She didn’t have time to worry about it. Already several Grave Walkers had spied the engineer’s fall and were climbing the rigging after her. She removed the mayfly from her pocket. Bernie had said that the little device was capable of destroying a portal—Jez could imagine what it might do to an engine. She gave the ball a twist and there was the sound of something clicking into place. Immediately the ball began to vibrate in her hand. She was so startled she nearly dropped it before tossing it into one of the engine’s many vents. Then she began her climb back along the rigging as fast as she could manage.
From deep within the engine she heard the sound of buzzing, like an angry bug in a jar. It was getting louder.
Just then Jezebel heard a great cry go up from the Grave Walkers, and as she looked down she saw Tommy’s submarine shooting up out of the river. It was nearly vertical, launching into the air on jets of water like a rocket. No, more like a missile—a missile aimed for the heart of the Charnel House. He was going to crash the sub into the zeppelin.
The rigging around her shook with the impact, and Jezebel barely managed to hang on. The whole ship quivered and quaked; countless Grave Walkers spilled over the railings into the churning water below. The Charnel House groaned and settled for an instant before the world around her cracked and burst into flame.
I held on to the wheel with one arm wrapped around the spokes as I searched frantically for the control panel. The water was rushing away from my feet, the near-vertical angle of the dying Nautilus causing the excess to wash to the back, drowning the aft engines and effectively killing them.
The viewport, and indeed the entire nose of the Nautilus, was mangled, crushed in places and torn in others. Not a foot from my face a large section of the Charnel House’s hull had splintered through the Nautilus like a giant spike—any closer and it would have taken my head off at the neck. The sounds of cables snapping, of metal grinding, filled the air with so much noise that I could barely think. But luckily I didn’t have to think. I just had to do and hope that the ship had enough life left in her to accomplish her last task.
Despite the pain of a hundred little cuts made by shredding, flying debris, my fingers found the button I’d been searching for.
I couldn’t really hear my own voice over the destruction, but I shouted the order anyway.
One last hurrah before I died.
“FIRE TORPEDOES!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
JEZEBEL
NEW YORK, TODAY
The ringing subsided, but her ears still felt like they were filled with cotton. At first she thought she was just dizzy from the blast, but she soon realized that what she was seeing was the motion of the Charnel House tossing about on the waves—the zeppelin had fallen from the sky into the Hudson below. Large sections were on fire, but the giant airbag and gunner’s deck had broken away from the ship proper and landed in another part of the river, floating on the rough waves; the rest of the ship looked like some great, sinking water beast spouting flame and smoke. Jez could hear the mayfly buzzing in the distance, tearing apart chunks of machinery in its fury even as it sank beneath the surface. The portal still twisted, darkly, above them.
But it wasn’t Jez’s mayfly that had brought the Charnel House down. This destruction had been caused by something else. Some kind of explosion when Tommy’s submarine had impacted with the zeppelin.
Jez was tangled in the rigging, suspended just a few feet above the dark water. The storm waves crested below her, and her shoes dangled in the surf. A long bloody rope burn cut across one cheek where a snapped line had whipped her on the way down, but otherwise she was miraculously uninjured. Charred and broken bodies of Grave Walkers floated everywhere, some still struggling to swim despite having lost a limb or two. The near-dead were, ironically, frustratingly hard to kill.
But one body in particular caught her attention. It floated near a broken ship’s wheel, its hand lashed to one of the spokes. Panic rising in her chest, Jezebel managed to pull herself free from the rigging and dropped into the river. When she reached the wheel she grabbed it for support and cradled Tommy’s head in her arm, pulling his head free of the water. She kicked with her feet, netgun slung over her shoulder, Tommy in her arms, and paddled back to the gunner’s deck, which was still afloat. It took all her strength to haul Tommy up out of the churning water and onto deck, but she did so. For once she was thankful he was so small.
She rolled him over onto his back, but his face was white and his lips already blue. A long splinter of metal protruded from his chest. Three inches of steel had entered his heart. Tommy Learner was dead.
“Such a shame to go like that,” said a voice in her ear. “I’d hoped to have the pleasure myself.”
The Dead Gentleman was standing before her. He was nothing more than a grinning skull in an immaculate black business suit, but his voice sounded like it was right next to her ear. He had Merlin clutched in a bony fist.
Her face was wet with river water and sudden tears. She wanted to shout something at him, tell him to shut up, but she couldn’t get the words out of her tight throat. Tommy Learner was dead.
The Gentleman bowed his skull and put one ghostly hand over his chest. “To our honored opponent. Our fallen foe, I salute you!”
Behind him, a few survivors had assembled, a motley group of wounded Grave Walkers. And in the middle was Macheath the vampire. He had removed his filthy cap, but his face was nothing but a gloating sneer. In the other hand the vampire held Tommy’s Cycloidotrope, the one they’d confiscated back in the Gentleman’s cell a hundred years ago. He was spinning it in his palm like a toy.
“A moment for Tommy Learner,” said the Gentleman. “You gave your life to bring down my ship, but it was all for naught—my victory is at hand!”
