

  Really good.

  Back in my time, I’d regretted waiting to sleep with him. I’d promised if I had a chance to do it all over again, I’d put sex with Abraham as number one on my to-do list.

  But now? I didn’t think he wanted anything to do with me. I found myself wanting to move forward with some caution. Just because he had been a man I loved before didn’t mean I would love him now.

  “Problem?” Abraham asked.

  I realized I’d lost a few seconds to my thoughts. My hand was raised toward him midreach, the other pressed against my stomach. He hadn’t moved, but Quinten had stepped into the room and closed the door.

  Everyone in the kitchen was looking at me.

  This was not the time to appear crazier than they already thought I was.

  “Matilda?” Quinten said.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Move away from her, stitch,” Left Ned said, breaking the mood and scrambling up a new one.

  I glanced over to where he was standing near the icebox, a sawed-off shotgun tucked against his shoulder.

  Neds Harris was our farmhand. He was all one body, with extra width to his shoulders so his two blond-and-blue-eyed heads could rest side by side in a pleasing, if unusual, arrangement of parts. In my time, Right Ned was always the kinder, more thoughtful of the two, while his brother, Left Ned, had a more suspicious, blunt nature.

  Looked like they weren’t any different in this time. They’d told me once that Right Ned controlled the left side of their body, and Left Ned controlled the other. So that meant Left Ned was the one ready to do the shooting.

  Typical.

  “Neds Harris,” I said. “I said I was fine, and these are our guests.”

  “So?” Left Ned said.

  “So we do not bring guns to the kitchen table. Set it aside. We all know we can kill each other if we’re of the mind to. Waving it around isn’t making a point. It’s just being rude.”

  Sallyo, a woman whom I’d only met once, chuckled. She sat at the table, a cup of tea in one hand, and looked as relaxed as could be. Sallyo was pale and pretty, her eyes snake-pupiled, which indicated she was born a bit like Neds: mutated. Her dark hair was shaved off above her ears, leaving the rest pulled into a heavy braid down her back. Hard and lean, the sleek and deadly woman had run the biggest, most feared smuggling ring in the world.