The Gentleman reached out toward Tommy’s body. Jezebel felt a chill descend around her. “May you serve me better in death than you fought me in life.”
“NO!” Jezebel screamed, finding her voice. “You won’t take him! You won’t make him one of you!”
She slid off the netgun and took aim. The Gentleman chuckled. “Well, aren’t you something? All dressed up for the part. You even have one of their ridiculous weapons. You sure that thing still works, my dear? It must be an antique, by now.
“Macheath,” he said. “She’s yours. The last Explorer is yours to feed on. You’ve waited long enough.”
Jez fired. Two shots—one at the Gentleman and one at Macheath and the Grave Walkers. The nets expanded as they flew, and Macheath cursed as one twisted around him and he fell, caught in a mass of kicking Grave Walkers. The Cycloidotrope clattered across the deck.
The second hit the Gentleman squarely in the chest, but he tore it away like it was so much paper. “Useless,” he said, glancing back at his tangled henchmen. He took two long strides and backhanded Jezebel. She rolled and cracked her head, hard, against the rail.
“You’ll both serve me soon enough,” said the Gentleman. “But I’ll waste no more time on children. My hour is at hand!”
The Gentleman reached up and with a bony finger stroked Merlin’s head. “Such a rare thing, this artifact! I have found you at last, Brother Theophilus!”
With that he popped the little bird’s head back with a click, opening it up like a pill bottle. Inside was a ball of soft golden light.
“How do you live forever?” asked the Gentleman. “Brother Theo thought he’d found the answer. He gave up his physical self—his fragile, feeble flesh and blood—for something more durable. An immortal soul in a body of brass and gears, so he could be an Explorer till the end of time.”
With two fingers he scooped out the light, cupping it gently in his palm. He let Merlin fall to the ground, a hunk now of dead metal.
He held up the little ball of light. “How does the song go? If I only had a brain …”
The Gentleman peered up at the heavens. “This world abhors what I am.” The sky was already lightening in the east; the storm was waning an
d dawn threatened to break through. “The soulless cannot exist here for long. Already I can feel myself begin to dissipate. As the sun rises, my power wanes.”
He looked back at Jezebel, his skull’s grin seeming to get wider. “A soul in a bottle—that’s what Brother Theophilus made himself into. And I will gladly swallow him whole!
“Bon appétit!” he said, and then he plopped the ball of light into his mouth.
At once he began to shine. First it was just a dull glimmer in the hollows of his cheeks and the dark sockets of his eyes. But the light continued to brighten and expand until Jezebel had to turn away.
When she looked back, after the light subsided, the Gentleman was gone. In his place was a handsome young man. He had pale cheeks and thick, coal-black hair. His mouth was unusually red, but his eyes were dark and cruel.
He hesitated at first, as if touched by fear, but then he took a long, deep breath. It came back out with a loud, full-throated laugh. He shouted as he raised his arms to the sky.
“THE DEAD GENTLEMAN … LIVES!” he cried.
Just then the sun broke free from behind the clouds and Jez heard Macheath cursing as he struggled against his bonds. But the Gentleman ignored his servant and turned his face toward the light, shouting in defiance.
“The Gentleman lives, but the rest of this world will die,” he cried. “In time, I alone, in all of creation, shall possess the gift of life. I will burn like a fire in the heart of a great black darkness. I alone!”
Jezebel covered her ears as a whip-crack of thunder rocked the heavens, and she looked up to see the prow of a second black zeppelin coming through the swirling portal. And another. And another. The curling vortex was expanding, making way for a thousand-thousand ships and their crews of grinning, leering Grave Walkers.
Jezebel crawled over to Tommy and laid her head down next to his. They’d failed. The Gentleman had stolen Merlin’s life, his soul. That was the secret the Gentleman had been after all this time—he’d been plotting to steal the bird’s soul so that he might live. Now the sun could not harm him. Now his army would kill everything else. Everything.
Something caught Jez’s attention; something flickered out of the corner of her eye. She lifted her head and saw the Cycloidotrope lying a few feet from her. It sparkled softly despite the gloom. Jezebel grabbed the little device and looked at the Gentleman. His arms raised, he was still shouting his triumph, and the ship around them began to rise out of the water. Fires died and shredded metal began to knit itself back together. Under the Gentleman’s power, the Charnel House was rebuilding itself. Even the sunlight seemed weak and ineffectual in this new world—the Gentleman’s world. Jezebel imagined what must be happening all over the city. She pictured the things that were crawling out of the dark spaces, and the millions of people who slumbered fitfully in their beds, unaware of the danger.
She looked down at the little cube. It lit up in her hands. She willed herself to see Tommy and there he was, still alive. In the cube Tommy was clinging to the wheel of his ruined ship as a wall of metal exploded into his chest. Next, he was fighting the wheel as the floor filled with water.
The Cycloidotrope was going backward.
“Yes!” she said. “Show me Tommy.”
He appeared before her in a hologram of light. His back was to her, but she still felt her throat catch when she saw him moving about, shouting orders at no one in particular as he flipped a row of switches and brought his ship around to aim at the Charnel House’s belly. There was that swagger in him, even at the end.
A glance at the Tommy here and now—his cold lips, his dusty-gray skin. The first time he’d visited her, he’d used the Cycloidotrope to project his image to the future so that he could communicate with her. He’d told her that the future was malleable, changeable, but that the past was fixed. You cannot alter events in your own life, you cannot change what has already happened, and to do so risks great danger.
“Tommy,” she said. He didn’t hear her. “Tommy!” she shouted, but he wasn’t seeing her. He was busy fighting to control his ship. He was going to drive it straight up into the Charnel House.
She had to stop him. He didn’t need to sacrifice himself to bring down the Gentleman’s ship—the mayfly would have taken care of that. He didn’t have to die.
She gently laid Tommy’s head down on the deck—she was glad that she didn’t have to close his eyes.
“I’ll see you in a minute,” she whispered, and then she leapt, one more time, into the light.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JEZEBEL
NOW.
“You okay?” whispered Tommy.
“Huh?” asked Jez, blinking.
“I asked if you’re okay.”
“Sure,” answered Jez, rubbing her eyes. “For a minute there, I … you’re alive!”
Jezebel grabbed Tommy and wrapped her arms around him in a giant bear hug.
He tried to shush her. “Keep your voice down! Of course I’m alive. We’ve already been through this. I did like you asked. I have to say, I’m pretty impressed at your sabotage. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
Jezebel let him go and looked around her. They were on the Gentleman’s ship, hidden away behind a crate of gun shells. The sky above was still dark, but there was the pink of early dawn in the east. The zeppelin tossed about on the waves of the river, but it wasn’t sinking. Grave Walkers were scurrying overhead, desperately trying to put out a fire that had originated in the engine but was quickly spreading to consume the airbag itself. The Charnel House had been forced to make an emergency landing on the river.
It was strange. Jezebel could remember everything that had happened to her—the explosion, finding Tommy’s body, using the Cycloidotrope to jump into the past. But she also had memories of bringing down the ship with the mayfly grenade, of hiding from the Grave Walkers and of Tommy’s surprise at seeing her appear inside his ship. She’d persuaded him not to attack. She explained that she’d sabotaged the Charnel House’s engine, though she had more trouble explaining how she got aboard the Nautilus. Luckily there wasn’t much time for questions, as the Gentleman’s ship came tumbling out of the sky and Jezebel and Tommy, alive and well, snuck aboard the wreckage.
It was like these two sets of memories were trying to occupy the same space in her brain. In one, Tommy died and the Gentleman won. In the other, she stopped Tommy’s suicide run. They were competing for room, and when she tried to focus on just one it felt like someone was digging around in her skull with an ice pick.
She’d done it. She’d actually changed her own past. “It worked,” she said, squinting against the pain.
“What worked?” asked Tommy. “You’re starting to worry me, Jez.”
“Never mind,” she said, suddenly self-conscious at her own confusion. “I’m fine.”
“Well, you’ve bought us some time, but we still need to find Merlin.”
“The Gentleman’s got him.”
“You keep saying that,” said Tommy. “But are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Jez answered. “Look, you said that the Gentleman could never conquer Earth because the undead can’t exist here for long—they cannot walk in the sun, because the undead don’t have souls.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I think he’s found one. He’s going to steal Merlin’s.”
“Merlin’s a gadget,” said Tommy. “He doesn’t have a soul.”
“Does the name Brother Theophilus mean anything to you?”
“Sure, Fat Theo,” Tommy answered. “He’s a founder of the Explorers’ Society. He discovered Merlin, actually.”
“Merlin is Brother … eh, Fat Theo. Somehow the guy put his soul into that bird so that he could live forever, and now the Gentleman is about to steal it for himself.”
Tommy was thinking it through, Jez could tell. He was chewing the side of his cheek as he looked for holes in her theory. But Jezebel couldn’t tell him that it wasn’t just a theory. She didn’t wa
nt to tell him that she’d broken the rule about changing your own timeline. She didn’t want him to know that she’d done it to save him.
The ice pick was stabbing at her brain.
He was still struggling to make sense of the Gentleman’s plan. “But even if you are right, even if he wants to get a soul—to be alive—what good would it do him?” he asked. “He’d be here on Earth, but what about his army?”
“You said yourself that his army is the near-dead. That’s why he’s been gathering them from all sorts of different worlds. Their bodies are decomposing and gross, but they must still have their souls—he’s keeping them just on the brink of death so that they can be his servants in the daylight. There are hundreds, thousands of ships full of them waiting just on the other side of that big portal. And I think the more killing they do, the more things that die—the stronger he’ll become.”
“He’s going to kill everything,” Tommy said.
“No, he’s not,” said Jez. “This time we’re going to stop him. Come on!”
“This time?” asked Tommy, but Jezebel ignored him.
They came out of their hiding place in time to see the Gentleman emerging from his quarters. Bloody Macheath loped along at his side, squinting nervously up at the weak sunlight that had managed to peek through the clouds. Again, he was holding the Cycloidotrope in his palm.
“We’ve lost the Nautilus, sir,” he said. “She surfaced for a minute after we set down on the river, but then she went under again. We’re assuming she’s too damaged to make another attack.”